[Spaceships] Biological Ships: Food Consumption

[scc]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

The rules in that book are particular to the TS setting. I don't think SS7 assumes that biological ships even need to eat at all. That said, if you do want consumption to be a factor, the SS8 rule should work fine. Interestingly, it uses a much slower scaling than one would assume based on the mass of the ships.

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

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

Bioships, as in living organisms, would need to consume organic matter to grow or repair itself,

....and the bioship example in Bio-tech covers this. Anything actually built as a character would. You might have to adjust it with Reduced Consumption to get the answer you _want_.

[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.