One of my new interests on YouTube is watching "van life" videos, where people go on tours of the tiny houses they have crammed into old FedEx trucks and ambulances.
I can't drive and don't aspire to that kind of life. So why do I watch them? For spaceship design ideas.
I can't drive and don't aspire to that kind of life. So why do I watch them? For spaceship design ideas.
Not "These are the voyages" type starships but what the inside of a ship owned by a solo spacer who had to fit their whole life into the biggest vessel they could fly (and keep flying) on their own.
One thing to bear in mind if you're designing a semi-realistic space vessel is that the craft is a closed system wrapped in nature's most perfect insulator. With a person inside, it needs a way to get rid of heat and humidity or it will just get hotter and damper all the time.
The popular portrayal is "space is cold", which means you can get away with portraying space is cold. But in reality, space is nothing. There's not anything there to be hot or cold. Hot stuff can be released into the void; heat itself cannot.
The good news is that if you've already got stuff like artificial gravity, inertial damping, and impulse drives, you've assumed future science can arbitrarily exert force on matter, which means you can also have a heat sink that perpetually cools itself while power is applied.
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