Disclaimer! All notes and calculations below are rough, approximate and may be wildly inaccurate. I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it used to be.
An empty hex is an area 1 parsec across. Consider it a cube 3.26 LY on each side and you have 34.65 cubic light years.
While for OTU/YTU purposes that area is called empty because it has not inhabited worlds or areas that anyone has bothered to explore it is most definitely not empty.
Space is full of things, dwarf stars, wandering planets or planetoids, asteroids, comets, alien wrecks, non visible nebulae. As much as you can think of and more.
So they are in a hex no one has bothered to properly explore. They have one huge problem. Fuel. Everything else is fixable if they can get power to the ship. Firstly they need to survive for a while to use sensors to find ice/hydrogen clouds etc.
The ship will have ambient life support for days just from the air in the inhabited areas. Consider a far trader. 156Dtons of that ship is not fuel; this is the staterooms, cargo, engineering etc. These are all areas that the crew enter and which have breathable air. Say that one third of that represents actual empty space and the rest is solid objects. That gives you 51.5Dtons of cubic air in the staterooms, cargo hold, corridors, bridge, common room etc. As a very rough calculation of the time it would take a human adult to exhale enough CO2 to fill a cubic area to a level considered beginning to be dangerous (3%). A human adult produces roughly 1.7 cubic feet of CO2 an hour (double for moderate activity and triple for heavy activity. It’s rough and in cubic feet so no complaints :wink:
T = vol of air in cubic feet x 3% / number of people x hourly production of CO2.
A Dton is 13.5 cubic metres by calculation but round it to 14 cubic metres because the rules do. A cubic meter is 35 cubic feet so a Dton is 490 cubic feet meaning the Far trader has roughly 25,200 cubic feet of air.
So T = 25,200 x 0.03 / 1 x 1.7
T = 445 hours.
This is one person. If there are ten passengers and crew aboard this will give them 44.5 hours of air. This can be extended considerably by putting as many of the crew as possible onto vacc suit re-breathers but there is a physical limit to the volume of breathable oxygen in the air even if you can scrub out enough of the CO2 to keep people awake and active. You don’t mention how big the ship is but with only 4 active crew even something the size of a scout should have enough remaining air to last a few days.
A decent engineer should be able to find enough remaining fuel in the pipes to keep minimum power for a week or so (any properly designed system will have lock offs in place to seal off ruptured fuel tank sections so there should still be fuel in the pipes from the tanks to the power plant plus to last a while on tick over).
The ship has water. The crew drink it, they wash in it etc. As covered under life support in another topic a single crewman is going to use or need about 20 kilos of water a day for all uses. A ship is going to recycle but is still likely to have several days or a week’s worth for every person (2 x staterooms). Double this value again to represent the fact that the ship has water in pipes, filters and heaters/coolers all over the ship. You said 6 crew but made no mention of passengers. If they have 6 staterooms you could be looking at as much as 3360 kilos of water in the ship. This can be cracked for hydrogen and oxygen by any competent engineer (this is energy intensive but you have a fusion plant that can move the ship at FTL speeds). Since it is H2O you are going to crack roughly twice the volume of H or 6700 kilos (about half a Dton). You may be going thirsty with only the soft drinks in the galley but that is power to last a while if you run the power plant on minimum. Yes I know the rules don’t cover that, they were written in the 1970s, make something up or set it at half or quarter power as the minimum to maintain a viable fusion reaction within that size of fusion chamber.
Now that they are alive and likely to remain so for a week or three they need to find a source of fuel (and adventure). This is where the ref comes in. That huge alien wreck, millions of years old. A floating city with a frozen lake at its heart. A system where the sun has burnt out leaving that water world dark and frozen. Gigaton ice balls drifting across the void. Einstien Rosen bridges. One of grandfathers long lost Jump portals. A huge turtle with four elephants on its back holding a disc shaped world.
The players can stay alive, what they find thereafter is limited only by your imagination :wink:
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