I have no artificial gravity, though on the large ships I have some spinning sections to provide forces like gravity.

I know that NASA uses specially prepared ration tubes for zero-g. Is that necessary?

Can I have then bring real food to prepair, of is that not possible?
 

Plates and bowls are entirely useless, of course, as are spoons and cups. Forks and knives are merely problematical...requiring special complementary utensils to be of much use. Most finger foods and some things you eat with chopsticks would be fine. But anything that consisted of many small bits would be as bad or even worse than a liquid (fried rice would be a total disaster).
 

Astronauts today eat dehydrated or freeze-dried food that come in pre-packed trays. They are NOT microwaved, as microwaves would interfere with delicate electornics, but rehydrated in heated in inductive heat ovens. Most of these foods are fairly gooey (ie: kraft mac and cheese) so that they remain stuck to the tray. Liquids are drunk friom plastic cups with special straws with a valve, although they've been known to deliberately leave some liquid escape, then drink from the bubble of floating fluids.

The food is actually pretty good, about as good as military MRE rations or any intitutional cafeteria food... a long ways from paste-in-tubes.
 

My input. If you have any questions about them as myself or HSO. ( I think he was in the military too )
 

It's a link to howstuffworks.com and this article is about the International Space Station... I've linked only to the section about living on the station, which I believe is relevant to the discussion at hand.

Of note: howstuffworks.com is a quick and dirty resource for the laziest of researchers. Nearly everything imaginable is covered on the site and written in layman's terms. Certainly worth adding to your favorites/bookmarks.

Happy Writing.

HSO
 

How can I say this delicately? The lower the residue, the smaller the volume of output from the large intestine. There is a limit to this, since the output of the large intestine is a combination of unabsorbed residue and actual metabolic waste.

For example, it would be very expensive to feed astronauts corn-on-the-cob. You'd be using a lot of fuel to accelerate cobs and residue for a very small amount of vitamins and calories. If NASA wanted to justify launching all those cobs and residue into space, they would need to design a way of recycling the cobs and residue into something useful.

So in real spacecraft the recycling and disposal systems are a significant factor in determining the crew's diet. In your case the converse will be true; if you want them to eat sweet corn and lima beans, you need to give them a waste reclamation and recycling system that allows them to make something useful from the residue mass they brought aboard. If you apply some imagination I'm sure you'll come up with something good.

[This message has been edited by Doc Brown (edited August 09, 2004).]
 

In my story I have one character hidden in a special crate that, when scanned, appears to be a crate of rice. It makes it past security, but later, the higher offecer notices the report and realized how the guy escaped because of the abserdity of taking rice into space. (The inspector is promptly demoted.)

I'll use the new information I got to make minor changes, but the main concept will work well.

Thanks Again.

 

And this guy is "escaping" into space?

I'm thinking that there are story difficulties here you haven't fully understood.
 

There are lots of places, planets, stations and ships to choose from, but he must first get off the planet while being sought.

plus there are other issues I've not made you privvy to, but which are planned out in detail.
 

[edited to correct my abominable typing]

[darn this computer! why won't it just show what I want instead of what I actually type? ]

[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited August 10, 2004).]
 

In that situation, there wouldn't be anything that wouldn't plausibly be sent into space. And there would be almost no reason for severe constraints on what people could import for food.

It might help if I were a little more specific.

The character in question is wanted for treason, but was recruted by a group opposed to the empress. The group is headed by a military leader and consists of "trainees" for the military. The "trainee" group is heading off for extended manouvers in space and has hidded the character in question so he can get off-world. The group will then make an attempt to cause problems for the government. (Who is good and who is bad dosn't matter for this explaination.) The government agents searching for the character are searching everywhere near the characters home town, including the military bases. They scan the crates the "trainee" group is taking as supplies. later, the government reviews the search results and notices that, for a training group, they were taking an unusual amount of rice. This causes the government to guess what happened to the character they're looking for and to suspect the training group and it's leader.

I determained that special space meals of some type would be the primary food, but that they would and could have "real" food occationally. It wouldn't be suspect if they had some "normal" food, but a crate of rice would be unusual.
 

Still, why would they try to disguise him as a crate of rice? That would be very difficult, and not very convincing, as you have already noted.

Besides, a couple hundred pounds of rice wouldn't be at all unusual for a good sized group of soldiers, presuming that you intend to cook it any other way than as fried rice.
 

As to the amount of rice working for a good sized group of people... This is actually a relatively small group.

disguising him as a crate of rice isn't difficult because all you are really doing is fooling electronic scanners.

The difficulty is in that you have to get over the fact that they chose rice for the scanner in the first place. I suppose I could get around that, but the reader dosn't discover the problems with the rice until well after the characters get away with it, and by that time, the reader may not think back.
 

This sort of attitude in an author can be annoying to the reader.

Sure, you can get away with logical inconsistencies in your stories, if the rest of the work is well done. But that doesn't mean readers don't notice them.

It is almost always possible to explain away such inconsistencies, with just a tiny bit of effort.

Maybe he bought the scanner-fooler for cheap from some smugglers, and found out afterward that the mimic setting was stuck on rice.
 

The problem is that if you ship rice into space in a crate, there is no need for life support or significant radiation shielding. It's just rice, after all.

So I could imagine a small anti-scan device that would trick a scanner into thinking that a crate filled with rocks of crack (or your futuristic equivalent) was just full of rice, but you aren't trying to disguise a crate full of crack. You're trying to hide a guy that is wearing a full on spacesuit.

The hard part is hiding the radiation shielding and the life support equipment. Compared to those, hiding the guy is trivial. In fact, since the guy would be inside the shielding, you wouldn't need to hide him from a scanner at all.

And trying to get the reader to swallow something stupid because they'll be further along in the story before you point out that it was stupid is...not very clever.
 

quote:

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The problem is that if you ship rice into space in a crate, there is no need for life support or significant radiation shielding. It's just rice, after all.

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Seriously, it's hard to think you have a clever idea, then find out there are issues beyond the ones you thought up. I'm having to seriously rethink a story I haven't really written yet, but have tons of notes on. And I keep finding out things that make my initial clever ideas crack. So keep asking myself questions like "why would they do that" and "what are all the things that could happen if" and "what could make this not work" - jabbing my own stuff until it holds up under pressure.

So you may really have to rethink this, ask the hard "whys" that everyone is suggesting, and maybe it will turn out that your story wants or needs to work differently than how you originally envisioned it. That doesn't mean you can't do something like what you want, but you might need to go off tangentially to your original idea.

This essentially sounds like a story you could just set here on earth back a hundred or so years a go - stowaway hides amid food/livestock in cargo hold of ship, isn't discovered that he has escaped until too late, etc.

If you can deal with life support and shielding, and the scanner-fooler stuck on "rice" (haha), and all the other myriad issues of first concealing, then getting contraband aboard a spaceship (look at all the security issues we have today), you can probably move on to other problems.

I wish you luck. I wish I could get my story worked out, but I'm not even at the point where I can post a question for help (well, I'd have too many questions).
 

quote:

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The problem is that if you ship rice into space in a crate, there is no need for life support or significant radiation shielding.

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Actually, wouldn't the radiation turn the rice into Rice Krispies or at the very least puffed rice (the kind they make those rice cakes out of)?

I agree on the life support thing though.
 

Even if the storage compartment is refrigerated, the stowaway can easily carry sufficient equipment to survive that -- present-day sleeping bags are technologically adequate for maintaining warmth in a refrigerated environment.
 

quote:

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The hard part is hiding the radiation shielding and the life support equipment. Compared to those, hiding the guy is trivial. In fact, since the guy would be inside the shielding, you wouldn't need to hide him from a scanner at all.

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This made me think of a story I read a long time ago about a king who hires a bunch of magical guards who can see through things. He's so proud of the guards that he offers a prize to anyone who can sneak something past them out of the castle. A little boy decides to try for the prize so he goes to the castle every day and brings out a load of something (leaves, dirt, gravel, etc) in a little red wagon. The guards "see" through the load and find nothing hidden there, so they let him pass them. When it comes time to award the prize, the little boy takes the king to his house and shows him all the little red wagons he has stolen.

(If anyone knows the title of this story, please tell me. I'd like to get a copy of the book.)

Anyway, if you absolutely have to use rice, fine. But if you don't, why not sneak the guy on board in a shipment of spacesuits?
 

The idea of radiation or cold storage isn't a worry fro me. I figure they bring up the supplies they need into the ship without worring about that. The ship they initially go to isn't really large enough to have superlong-term storage.

As for the other concerns, I believe I have gleened enough from your suggestions to fix those.
 

quote:

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about a king who hires a bunch of magical guards who can see through things.

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The version I heard, as a joke, was a factory worker using a wheelbarrow, and taking it out past the security guard.

I've never heard of it as a fable.

Susan