Life support

Life support was a system that made the interior of a starship or other vehicle capable of supporting life. Ships like the TIE/LN starfighter did not have this system, so the pilot's suit had to have it. However, the X-wing starfighters had life support. Most ship-based life-support systems could only operate for a few hours or so before needing to be recharged. Gax was one of the many corporations that produced such systems. Life support systems utilized technology that allowed it to produce necessary chemicals and gases needed to sustain on-board life such as oxygen and nitrogen; it also filtered out toxic gases and chemicals such as carbon dioxide and ammonia.

Life support systems were mostly made to support Human life, because a good number of species breathed very similar if not identical gas mixtures, though multiple variants were created for different alien species.

They came in many varieties and were very complex systems, requiring very skilled technicians to repair or even utilize the system, though most life support systems ran alongside regular ship systems; meaning if the ship took a hit to the power generator and the ship loses power, it would switch the life support to backup power, running on charged power cells, until either power depletion caused the life support to fail or ship power was restored.

Text and facts from the “Life support/Legends” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.