Having a tanker of some sort going round the stations does make sense. You don't want to mess up your local environment with assorted organics, especially if you're a manufacturing plant of some sort. It's also a bugger getting the window cleaner round to clean the crap off the outside.
It's the equivalent of getting a tanker round to pump out your septic tank once in a while rather than just having the pipes having the outfall in the local stream. It might work for you, but the next house downstream isn't going to be happy.
It's likely that the stations will be in clusters in particular orbits though, metal refineries supplying the nearby shipyards for instance, probably the equivalent of North Sea accomodation rigs near clusters of oil production rigs. Even with earth level space programmes there are problems with debris and they try really hard not to create anything that will hang around. By the time you've got enough space borne activity that you get 5000 survivors from an attack on each of 12 colony worlds (Just under 50k in Galactica's fleet, say 7K with Pegasus and a number of random ships) that's a lot of waste has to be dealt with.[ Parent ]
Build up a big ball of crap somewhere and push your sewage towards it.[ Parent ]
If the stations need the processed output, why not have their own processing plant, especially if they are huge clusters like Vulch thinks.
Or if it's used on planets, just ship it to the planets in a standard freighter and process it there.
Why have the interstellar equivalent of a "sewage processing truck"? [ Parent ]
Why have a Tylium ore processing ship with FTL capability? It would make more sense for it to be something fixed to the asteroid being mined. When the asteroid was exhausted you'd maybe move the refinery to a new one in several sections.
Why do so many of the transports previously used for hops between the colonies have living quarters for passengers when the journeys are relatively quick? The longest route seems to be about the same duration as a trip to New Zealand.
Why is the prison transport ship so big? A Raptor carries an FTL drive, with that you'd expect something more the size of a Group 4 truck.[ Parent ]
An ore processing ship makes more sense. If the asteroids are small, you may have to move it around quite a lot: you don't want to have to keep disassembling and reassembling it every few days. Not sure what advantage it would give you to split it up into sections. On Earth you might want to split it up to truck it around more easily, but from the diversity of the fleet it seems that you can move pretty much any shape you like with ease.
And if you're only extracting a little Tylium from a large amount of ore, you don't want to have to lug all that ore back to a planet for processing. With sewage, presumably you want most or all of it. [ Parent ]
As to why Raptor's have FTL, they're scout ships. Earth First! (We can strip mine the rest later.)[ Parent ]
...Then you don't want to have them sitting around at all. You'd be more likely to build a very large frame with an FTL drive and conventional engines to move large things around and keep it working. Imagine something getting on for the size of Galactica but the shape of Thunderbird 2 without a pod.
The using a Raptor to jump a Basestar thing throws this comparison off a bit, but jet engines are expensive yet non-military users still build small airframes around them instead of everything being an A380. There aren't many 747s used on short haul flights, and just how many prisoners need to be transported to parole hearings at once anyway?[ Parent ]
Irony: ammo says it's time. Tom is blocked.[ Parent ]
"And this ... is a piece of Synergy." --Kellnerin[ Parent ]
Space is big Space is Dark It's hard to find A place to park
