Space Ships question regarding total life support

[YankeeGamer]

If I put total life support into a ship, it halves the number of cabins. Do establishments, minifactories, offices, etc, also pay the same price? They don't add to the number of people aboard. (Pyramid 3/34 states that these facilities don't gt the extra room that not having life support systems provides.)

I couldn't find anything either way.

I'm redoing USS Enterprise--the enormous ice crawler--now that I have that magazine issue.

THANKS

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

If I put total life support into a ship, it halves the number of cabins. Do establishments, minifactories, offices, etc, also pay the same price?

Hm. It looks like as written the answer is yes (they all replace cabin counts, and total life support reduces cabin count), but it should probably actually be no.

[AlexanderHowl]

Total life support doubles the size of accommodations (Spaceships, p. 17). Accommodations are defined on the same page as cabins, cells, and bunkrooms, so the doubling for total life support does not apply to specialized rooms or steerage cargo.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Anthony

they all replace cabin counts, and total life support reduces cabin count

Total Life Support doesn't change "cabin count", it doubles the space required for accommodations.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Total life support doubles the size of accommodations (Spaceships, p. 17). Accommodations are defined on the same page as cabins, cells, and bunkrooms, so the doubling for total life support does not apply to specialized rooms or steerage cargo.

AlexanderHowel is correct here. Cabins, Cells, and Bunkrooms ("accommodations") take up twice as many cabin "slots" while specialized rooms and steerage cargo do not.

An unfortunate part of the rules here are that "cabins" is used as a label for two different things:
1) the number of slots a Habitat has available to install rooms
2) a room used as living quarters

I usually refer to the first as "Cabin Slots" or just "slots" to differentiate them from the living quarters meaning of the label.

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

(Pyramid 3/34 states that these facilities don't gt the extra room that not having life support systems provides.)

That article specifically calls out Minifacs, Steerage Cargo, and Transporters as taking up more space. Basically, rooms that people occupy get the space-saving benefits from having No Life Support while rooms which are mostly machinery or unoccupied cargo space do not. The reasoning there is pretty simple: you can't cram more machinery or cargo into those because they don't contain life support machinery to remove. OTOH, you can get more seats in a restaurant or more desks in an office by removing the life support machinery.

This rule is completely separate from the rules for accommodations from the Habitat rules in Spaceships 1. And, yes, this does create a weird hodge-podge way of handling habitats. I'd rewrite the entire section if I were put in charge of making a Spaceships 2nd Edition.

[YankeeGamer]

Thanks all. That's what I thought--no extra space needed for establishments and the like. With the number of non-accomodation spaces in the 300,000 ton Enterprise, it's going to be a noticeable difference.

(When Enterprise is finished, I'll post her)