A professional hazard of mine is thinking about the finer details of moving goods and people around, or at least it was.   Also, I've been doing a lot of stuff with Traveller lately, and so I've got a mind to look at just how to go about breaking down some of the requirements for hauling people-carcasses around space in small boxes.

Lets look at food, because that's actually the most overlooked, and most... well... logistically intensive element of life support in space.

First up: Water. Why? We can dispense with this relatively simply, as water is mostly recycled. Yes, space-people drink their own pee.  We can assume a starship comes standard with a sufficient amount of water for its size as part of cabin space, etc... and yes, loss of life support means a loss of recycling, but you'll die of carbon dioxide poisoning long before you dehydrate to death, so you've got that going for you!  

If its important to know exactly how much water is 'in the system'...mostly in tanks, you have to determine how common showers are. No showers (or sonic, waterless showers), you can probably get by with something like one gallon per person.  Rare showers (or small crews), maybe thirty gallons. Lots of crew and lots of showers? Well.. the 'average' earth shower uses 17 gallons.  FIgure out how many people will be showering at one time and estimate your recycle rate (I can't do this for you, folks... Tech levels may vary), and there you go.  I'd guess space showers are less wasteful so we can round down to 15 gallons, or even say stingy space captains make you use 10 gallons or less. Choice of body washes and other chemical cleansers may be limited.

Now we can talk real food.

THe average person consumes 5 pounds a food a day. Well, we can reduce that to 4 probably, since Americans are fat bastards.  A lot of that weight is water however, which is why NASA uses freeze dried foods, but really... no one likes that shit.

5 lbs a day represents fairly normal meals with reasonable fresh ingredients.  One ton of cargo provides roughly 450-500 meals. For Traveller this is easy, since cargo is measured in Tons (and for the sake of sanity, I assume the 'Tonnage' is identical to volume and mass, meaning stupid people often overload their cargo bays because not much cargo has a density of .07... and thus why shipping containers (packed by professionals, certified by licensed cargo masters, etc) STILL list their maximum tonnage in mass. Just in case.

So, just for grins, lets look at a traveller Capital Ship. A Sylea class Battleship has an operating crew of roughly 4000 people (3951 or some such...), which means they go through a little under 10 tons of food EACH DAY.   A jump lasts seven days, which means at a very, very minimum you need 70 tons of food on board or the ship comes out of jump missing a few cabin boys.  As it happens the Sylea carries a bit over 5k tons of cargo and also has almost 6k tons of Staterooms... which we'll 'translate' into 'living space', to include a mess hall of some sort, a proper kitchen and cold storage for food.   In all probability the Sylea uses none of its official cargo for food (wait for it, please), and has enough "Mess Space" as part of its staterooms for maybe two weeks of operation (140 tons or so)... and uses all that extra cargo space as 'planning space' for longer deployments, when resupply is uncertain. Patrols, active wartime and so forth.  Not that they'd ever shove five thousand tons of food on board at one time!

This sort of vaguely works. Traveller assumes a standard 2 tons alloted to living space for each crew member, much of which will be largely empty space (meaning very low density/mass). This is a unique issue for Traveller where Volume and Mass are heavily conflated, other games tend to be far more abstracted.

Now, as you can see the calculation for feeding your crew (should you wish to do so. We here at Spike Incorperated simply advise hiring more Cabin Boys instead...) is simple: Number of idiots X Number of Days X 5 Lbs.

And we're done!

We are not done!

Now, as of right now you can save an assload of weight (mass), but not a heck of a lot of volume by simply freeze drying your food, adding water to reconstitute it.  Just for the sake of argument I'm going to say if you do that the weight of your food goes down to 1 lb per day... but if better food is available your crew will hate you for forcing this crap on them, and you may wind up short a captain or two by the end of any decently long trip (Morale rules, like ship rules, vary per game).   We can assume our Sylea carries some emergency rations (say 10-20 tons), which might be equivalent in weight/mass.

Which brings us to expanding that with "high tech".  Once upon a time it was a common trope in Space Fiction to have people carry 'food pills' or some similarly absurdly small source of food on their person... though of course this often lead to absurd circumstances forcing them to only have a couple of pills on them at the time so you could still have starvation drama.

Food pills are a nice idea, one supposes, but impractical from a real science standpoint (Star Wars fans can safely ignore me now. Have all the food pills you want!). Off the top of my head pure calories can be done for roughly 10 calories to the gram, meaning the least amount of food to keep you going still is going to be... 100 grams? that's starvation rations for most people in the form of a... hmm.. four ounce bar of sugar**? A bit more than a tiny pill. Also, not very satisfying to hunger pangs AND we haven't even (and won't) talk about how fast your body can absorb that shit.

So for moderately high tech societies we now have something of a goal for 'survival rations'... 8 ounces (half a pound, one quarter of a Kilogram) of 'food', enough to keep a reasonably active adult going at full speed. Toss in some fancy space-chemicals to supress hunger pangs and now you've got something you can work with. Again.... you can do the math here. Just... just divide our standard food weight/mass by.. twenty or so.  

Now... all of this assumes a roughly 2k calorie diet, with some people eating slightly more, some people eating slightly less and generally balancing out the whole shebang. Also it assumes some form of coffee or tea as a common drink, maybe Tang.

Now... in times of trouble its possible to put people on half rations, which... of course... doubles your food supply at a penalty to morale and general performance. Quarter rations would be extreme 'don't know if we'll make it, boys' situations, and yes, again.... missing cabin boys are a real probability.


And that was just food and water.

Remember all that extra cargo capacity in the Sylea above?

Well... while I've never worked on a ship, I once worked with a guy who, in fact, did do logistics for ships. A great deal of that cargo space will be taken up by general stores. You've got the population of a small town up in there, after all.  A lot of it will be dry goods, 'luxury snack foods' and so forth... a lot of it will be spare parts for the ship, and then you get into less obvious things, like bolts of cloth to fabricate additional uniforms or bedsheets...  I'm sure a bit of research online could provide a good list for what a modern naval ship stocks, but I'm too lazy to get that for you.

None of that matters for the smaller ships that most players will be using in most games.  Obviously in heavily abstracted games (most Star Wars ships, Fragged Empires (just 'cause I love to call it out...squealing fangirl that I am...when I'm not nerd-raging against it... so conflicted) and so forth) most of this won't feature in planning but could very well be a part of adventuring, a way to jump-calculate emergency reserves and so forth.  Some games actually do all that for you, giving you a ship's 'space endurance' right up front (Fragged Empires, Rogue Trader both come to mind), though it can still be fun to surprise players with a hard number of just how much food is being brought on board when their flying metropolis parks over a world....

In fact, lets do that just for grins  

 A Lunar Class Cruiser has a crew of 100k (rounding up!), and an endurance of 6 months (Default), which we'll call 180 days.  Assuming that they don't wait to run out before restocking, lets say the last port of call with supplies was... 80 days ago (because I can...). We have 40 million lbs of food being brought on board! We can put that in tonnage... 20,000 tons. Thats not even (quite) half a load!  So we can say that a full load of food is on the order of fifty thousand tons of food.

This allows one to start making necessary adjustments to dockside time (moving that much food is a big job), helps cover where one's Wealth Stat is going (and thus why buying a bolt pistol is such a pain for a guy with such a nice ship...) and so forth.

It might also make you realize why its been said that Logistics is what wins the war...







*Disclaimer: I am ballparking numbers, so please don't Pedant me with details about the difference between imperial and metric tons. I know. Ballparking. Try it, its fun and relaxing.

** I double checked. 3.5 ounces, not bad for top of the head math.  Also roughly double the size of a snicker's bar and much more unhealthy...

Food Fabricators.
Machines that can assemble food from raw elements either complete or in ingredient form using an advanced form of 3D fabricating. Not outlandish compared to Star Trek replicators and is a straight extrapolation of existing technology. Coupled with an efficient recycling system this can reduce the volume and mass of what needed for food stocks.

Early version would be working with "food pills" and "freeze dried" stock, later versions can go directly from CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) and Mineral supplements. Early versions would be better at making ingredients to be combined and prepared traditionally. Later versions can prepare complete dishes that just need to be cooked or eaten as is.

In any case for gambility just declare a volume/mass for one man-day worth of supplies, live with the implications, and be done with it. For Classic Traveller it is assumed to be built into the hull assembly and is a fixed cost per crew per month.

Here is how I set it up for my Majestic Stars Setting.

Fabricators
A Foodfab is a unit the size of a 21st century microwave that can produce a variety of prepared foods and food ingredients including artificial meat. It takes a CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) pack, and a M (Mineral) pack for flavor and nutrients.

Type A fabricator is the size of a 21st century office laser printer. It can produce a variety of handheld household items and electronic devices. It call also produce parts to be incorporated into a larger assembly. It is takes cartridges filled with raw materials for fabrication.

Type B fabricator is the size of a 21st century refrigerator and it can produce larger household items including clothing. It also can produce parts to be incorporated into a larger assembly.

Industrial Fabricators can range from the size of an automobile to an entire building. Typically they are specialized to produce specific parts more efficiently than home fabricators could. The parts are then used by a human supervised drone assembly line to make the final product.

Quote from: Spike;1001248Well... while I've never worked on a ship, I once worked with a guy who, in fact, did do logistics for ships.

Was this guy a Traveller player? Used to be big on the CotI forums? Went by the handle of Timerover?

You can't do it with out a massive hydroponics and arboretium.

If we have starships, then I would imagine that food technology is also much more advanced today. If not the already mentioned food replicators, then advanced hydroponics that can grow about anything in a limited amount of space, using recycled waste as ingredients.

I saw a thing about Japanese vertical farming. It's pretty impressive. Imagine that 200-400 years into the future

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1001323Was this guy a Traveller player? Used to be big on the CotI forums? Went by the handle of Timerover?

Sadly no. He sold houses in his spare time. I'm sure there are plenty of former squids running around who do play, however!

Quote from: JeremyR;1001368If we have starships, then I would imagine that food technology is also much more advanced today. If not the already mentioned food replicators, then advanced hydroponics that can grow about anything in a limited amount of space, using recycled waste as ingredients.

I saw a thing about Japanese vertical farming. It's pretty impressive. Imagine that 200-400 years into the future

Bah. That's nothing, I saw a thing were the Japanese were turning Poop into Meat.  


Between this and the CHON comment above it reminds me I was going to talk about such interesting 'food' sources in the potential future as SCOP vats and so forth, but I got caught up in more of the logistics of moving stuff... like I said it was a professional hazard once upon a time.

Thank you Spike! This is interesting stuff.

I handwaive lots of stuff, but there is adventure fodder in the concept of how much stuff has to be loaded aboard a ship that isn't "precious cargo". I also like the concept of massive food stores...and thus Tribbles or space rats as a possible problem aboard large ships.

Quote from: Spike;1001370Bah. That's nothing, I saw a thing were the Japanese were turning Poop into Meat.

So Japan got Taco Bell?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1001372So Japan got Taco Bell?

That's just called recycling...

Quote from: Spike;1001369Sadly no. He sold houses in his spare time. I'm sure there are plenty of former squids running around who do play, however!

Would have been absolutely too good of a coincidence. There was a guy on the Traveller forum who was a former naval... well something involved with logistics. Super into it, to the point of trying to shoe-horn it into conversations where it was only marginally relevant. Super smart though.

Quote from: Spike;1001370Between this and the CHON comment above it reminds me I was going to talk about such interesting 'food' sources in the potential future as SCOP vats and so forth, but I got caught up in more of the logistics of moving stuff... like I said it was a professional hazard once upon a time.

Islands in the Net reference for the win.

Quote from: Spike;1001369Sadly no. He sold houses in his spare time. I'm sure there are plenty of former squids running around who do play, however!

You rang? (Machinist Mate Nuclear Second Class on departure from active duty)


The problem that you are bringing up is an important one if you want to strive for realism in your games. I can give you my solutions, but they may not be to your tastes.

Open Cycle life support is how I envision most of this going. For ships with large crew or passenger compliments, there must be frequent starport visits or underway replenishment for resupply and refueling. For military vessels, there are dedicated replenishment ships for just this occurrence.

Now, shipboard supplies of food and oxygen recycling are supplemented by specially bred algae in tanks. This would be the most hardy and efficient of systems, coupled with Textured Vegetable Protein technology (available today) can provide a good amount of variety for the crew. Remember, if this is for a combat vessel, then the system must be able to survive combat (which most hydroponic systems cannot).

Lets take a look at waste management. You may have multiple species crewing your ship, which means multiple dietary requirements which means multiple different kinds of urine and fecal matter to deal with. Now you can fill waste tanks which are species specific and dump those at the nearest starport* and can even make a small profit from selling all that poop as fertilizer on worlds with little in the way of native useful organics, but I usually just burn them. Enter the SCWO (Super Critical Water Oxidizer) in which all the urine, feces, wash water, soap scum, garbage and food scraps are mixed with waste water to form a slurry. The slurry is heated to 480C at 3500 psi (250 atmospheres). Compressed oxygen is injected into the hot slurry and all the wastes are oxidized in less than a second.  What comes out of the SCWO? Mostly steam, CO2, fixed nitrates and nutrient salts that are fed to the algae and other plants.  It's sterile too.

Closed Loop life support systems are another matter entirely. For one, they are far more fragile. They will be completely destroyed in combat when that section loses pressure. These are much more detailed in the Traveller 4 book Fire, Fusion, and Steel 2. I have my own take on them for T4, detailed below.

Quote from: jeff37923Closed Extended Life Support Systems may be added to the ship at a cost of KCr 14, a volume of 0.1 tons, and a power requirement of 0.7mw per ton of volume of the ship. This system will provide regenerative life support for a period of years equal to the TL of the ship minus 6 plus the population code of the total high/medium passenger and crew (TL 9 with 4 crew and 8 high passengers, pop code 1, means 4 years of life support). Low passengers do not count against this number.

   This comes out to MCr1.4, a volume of 10 tons, and 70mw per 100 tons of ship. This unit is very fragile and any internal hits will cause the crops to be lost, requiring that a number of weeks equal to the total year capacity be spent in repair and regrowth before it can be used again.

Yeah, I've done far far too much research into this subject.....

*The Star Wars method of dumping waste prior to entering hyperspace just produces unpowered high velocity garbage projectiles in cometary orbits of a habitable system. Don't do it! You will get fined by the Starport Authority at the very least,

Something else to consider. All open space on a ship is cargo space for logistical stores. So if you have a large chunk of the crew in low berths during the voyage, any berthing for them that is empty can hold life support supplies for the trip. By the time the crew is brought out of low berths, the cabins will be empty because the supplies will have been consumed by then. That's an adaptation of how we did it in the Navy.

Quote from: Dumarest;1001373That's just called recycling...

Anyone else find themselves endlessly mesmerized by Dumarest's avatar?

In the outstanding novel "Superman last sonnof krypton" by Mario puzo led luthor owned a small starship and faced the issue of a life support system in it. He developed a strainnof algae that had the highest respiration rate known to man. It lived on light produced by the ships's power source and provided luthor all his oxygen needs.

I'd imagine a life support system might contain a synthesis of advanced nanotech and genetically engineered microbial systems that could run on minimal energy and would even recycle most "dust" which is mostly dead, discarded skin cells as nutrients.

Realistically most organic matter is made from the lower part of the periodic table and fairly common, so the basic elements could be easily acquired in mist star systems.

For semi hard sf advanced nanotech can handle most life support needs. Crew could be conditioned in various ways to have a lower desire for food.  Possibly  extreme vr could provide the sensations of eating various things to make a monotonous diet more easily endured.

Another idea is supply ships that make occasional runs to outbound ships. Small, high speed cargo/passenger ships that would bring supplies and crew rotations to and from the explorers.

Like I said earlier I believe 3D fabricator of food from CHON and minerals is going to be a straight forward technological development. We are already 3D printing molecules. And to be clear it is not going to be Star Trek replication. Rather it going to be a compact staged process with CHON + Material turned into various stock materials, which in turn combined into various ingredients which is processed into the final food item.

A large part of the development process is figuring out what food grade stock material and ingredient work well with automated fabricators. It highly likely that there will still be a lot of traditional preparation with ingredients rather than whole dishes pulled out of the fabricators.

To close the loop requires waste and other material to be collected and processed back into CHON + Mineral. Since closures is never going to be perfect there will have to be resupply.

The main reason this is all possible is because of ability of humankind to control processes and materials precisely with digital controls.  

As far as gaming goes, this makes handling life support and supplies in a straightforward manager plausible without needing tens of thousands of tons of cargo space