Starship Life Support Systems

Life Support covers a myriad of functions that are kept under an umbrella term. At its core, life support covers specifically removing carbon dioxide from the air and adding oxygen. Without these functions, the crew would die quite quickly. However, "life support" also covers heat, ventilation, cooling, water reclamation and distribution, artificial gravity, waste disposal, even lighting and door mechanisms. Crew Comfort Systems may be a more accurate descriptor, but on most ships these systems are all considered vital for starship operations.

The Gudersnipe Foundation mandates that all spacecraft must have "triple-redundant" life support systems; EG systems with three levels of redundancy. This rule applies strictly to the basic requirements needed to keep the crew alive. On Foundation-owned starships, the general rule is "double-capacity, triple redundancy", meaning that a ship should have a capacity(in terms of life support availability) equal to double it's crew compliment, and that this system should be triple-redundant.

Redundancies

Most systems achieve the triple-redundant requirement by having a primary, secondary, and emergency backup. The primary and secondary may be inter-changable, usually copies of the same system but with fully-independent components. The emergency backup is usually much simpler, in most cases just a system that scrubs C02 and opens a valve on an oxygen tank.

The term "shuttle breathing" refers to a state in which all systems have failed, and the crew is left with nothing but the available oxygen circulating in the air. This is typically considered a very bad thing. Foundation ships are often designed with larger-than-necessary spaces in the pressurized section of the ship to provide a little head room in these situations.

Scrubbing

C02 scrubbing is accomplished usually by freeze-seperat