[Low-Tech] [High-Tech] Portable cooling: higher-TL replacement of water jugs?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Well, let's think about it. I'm about 165lbs, so that's 75kg, right? About 70% of me is water, so that's what, 52 liters or so? During the summer months while working, consuming 2 to 4 liters of water in 5-6.5 hours was a regular thing, with few breaks to urinate. That's about 3-5% of my total water content in a work period. And I would have considered myself poorly hydrated through-out that period.

Yes, if we're talking about a few ounces of cool water, that's no big deal. But if we are talking about multiple liters of water consumed and lost, then that's a pretty significant amount of my water mass. But over a day, you need to consume about a gallon and a half of water to be healthy. GURPS lets us get away with what, 2 quarts day? Which is a half gallon, which is about on the minimum I would put back for a day if I suspected potable water to be hard to come by.

...
But yeah, a bonus to survival and FP loss due to heat is probably due. After-all, if I'm losing 1fp an hour due to work, and that was doubled by the heat, then that's 10-12 FP lost over the course of the night, without failures on that check at -2 every 30 minutes. So either I have really good health, or water helps.

2 quarts is 1/4 of a gallon. A healthy human can handle sweating up to 1 gallon a day. Evaporative cooling is incredible from a physics standpoint.
I'm sure you gained a point of Temperature Tolerance toward heat. That would allow you to work merely being healthy rather than uber-athletic.
Also if you're drinking that much water that often, I don't see how Vicki's portable cooling devices would have time to work on all that water before PCs drink it.

Even cold loving lazy me adapted to long walks in 100+ degree weather last summer, something I never would have thought possible before I did it. Obviously nothing like heavy work in high humidity near those temps, but it illustrates the principle of how much humans can adapt to heat.