Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
Bio-Tech has food scaling for large and small creatures. It uses the square of scale (i.e. height), which is the 2/3rds power of mass.
Spaceships 7 says you should shift up and down the Habitat table by the SM in steps, which means habitats scale in proportion to mass. That's probably fair, as what you gain (for larger beings) by having 2/3rds scaling in walls, etc. you lose because you need more than 1/1 scaling of things like chair legs and bed supports (not much more with high TL materials, but some).
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I can see more than linear for supports, now that you mention it - cross sectional area for the supports would need to be linear to have the same pressure (as pressure is force - weight - per unit area), and then would need to be taller besides. So, I can see furniture and the like having 4/3rds scaling. If we assume roughly half the mass of an unoccupied Habitat is in that sort of stuff and the rest is in life support and walls and the like (which has 2/3rds scaling), you'd end up with linear scaling overall. I always assumed the furniture of a Habitat was only a tiny component of its mass, however, but I could be mistaken. Indeed, steerage cargo implies I may well be - that shows ~1/3 of the cabin's mass being taken up by life support and the like (a full Habitat used for steerage cargo gives available tonnage equal to roughly 2/3rds of the system's mass), which would give another ~1/3 for furniture and ~1/3 for the inhabitants, their belongings, and sundry other bits that aren't furniture and scale linearly.