Editing Stellar Hero (section)

=== Starship Maintenance ===

*I'm going to ignore Crawford's comments to you and stick with the rules as written. Maintenance costs only come into play annually. The monthly costs should come from paying for the ship and its crew. However, once the food, water, and oxygen run out, they're out. I have no trouble with players manually restocking the larder with food but the ship is equipped to reload water from a spaceport. You'll need to jury rig something to pump (a lot of) potable water from somewhere else. It's not as easy as filling up a few jugs of water and pouring them into the tank.

*Water is key for oxygen as well. The ship uses some of the water onboard for oxygen by way of electrolysis. Once the water is split into hydrogen and oxygen, the ship scrubs out CO2 from the air and chemically combines it with the stored hydrogen to magically create more water. Yeah, you waste hydrogen in the form of methane but you can get hydrogen from stars or gas giants. Look up the Sabatier Reaction for more details. This process works well enough but sooner or later the water runs out, and so does the oxygen.

*What I will say is that you still have to do maintenance on all parts of this process. Once you reach the end of the Stores' life, even if you've manually added more food and water, the equipment can still fail. If the CO2 scrubbers go, or the electrolysis components, then we're talking major disaster. I'm not going to tell you the chances of that happening but you can ask around a spaceport and get people's opinions. In any event, if you're out there by yourself, your Stores will last six times as long so you've got more wiggle room.