Letters to the Editor
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Silly Complaints
The fleet has enough water to last indefinitely, but after losing half or so, suddenly they only have enough for a week?
Well, yeah. How quickly can you recycle your water? If you lose half of your water supply, you may not have enough left over to supply people until the recycling process is complete. Also, does your recycling system run 24/7 at a constant rate? Or is it engineered to run in batches?
They find liquid water, but they can't use it because it is salty? This, when they have the processing capability to recycle urine?
Urine isn't nearly as salty as some brine. Might also have to do with the nature of the salts in the water they discovered - stuff their recycling equipment isn't designed to handle.
Water is made out of two of the most abundant elements in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen, but since they can't figure that out, they can only use pre-made water?
Hydrogen and oxygen may both be pretty common, but there's no indication they have the equipment onboard to collect and combine the two into water. And oxygen and hydrogen aren't found floating around in empty space in quantities which would be useful. You'd have to find a planet, comets or asteroids which are rich in the elements, in a form their equipment is designed to process.
Back in the Colonies, it sounds like they just shipped whatever they needed off the surface of their terrestrial worlds, which were rich in water, oxygen and the other elements needed to support life. They have the kind of hyperspace drive technology to make that practical.
They find pure ice, the most convenient form of storage for large amounts of water in space, but they want to melt it first?
Ice isn't terribly convenient, especially since humans, plants and most equipment require water in liquid form. It also takes up more space as a solid than as a liquid. There are plenty of reasons why they wouldn't want to store water as ice.