There's an awful lot of "unintentional" in the books, I wouldn't hang my hat on that. For example, sometimes life support includes oxygen, heating and lighting, other times heating and lighting are mentioned separately to life support in the same sentence, and in the paragraph on suffocation air is mentioned distinctly from life support.
In the table of costs on p154 it does not explicitly state per "occupied low berth", but it does in the text.
One location, the text explicitly states something, but it is not mentioned on the table? That sounds like an oversight. That is vastly different than, you saying that food is paid for from one location when it clearly states that it paid for elsewhere. Your thing about occupied low berth is easy. The text mentions the rule. The text is the rule, the chart is just for handy variable checking. Without the chart the rule still exists, but without the rule, the chart can't exist as there is nothing to explain what the different parts of the chart mean.
The wording of the per passenger cost indicates it is for life support only (and food/water is never explicitly included in the definition of life support). You can live for days without food or water, but without life support you die in minutes, and only life support provided by staterooms allows an oxygen reservoir to prolong that in the event of a life support failure. Unoccupied rooms don't need to use up food or water. You could easily manage to ensure you only stocked them when passage had been booked and have them serviced after occupation.
Food and water are explicitly excluded from being considered life support, but are paid for using the per stateroom life support fee, as it says on page 154 of the CRB
"Life Support and Supplies: Each stateroom on a ship costs Cr1000 every Maintenance Period. This cost covers supplies for the
life support system as well as food and water, although meals at this level will be rather spartan."
This covers the cost of supplies for "life support system" as well as the cost of food and water. This means they are clearly separate things.
It makes more sense to me that unoccupied staterooms don't require life support, food and water (more so than stateroom costs don't include food and water), you could interpret the wording to mean either case (or we would have all have come to a consensus by now).
The problem being is that Traveller has pegged life support for the whole ship based on how many staterooms as ship has. A ship with no staterooms has no life support equipment. What they should have done, was made the entire thing 2,000Cr per person Middle, 4,000Cr per person for High, 6,000Cr per person in Luxury and just call it done. Having two life support cost numbers overcomplicates the whole thing.
I glad for the discussion but I think I have reached my conclusion.
It is not interpretation if you have to ignore the plain text. You are ignoring that it does say what is for food and what is not. It is stupid and doesn't make sense, but that is the rule as written. Life support in Traveller is not light and heat. Those are all covered by the Basic power usage of the hull. You know, that 0.2 PPs per ton that ships have to provide enough power for? Life support is basically, air, food, and water. Heat and light are provided by other systems and do not cost extra money
