Original trope here; a comment left on the original posting of it was:

“Now you have me wondering about parentally-assisted pods: “Well, we have just enough emergency reserves to give this ship a delta-vee of 0.1 km/s… or we can use the same joules to give 10 km/s to an escape pod.”

That could conceivably be useful, if you have a way of dumping large amounts of KE into a pod without turning the occupants into strawberry jam.”

Interesting thought – and it probably could be done using their vector-control inertial dampers, although that’s a lot of systems to put into the pod, and if you don’t put them in the pod, the sort of thing you’d hate to rely on once the mother ship got all shot up.

But even then, even 10 km/s isn’t going to get you anywhere (even away from the AM explosion) very fast, except in situations where you’re already close enough to somewhere that they can, equally, get someone out there to help you in about the same time-frame, better equipped than the pod probably is.  (And if you aren’t, you might as well stick close to the resources, however damaged, that you have got; and if nothing else, that at least does include a bigger radar/thermal signature.)  So while I can see the possibility, I’m still not sure what it buys you, in practical terms.