How Does Your Station Get Supplies?

Now that you’ve decided on the currency used on your fictional space station, you need to decide how your people get their supplies. Is everything through mail order or by traveling ships that stop at the station, sell things, and move on to the next station or by a store on station that gets refilled every day or every week? As far as “supplies” I mean things like soaps and the basic clothes or snacks, things you might go to Target or Walmart for, not so much the special things like daily meals, fancy clothes, or decorations. We’ll cover those in later posts but for now I want you to think about where the basics for your people comes from. Is it one store or many stores selling different things. How often does the store or stores get restocked and what happens if that store isn’t restocked on time?
Instead of stores you could have replicators. Replicators are what the creators of the various Star Trek series decided on to explain where supplies comes from on ships and stations. Basically the idea is that the station holds a huge amount of raw supplies, such as huge squares of metal with a lot of molecules in the smallest space possible. Someone asks the replicator for something, let’s say a cup of tea, and the replicator takes a piece of the metal square, seperates it down to it’s molecules, sends the molecules (atoms) through the wires to the activated replicator, and reassembles the molecules from the metal into the desired cup of tea. It changes the metal at the atoms, changing the number of protons, electrons, and neutrons of the metal into the correct number, so it really is a cup of tea when it comes out. Then when the person is done with the tea, they put the cup back on the replicator and the cup is broken down, sent through the system and reassembled as the metal square for storage. Everything on station could work like that which in theory would mean no waste sent off station and never needing new metal pieces. However, since a space station is by design a temporary space port for most people, what goes out of the replicator may not go back into the system to get recycled. A snack may have been gotten for a ride on a ship that has no replicator or visitors may leave before the food had a chance to re-enter the replicator system. With that in mind you may want to decide how often your raw supplies get replaced and if there are any limitations such as if molecules can only be arranged and rearranged so many times.