Stocking your Life Pod

[Fred Brackin]

This s the Life Pod on p. 232 of UT and for the sake of this discussion and preserving the utility of this fictional trope I'm going to assume that while situations where you need to eject your life pod from your spaceship do occur they do not occur in just any old random section of infinity.

Instead they are likely to occur within a useful distance of an Earth-like planet. So perhaps some sort of "misjump" scenario where misjumping severely damages your ship but at least puts you out of hyperspace relatively close to an Earth-like planet even if it's not the Earth-like planet you were originally aiming at.

The technobabble would go something like "Precursor-created network of spacegates with occaisionally eccentric navigation control" . It could also be soemthing basic in hyperphysics where the co-ordinates you use for hyperspace exit have a component that includes the age, mass and type of the local star. So if you were aiming at a star with planets you probably come out at some star that also has a good chance of having planets.

How close do you need to be? Farther away than orbit is posible. The pod has 1000 yards per second of Delta-V which you could turn into 2000 miles per hour of speed.

The pod also has 90 man-days of limited life support and a capacity of 4. So over 22.5 days at 2000 miles per hour you could travel about a million miles. Then you add in what you'd gain from gravity. If that was similar to the downhill run from the Moon to the Earth taken by an Apollo capsule add in another c. 250,000 miles.

If you're wondering about re-entry speeds that TL7 Apollo capsule did it at 25,000 mies per hour. So 27,000 is probably not a problem for a TL9 life pod.

Distance possible only goes up a little if there are less than 4 people in the pod. UT says that there's only 30 days of stored power to run all the onboard systems. Both Delta-V and stored power probably go up at hgiher tLs but that's a complication I'll avoid for a while.

So the pod provides air and water but everything else has to come out of the 200 lbs of storage space in the pod.

Even before landing we need to keep people fed but looking at the food on p.73 we see that 90 man-days of Meal Packs is 270 lbs. Survival Rations are still 135 lbs so it's probably Food Pills at 67.5 lbs. The lack of dietary fiber in those might be easier on the life support anyway. :)

So 67.5 lbs and $900.

An option that could save those food pills for after landing and stretch the life support a little is the Torpine drug from Bio-tech p.157 (but not the same-named but different drug from UT). That would let the pod-people sleep away the travel time while cutitng air use by half and food and water by a factor of 32.

That would let you stretch the life support to the full 30 days of stored power so you'd need 120 does for 4 people. That comes to $2400 and some small but unspecified amount of weight. Let's call it 2.5 lbs.

Now we come to what you need after landing. We'll add the simple stuff like 4 sets of personal basics and 1 set of group basics (as from Basic). $40 and 24 lbs.

4 Large Knives of Super-fine quality. I'm springing for the Super-fine because those UT cutting edges almost certainly don't need to be (and/or can't be) resharpened by hand which our TL9+ people probably don't know how to do. 4 lbs and $960.

We could go with 4 Small backpacks but those would only carry 160 lbs. So it's going to be 3 Small and 1 Frame backpacks and we'll hope for one strong person in the pod. 19 lbs and $280.

3 First Aid Kits and 1 Crash Kit as per UT p. 198. 16lbs and $350.

4 Vapor Canteens. 16 lbs and $1800. Filtration canteens are cheaper but probably less useful.

4 Envirobags. 12 lbs and $720.

4 Pocket Packs (p.38). These include penlights, Swiss army knives and a roll of duct tape each. 3 lbs and $100.

4 Pocket Laser torches. Useful for many purposes and probably the only way our UT castawys can start a fire. 1 lbs and $200.

4 Small radios to go with the Medium Radio salvaged from the pod. 2 lbs and $800 with another 5 lbs for the salvaged medium unit (price included with the pod).

I set of Televiewers (UT p.60) 0.6 lbs and $500.

1 rechargeable E-cell to extend the lives of all their other gadgets. At TL9 there do not seem to be better options for power. 20 lbs and $2000.

We're at 193 lbs and the castaways probably had some sorts of persoanl belongings when they entered the pod.

There's also a Personal Computer built into the pod. At 5 lbs it doesn't weigh much but I'm not sure how useful it would be.

Anyway, we're about at our weight limit and I know the lsit could be upgraded by spendign more money and/or going to higher TLs (like for TL10 Survival Watches) but this might be a good start.

Feedback and improvements welcome.