Mr Bean wrote:How viable is a two to a unit sleeping quarters? Can you stack as many in the same space? The reason I ask is that four per room encourages shifting thinking. IE Gold and Red, where the left side bunks are gold crew 6AM to 6PM while Red crew is the opposite. Otherwise four people in that space is going to have them tripping over each other.
We hashed some of this through in the prior thread. There are several ways to look at the dorm situation.
First of all, remember that this is intended to be home for
ten years. While submarine crews routinely pack people much more densely submarine cruises are limited in part by psychological limits than supply limits. Even with carefully selected crews chosen for tolerance of such conditions Navies usually don't keep them down longer than a year.
We could develop individual "pods" for single occupant use and just assume everyone stays put for 10 years. Or we could have sleeping rooms that are
primarily for sleeping and not for living in. Keeping the sleeping areas very limited in use forces people to get up off their lazy asses and
move, which promotes health and social interactions. The dorm dwellers are intended to spend most waking hours outside of their bedroom - lounge, work area, exercise area, kitchen/mess hall, etc.
People can sleep four to a room - I remember when all four siblings in my family slept in the same room. When my mother was a child they slept 5-6 to a room. What makes such sleeping areas tolerable is the ability to
go elsewhere. For both mental and physical health people need space to move around, need to actually do some moving, and there are multiple ways to configure space. Likewise, the current promoters of teeny-tiny living spaces (often just large enough for a bed and a little storage) invariably live in situations where they can
go outside. We won't be able to do that for
ten years.
Upthread here we had some much less dense living units as well. Such units would have a smaller (or no) "lounge"/living room/entertainment area.
Keep in mind, too, the notion is NOT to simply stuff these dorms full - we might start with even the densest dorms at half-capacity. We need to have extra capacity for three reasons:
1) After 10 years there will be more people even with the tremendously skewed male:female ratio of SD.net
2) We seem to have some notion of wanting to be able to accept refugees from outside
3) After 10 years stuff is going to break - due to one thing or another some rooms and perhaps an entire dorm might be rendered uninhabitable or severely degraded.
4) Most importantly, especially since this is NOT a carefully selected "crew" but a random cross-section, we're going to need room to move people around when conflicts arise. Failure to recognize that some people hate each other and should not housed too closely can lead to assault and/or murder over the long haul.
Also have you considered tracked storage?.
Moving parts are more likely to break than non-moving parts, it's that simple. Such moving storage might have utility in longer-term storage areas, or some workplaces (including food storage, medical storage, etc.) but I think humans, like most primates, can be pretty hard on their living/nesting areas. I've seen the damage human beings can do to their living quarters, we really do want durability for a decade long habitation where outside resupply is impossible.
Not to mention the added expense - moving storage systems are invariably more expensive than the non-moving variety (unless you're building shelves out of exotic woods or such, which we wouldn't be doing here).
