-Armor provides 1 day of protection/level
-A single casting of life bubble by a 4th level mage would protect an average-size party for 4 days.
-Reusing/recharging both is free.
Other than being able to take off their armor from time to time, there seems to be no reason to power or maintain life support on one's starship once you get a few levels in, unless I'm forgetting something.
Even if the group has no spellcaster, if the ship has a Drift Rating of at least 2, a group of 9th level or higher wouldn't have to worry about life support unless they were going to the Vast.
And that's not even touching androids and star shamans.
US Astronaut suits aren't "a minor force field specially attuned to pressure and temperature" (for some armors) or "a constant and movable 1-inch shell of tolerable living conditions customized for each creature" (life bubble).
US Astronaut suits aren't "a minor force field specially attuned to pressure and temperature" (for some armors) or "a constant and movable 1-inch shell of tolerable living conditions customized for each creature" (life bubble).
While there is something to be said about characters with heavy armor not wanting to be wearing them all the time, but many types of light armor are described as essentially normal clothes with special fibers or force fields.
Even so, a single technomancer of 2nd level could permanently provide life support for a group of 4 by casting the spell once per day (half the group on each day, alternating), and they can all be naked if they want to.
If the ship normally has life support, when it loses it in battle, everyone's suits are at full charge. That at least slightly increases the chances to survive.
EDIT: It's also probably a pain to eat regular food in a vacuum.
Sure. I think that's the whole idea behind having armor protections in the first place. The issue that I have is the amount of protection is *so redundant* that losing life support would not even be a remote concern.
And who said anything about it being a vacuum? Your ship is still sealed, the life support is just... not on, and that power can be better spent on something else.
There's no mechanical benefit to turning off your life support, but there's also no mechanical reason to, is the point I'm trying to make, which is an immersion issue for me.
How do you get food into your suit/armor, and how do you get waste out? Life support is a tremendous benefit that I wouldn't willingly go without.
Life bubble is just an inch of warm, breathable air, and the minor force fields provided by light armors aren't thick enough to stop anything solid or liquid.
Heavy armor folks might have an issue, I admit, but only if there is no spellcaster in the group. As soon as a single 2nd-3rd level mystic or technomancer is on board, the entire group can eat and expel waste through life bubbles at their leisure, with the energy consumed by life support being diverted to thrusters or shield or some other scifi thing that helps them.
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Also worth nothing that Life Bubble can be dispelled, and that there are places in the drift where magic (and technology) simply fail. It's rare, granted, but you do come across them.
Really, though, what it boils down to is comfort. There's life support on a typical ship because people like to be comfortable, and are usually willing to make extra effort to achieve that. Sure, I could survive in a cave or tent, but I'd much rather live in a house, and in fact I'm willing to pay extra to be able to do so.
We know there are ships in Starfinder that don't have life support -- generally Eoxian/Corpse Fleet vessels -- since undead don't need the systems and from a military perspective, it puts living attackers or prisoners at a disadvantage. I could easily see Android operated ships doing the same thing as a matter of efficiency if they didn't have any passengers or crew that required life support. There's nothing stopping a group of PCs from doing the same thing, if they really wanted to -- most people just wouldn't see the need.
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Without the life support on your ship's air probably gets stinky. My experience with having stinking stuff in the fridge is that it causes everything else in the fridge to taste bad, and possibly to stink also. With life support on your person only, you're eating prepackaged food and announcing to everyone within smelling distance on the space dock that you're some dead broke hobo. Which doesn't mean no one would do so - if you can save a little by cutting life support someone on a tight margin's going to do so.
Also the ship might well get either worryingly hot or worryingly cold.
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Sure, you can turn the life support off in your ship. You can also live off nothing but rations and only sleep on a pile of rags in the cargo bay. Mechanically, there's no reason not to do this. But this is a role-playing game. Would your character really want to subject themselves to that sort of life, when a climate-controlled ship and nice bedroom are an option?
What if you want to bathe? Or keep houseplants? Or have a cat? Or just take your armor off once in a while, because you prefer to sleep in pajamas?
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I imagine that running around in your armor for extended periods is not fun. I mean, how much do you want to kick off your shoes, take off your jacket, and relax after s hard day’s work? Now consider having to stay in that smelly jacket for days or (at higher levels) weeks at a time? No thank you. Plus, while I imagine the space suit allows for eating/drinking, it probably doesn’t allow for things like surgery if you wanna heal your friend in the medbay.
Life bubble’s a bit better, but if you Mage is incapacitated, you’re dead, where as I assume ship life support has backup systems.
Although. . . That would make for a good SFS scenario/module where the PCs have to cobble together a ship and one option is to just do away with the life support system.
Or a scenario where you steal an Eoxian ship to make a daring getaway, and you simply don’t have life support on it.
I guess the question is, what is one saving all this Life Support energy for? If energy is in sufficiently short supply that you need to worry, then you're probably in a tenuous enough situation where you can't be blase about being able to recharge your suit. Of course there's all sorts of measures you can take once in this situation, Life Bubble being one -- and a good one -- but it's a sign of being in bad circumstances.
If you're not in extreme circumstances, then living constantly in your armor or through back-to-back uses of Life Bubble spells would sound pointless at best. Besides which, unless the circumstance are Siege of Malta-level extreme, trying to live constantly in your armour is practically begging your GM to mess with you.
Also note that trips through the drift while very fast for getting around the galaxy still can take days-weeks to get from here to there. That is a lot of time to be stuck in your space suit with it sealed up. Could you do it yes I don't think most would bother doing so though. It does make some sense to evac the air if you know you are going into a fight. The lessened danger from fire due to combat damage is a pretty huge plus.
Man, who wants to waste a spell slot on Life Bubble when you could have stuff that helps you not die in combat? Especially when every armor and every ship has life support...
I think that this argument works the other direction more. Presumably you need life support on your ship to recharge your armor's environment capabilities.
I think most people probably would run with their ships aired up but if your crew is all androids/SRO you may not bother airing up unless you get company. If you look at the eoxian ship designs most either don't have any aired up compartments or minimal ones for visitors/prisoners so there clearly are some people who don't need it and don't use much/any life support. But for most races that need to breath being able to unbutton their armor to relax is probably important.
Mage? What's that?
A word for "magic user that may be of any spellcasting style" that is much shorter to say than that ;)
On the RP side, it's definitely true that relying on these sorts of things is not the most comfortable way to live. No question. Maybe my issues are better expressed in the specific context of my game, which is less of a dig at ship life support and more at the tremendous redundancy of environmental protections in general (but especially life bubble):
I completely overlooked that armors had environmental protections for most of the campaign, and so did all of my players (we flipped to the equipment tables, saw "filtered rebreather" as an armor upgrade, and figured that was basically it). After an uncomfortable trek through the desert at 2nd level, the party technomancer decided to take Life Bubble to keep herself okay in just those circumstances.
Fast forward to the present day, when the group recently hit 7th level. Life Bubble can affect up to 7 targets for an entire week with a single casting. No no one is ever in danger of suffocating, drowning, freezing, overheating, or inhaling harmful substances. While their life support system has never been damaged for put offline, if it was, they would not need to worry about abandoning the ship or even repairing it. It has eclipsed the usefulness of every other 1st level spell, most of which are no longer as powerful as simply taking a shot with her pistol or making use of one of her armor upgrades.
That by itself was beginning to feel like a bit much: that several biological needs were completely conquered by a single casting of a 1st level spell, but then we all realized armor had this effect built into it already.
This realization had the effect of both making life bubble (which, in terms of what it's effects are compared to other spells, is one of the most powerful spells 1st level spells ever written) less necessary and also making the experience of space and new worlds... diminished. It's always going to feel like Abasalom Station wherever they go. If the life support system goes critical in a starship combat... well, who cares? They'll fix it when they get around to it. No urgency whatsoever.
tl;dr While oxygen/thermal protections should be free to every PC, it feels very strange for them to be so redundant that damaging life support in combat will have no effect or urgency, or that a low-level character adrift in space would die of thirst before they ran out of air. That may not feel strange for everyone, but it feels strange for me.