* A starship can't sink, so why abandon ship? If required, find a way to
eject the reactor core, not the passengers. The damaged ship is easier
to find than a bunch of little pods.
Reactor core is expensive. (Although I suppose you could recover it)
This first beckons the question: "Why would the situation occur for a
disaster in a ship?"
- Internal:
- - Ship-based - life support / radiation / self-destruct
- - biological - Robot
mutiny/Plague/nanobots/Aliens(tm)/zombies/dinosaurs (the usual)
- External: - hit something in the past (ship damaged significantly,
maybe some completely gone!)
- - about to hit something (smaller -- life pods may avoid such as
asteroid; larger, can land)
- - hostile force (warship) that targets things, possibly may ignore
small targets.
* Abandoning the ship can be a great roleplaying opportunity. A 'random'
collection of characters in a life or death situation, but without the
usual chain of command. Who will take the lead? Wo will panic?
So containing more than 5, say 8 persons would be ideal from a plot
point of view.
I posit this so you have NPCs to act as GM mouthpieces, and as Red
Shirts(tm) to help the PCs discover the dangers of the area, and
possibly be the Wealthy Heir who they need to put up with and get to
safety even though they'd personally rather leave them to die because of
their own overconfidence...
* The starship could have passenger shuttles, anyway. But shuttles won't
have seats for 100% of the passengers and crew. Nice drama, of course.
* There is a difference between lifeboats and shuttles, too. I wrote a
TL15 lifeboat (back in February 2011) to explore the upper end of the
scale -- hyperdrives, cryosleep chambers, nanofactories in the hold.
* ISTR that real-world ships require lifeboats for 125% of their maximum
capacity, in case some are blocked/disabled by the accident.
* Just eyeballing the numbers, a passenger liner could be 10 tons per
person -- 1,000 passengers and crew in a 10,000-ton starship. Roughly.
Can I get a lifeboat with less than 1 ton per person? That would mean
10% of the liner for escape mechanisms. Too much?
* Of course it would be possible to build a TL11+ escape pod with less
than 0.1 tons per person, but that again raises the question if the
survivors are better off in a pod than in the wreck.
I assume there must be some economy of scale for hull/life
support/computer/airlock for having more than one person in a pod.
* Default assumption that survivors stay in/with the ship, but escape
capsules only for the specific case that the ship is going to crash
really soon. No long endurance, just a safe reentry and soft landing.
* But then, why not space suits with grav belts/manned maneuvering units?
They could be used for comet sightseeing, too.
What do you think?
Full compartmentalization, build the ship inside a self-sealing hull,
make the larger common rooms the Secure Rooms (say, the pool area, the
concert hall, the dining hall)...
--
Eric Funk
Knowledge Brings Fear -- Motto of Mars University, Futurama
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