Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
The big space filler on a generation ship is food. Even with conservative numbers, you need 2,000 square feet of space per person.
I think spaceships cabins are about 100 square feet a piece: sufficient for one person, cramped for four, and you need two of them to have a restaurant that maxes out 20 people. That means you need 20 cabins worth of floor space to keep one person alive. You might be able to drop that to 10 because plants reduce life support systems though. So that increases things by a factor of 10.
That still gives a mass a few orders of magnitude off what I wrote earlier. Some of that might be spaceships optimism, but its worth looking into the rest of it.
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The habitats were presumably intended to feel spacious, so I think you can fairly arbitrarily make them much larger than the bare minimum. It might be sensible to start with enough area for a small city plus supporting farmlands and a big natural park too, as the basic hab module.