• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Replenish life support on a primitive planet

Well, then you've got plenty of fuel and can jettison the unneeded O2. A ton of water gives you 111 kilograms of hydrogen, which is a 50% improvement volumewise and you don't need to have gear to keep it cold, which should make up at least in part for needing gear to crack it. You can tap the O2 for what you need and ditch the rest.

The deuterium water idea makes for an interesting variant.
 
It's NOT a power issue. It's a matter of how fast can you separate the two, and how to you keep the concentrated Oxygen from corroding the hell out of the purifier. Plos that you'll need to be either cryostoring or dumping surplus O2. And cryostoring it is a minor power but a significant space issue.

I am assuming that I am producing about 2 pounds of oxygen per person onboard per day, depending on oxygen needs. I cannot see how that will produce such a problem. I can either vent the hydrogen produced into an empty fuel tank, vent it off of the ship, or react it with CO2 to produce methane and more oxygen.

Then there is the potential for advances in electrolyzing water for oxygen in the future for oxygen supply in Asteroid Belts and unfriendly atmospheres.
 
The Power Plant isn't the big issue, Timerover. The Jump Drive is. 20+ tons in 20 minutes, of some 180+ tons of water.

And the issue that water masses 9x what molecular hydrogen does.
 
The Power Plant isn't the big issue, Timerover. The Jump Drive is. 20+ tons in 20 minutes, of some 180+ tons of water.

And the issue that water masses 9x what molecular hydrogen does.

I am using the water for oxygen storage, not hydrogen storage, as it is far more efficient to store oxygen as water rather than compressed oxygen. The hydrogen is simply a by-product.
 
Hmm, depends on how handwavey vs. hardcore you want to be. Toting around water is a LOT more weight then L-Hyd, or even my preferred variant, solid hydrogen.
 
Hmm, depends on how handwavey vs. hardcore you want to be. Toting around water is a LOT more weight then L-Hyd, or even my preferred variant, solid hydrogen.

Classic doesn't seem to care, which makes water nice. MT doesn't care either unless you want agility, so long as you're using a maneuver drive; those are rated by spacecraft volume rather than spacecraft mass. Real life - real life would care a whole lot. Real-world physics would howl in anguish at some of the things we say we can do in the game.

We know the classic 1 EP power plant draws a ton of L-Hyd in 4 weeks, so about 414 milligrams per second, so the craft using that little plant would need to break about 3.7 grams of water per second and then either use or discharge the O2 produced. Since I think that would support about 360 people, I suspect most of the O2 is being vented to space. Of course, jumping is a different problem; we'd either need L-Hyd for that or home-rule some other way to power jump. Still might be worthwhile if we're saving some space on power plant fuel.

As for cracking water, well ... mostly the game gives us ducks without much attention to their feet: we see the ducks cruising through the water with only a general notion of how much effort they put into doing it. How big is the machinery that would be doing the cracking? I don't know, duck's feet. Are there dangers involved in cracking and then venting 2 and a half liters of O2 per second? I don't know, duck's feet. There may be dangers involved in the design of the maneuver drive too, or in the coolant system needed to support the fusion plant, or in the batteries that start up the fusion plant and that by canon can operate life support for a few days. There's something on that ship that goes kablooey if you make the wrong combination of rolls, but it's all duck's feet. We don't see it, we just see the effect of it.

That being the case, and Traveller maneuver drives holding physics basically in contempt, I can see definite value in taking 2/3 the room to store the fuel, so long as you're willing to give up the gas-giant-skimming bit. If we want the O2 vent system to have some interesting danger that might make for a bit of drama for the players, we can do that, but then we're landing ships that are putting out hundreds of millions of joules of heat per second without hearing much about dockside accidents, so maybe it's one of those duck's feet things we can bring up when we want a bit of drama and ignore at other times.
 
Once again, I am thinking of using water for oxygen storage, not hydrogen storage or replacing Liquid Hydrogen. I use heavy water, deuterium oxide, as I have accurate data on the energy yield of deuterium fusion. A cubic meter of heavy water weighs 1107 kilograms, and will contain 885.6 kilograms of oxygen. Assuming that a human requires a kilogram of oxygen a day, a cubic meter of water will store sufficient oxygen for one human for 886 days, as a kilogram of oxygen a day is a bit more than what is needed.

I then figure on having a small auxiliary fusion plant to supply ship power running off of the deuterium produced by electrolyzing the heavy water to produce oxygen. The fusion of 1.47 kilograms of deuterium will supply 10 Megawatt-hours of power for an entire year, 365 days of 24 hours a day. The unused deuterium I store to react with oxygen on arriving at my destination to produce replacement heavy water for more oxygen storage. One cubic meter of water contains sufficient oxygen, if electrolyzed, to supply two humans with oxygen for well over a year.

One cubic meter of water is also equivalent to 264 gallons of water, and as I figure at least 60 gallons of water per person onboard for water supply, the additional water give me a lot of backup for adequate water. The water for ship usage is the ordinary H2O, not D2O.
 
Here's a thought- we have all those exhausts in the back of our ships, even though most editions and people's conception is grav drive.


Perhaps excess oxygen is vented through those, effectively the exhaust stacks of the ship, and placed logically in the back as it streams out away from the ship.


Or used as reaction mass for the drives themselves in some hypercheating/handwavium way.




Of course then deuterium oxide becomes refined fuel and water is unrefined fuel- or perhaps a lot of our tankage is oxygen proper and we can still skim a gas giant for hydrogen for refining to deuterium.




If one goes to this system, then do you use the high percentage of ship volume for jump fuel mechanism?
 
Last edited:
Speaking of biologicals, pulling in either oxygen or water on a primitive planet likely means inviting in whatever surprises are in the planet's biosphere- or maybe even a gas giant.



Yes of course there would be sterilization subsystems as a matter of course, but ACS are commercial or private vessels mostly, and being run for profit or pleasure and not by NASA/IISS sanitation protocols. Something known may get by because of sloppiness by crew or starport life support maintenance, or the unknown that can survive and harm past designed sterilization.
 
Speaking of biologicals, pulling in either oxygen or water on a primitive planet likely means inviting in whatever surprises are in the planet's biosphere- or maybe even a gas giant.



Yes of course there would be sterilization subsystems as a matter of course, but ACS are commercial or private vessels mostly, and being run for profit or pleasure and not by NASA/IISS sanitation protocols. Something known may get by because of sloppiness by crew or starport life support maintenance, or the unknown that can survive and harm past designed sterilization.

And sanitation protocols may not get rid of a microbe it isn't set up to deal with.
 
Read Plague Ship by Andre Norton, available at Project Gutenberg to get an idea as to what might happen. Or some of the stories in the Med Ship series by Murray Leinster, also available through Project Gutenberg.

However, if you demand that no risks are acceptable, no exploration gets done and stagnation sets it. Stagnation is fatal in the long run. I go with you land on the planet, take every precaution and sanitation procedure you can, and take your chances.

In the immortal words of U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Dan Daly: "Come on, you sons of (blank), do you want to live forever?"
 
As for cracking water, well ... mostly the game gives us ducks
I suggest calling this new water extraction process as "Quacking Water".

:rofl:

And sanitation protocols may not get rid of a microbe it isn't set up to deal with.

I see this as more of an engineering challenge than an obstacle. I don't have a clue as to how to approach it, not being an engineer myself, but I think a spacefaring culture that has had the jump drive for better than 10,000 years would have figured out a way to draw water from the local water supply without getting themselves killed. Timerover's milieu might have a different history but, it being his milieu and they being accustomed to using this method, I'm pretty sure they'd have solved the engineering challenges as well. It doesn't seem to me like it would be an insurmountable challenge for a culture that has fusion plants small enough to carry on a small ship available to them.
 
I see this as more of an engineering challenge than an obstacle. I don't have a clue as to how to approach it, not being an engineer myself, but I think a spacefaring culture that has had the jump drive for better than 10,000 years would have figured out a way to draw water from the local water supply without getting themselves killed. Timerover's milieu might have a different history but, it being his milieu and they being accustomed to using this method, I'm pretty sure they'd have solved the engineering challenges as well. It doesn't seem to me like it would be an insurmountable challenge for a culture that has fusion plants small enough to carry on a small ship available to them.

Making chemically pure water wouldn't be hard considering the power available for a Traveller Starship. Electrolyize the water into separate Hydrogen and Oxygen, then precipitate it out as water again is a possible way to ensure purity. Also, flash boiling, and then condensing the steam is an option. The hard part is getting out chemicals that behave like water.
 
Making chemically pure water wouldn't be hard considering the power available for a Traveller Starship. Electrolyize the water into separate Hydrogen and Oxygen, then precipitate it out as water again is a possible way to ensure purity. Also, flash boiling, and then condensing the steam is an option. The hard part is getting out chemicals that behave like water.

I think that I would run it through a reverse osmosis system to start with if on a new planet. Then boil and convert to steam, condense steam, and then electrolyze. As I am looking for potable water for a limited number of men, you can hit it with a variety of purifying agents. There are units available today that also use ultraviolet light to aid in purification. Then there is always a touch of chlorine. Based on current technology, I think that I can put a fully capable unit good for 200 gallons an hour into a 1.5 X 1.5 X 3 meter volume.

Edit Note: Remember that the thread says "Replenish life support", not totally replace. I would have a fair amount of potable water in my recycling system, along with oxygen stored in that water, and at least another month or two of food supplies. I was an Army supply officer, and I am a firm believer in making sure that I will not run short when prowling the Galaxy. I would also probably have one or two complete sets of replacement CO2 scrubbers onboard.
 
Last edited:
Isn't it better to just distill out 80% of the water, and jettison the remaining slurry?

I just mention this because as with most things in Traveller, we're not power limited. Power we got. Boiling water is easy, no need for filter (at least not microbial filters, best not to pump algae and mud in to the tanks), easy to clean (even if there's residue, it has to survive the distillation process).

Then you can have a second stage of mixing in trace minerals for taste or application if necessary.

But in the end you have a simple system, that's heavy on power. We use reverse osmosis for things like sea water because it's cheaper than boiling it off because power is expensive.

Nuclear submarines distill water, they don't filter it, for example.
 
The Navy destroyer I was stationed on, DDG, had two 10,000 gallon evaporaters. The steam plant, four 1200 psi boilers, used one of them. The rest of the ship for cooking, water fountains, coffee pots, laundry, etc. used the other one.

One trip to the Med one of them failed. That got interesting...
 
The Navy destroyer I was stationed on, DDG, had two 10,000 gallon evaporaters. The steam plant, four 1200 psi boilers, used one of them. The rest of the ship for cooking, water fountains, coffee pots, laundry, etc. used the other one.

One trip to the Med one of them failed. That got interesting...

I bet that it did, and I can guess which department got to use the functioning one. How much cold food did you eat?
 
I bet that it did, and I can guess which department got to use the functioning one. How much cold food did you eat?

Showers off for several weeks. Well, engineering came to meals all clean. Suspiciously. Questions were asked. Including by the XO. They started coming up out of the engine/boiler spaces not so clean after that.

We hit a rain squall crossing the Atlantic back to our home port. Several guys ran up on deck to soap up and wash off. I don't know the numbers, but its sound like a significant percentage of the crew.

The ship turned one way, the rain went another. The XO had to ask the Captain if water could be turned on so those guys could get the soap off. The Captain made them wait around an hour, then relented.

And we all got chewed out over the intercom, then we were told that was just for those who ran up on deck and soaped up.

The Chief Petty Officers were upset when coffee pots weren't filled.

We did have some cooked food, but sandwiches were eaten as well. Breakfast was cooked and most suppers.
 
Back
Top