Life on a Ship

The laws of physics make space travel a dangerous activity. You’re in a giant, pressurized tin-can, hoping a single leak doesn’t vent all the air you need to breathe. Out int he void, you’re kept alive by your air supply, some recycling equipment, and a fierce dedication to following the rules. A single momentary slip up will fuck you in a heartbeat.

Dilligence, procedure, and maintenance is the difference between life and death in the stars.

Life on a Ship

Living on your ship is almost like being on a planet. Almost. Maybe. You’ll sleep in a special bed designed to protect you from G-forces during manuevers, called a crash couch. The food you don’t eat will be fed to a recycler which will use it to make new food. Your air and water is filtered, re-used and recycled to make the most of your very limited resources.

The sucky part is probably the lack of space. In space, everything is at a premium, including the room you have on your ship. Crew quarters are often compact and there is an emphasis on common recreational spaces. Guests on luxury ships can at least look forward to movie theaters, performances, and some notions of fine-dining.

Shipboard Chores

The crew of a ship is often kept busy, even through the long, boring, and tedious flight between planets and stars. Your ship is your home and its wellbeing is your life. There is a constant list of chores and maintenance tasks to keep you and your friends alive:

Replacing air filters
Tuning and calibrating sensors
Cleaning water filtration systems
Lubricating hydraulics
Replacing airlock seals
Inspecting safety equipment

There’s a million pieces of your ship and every minute of every day they’re wearing down. There’s a maintenance schedule that keeps everyone busy. Smaller crews have more chores as they each have to pull more weight.

Officer of the Watch

Even in calm conditions and boring travel, there’s always someone duty. It’s the Officer of the Watch. This person’s job is literally just to supervise the ship. They’re the defacto person in charge, manning the bridge and keeping an eye on things. During the night shift it might be a junior member of the crew who’s orders are simply: “if it hits the fan, get the captain.”

Automated systems have reduced the workload on these officers and in the case of a fully bot-piloted ship there might not even be an officer of the watch. This is however a risk. You’re trusting that computer to never breakdown or never develop some malice towards its passengers.

Fine Dining

For those offput by the work or the tedium, they can at least look forward to some incredible… synthetic… material that looks, smells, and tastes like food.

The reality of it is, in space you don’t carry raw food - it takesup valuable space. Your ship carries proteins, mushroom powders, and other materials that, when cooked properly will make approximations of food. There’s also a fair amount of pre-made food items, dense in calories and small in physical size. You’re setting out on what could be a multi-month deployment with your ship. Except for short inter-system flights. A passenger line from the Slinger to Poli at least has a shorter trek.

Naval Tradition

For everything else about space-flight, think about Naval Traditions. A ship in the stars is run and operated much like a ship in the oceans. There’s crew, a captain, work to do, procedures, a watch. By maritime tradition, a ship that receives a distress signal is obligated to report and respond to it. By tradition, the current commander of a ship - even a temporary one like the office of the watch is called Captain.

There’s also usually punishments for failing to follow orders or breaking rules too. You’ll be sentenced to some time in the brig or maybe you’ll be left the sucky duty of cleaning the head (bathroom), pushing on the deck (push ups on the floor), or left scrubbing bulkheads (walls).

Equipment

In your time aboard a ship or even a station, you’ll generally have a few key pieces of hardware at all times:

Magboots: The electro magnets in your shoes will anchor you to almost any ship’s surface.
Terminal: The phone of the future. It connects to the ships’ systems, provides comms, tracking, and entertainment.
Vac Suit: Not worn at all times, but every room will have emergency supplies for sealing a hull breach and many locations will have emergency suits on-hand.

Networking

Every you go, you’ll be surrounded by machinery connected to The Network. Everything is networked. Your ship provides its own local internet system. The stations have a vast and multi-layered system of networks. This provides a constant stream of… advertising in some awful corporate places and access to information in others.

AI’s and network-augmented humans have access to these networks and data feeds around the clock. They can remotely access ship’s systems at a thought, collect and analyze complex data, and hack into security systems. These implants allow them to talk directly to bots as well. Or at least try. Not all bots speak human languages.

Weapons

Pirates and soldiers will also have access to weapons. They don’t work the same in space. A pistol is just a really loud thruster if your magboots aren’t engaged. The course of a bullet is different too. If you’re on the float, there’s no gravity and it won’t dip downwards like a bullet in gravity does. There’s also that heightened risk of putting a hole in the hull and killing everyone onboard.

Some what. A small puncture isn’t the end of the world and the ship will survive small holes just fine. It’s still best not to poke holes in your ship, but hitting the hull will not cause an explosion unless you’re flying in a balloon or an inflatible escape pod.

Emergency Airlocks

Like a Vacuum Suit, an airlock is another essential piece of equipment. During rescue operations - or even breaching operations - a temporary airlock can be attached to a room or ship. It’s essentially an air-tight plastic sheet that glues to the hull, deck, or bulkhead. Once sealed, it can be pumped full of air and allow for a trapped passenger to be put in a vacc suit and transported to safety.

These get far more use than most would expect. Space battles can leave whole sections of a ship vented to the depths of space. An emergency airlock is the only way to rescue trapped crewmen and passengers without pulling them out in bodybags.

Physics

Your ship is a giant metal tin, with some thrusters, a main drive, life support, and maybe a few weapons. Whenever your drive is off, you’re in 0-G, often called “on the float.” When you’re main drive is on, you’ll experience some gravity. This is called Thrust Gravity. The faster your ship accelerates, the more gravity you experience, up to and including lethal forces that’ll crush your bones.

This is the same force you feel in a fast car or on a roller coaster. The ship is pushing up against your body and that acceleration creates the sensation of gravity.

Consequently, a ship flying in space isn’t always pointed where it’s going. To make a course correction, your ship might thrust sideways or you’ll even flip your ship a full 180 degrees to slow down as you near your destination. You’ll even spend days or weeks slowing down to make the braking burn a more gentle manuever.

There’s some spoilers in the video below, if you haven’t yet seen the Expanse.

The Expanse gives us an idea of what space flight is like. Your ship doesn’t have artificial gravity, objects left sitting out during hight speed manuevers and turns quickly become like bullets ripping around in confined spaces. You can be taken out in a heartbeat.

At the same time, this means that we don’t point our ship at Mars and just keep thrusting in that direction. To meet with any celestial body, you don’t aim for where it is: you aim for where it will-be. As your ships travel around the system, you’ll have various courses to get from point A to point B.