Environmental Control
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Environmental control system provide life support system for people working and living in environments which are otherwise hazardous. There are several types, depending upon the needs of the vehicle or station.
- Type I: Mininal life support provides a sealed environment, heat, and light. The Air supply is open loop, meaning there's no attempt to recycle it. Stored air provides fresh oxygen while minimal air processing (filters and chemicals) removes the worst of the waste products from the air. Water and food are not normally provided but may be carried along. Normal duration is three hours.
- Type II: Basic life support provides heat, light, and short-term purified air. This is also an open-loop system but it provides better air processing to clean impurities out. Nether water nor food are included. Normal duration is 12 hours.
- Type III': Standard life support is so named because it's the standard system aboard spacecraft. It provides light, thermal control, closed-loop water recycling, and semi-closed loop air. Food is a carried consumeable, and given the duration it must be separately provided rather than carried on in the passenger compartments. Water is recycled and is basically unlimited. The air is purified and recycled, but filters have a limited life and slowly break down. Normal duration is two weeks.
- Type IV: Extended life support provides light, thermal control, and closed-loop air and water (indefinite). Food is still a carried consumable. Nomal duration is limied only by food supply.
- Type V: Endurance life support provides full closed-loop recycling for air, water, and food through use of hydro/aeroponics, aquaculture, and even cariculture. There are several different levels of Type V life support, each representign a major improvement over the previous. These forms of life support are usually only used aboard space stations and generation ships. Since Type V life support systems are miniature ecosystems, they are vulnerable to sudden changes in population. A sudden influx or outflux of people can change the system balance and cause failures.
- Type V-a: At this level, air and food are provided by low-level plant life, usually algae which requires processing to create food.
- Type V-b: This level provides vats and gardens. The gardens provide supplemental foods to the majority algae vat food.
- Type V-c: This level relies more upon the gardens for providing food than the algae vats. It also incorporates small animals like chickens or fish (usually any edible herbivore up to about 10kg).
- Type V-d: This level relies entierly upon gardens to provide both air and food. At this level larger animals can be incorpoprated into the evironmental systems. This level is usually only found on the largest space stations or on domed environments.
- Type V-e: This level is a full working ecosystem incorporating several hundred species of plants and animals. These are usually only found on large domed environments.
|
This article is a stub or placeholder. Please expand this article to include further basic detail: who, what, where, etc.
|
This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.