Water Pressure Is Part Of Life-Support

[Grand Magus]

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If your spaceship is in combat and loses its life-support system, then you
lose water pressure too. Thus, you can't use the toilets or the sinks.

Let's keep this straight.

But, are the inertial-dampers which allow you to have gravity part of
life-support? I say maybe, it depends upon the ship-type.

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[Klaus van der Kroft]

Hm, well, if you consider the inertia-dampers part of life support as they provide gravity, you could technically also consider the hull to be life-support, as it allows the ship to have a survivable medium.

In that case, failing toilets would be a minor concern. Although I believe spaceships do not use water for flushing, but rather negative pressure.

Being water so fundamental and complicated matter in space, I don't think it would be the most efficient thing to use when emptying the Ivory Throne.

[Terquem]

If the source of the water pressure is a cycling pressure tank, then there is no reason to assume that the tank would lose pressure upon a loss of power. As the water from the supply tank is drained, pressure will be reduced, but it should last a little while. So the supply may not be affected.

Drainage is another matter, and it is interesting to theorize how much "liberty" space-ship designers would take with the idea of gravity based drainage systems. I would think that tasking inertia compensators for the simple pleasure of water drainage would be impractical. It would be easier, less maintenance, fewer power consumption problems, to keep water based units (let’s use the old Traveller word, ‘fresher’) functioning on simple differential pressure principles. So a Fresher, shower or toilet, would involve an isolated chamber where a vacuum pressure, maybe two inches of water column (but maybe that’s too high), is maintained in relation to the area of the chamber where the water is introduced. Water (waste) is evacuated from the chamber because of the DP, not because of gravity. In this case, the vacuum pressure is more likely to be maintained by regulators and the always available vacuum of space (no pumps required, and holding tanks to keep waste ready for recycling). Now if the regulators are not on back up /life support systems and the pressure of the internal ship structure (the people tank) is equalized with the external pressure (vacuum) assuming people don emergency suits, they still may have to deal with globules of waste water floating around if there were a failure of back flow preventer valves.

By the way, I am a system engineer at a nuclear waste site. Fun topic.

[Caineach]

Water pressure could be part of the fuel system, as either something consumed or a byproduct, so you could maintain pressure in the tank. As long as there is pressure, you don't need power to the system. Similarly, O2 levels could be from electrolysis, and then you could use the H2 for fusion. DOing this would make it really hard for life support to go down.

[Terquem]

It's probably easier to carry compressed hydrogen, rather than liguid fuel (a non compressable media). Oxygen generators, and diverted hydrogen from the fuel system could be used to make both heat and water.

[Grand Magus]

Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

Hm, well, if you consider the inertia-dampers part of life support as they provide gravity, you could technically also consider the hull to be life-support, as it allows the ship to have a survivable medium.

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great point. and because you said it, i'm going to consider inertial-dampers *not* part of life-support.

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