Is life support still planned to be limited to prevent people using ships as a clown car?
TL;DRLife support will be limited systemically rather than by a hard cap, so cramming too many people in a small ship means scrubbers deplete fast and temperature and pressure suffer.
Yeah, of course. Because the way it's supposed to work, like on the ISS, you have the scrubber, it removes the CO2 and it has only a certain rate that it can process. So if you suddenly get 20 people inside of a small ship that's designed for two people, then your life support is going to start not managing it. And the rate of flow of the air for the system will be too slow. The CO2 will build up and you'll probably die. But obviously it all needs to be balanced with the bigger ships and the different rooms in the ships.
We don't want to put a hard limit on it. So we want to have it systemic driven. So that means that if you have an Aurora and you want to cram it with five people, then sure, it will work. But what you have to do as the person running the Aurora, you have to replace the scrubber constantly. Because the scrubber just depletes very, very fast because of the CO2 production in the room. And then, yeah, sure. If you decide 'every 10 minutes I have to replace the scrubber', yeah, sure.
And also, life support is not only doing the CO2, it's also temperature and the pressure, and those things will also be hit by too many people breathing in the room, because then there's less time for heating or cooling the room. So it's going to be interesting gameplay there to balance what you want the atmosphere in your rooms to be like.