What Food Can Be Found On Your Space Station?

We’ve spoken of what currency your fictional station uses, how your crew gets their basic supplies, and of the need to have specialized vendors on station for things like cultural crafts, clothes, and fresh food. Now let’s talk about where your residents eat. You could have kitchens set up so everyone could cook their own meals or have replicators provide food on request but there will still be those who want the convenience and pleasure of having others prepare and bring their food while they talk with friends or finish work. If you decide to have no replicator on station it would probably be smartest to at least have a cafeteria your workers could eat at during working hours or at any hour on the clock as a station will have to be worked all day and all night. It makes for a quick meal while on the clock. The faster the meal, the more work that gets done, and the more work that gets done during normal working hours means less overtime the company needs to pay. That means that if the company that owns the station puts in a cafeteria, whether the crew pays for the food or if it’s free for the workers, the company wins in the long run. If the station is run by a military, especially if the military is based on the United States military, the crew will be provided a place to eat or given a stipend on each paycheck to buy food.
But where will the rest of the residents eat, the ones that don’t work directly for the company or military that runs the station? Think of it this way: a space station is very similar to a city or town here on Earth. Have you ever been in a town, no matter how small, that didn’t at least have a café, bar, and or full restaurant? I’ve never been in a town that didn’t have at least a family friendly establishment and a bar with in twenty minutes of it. True, there may only be one in the town, but there is usually at least one place that provides food to those not in the mood to cook that meal or who want somewhere to go to celebrate. You may decide to create what is called a “dry” station where alcohol isn’t sold or is banned, but on a station of at least the thousand or more people needed to keep the station running, you can bet that someone would realize there is an opportunity for income and set up a restaurant or café. How many establishments would depend on what type of station you want to create. A tourist stop could have a lot of restaurants providing a lot of different types of food. (Think of tourist places like Disney World, which provides food themed to fit the amusement park.) However, an oasis for crew members traveling the stars would be more likely to have a bar that provides food than a family restaurant with a child’s menu.
You should also take into account the nearby planets. Their cultural or favorite food is more likely to be on the station than the distant food from Earth. If the station is run mostly by humans, though, then you may find a few favored Earth meals sold on station.
There are a lot of factors that would affect what food is sold what food is sold on your station and how it’s sold but you are likely to need the information at least once in your story. How many stories have you read with at least one scene involving food, whether it’s preparing a meal, cleaning up afterwards, or a waiter interrupting a conversation while delivering food? Food is such an intricate part of a human’s life that it’s hard to not include food in a realistic story.

How Does Your Station Get Its One-Of-A-Kind Items?

Last time we discussed how the residents on your fictional station would get the basics, now we’ll discuss how they get their special things such as cultural decorations, souvenirs, and special clothes. True, you could always have them design and program the perfect product into the replicator but the true pleasure of cultural or expensive things is that they were handmade or made the traditional way. Things such as rugs or pottery are often bought more for the time put into the product and the story behind it than for the look of the product itself. Even now, in such an industrialized culture on Earth, stores are created where their specialty is selling handmade products from a specific area or culture somewhere else in the world. Having stores like that, even just vendors on the main hallway, would be very likely in the future with people traveling light years from their home or their parents’ cultures.
Other types of vendors you’d likely find on a space station would be fresh food from a local planet (everyone gets fed up with replicators that never quite create the perfect taste of real food) and tailors. Tailors and seamstresses can make the one size fits all outfits and uniforms sold at the basic stores to truly fit and show off a person’s figure. People go to tailors and seamstresses now a days to have the perfect outfit created just for them and to know that they’ve reached the point in their income where they can afford the expense. As mass produced clothes take up almost all the shelves in stores these days, tailors, seamstresses, and the truly expensive personal designers still make a healthy living and I doubt that need to be special and feel rich will ever go away.

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.

What Currency Is On Your Station?

I mentioned in a previous post that most stations seem to rent out their quarters( but I still haven’t talked about currency on a space station. We have a saying on Earth that “money makes the world go ‘round”. Not much of anything gets done on Earth without compensation for the job, whether it is in the form of money, brownie points aimed at a higher goal, or favors now being owed. It’s up to you to decide what form of currency is used. I know that in an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation it’s mentioned that the Federation no longer has a use for money, and although a society that doesn’t use money is possible it would need some sort of resource management to be sure everyone got what they needed on time. In the next Star Trek series, Deep Space 9, the Ferengi used latinum and the Federation used credits. In the television show Babylon 5 they used cards like modern debit cards that paid in “credits” as well. The term “credits” is a good way of using one currency to cover any local currencies that may be on station but isn’t very imaginative. On the plus side, people who travel a lot often refer to the local currency by one term, whether everything is spoken of as “dollars”, “pesos”, or merely “dubbers”, it’s all the same to many people. On that idea calling the local currency all “credits” or something similar would make sense, no matter what the locals call it.

What Schooling is on Your Fictional Space Station?

Along with knowing what quarters your station has, you should by now know what type of people, or demographic, your station has. If you have children as permanent residents of the station, or at least there a few months out of the year, you should probably think about how they are getting educated. There are many ways to educate a group of children, whether in a classroom with all ages in there and the older children reading at their pace while the teacher focuses on teaching the younger children to read and write or by each ability group being taught together or even independent study. How you teach the children on the station can come up in your story a number of ways, whether it’s crossing a group of children on a field trip or walking your character’s child to school every day, so it’s a good idea to know this before you start writing. The more you know about your setting before you start writing, the more consistent your story will be.

What Living Quarters Are On Your Fictional Space Station?

One of the biggest things people worry about when they travel or move to a new place is where they’ll stay when they get there. Creating a fictional space station is no different: possibly one of the most important facts that will come out in your story is the living quarters your characters live in. Do they live in a small single person quarters or share a slightly bigger space with a roommate or two? Do they share a bedroom with their siblings or do children get separate rooms from siblings and parents? Do they live in a room similar to military barracks or are their quarters closer to a penthouse?
How does the station distribute quarters? Is it similar to a hotel where the station gets paid by the day or is it more like an apartment building where rent can come by the month? Does your station even collect rent on the quarters or is it a first come, first served mentality. Does your station house permanent residents or merely have crew come and go every few years? Many stations, such as Star Trek Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 in their television series, have quarters set aside for the crewmembers stationed there for a few years and rent out the other quarters to guests or merchants as they pass through.
Another question to ask is how your station deals with other species. Taking the previously mentioned television series DS9 only seems to have species that breathe air similar to Earth atmosphere and the individual rooms have the ability to change their own air if desired. Babylon 5 has areas in a section called the alien sector that have different atmospheres for different aliens and humans have to wear gas masks to enter the sector. Those are two ways to deal with the question of what air other species may breathe. However you decide to adapt to your aliens or have them adapt to humans, remember to be consistent. There are readers that will pick up on things such as that a low oxygen environment doesn’t affect a character it should affect or that a character isn’t wearing a mask when it should be.

What Medical Care Does Your Space Station Have?

Now that I’ve gone through the technical areas of a fictional space station, let’s talk about the areas that deal with intelligent life, starting with medical facilities on station. Your station remains in one place and as such would most likely have more of a hospital feel to it than that of the local family doctor who can only deal with so much. Most station medical areas in books and movies can do anything from the full laboratory work up needed to diagnose a patient to the basic steps needed to heal the patient as well as dealing with anyone from newborn infant or pregnant mother to an elderly person dying of old age from any species. Often they have separate wards for different species that need special environments to survive or heal as well as at least one manually adaptable room for treating new species with the atmosphere found on the ship the alien arrived on.
I’d say that a space station is similar to a town or city now a days. As you journey across the country you pass through fields and woodland, small towns, bigger towns, and cities of all sizes. The sizes change, but every county has a hospital and every city tends to have a few hospitals and a number of clinics. An interesting thing about the city hospitals is that most of them are renowned for specific things. The Mayo Clinic a hospital systemis world renowned for its unique treatments on rare diseases while other hospitals can focus on children or research on conditions effecting specific organs that could change the future of science and medicine. Many hospitals these days also cater to cosmetic surgeries, such as reconstructing a face or merely shrinking a nose for vanity’s sake, and there are even pet hospitals in many cities now. Modern medicine can do many things and most hospitals in large cities can accommodate anything or can quickly get the patient to the correct hospital. It may be beneficial to at least decide what the limits of your medical facilities are before you write a lot of scenes in the medical wards.
Another thing to consider is that every doctor has his or her specialty whether it’s dealing with children, a specific alien species, or prefers diseases to dealing with broken limbs. Knowing the doctor’s specialty and their reason for learning that specialty can do a lot towards creating the character for story purposes if the doctor isn’t a major character in your story. (A scene where an animal doctor is forced to heal a human or alien could be a fun scene to read and write. I know I can think of many other examples where a doctor’s training doesn’t prepare him or her for an emergency could create an interesting scene with nervous tension or near panic.)
One final thought on medicine on a space station comes from the Babylon 5 television series. It was set on a space station that had its main doctor have a specialty in zenobiology, or the study of non-human life. I would guess that zenobiology would be a common focus or hobby of many doctors that would choose to work on a space station instead of a possibly better paying job planet-side somewhere.