Where's the Life Support System?

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Where's the damn Life Support System? Where's the thingie on the map to be smashed, bashed, exploded, or sabotaged? And where are the rules for fixing it when those mercs who boarded your ship took it out, or when some mystery passenger is bored and wants to manufacture some intrigue?

 

[AndrewW]

Life support is throughout the ship, not concentrated in one central location.

 

[wbnc]

This has come up a few times. So I did some research on how NASA, and other agencies, supply life support to the space station...Its scattered through out the station. On the ISS the components are broken down, and situated in various locations in a module of the space station. With each country using their own systems for their sections of the Station.


.As AndrewW pointed out. So it seems that he model Traveller has used is one that works.


So you can sabotage one section/or stateroom's life support,and the neighboring areas aren't affected.( well other than having to work a little harder to make up for the damaged/sabotaged system)

also if one component breaks down it doesn't disable Life support for the entire ship.

 

[phavoc]

Traveller has always paid lip-service to the idea of life support. Specific details have never been part of the gaming system.

The ISS does have various life support pieces distributed throughout the station, but it's not a good example because of the underlying reasons for how it was constructed - not to mention that various partners have been responsible for different sections. It's a station constructed by committee.

A more comparable example would be submersibles, as they are sealed environments like space ships. In those you will find specific areas and sections that perform one function. Sewage and water treatment are concentrated in one area, as is the primary air filtration system.

Even in the future it makes no logical sense to distribute life support functions and equipment in every compartment. That flies in the face of logic and engineering. When you distribute the systems you lose efficiency and increase costs (which could actually explain the astronomical life support charges...). In reality ships are going to be built to be run as inexpensive as possible - or at least civilian ships would. That's a business paradigm that hasn't changed in thousands of years.

Aside from that, unless you are wanting to make hyper-detailed plans, it's best to toss the concept aside. To do it properly you'd need to rationalize all of the requirements to generate the necessary estimates on displacement tonnage that you were going to model. There is some official canon data you can dig out, such as the livestock/slave containers which are entirely self-contained. From that you can derive some rough estimates on what sort of displacement your life support equipment requires. But it's probably going to be an exercise in frustration than anything else since I don't think any thought went into the original designs to generate the underlying specifications.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Yes, exactly; the ISS is a bad example because it was designed by countries who could neither trust each other not to sabotage each other, nor be trusted to make the correct design tradeoffs for a project of this importance. It's a better example for a Libertarianist or Anarchist commune.

Submarines are a much more correct example.

The Life Support requirements are such an unspecified quantity in the game system that it is impossible to account for. Mongoose, please have a look through the Atomic Rockets website, get a realistic perspective about the issues at the current TL, and scale the TL up plausibly, so the players have something to interact with!

 

[MongooseMatt]

The problem here is if we make life support a single point on a ship, why not computers?

I think distribution is the logical way forward, especially as we go up in both size and TL.

 

[phavoc]

Remember that your life support systems include air, water, sewage, etc. It's much easier to run pipes to a central location where you work/repair/maintain ONE set of machinery than say 24 sets that are scaled smaller.

If you want to address the issue it really becomes a formula. Assuming you use say 1/4 dton per stateroom (or whatever), multiply the numbers to get a rough estimate of the space required.

OR you do it by displacement. for every 100 tons you need X space, but with 52nd efficiency you may be able to have a very small foot print and that 40,000 ton passenger liner only requires 20 dedicated Dtons for all of this.

Distribution isn't the most efficient way, but it makes drawing deckplans easier.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Remember that your life support systems include air, water, sewage, etc. It's much easier to run pipes to a central location where you work/repair/maintain ONE set of machinery than say 24 sets that are scaled smaller.

It might not be, because Technology. Think of a little TL12 suitcase-sized box that handles all that recycling for a dozen staterooms...

Distribution isn't the most efficient way, but it makes drawing deckplans easier.

There is that too

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Remember that your life support systems include air, water, sewage, etc. It's much easier to run pipes to a central location where you work/repair/maintain ONE set of machinery than say 24 sets that are scaled smaller.

It might not be, because Technology. Think of a little TL12 suitcase-sized box that handles all that recycling for a dozen staterooms...

Distribution isn't the most efficient way, but it makes drawing deckplans easier.

There is that too

If you're saying that "Life Support Equipment" is sufficiently ubiquitous and innocuous that its size and shape don't matter, then that needs to be reflected in the deck plan rules; cabin sizes no longer have a volume requirement due to life support, and the design rules should reflect that. Regardless, I still say it's better to have something for the passengers or pirates to smash. When the question comes down to availability of a plot point vs. seemingly magical technology, the availability of a plot point should win.

And don't forget, all decks have a portion of the vertical space already dedicated to allowing all this "Life Support" ductwork to be ignored. So the design rules actually don't need to address "the plumbing"; you're just killing a plot point.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

We need realistic rules to explain how artificial gravity works.

Actually, we don't.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

We need realistic rules to explain how artificial gravity works.

Actually, we don't.

No, we don't. But we do need more plot devices. Of which, the Life Support System is a pretty standard one. We shouldn't go without it without very good reason.