There's the answer then... the [game] designers clearly built the fleet to conduct the Exodus. That no in-game engineer would be that insane can be ignored due to the same factors that brought us Fasanomics.
As for the NIMITZ class, that's exactly what my second sentence alluded to. They're absolutely not expected to go for multiple months without resupply. The space is there to make it happen, though, even without counting the reactor cores as "fuel" tonnage.
Gentlemen,
I believe you are comparing apples to oranges here...to me, WarShips, or any (especially military) spaceships in the BTech universe should not be compared to modern vessels, at least not as far as having ease of access to resupply and the like...instead, they should be compared to old Age of Sail vessels...nowadays, most ships can be reached in little time, and have easy access to communications with the homeland...this is not like in BTech, unless one has access to a HPG (and even then, communication can sometimes take a while)...instead, each ship is a world onto its own, out of contact or easy access to resupply for weeks to months at a time...the closest analogy in today's vessels would be nuclear submarines, which can be expected to spend long periods (up to months at a time) out of communication, underwater, and isolated...now granted, back in the Age of Sail, all food was natural, and they didn't have things like food concentrates and the like, but still...
Has anyone tried to scale up the mass of ship vs. supplies for a warship from the Age of Sail to one for the BTech universe? For instance, on James Cook's first voyage of discovery, his ship, the
HMS Endeavour, was a 366 ton Bark, and was crewed by just under 100 people, and provisioned for 18 months (he had to reprovision several times during his journey)...those provisions consisted of the following (per Wikipedia, which replicates what I recall from my Seafarers Time-Life series book on the Explorers, and is quoting from a source quoting original Royal Navy records): "Provisions loaded at the outset of the voyage included 6,000 pieces of pork and 4,000 of beef, nine tons of bread, five tons of flour, three tons of sauerkraut, one ton of raisins and sundry quantities of cheese, salt, peas, oil, sugar and oatmeal. Alcohol supplies consisted of 250 barrels of beer, 44 barrels of brandy and 17 barrels of rum."
In BTech, even though jumps are not long at all, time between jumps can range from days to weeks, meaning that long voyages are going to take several weeks to months, unless command circuits are created...and those use considerable resources...
Ruger