cthia wrote:saber964 wrote:My guess on lifeboats and lifepods is much like they are today so to speak. Lifeboats are minimally powered to get you (hopefully) to land and tow life-rafts to shore if practical. Civilian ship normally carry lifeboats for a ships crew + 25% extra. But navy ships carry only a minimal number of 'lifeboat's' and a whole lot of life-rafts which when launched sit and drift near the wreck site with radio locator beacons going beep, beep. In the Honorverse I see much the same idea.
I really meant to ask this then but it slipped my mind. Lifeboats have an ability to cover some distance, to enter atmosphere and actually land. Now, I'm going to assume, in case there is no chance to actually reach a planet, that the power can be diverted to life support (Star Trek baggage). That would imply a very long time to hang out in space - should the space sickness of claustrophobia not consume you. That would also imply a much more extreme dependence on your plumbing. And I would assume that there is a limited onboard storage for excrement on a skinsuit. So I would suppose that a lifeboat would stand in for extra storage. But how would that actually work?
I'm not even sure if spacesuits are worn inside the lifeboats. Hope this question as posed makes sense to someone, 'cause you'll have one over on me if it does.
The passenger liner was described as having "outsized lifeboats" but Wayfairer was described as having Life Pods or Escape Pod (pod 184 that Steilman and Co. were planning to steal was described both ways), and PNS
Falchion is described as blowing up without launching "life pods", and HMS
Hawkwing so blasted some "life pods" clear before she blew up. So military ships seems to carry pods, not boats. Though, if possible, they also use pinnaces and shuttles during an abandon ship operation.
The pod 184 was a 10 person pod and about all we're told about them is "In deep space, they were little more than life support bubbles fitted with transponders which both sides were supposedly duty bound to pick up after an engagement, but they were also designed to be capable of independent atmospheric entry if there should happen to be a habitable planet handy when disaster struck."
I have to imagine that you aren't required to wear suits in them because a disaster could occur when the ship wasn't expecting combat - in which case most of the crew would be in normal cloths, not skinsuits. But equally I'd think the pods should be flexible enough to handle skinsuited people for the pods entire life support endurance - not just long enough to blast clear. You don't wear clothes inside the skinsuit, so even if you wanted to take it off once the pod was floating clear you likely wouldn't have anything else to wear.
But the question would be would you turn off the suit's environmental systems and just pop off your helmet, or would you be able to umbilical into the pod and keep buttoned up while still not running down the suit's internal life support.
As for your solid waste question we don't know enough about how the suits handle them to know how a life pod might (or might not) be able to increase that endurance. But again, the pod would need to have facilities to sanitarily defecate for people just in normal clothes (chemical toilet, or something). I also wonder if grav plates are low enough power that the pod can afford to run them, or if you've got to float in zero-g. The later would make restroom use far more problematic...
