Shipboard life support and food per person per day?

[FreeTrav]

Reminds me: in comparing modern titles to thos[e] in the game, it's best to not fixate on the titles, but the duties.

This concept should extend to "stuff", not just people/titles - if someone is dealing with meals by reaching into a storage unit, and pulling out a package that contains all of the components of a proper meal, with nothing more needed than to stick it into a heating unit, it doesn't matter whether you call it "MRE", "TV-Dinner", "MealPak", or et cetera. Sure, freshly prepared using the steward's creativity (or even following a stock recipe with no creativity) is better, but space - especially non-revenue space - is at a premium in most Traveller starships, and you might have to save those meals for scheduled morale-repairing exercises, and use MealPaks the rest of the time.

Honestly, even today, while I wouldn't call the frozen dinners you can get in your local Stop-and-Shop or Kroger's "gourmet dining", and many of them are suboptimal nutritionally, if you have a sufficient variety, they're mostly no worse than "meh", and many of them are better.

Just because I call 'em "MRE" when talking about them as shipboard rations doesn't mean that they're the low-quality/high-calorie/marginally-inedible Defense-procurement disasters that soldiers make black-humor jokes about...

 

[casquilho]

Reminds me: in comparing modern titles to thos in the game, it's best to not fixate on the titles, but the duties.

In other words, if you're serving the food, doing the laundry, and seeing to it it gets cooked, it doesn't matter if the title is shipswife, steward, or domestic affairs technician... for game purposes, you're a steward.

True, this is a good point. It also works for both careers and skills in my opinion.

(Now if only trek fans would get over "Marine" vs "Space Army" vs "Naval Infantry"...)

Now you are really asking for miracles.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Just because I call 'em "MRE"

Meals Rejected by Enemy