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These are some of the things C. Flynt has been up to, some of our personal lives, some reviews of things we've read, some stuff we've learned.

The blogs are organized by date.

Comments will appear when we've had time to check them. Apology for the inconvenience, but it's a way to keep phishers and spammers off the page.

Information comes from the strangest places.

It's generally easy to find the big facts like how far from here to the moon, but it's harder to find the little things you need to make a world real.

For instance, how many people would it take to run a lunar colony? How many cooks, cleaners, admin, etc are needed to keep three shifts of miners in the mines?

The answers come from strange places. I found the answer to how much support staff it takes in an Army Correspondence Course that describes how many folks it takes to run a field kitchen, which can feed 300 soldiers in a pinch (T rations) or 125 if you are serving cooked meals (A or B rations).

For the record, A rations include perishable items like milk or eggs, while B rations are non-perishable, dry milk and powdered eggs.

For the sake of our story, I ignored MREs and T rations, which are military-strength TV dinners or camping meals. Our luna colony is not in danger of being attacked or having to pick up and move quickly.

However, since critical parts needed to be shipped from Earth, the kitchen will be as lightweight and portable as possible - so an off-the-shelf military field kitchen is a likely candidate.

The document suggests that three servers and one or two cooks can handle the field kitchen for a meal. This is not an individualized meal. The guys are eating what's been cooked or going hungry.

So, a cookstaff of five can feed about one hundred people if they just heat up more-or-less pre-assembled meals. That would be things like pots of mashed potatoes, stew, soup, and such.

If the Luna Colony kitchen will be more like a diner or fast food restaurant with multiple items available, I found another site with numbers. This site is designed for someone opening a fast food restaurant and needing to figure out how many folks to hire.

For a sit-down restaurant with table service that serves one hundred folks an hour you need this many folks up front:

  • 7 servers
  • 2 bussers
  • 2 bartenders
  • 2 hostesses

and a kitchen staff of:

  • 4 line cooks
  • 1 dishwasher
  • 1 expediter

I don't intend to give the miners on Luna Colony table service, but it's reasonable to give them more choices than a soldier on the front line gets. So a kitchen staff of six or so seems close enough to what it will take to feed every 100 miners.

For engineering support staff, I found DoD manuals on how to staff a motor pool.

There's amazing stuff in the Army War College, and it's all online.