Food and Consumables For Starships

[kaladorn]

I look at deck plans, and I sometimes marvel at the absence of a fresher. But then I also think 'hey wait, they don't even have a cupboard to store dinner in!'.

Now, one can handwave 30 days worth of food in various overhead (and otherwise invisible) bins given this is typical air/power duration - so that's okay.

But what about ships that need to go 'beyond normal supply'. They can carry skimmers and purifiers to address the fuel situation. They can carry an extra battery round or two of missiles. But what about food?

I'm going to guess that a human probably consumes 2-3 pounds of fresh food every day. No one wants to eat emergency rations, but assuming you did, you might make due with 1 pound (and probably lose weight if you're doing much). Maybe you could eat MRE equivalents for 2 pounds (we're high tech here, we may have dehydration, etc. down pat).

But even so, a crew of say 6 x 30 days x 2 kg = 360 kg of food. Not a lot, but probably takes a fair bit of space, like maybe a dTon or so.

But what if I'm a scout having to provision for a year outside normal space? Or two years? And I have a basic crew plus surveyors, etc? I start getting into some pretty significant food volumes.

How have other folks addressed this? Does anyone have some realistic guesses or a table of fresh/dried/survival rations weight/cost by TL? And how many days might fit in a dTon?

 

[grendelttroll]

The T20 rules detail storing extra food. It even designates between crew/mid passenger and officer/high passenger foodstuffs. 1 dTon od extra consumables will handle 20 people for 1 month. If yo have access to the T20 rulebook, check page 348.

 

[daryen]

Of course, GURPS Traveller takes a different tack.

They presuppose that, as part of the "stateroom" package, is a food generation system that grows necessary food. (This is "total life support".) Not necessarily the tastiest stuff, but it keeps everyone alive and going until they can set down for some "real" food.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by daryen:
Of course, GURPS Traveller takes a different tack.

They presuppose that, as part of the "stateroom" package, is a food generation system that grows necessary food. (This is "total life support".) Not necessarily the tastiest stuff, but it keeps everyone alive and going until they can set down for some "real" food.

From what? Energy? (ala ST replicators) Waste recycling? (I think this was in MT) How big are GT staterooms? I'm not knocking GT, but not having it I'm curious. Also how long does it last and do they have bulk refills if its a limited resource?

 

[TheDS]

I personally consider food to be "life support". Actually, the reefers would be what you put down on your maps. How often does a ship's map take the galley and mess decks into account? How about the offices used by the officers? Or the offices used by the support staff? Computers don't fix themselves, you know. Supplies don't order themselves. Marine invasions don't plan themselves either. So there's a LOT of stuff that just gets subsumed under other stuff.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Grendel T. Troll:
The T20 rules detail storing extra food. It even designates between crew/mid passenger and officer/high passenger foodstuffs. 1 dTon od extra consumables will handle 20 people for 1 month. If yo have access to the T20 rulebook, check page 348.

And as is usual for Traveller, uses way too much space for all but the highest quality food. Typical packing density is about 5 tons/dton, and 20 person-months = 600 person-days. That works out to around 8 kilograms per day. Actual daily food consumption, per NASA, is around 3 kilograms per day (much less if freeze-dried; around half a kilogram per day).

 

[jchurchill]

Two solutions but based on CT allocations:

1) One can cheat and take the space allocated for the 1970's style computers and apply some that to food.

2) The crew lives on Tang for days on end.

Given the wargamer/sci-fi geek propensity for low grade junk food, it seems implied that the crew will live off M&M's, Cheetos, Hostess products, and popcorn.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by secretagent:
Two solutions but based on CT allocations:

Those are solutions in the wrong direction. A dton of cargo actually holds more like 50 man-months, not 20.

 

[jchurchill]

Those are solutions in the wrong direction. A dton of cargo actually holds more like 50 man-months, not 20.
================================================
I only have the CT and a handful of the MT books but not the referee book.

1 dton of Tang would provide 50 man-months of food? Is that calculated with water added or only if the crew ate the powder without any water?

 

[Anthony]

No, one dton of Tang, assuming you have water recycling, would probably provide on the order of 30 man-years. 50 man-months is assuming relatively normal food (though chosen for reasonable storage).

 

[kaladorn]

What assumptions on packing are these based on? Remember, packing on ship has to sustain stuff very little modern food packing has to suffer - potentially, these include vacuum, extremes of heat or cold, radiations, and up to 6G omnidirectional (well, possibly 6G longitudinal, 3G lateral, and -1.5G longitudinal from decel). I'm assuming this kind of packing may actually necessitate some pretty decent containment systems.

And our Baron Von Kibbleznbitz isn't going to want to eat NASA granola..... he's going to want Roast Space Ham, prepared with 13 side dishes, a bottle of excellent Chateau Cote du Rod Laver, followed by a nice Whisky with a Madeira finish to it. All that kind of storage, plus the kitchen to prepare it, isn't going to be small.

As TheDS observed, these types of things are often left off ships. Note however that I don't think the 4 tons allocated for a stateroom can include all of this .... for the simple reason that already you're running short on space. Something tells me aboard a true space yacht, you'd want two to four times this much space allocated to allow for all the huge extravegances.

And on long term exploration vessels, it might well be necessary to allocate some more space just to help keep everyone from going stir crazy.

 

[jchurchill]

50 man-months is assuming relatively normal food (though chosen for reasonable storage).
===============================================
Perhaps the difference between airline food [when airlines still served "food"]and Amtrak food when Amtrak has a real kitchen car and produced some surprisingly decent food. But not the Orient Express level that Kaladorn refers to.

In "civilized" space [along the well travelled routes] food for just over a week would be the minimum acceptable amount and therefore might not play a large part in ship supplies. It's the exploration of reasonably unknown space that raises the difficulties.

 

[Anthony]

First of all, you can probably assume a walk-in freezer for storing anything that needs it. Given that Traveller ships can store vast quantities of liquid hydrogen in tanks, refridgeration is clearly not a problem at Traveller technology.

I _am_ assuming fairly efficient storage; packing densities comparable to modern cargo shipping (incidentally, 5 tons/dton is only around 40% of the volume as food; the rest is air and packing space). It's certainly possible to be vastly inefficient about food storage, but the default case should be normal stores, not weird and specialized food.

 

[TheDS]

And before we go too crazyon how much stuff can be crammed into a given volume, let's try to remember that we've got to get this stuff back out too. Lots of space in the walk in freezer is simple walking-access space, probably 1/2 to 2/3 of it.

I would imagine space craft would necessitate better packing efficiency than I observed on our ship. Stuff is going to have to be packed in rectangular containers most of the time, to save on space and allow easy removal. We're also going to have to have a single size for things. So what if a box of chicken parts can feed 10 people and an equal sized box of doughnuts can feed 50? They have to be compatible, so they can go anywhere.

Of course, like everything else, you have to keep the stuff organized, and it's best to do most of that when you're onloading your stores. But you do occasionally have odd cargoes, and need to shift stuff around. It's not as pretty as our home freezers, not by a long shot, but clever design can drastically reduce the wasted space and still make everything accessible.

Let's assume you're really smart and can make use of 1/2 the space in a freezer, the rest being access space and container space. That's 7kl (thereabouts). If food has a density of 1, and people need to eat 3 kg of food a day, that's 7000 kg / 3 kg per man per day = 2333 man-days / 30 = 78 man-months of food that can be stored in a single D-ton of freezer space. My own experiences on ship would laugh at that; it was maybe 1/4 of that, because we didn't stack very efficiently at all. No need, really.

78 can round to 75, and that's 50% more than the 50-figure quoted above, so they were allowing only 1/3 the space to be used.

Now, how do we get all that food on board? Submarines require you to bring it all through one little hatch, and it's an all day evolution. We had a hatch on the side of the ship and a crane of sorts that would do the job, but they prefered to simply drive their forklifts on board and park the palattes in the hanger, then assault the stuff with a 200-man working party and could knock out most of these things in 4-6 hours. (One took 20 hours with "all hands" "participating". Gee, I wonder where everyone was? I didn't see 1200 people in the hanger or the freezers.)

EDIT: numbers were goofy, sorry.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

FF&S2 has rules for food storage. I think there 3 or 4 different types, plus storage units.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Different assumptions, different results
Requiements (from Living In Space, Michael Sharp, c 1969)
Oxygen 2 lb/day (~1 Kg)
Drinking Water 8 lb/day (~4 Kg)
Hygeine water 12 lb/day (~6 Kg)
Food 1.3 ib (~0.6 Kg)
But these are irreducable minimums.

For example, figure 1 Kg/day for MREs, 3 Kg/day for real food. So 30 man-days of real food will be about 90 Kg/120 L. MREs 30 Kg, maybe 50 L. So a pantry/freezer big enough to hold 30 days real food for a crew of 6 has to be 720 L, packed tight. That is the same size as a Sub-Zero model 642 Refrigerator-Freezer (107cm W x 213cm H x 61cm D) That should fit in most galleys without much redesign.

Recycling. GURPS seems to be running a closed-cycle system where food (at least crappy food) is produced indefinitely. OTOH, the 30 day limit on LSS sggests an open system.

A truly open system would need 1 Kg/man-day O2, about 1 Kg/man-day LiOH/filter canisters, and at least 10 kg/man-day water. So for our 6x30 man-days that is 2160 Kg, or about 2.2 KL. That does cut the water very close, but in could be easily accounted for by tanks and storage lockers under the floor in the stateroom area.

Water is the easiest thing to recycle, the heaviest, and the most pain to ration, so I assume water is recycled. Rather than use LiOH cannisters I freeze the CO2 out of the air at -57 C.

I use some of the other ideas myself. Scoutships may use closed-cycle life support, but it costs extra. As for "test-tube meat" (H. Beam Piper caled it "cariculture" fifty years ago} I always assumed it was available only in larger habitats. I will have to think about it

 

[Anthony]

With the sole exception of food, none of the requirements of life support are difficult to recycle as long as you have substantial excess power, which Traveller ships have.

 

[John Ross]

Well, I have in my hand the relatively new GURPS Traveller :Starships, and under provisions it says #1, that the total life support prduces food from algae and mycoprotein,(not to tempting or tasty, can be flavored) The ships can have tissue vats to produce animal flesh,( Doable now if my memory serves,expensive and nonefficient,but doable.) But for FRESH provisions, you have a value of 2 lbs,.04 cf , and Cr6 per person-day.(pardon the english measurment, I have been infected.)Fresh real food is anywhere from 2 to 4 times the price and has twice the weight and volume, but needs preparing by a cook.
So 12500 person days of standard provisions per standard ton,at a cost of Cr 75000.and 12.5 tons of weight stored mass.
John

 

[Zutroi]

Why the assumption that 1/2 to 2/3 of the freezer/storage space is access?

Pre-planned menus loaded from back to front (Last in/First out) would allow virtually 100% of available volume to be food packaging. Even with this there's a heck of a lot of flexibility remaining for the steward, who can select the top 'can' from any of the half dozen or so stacks in front of him/her/it.

 

[Anthony]

It's usually not possible to exactly predict what you'll need at what time, which means if you don't include access space there will be periodic digging expeditions to get out something you discover you need.