[Spaceships] Biological Ships: Food Consumption

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That SS8 figure seems... off. A living spaceship probably isn't going to need to burn as much energy staying warm as a human (it's cold in space, but you don't lose heat all that readily) and isn't going to be burning calories moving around (its drives do that for it), yet a human-sized (SM 0, ST 20) bioship is going to consume 20x as much food as a human (or 80 lb/day). As the ship weighs 200 lb, that means it's eating 40% of its body mass every day.

I assume that's supposed to be using the Spaceships standard dST. That man-sized bioship would have a dST of 2 and require twice the food of a human. That is says ST instead of dST should probably be considered errata.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That SS8 figure seems... off. A living spaceship probably isn't going to need to burn as much energy staying warm as a human (it's cold in space, but you don't lose heat all that readily) and isn't going to be burning calories moving around (its drives do that for it), yet a human-sized (SM 0, ST 20) bioship is going to consume 20x as much food as a human (or 80 lb/day). As the ship weighs 200 lb, that means it's eating 40% of its body mass every day.



SS7 has two options, one that's 1% MaxHP per minute and $200k/ton and one that's 1% MaxHP per day and matches your price. Extrapolating, that's around $22k/ton for your quoted rate. One can argue that a bioship should get this for free (although simply stating every bioship has it and charging full price is still appropriate, depending on setting).

[quote=SS8:8]
Biomechanical Self-Repair: The ship is capable of self-repair.
If the spacecraft is reduced to -5 times its HP, it can no longer
fix itself – there isn’t enough structure left. Otherwise, regener-
ation rate is 10% of the spacecraft’s dHP every day. This option
costs $0.02M per ton of mass, e.g., for an SM +7 (300 ton)
spacecraft it costs $6M.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I assume that's supposed to be using the Spaceships standard dST. That man-sized bioship would have a dST of 2 and require twice the food of a human. That is says ST instead of dST should probably be considered errata.

The example is of an ST 100 bioship. That would be SM+4 and 10 tons, or about the size of a small whale or rather large elephant (largest recorded elephant was around 10 tons). That makes sense. A dST 100 bioship would be SM+9 and 3,000 tons, or about 15x the mass of the largest known organism to ever live. That seems rather excessive, so I'd imagine that the intent was indeed to be ST rather than dST (although I'd need to read SS8 to know - I'm not interested in TS so I never bought it).
EDIT: Misremembered the scaling - SM 0 is ST 30, and ST 100 would be SM+3 and 3 tons. The point stands, however (in fact, it's now even worse - a human-size bioship consumes 60% of its mass every day).

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Ah, there we are then. Honestly, 10%/day makes a lot more sense than 1%, so I'd say we should indeed go with that.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The example is of an ST 100 bioship. That would be SM+4 and 10 tons, or about the size of a small whale or rather large elephant (largest recorded elephant was around 10 tons). That makes sense. A dST 100 bioship would be SM+9 and 3,000 tons, or about 15x the mass of the largest known organism to ever live. That seems rather excessive, so I'd imagine that the intent was indeed to be ST rather than dST (although I'd need to read SS8 to know - I'm not interested in TS so I never bought it).

The Nadezhda Bioship (SS8:36) is SM +9, giving it dST 100. In the notes it mentions that it consumes 100 man-days of food per day of operation. It seems clear that the SS8 rule really is based on dST, rather than ST.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

The Nadezhda Bioship (SS8:36) is SM +9, giving it dST 100. In the notes it mentions that it consumes 100 man-days of food per day of operation. It seems clear that the SS8 rule really is based on dST, rather than ST.

Yep, that example makes it abundantly clear. That's a freaking huge organism, but I guess with it being in space that's not as big a deal. That's still some rather odd scaling (an SM 0 ship consumes 3x as much as a human, but an SM +9 ship consumes 1/10th as much as a similarly-scaled human, were that possible), but I'm certain the writers of SS8 had their reasons.

[MatthewVilter]

Originally Posted by scc

Bioships, as in living organisms, would need to consume organic matter to grow or repair itself, and personally I can see a nuclear pile making it's internal reactionless drives work, but it wouldn't provide energy to it's basic functions

I agree.

It probably should not need much food unless it is growing/repairing.

If the bioship includes a reactor of some kind I think it probably could produce food for itself mostly by reprocessing its own waste (maybe in an Open Space system which might only need a reactor for lighting/heating/whatever if the ship is in deep space). If it was replacing lost mass or adding more it would need to take on raw materials the same way that a normal ship with a fabricator would.

Eventually, even without growing/repairing, it would rundown its food supply due to some level of inefficiency in the reprocessing but the same is true of the "total life support" option for Habitats. OTOH a really advanced and well designed system (or maybe just really large and self contained) might last longer than the reactor's fuel...

A bioship (especially a prototype) might also need a supply of micronutrients but even if the ship was pretty poor at reusing and synthesizing them a very long term supply would probably be very light.

[scc]

SM+4 ships are dST 15, not 10.

I posted a prototype design in another thread, I gave that two energy weapons with a MHD turbine to run them, two standard reactionless engines, with a MHD turbine to run them, plus a psychic brain and ether wings/flukes. When those MHD turbines run dry there's no way their providing energy to the rest of the creature.

And this brings up the question: A man need 3 pounds of grain a day to survive and the rules give him 4 pounds, is there a way to reduce this more?

[MatthewVilter]

Food (or Cyborg) Paste from Ultra-Tech (p. 73) is 0.75 lbs. per day...

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by MatthewVilter

Food (or Cyborg) Paste from Ultra-Tech (p. 73) is 0.75 lbs. per day...

"Stoking the furnace" involves a backhoe full of baby food. Ewww.

[MatthewVilter]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

"Stoking the furnace" involves a backhoe full of baby food. Ewww.

LOL

Alternatively use Spaceships as written and it's a backhoe full of airplane food, complete with packaging...