On 29May2023 1247, trent shipley - trent.shipley at gmail.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> Yes.  I guess you might want to recycle the tankers.  If you are using
> water, just vent excess O2 to vacuum.  The same with carbon if you're
> shipping methane.   Then you either keep the containers as building
> materials for the deep space station, or you send them back empty using
> sub-light reactionless drives.  That just leaves the problem of what to
> do with the reactionless drives, which are probably worth too much to
> just throw away, and not terribly useful to the deep space way station
> either.  So you either send the engine components back with no tanks
> at sublight, put them on a jumpship back periodically, or the waystation
> is a great place to get a bargain on one particular standard design of
> reactionless drive.

You probably don't want to just vent the excess to vacuum, because after
a while you'll end up in a cloud of the stuff and it'll start being
annoying.

Instead, cool it and park the resulting lumps of solids a few km away in
case you find a use for them.

You could do something like store stuff you want to keep at galactic
south of you, and toss just out towards galactic north and as long as
ships always approach on the ecliptic they don't have to worry about
debris (and far other ships, well that's why you have traffic control).

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>