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Life-Support Economies of Scale

Interactive 3D model of how a closed-loop ECLSS scales from a 6-person crew to a 1000+ colonist planetary base: tune the economies-of-scale exponent, redundancy spares and module capacity, and watch specific mass per person fall along a power-law curve.

Space & Astronomy3DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted

A closed-loop life-support system doesn't get cheaper per person just because a colony grows — two separate effects fight it out. Bulk hardware (tankage, reactors, thermal radiators) follows a six-tenths-style power law, getting more mass-efficient per person as it's built bigger. But redundancy is discrete: a colony of any size needs whole spare recycling modules to survive a single failure, and that fixed spare count is brutally expensive per person in a small crew, and nearly free in a large one. This simulator renders both a 3D grid of colony pods and a rack of active/spare life-support modules that grow with population, and plots the resulting specific-mass curve live as you tune the economies-of-scale exponent, the spare-module count and the capacity of each module.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D model of how a closed-loop ECLSS scales from a 6-person crew to a 1000+ colonist planetary base: tune the economies-of-scale exponent, redundant spare modules and per-module capacity, and watch specific mass per person fall along a power-law curve.

ECLSSlife supportspace colonyeconomies of scalemass balanceredundancy

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install