from france

the question may seem strange but it is a serious one. In huge ship with hundreds if not thousands of people eating and their reject they will face sonner or latter the problem of food shortage and the accumulation of shitt.

so does a ship function like a hive in regard to this particular problem. is their a recycle systeme?

Yes, at least in reguards to waste, that's part of the function that comes from the Life Sustainer. Some low quality food (read Sylant Green) may be created on board, but most of the time these ships just carry massive stores of food. Keep in mind your standard vessel is only outfited with six months supplies. After that you need to at least stop by a habitable planet to pick up fresh food & water, as well as dump wastes.

Well,

There are rules for restocking in Rogue Trader, you even have the Expanded Supply Vault Space Ship part.

As for those nasty left overs, they are recycled, along with dead crew into amongst others, Corpse Starch rations....everything that can't be recycled is simply airlocked...

Crew waste (and dead crew) can also be used to replenish/fertilise the algae farms or other shipboard farming areas in the deep holds of some ships

Corpse starch rations......are people!

Doesn't have quite the horridness that the Soylent Green exclaimation does. Maybe its in the name.

I'd say the ships contain massive amounts of food, remember the sheer size of them. And yeah, waste gets recycled. Poor quality life sustainers have the water processing just a little too close to the fecal vats, hence the penalty to morale.

Gribble_the_Munchkin said:

Exactly what I was thinking when I read that!

-Cynr

I suppose simply dumping the crap into space wouldn't be too hard, especially if it's collected in a specfic place (after water has been extracted out of it), and ejected whenever that storage space gets full.

If you run the math for the hulls given in the book, approximating the ships as rectangles equally high as wide, it turns out that the density of folks aboard isn't so big after all. When I did that, I got something like 6000 cubic metres per crewman. Meaning, it's not at all implausible that there'd actually be space for half a year of food per person aboard. I remember from somewhere that a typical adult will eat about a ton of food per year, that'd only be about one or two cubic metres of storage space.

Gribble_the_Munchkin said:

But considering the scientific illiteracy of the masses of the 41st millennium, some might actually start to think the authorities are breeding people for food