In MegaTrav, basic live support's 50 kilograms, 1 kilowatt per person. In Striker it's bulkier: 500 kiloliters per person, no mass listed but probably 500 kilograms. If I were running the Scout Service I'd have a demountable life support unit that the scout could put in the back of that air/raft in a pinch, with a solar panel that could be deployed after the air/raft launched, and plug-in for hoses from his vac suit to maintain suit environment and O2, etc. Then he could hop in the air/raft and use it as an impromptu life/raft. At the very least, it would give him a fallback if he were forced to abandon his ship near a world without a breathable atmosphere.
Commercial starship lifeboat requirements
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Neither am I and for all the reasons you neatly stated.
Once you examine the actual issues in the setting, instead of mindlessly copying our current maritime issues, the "need" for lifeboats all but disappears.
It would cost more per person.
100,000 credits for the Emergency Low Berth
150,000 credits for the 1.5 dT hull to shield it
(plus possible issues of needing a power supply)
So 1.5 dT and at least 250,000 credits for 4 people for an emergency low berth.
Versus 2 dT and 230,000 credits for 7 people with fast drug.
[although fast drug probably forfeits the chance of a hundred year accident.]
I agree ... subject to the caveat that this is a game that is often used to replicate books and movies ... a lone hero or a couple plucky droids fleeing in an escape pod is a staple of space opera, so there may be a meta-game reason to have them.
Off the wall thought: emergency aboard ship.
Fire is straightforward: flood the compartment with nitrogen, keep little portable O2 masks where the passengers can get to them. Even if they pass out, you ought to be able to don emergency gear and get them out, they're at less danger from an inert atmosphere than from the fire - at least briefly.
Vacuum: also straightforward, nothing there that would force you to leave a properly equipped ship.
Cargo: What about hazardous cargo? Flammables you can stop by evacuating the compartment or flooding it with inert gas; possiblty hard on the cargo but it beats losing the ship. However, some flammables may have their own oxygen source - I recall a story about an airliner going down because O2 canisters lit off in the cargo bay, or some such thing. Chemicals may accidentally mix or be released with unfortunate consequences - gases can be handled, but some may mix explosively. I imagine a ship might be equipped with blowout panels to reduce the likelihood of a cargo detonation breaching the deck or bulkhead to damage the passenger sections. Are there circumstances under which a hazardous cargo might prompt an evacuation of the ship, either for good or until the crew can get the emergency under control?
Fire is straightforward: flood the compartment with nitrogen, keep little portable O2 masks where the passengers can get to them. Even if they pass out, you ought to be able to don emergency gear and get them out, they're at less danger from an inert atmosphere than from the fire - at least briefly.
Vacuum: also straightforward, nothing there that would force you to leave a properly equipped ship.
Cargo: What about hazardous cargo? Flammables you can stop by evacuating the compartment or flooding it with inert gas; possiblty hard on the cargo but it beats losing the ship. However, some flammables may have their own oxygen source - I recall a story about an airliner going down because O2 canisters lit off in the cargo bay, or some such thing. Chemicals may accidentally mix or be released with unfortunate consequences - gases can be handled, but some may mix explosively. I imagine a ship might be equipped with blowout panels to reduce the likelihood of a cargo detonation breaching the deck or bulkhead to damage the passenger sections. Are there circumstances under which a hazardous cargo might prompt an evacuation of the ship, either for good or until the crew can get the emergency under control?
Since you can open the cargo bay doors, any chem based explosion wouldn't be powerful enough to damage the bulkheads. Fire couldn't get hot enough either. Only a small nuke going off would be dangerous enough to call for evacuating the ship.
Oh, you COULD get a chem explosion that would blow seals. You can get 50KT from a dTon of Octanitrocubane (ONC)... and a 20 ton lot rivals a small nuke. Worse, if that's coupled with a similar volume of water stored nearby, the heat expansion can cause considerably more damage (as the water builds a tremendous pressure by vaporization as well).
Of course, ONC is, at present, manufactured in very small lots. While rather stable, it's hard to synthesize. (So says the Wiki.)
It's not unreasonable to envision a 50 or even 100 Td shipment of RDX, with a density of 1.7 and RE of 1.6, for a 50Td being 500 tons, or 800tons explosive force in the cargo bay, and it vacuum sublimates, so you can't transport it in vacuum. Plenty enough force to shatter bulkheads. Heck, Even 1 Td of RDX should be able to breach the cargo bay's internal access doors in a small bay or if near the door.
But the most likely cause of an evacuation is a liquid hydrogen leak. It's not the explosion potential, but the cryo issues.
Unless whatever caused the leak caused damage that extended over several compartments, that could be limited to the affected compartment, no? Vent the stuff to space?
With cargo bays open and in vacuum, most of the force would be expended outward. Much like the blow out panels for ammo storage on an M1 MBT. No atmospheric blast wave either. Also, RDX is stable in storage. You're looking at sabotage rather than an accident in this case.
A Lhyd leak could be localized because of the different, separate pressurized areas of a ship. So, other than a dedicated unstable munitions cargo hauler, I don't see an evac situation.
If you're rupturing the fuel bulkheads, you've got sabotage anyway, or you've got a pressure detonation that's compromised bulkheads throughout the ship.
Or you have metal fatigue and an accidental explosion in a large compartment due to a minor leak and a spark at the right concentration range.
Note that RDX can't be transported in vacuum - it sublimates readily.
It would have to be in a pressurized hold or in vacuum stable containers, but, since it's stable against everything short of vacuum, explosions and being hit when on fire, it's likely to ship in just locked normal containers in pressurized holds.
Most of the things that would trigger any commercial high explosive are going to involve sabotage or gross negligence.
Never ever underestimate the power of stupidity and/or laziness to ruin a perfectly good situation.
Realize if your using a alternative drive system that requires the crew to go into Cryo-Sleep to travel between stars, then Life Pods would be more likely to be used. Now in standard Traveller, most likely they would not use Lifeboats at all.
Ain't that the truth.
High Guard damage table suggests that the fuel compartment can be breached by laser and missile hits. It is conceivable that a laser or missile hit that can penetrate the external wall of an armored ship can penetrate both external and internal bulkheads of an unarmored merchantman.
Patron Zero
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That seems to sum-up a pretty good suggestion that all private sector-civilian operated starships have a compartment aboard designated as a 'shelter-rescue' zone.
Could be nothing more than the ship's commons or just a specially modified shipping container in a cargo hold. Either space would have been renovated or upgraded to meet set standards as protection from radiation, provide life-support independent of the vessel, have stores of water and other consumables and have vac suits and rescue tools.
In my TU, ships have what's referred to as a 'rescue' port, a designated exterior access hatch-iris that opens to such reinforced-modified compartment where surviving crew await rescue or recovery.
That isn't a pretty good suggestion. That is an excellent suggestion!
IMTU, one of the many differences between military and commercial ship construction is the amount of compartmentalization. When compared to the multitude of pressure-tight compartments aboard a warship, a commercial ship have a small number of relatively large pressure-tight "flats". Aboard a free trader, for example, the bridge would comprise one "flat", crew quarters another, passenger accommodations another, engineering another, the hold another, etc. Then, within each flat, certain locations can act as "safes".
Designated staterooms, for example, would have actual bulkheads rather than the usual internal walls. An emergency portable airlock like the one shown in JTAS would be stored nearby, along with the various drugs and supplies mentioned earlier, allowing the stateroom to be converted into "safe" for survivors awaiting rescue.
That isn't a pretty good suggestion. That is an excellent suggestion!
Yep, agreed. Simple & effective as well as economical.
It would if it's stored separately for such a purpose. I don't know how an air recycling system would work engineering-wise. If room air was simply drawn in and processed - the CO2 and other undesired content filtered out and O2 added - then you wouldn't have separate nitrogen available for fire fighting.
Fire consumes oxygen pretty quickly. Certainly the most immediate strategy would be to shut down air flow and seal the affected section. In the case of a small isolated fire, that leaves the occupants time to get out. In the case of a large-scale fire, that deprives the fire of fresh oxygen - to the detriment of occupants, but it's easier to rescue and revive unconscious occupants (if you're fast) then to treat large-scale 3rd-degree burns. That's adequate for most fires.
The partitions in ships would likely be fire-rated. "Fire-rated" means that the partition walls, doors, floor and the ceiling would be designed to resist fire and to remain air-tight, preventing transmission of smoke to adjacent areas. It's easier to make something air-tight than to make it vacuum-resistant: it doesn't have to resist pressure differentials, it just has to prevent the transmission of smoke and flame. If it does that well, then the fire can be contained to one room. This is pretty much a must, or a fire in the kitchen could suffocate everyone in the section. "Fire-rated" in the modern world usually calculated in terms of how long a given wall type will resist intense fire, with more resistant walls required for rooms more likely to suffer intense fires.
Note that fire-rated doors do not have to be perfectly airtight. If they stop, say, 95% of airflow, that will still significantly suppress the rate at which fire can burn, allowing responders time to react and occupants in adjacent rooms time to evacuate. Thus you'll have a door (probably a sliding door in this context) that sits reasonably tightly within its frame, but it doesn't have to make a perfect seal. It WILL have to have some sort of automatic system for closing in the event the fire alarms trigger - not locking, but closing, so that folk aren't trapped but a door that's left open by some fleeing soul does not become an invitation for the fire to spread.
In areas most likely to suffer large-scale fires - the kitchen, for example - the room would likely have its own nitrogen purge equipment, and it'll be placed close to the most likely ignition points so that the fire is smothered off or at least partially supressed as quickly as possible while giving people time to evacuate the room. In a modern commercial kitchen, that equipment is located directly over the stovetops, designed to sent down jets of gas that push oxygen away from the fire at rates calculated not to splash oils in pans and such.
This brings a point of tech. Ships are not typically constructed with airlocks between internal compartments; warships maybe, but not civilians, at least not from the published deckplans. To access a compartment without allowing too much oxygen in - something which can cause a fire to flash up suddenly, injuring rescuers - a ship could use heavy fire-resistant floor-to-ceiling curtains, stowed in the walls or ceiling a couple or three feet back from an iris port or hatch and deployed when needed. This would create an "air-lock" effect so long as pressure between the two compartments was fairly equal. One item of emergency equipment might be a curtain with magnetic edges that could be slapped over a partition door so that rescuers could likewise enter an affected room without admitting too much air from the hall.
As pointed, lets not copy current maritime rules, lets look at the setting.
Very fine, however, the issue raised have all been raised on the way to the current rules and we may find answers (approx) to the question: how the public and industry will react?
Safety rules have never been intended to "choke" the business and a practical business like approach is the norm.
Load Lines (the Plimsol Lines, from the M.P. that pushed the legislation in the XIXth cnt) were imposed after gross abuse had doomed too many crews.
Current rules state for cargo ship that enough lifeboat for all member of the crew must exist on EACH SIDE of the ship (in the event that list would prevent the use of the boats on one side) while passengers ship need place for all counting boats on BOTH SIDE. It would not be commercially wise to double the number of boats even if safety wise (it is wise on cargo ships afterall).
You do not issue parachute to airliner's passengers. That does not prevent a lot of safety mesure to exist in case of crash landing
Pre Titanic lifeboat rules were based on lenth of ship for minimum number of boat and % of passengers for capacity of boats. The belief was that i) there is no safer place than the ship ii) boats were intended to transit the passengers to safety (shore or other ship). Even in that perspective, the rules were obsolete when the large liners of early XX entered service for the belief was that large modern ship been safer they did not need more safety rules, even if they carried so much more peoples.
Boat for all is in no way a sure way to save everyone. Sinking (amongst many) of Empress of Ireland (after collision) and Lusitania (war) in the years following Titanic show it.
When the Stockolm rammed the Andrea Doria (1956) it was a textbook case of Pre Titanic life saving for it was the boats of the rescuers ships: Île de France and Stockolm that picked about half of the psg and crews of the Doria (the list having prevented the use of the seaworthy boat on the collision side).
So there will be no more bulkhead, airlock, fire fighting material or life saving appliances (or anything that cost money) than necessary to reduce capital investment or operating cost, for that is a business afterall. Exeption will be: Official Rules and Regulation that apply to all and maintain a level field; Contractual requirement (will a Starfarers' Union exist?) or Insurance requirement. Marketing gimick may also be a source of lifeboat requirement.
However, you only need the Empress Mafalda to loose 1000 passengers after a defective thruster placed her on a decaying orbit, with enough time for everybody to evacuate if escape pods had been available, to have public outcry force a new rule.
have fun
Selandia
Very fine, however, the issue raised have all been raised on the way to the current rules and we may find answers (approx) to the question: how the public and industry will react?
Safety rules have never been intended to "choke" the business and a practical business like approach is the norm.
Load Lines (the Plimsol Lines, from the M.P. that pushed the legislation in the XIXth cnt) were imposed after gross abuse had doomed too many crews.
Current rules state for cargo ship that enough lifeboat for all member of the crew must exist on EACH SIDE of the ship (in the event that list would prevent the use of the boats on one side) while passengers ship need place for all counting boats on BOTH SIDE. It would not be commercially wise to double the number of boats even if safety wise (it is wise on cargo ships afterall).
You do not issue parachute to airliner's passengers. That does not prevent a lot of safety mesure to exist in case of crash landing
Pre Titanic lifeboat rules were based on lenth of ship for minimum number of boat and % of passengers for capacity of boats. The belief was that i) there is no safer place than the ship ii) boats were intended to transit the passengers to safety (shore or other ship). Even in that perspective, the rules were obsolete when the large liners of early XX entered service for the belief was that large modern ship been safer they did not need more safety rules, even if they carried so much more peoples.
Boat for all is in no way a sure way to save everyone. Sinking (amongst many) of Empress of Ireland (after collision) and Lusitania (war) in the years following Titanic show it.
When the Stockolm rammed the Andrea Doria (1956) it was a textbook case of Pre Titanic life saving for it was the boats of the rescuers ships: Île de France and Stockolm that picked about half of the psg and crews of the Doria (the list having prevented the use of the seaworthy boat on the collision side).
So there will be no more bulkhead, airlock, fire fighting material or life saving appliances (or anything that cost money) than necessary to reduce capital investment or operating cost, for that is a business afterall. Exeption will be: Official Rules and Regulation that apply to all and maintain a level field; Contractual requirement (will a Starfarers' Union exist?) or Insurance requirement. Marketing gimick may also be a source of lifeboat requirement.
However, you only need the Empress Mafalda to loose 1000 passengers after a defective thruster placed her on a decaying orbit, with enough time for everybody to evacuate if escape pods had been available, to have public outcry force a new rule.
have fun
Selandia
Patron Zero
SOC-13
The general public as a rule doesn't understand the overall safety in commercial travel, accidents originate more from human error than mechanical or design failure.
That said, in a Traveller setting a transport operator, independent or corporate-commercial carrier would see touting their safety features-measures as a selling point just behind passenger comfort and timely arrivals.
Fast, comfortable and safe go hand in hand whether it be selling automobiles or travel between the stars.
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