Editing Spaceship (section)

=== Things you'll want on a large spaceship ===
* '''Airlocks''': A means of getting in and out of the spacecraft without letting all the air get out. Usually two air-tight doors with a chamber between them. Can also serve as bulkheads to seal off damaged sections of a craft if it's a modular design.
* '''Docking Mechanisms''': a prerequisite for linking up with Space Stations or other craft. Modern docking mechanisms have to be very sophisticated in order to get ships/stations to join up without crashing or losing an air seal.
* '''Toilets''': Unless you plan on traveling for at most a few hours a day in your spaceship, you'll need some way to deal with the inevitable fact that living humans need to relieve themselves. Modern spaceship toilets are able to work in zero-g environments, and research is being done to extract moisture from waste; as unpleasant as it sounds, every drop of water counts in the vacuum of space. The downside is cleaning out toxic residue before jettisoning the mass if it's not reused for things like fertilizer.
* '''Artificial Gravity''': Less advanced spaceships can get it via centrifugal force by having rotating sections. More advanced ones don't really need explaining how they do it. It's a big deal as even life on the ISS has shown how microgravity can make the human body suffer weakened cardiovascular systems, brittle bones, and degraded eyesight (called Spaceflight associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome) from nerves being pinched by bodily fluids normally restrained by gravity. The former two can be mitigated with copious exercise, latter currently has no viable method to counter unless inertial rotation to generate artificial gravity is used.
* '''Parasites''': No, not [[Nurgle|like that]]. One or more small ships your big-ship carries around for various purposes. These start with simple EVA sleds for moving stuff around the ship and small drones to escape pods, work craft with articulated arms for repairs, construction or salvage, mining ships to top up on raw materials from asteroids, shuttles to move stuff from ship to ship without having to dock and Dropships for when you want to land on a planet.
*'''FTL Drive''': Even if a ship has enough propulsion to reach light-speed it will still hate a couple of years at best to reach another system because of those pesky things called laws of physics. An FTL drives solves that problem, either bends the laws of physics around the spaceship so it can go faster, takeing the spaceship through another dimension where said laws just don't apply, or creating an artificial wormhole to connect two places. There are a couple of theoretical FTL drives, which sci-fi writers keep using, but since we have nothing concrete with our current science feel free to use any principle that sounds pseudo-scientific. It should be noted that the distance to the closest galaxy is just 20 times the length of our galaxy so any ship that can travel the galaxy in less than a week should have no trouble reaching another galaxy.