Editing Spaceship (section)

=== Things you'll want on a slow spaceship ===
* '''Food Production''': People gotta eat and you'll often be far away from any resupply. Besides, eating nothing but canned food gets real old real quick while nutritional balance can be thrown off. Some solutions are a hydroponics bay to grow plants or algae and space-efficient farms like fish tanks for shellfish and seafood is viable (case & point with tilapia, catfish, clams, and crawfish being adaptable anywhere). Hydroponics can double as a natural CO2 Scrubber that you don't need to replace as well since the plants are doing what nature made them for. Humorously, synthetic protein grown in a petri dish can be viable if it can be scaled up.
* '''Fabrication systems''': anything that you don't take with you, you'll have to make do with what you have or else make it yourself. The last thing you want happening is something critical breaking and you don't have spare parts on hand. Being able to make what you need from raw material helps alleviate such concerns, especially if the goal is to eventually colonize another world. NASA has invested a lot in 3D printers for this purpose. And space mining and fabrication in the form of smelters and orbital foundries are a possiblity.
* '''Cryo-Sleep Chambers''': depending on how far you're traveling and how long it will take (or other factors such as [[Warp|traveling through literal Hell]]), it may be best to spend the majority of the trip in suspended animation and let the computers do the boring task of piloting a giant hunk of metal through the vast expanse of space. Cryo-Sleep is typically not required if the ship in question is a Generation Ship (where people are expected to be born and die on the ship before it reaches its destination), or if FTL is sufficiently advanced that journeys can be made in less than a year.