(UT) Biosuit - does it feed you?

[Kilmore]

In Ultra-Tech, it says that a biosuit provides full life support, but says nothing about supplying nourishment to the wearer. I am going to assume that since it says full life-support, that it has some ability to manufacture and administer a survival level vitamin slurry to the wearer. Anyone else have any take on this?

[khorboth]

I would assume that life support does not include food, but may have water recycling. That said, I would figure that getting 2-3 days of TL10 MRE into a suit would be easy. It may even be standard procedure depending upon environment.

[Kilmore]

Here's what I'm thinking. If you need six straight weeks of life support without taking your suit off, you're pretty hosed. So the suit has a sleep mode. The suit doesn't sleep... you do. It shuts you down to a coma level and gives you just enough nourishment via IV to keep you alive. It would also have a rescue pinger.

[Nereidalbel]

The suit says it lives off your bodily waste. Air and water are recyclable, and a day's supply of food paste is only $10. Doesn't say it feeds you, but, I wouldn't see having a tube you can get food paste through as being unrealistic.

[Mithlas]

Unless it's Soviet, when you feed it.

But no, typically food is typically left out of such small-scale life support. Sometimes water is even treated as non-recyclable, but I think this gets more into the setting and background. Having a few days of rations with you wouldn't be unusual supply preparation.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by khorboth

I would assume that life support does not include food, but may have water recycling. .

That's what "full" life support means. The upgrade that provides food as well as air and water is _total_ life support and I know of no wearable suit that does this, just vehicular systems.

[Flyndaran]

It's a skin tight suit that safely removes sweat, organic debris, urine, feces, and menstrual flow all without "real" power for a month an a half. I think it's already gone beyond realistic tech into space opera, so adding magically dense nutritional supplements wouldn't break physics any more, I imagine.

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by Kilmore

In Ultra-Tech, it says that a biosuit provides full life support, but says nothing about supplying nourishment to the wearer. I am going to assume that since it says full life-support, that it has some ability to manufacture and administer a survival level vitamin slurry to the wearer. Anyone else have any take on this?

From a game balance standpoint, I don't think it hurts anything to rule that it provides food as well.

From a realism/setting standpoint, well, I suppose the main consideration is energy. Not a physicist, so by all means correct me if I'm wrong. A human burns 2000 Calories per day. That translates to roughly 10 million joules, if we round up a bit to account for energy loss in the recycling process. And remember that the energy in bodily waste is supposed to be burned to operate the suit (plus solar).

If I recall from my lwcamp laser weapon posts, a rifle bullet is about 5 kJ. So the real question is, can a C cell store enough energy for an antipersonnel laser to be fired 2000 times? Looking at UT, the "clip size" for a laser pistol is 33, or 165 with a superscience power cell. So you need 6 superscience cells. And that just gets us through one day. Added power density for higher TL, hacks that reduce human consumption requirements, etc, can probably cut that back down, but we're not even remotely in the 6week ballpark.

I'd say that there's enough wiggle room that you could hand-wave it as a superscience technology. That's what superscience is for, right? But the biosuit should not recycle food if you want a hard science setting.

(Like I said, not a physicist. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.)

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by wellspring

From a game balance standpoint, I don't think it hurts anything to rule that it provides food as well.

Food paste is cheap, and the insert for a suit to be able to provide food is only something like $50. Fairly small expense to say "I paid for this" instead of trying to convince a GM to make the call.

[Celti]

It does not.

The biosuit (and several other suits and vehicles in UT) provides “full life support”, which is defined on p. 224 of Ultra-Tech as recycling air and water as long as it has power. If you want food, buy a provisions dispenser and add it to your suit: it's on p. 187.