Space travel in the Alliance and surrounding areas is a mature technology, about as safe as modern air travel. For most interstellar travelers, it’s almost identical to boarding an airliner or passenger train. You check your luggage, walk through a weapons scanner, get on board, and when you get where you’re going you get off, collect your luggage, and go about your business. On an interstellar trip or long-distance interplanetary run you might have a bunk or stateroom, but other than that it’s the same deal.
Easy as pie and usually pretty boring. Except when it isn’t. And then it gets interesting, in the Chinese curse sense.
Thankfully, space crew are well aware of the dangers in their environment and have invented tools to deal with them. These items are common regardless of government or species, with anyone who goes into space regularly having come up with their own versions at one time or another.
Pressure Suits
Also known as spacesuits, these are full-body vacuum-sealed suits made to allow the wearer to function in vacuum. An astounding array of these exist with a similar array of functionality.
Most people who live or work in space wear an emergency suit under – or instead of – their other clothes. These suits don’t provide much protection from anything else, but they’ll keep the wearer safe in a sudden decompression. This is a common enough practice that nobody gives it a second glance in most startowns unless the suit in question is transparent.
Some top-end suits in use by the Patrol and certain very well-equipped mercenary units use powered fabric to emulate the capabilities of a light powersuit in a flexible package that looks like heavy synthetic fabric. While not as effective as a proper combat powersuit, they’re a step above most other pressure suits.
While it may seem like cheating to mention them, almost any combat-grade powersuit will protect its wearer against vacuum and other hazards incurred by leaving a perfectly good spacecraft.
Freeze Tube
Freeze tubes are simple suspension chambers. Depending on the manufacturer, they could use low temperatures, drugs, or nanomachines to knock their occupant out and slow their metabolism, but the end result is essentially the same. For all practical purposes, the occupant of a freeze tube stops aging while frozen, with all their functions reduced by 95-99%. They’re a well-understood technology – the CT Pedro Cabral used them – and some people even use them for routine travel.
Rescue Ball
A rescue ball is exactly what it sounds like, a big vacuum-rated ball with room and temporary life support for one occupant. Its life support system is a simple breather apparatus with a small oxygen tank. Unlike a normal breather rig, the oxygen supply also includes drugs designed to render and keep a human or other common species unconscious until revived. The occupant climbs in, puts on the breather mask, and goes to sleep for several hours to conserve oxygen. They may be revived either with an antidote shot or simply removing the mask and letting the soporifics wear off on their own.
Once inside the ball, the occupants can be dragged into a relatively safe part of the ship, left where they are, or even thrown out an airlock or breach if necessary. Rescue ball fabric is a tough, flexible layered blend of rip-stop fabric similar to that used in flexible body armor, a thin metal layer to help with radiation shielding, and a layer of self-sealing material to quickly close any holes before they become life threatening. While it isn’t really armor, the skin of a rescue ball can stop a knife or light shrapnel. Most have emergency transponders and a radar-reflective coating to make their retrieval easier.
An occupant in a rescue ball can survive for several days even in hard vacuum if necessary. Typically, nonessential personnel are stuffed into balls to keep them relatively safe and out of the way while the emergency is dealt with. Unless they’re unfortunate enough to be near an unshielded reactor core, nuclear detonation, or especially energetic star – or come under fire – they should be fine.
Escape Pods
If the worst comes to pass, there are usually escape pods available. Their comfort and capabilities vary widely. Some are simple sealed tubes with a hatch on one end and a basic life support system, effectively a can-shaped rescue ball. Others are made for multiple occupants in individual seats. Many are effectively freeze tubes in an armored shell that can be jettisoned. As with rescue balls escape pods are designed specifically to be easy to spot with shipboard sensors and use equivalent features to do so. A number of escape pods are capable of atmospheric reentry, but this isn’t universal. These pods usually include a cache of emergency food and water as well.
The best escape pods aren’t actually pods, but spacecraft. In an emergency shuttlecraft and combat spacecraft can be pressed into service as mobile and often dangerous escape vehicles. If the emergency is due to outside hostiles, these “escape pods” can provide a nasty surprise.
Many ships are equipped with small repair craft that are just cockpits with life support, propulsion, and a few arms. They don’t have room for a passenger, but repair craft are guaranteed a role in any emergency that involved escape pods or rescue balls going overboard, simply because someone has to go out and collect them and these pods have hands.
Fire Extinguishers
Extinguishers intended for spacecraft use are usually cold gas based, using something like halon or even carbon dioxide. If a fire breaks out inside a control panel, the extinguisher’s nozzle is inserted into the nearest extinguisher port and emptied. For more readily accessible fires, theyre used as they would be anywhere else – just aim and spray. The ship’s air filtration system then separates the gases back out of the air and stores them in small pressure tanks to recharge the extinguishers.
They’re also useful as emergency thrusters, something that was known back on Earth in the 20th century. Shipboard extinguishers tend to have adjustable nozzles for use as standard extinguishers, panel insertion, or emergency thrusters. If it wasn’t standard equipment, an adjustable nozzle can be assumed to be in stock at any startown hardware store for the local equivalent of a few dollars, and easy enough to install that almost anyone can do it.
If there’s a really big fire, people are sealed into pressure-safe areas, pods, or rescue balls, and the burning area opened to space. The air flows out, taking the fire with it, the ship is resealed, and the life support system replaces the missing air. Unless the fire damaged the life support system, that is…
The Maintenance Crew
Once the problem is diagnosed – which is often as difficult as “hole Elvis there’s a giant hole in the hull!” – someone has to fix it. Sometimes they’re trying to fix it while the situation is unfolding around them. Nobody can do any but the simplest repairs with their bare hands, so the maintenance crew by necessity has an impressive tool kit. On a shuttle or similar craft it might be a portable toolbox in a cabinet, while a full starship will have anything from the equivalent of a big rolling toolbox the size of a refrigerator to a full machine shop with stations for multiple simultaneous users.
This is especially true of Patrol startships. Even a relatively small Patrol ship like a Quang Duc frigate has a shop capable of routine maintenance on itself and its small craft, with enough extra capacity to do major repairs in the field. It has limits, but it requires multiple antiship torpedo hits to get into that realm.
Maintenance Robots
Any spacecraft larger than a fighter, and even some of those, will have at least one robot on board to do almost constant maintenance. They roam the ship inside and out looking for things to fix or maintain under the direction of the ship’s AI. Under combat conditions, they use this connection to the ship’s sensors and diagnostics to repair battle damage as it happens.
Unfortunately for these robots those kind of repairs are often suicide missions, which is why they’re performed by robots. Between combat losses and general attrition due to maintenance being a dangerous profession and the robots getting the worst parts of it, they are almost never equipped with much brainpower; they’re essentially the onboard AI’s hands and remote sensors rather than independent entities. There have been occasional exceptions, including some very strange events at the battle for the Netzach, but maintenance robots are considered semi-disposable.