mavikfelna
Cosmic Mongoose
Ok, So my group is currently travelling through Lunion subsector and there seems to be alot of High Population, Non-Agricultural worlds there. And most of those worlds are hostile environments and low tech, TL8 or less.
An average adult human needs about 3 L of water and 3 Kg of mixed calories a day. In Traveller, a Biosphere feeds 2 people per ton per day, requires 1 power per ton and likely has a mix of vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains and proteins (probably legumes). It doesn't need to process them further, you can eat directly from the biosphere, though some preparation is probably done in the kitchen. The biosphere also provides for the purified water and air needs for those 2 people.
After some work with Terry Mixon, we came up with the idea that you need about 90 dtons of high-yield advanced crop farming per person per day but no additional power requirement. This provides food only, though presumably it would supply some oxygen as well. It requires natural sunlight for at least part of the day. No idea on water use but it isn't self purifying like in a biosphere so you would need an independent water supply and water treatment for your recycling.
I built a 1 million dton station in a planetoid hull to see I could build anything even remotely economical and it's not, sort of. It can feed 8000 people a day (24 tons of food produced and processed per day), at a cost of about 18 cr a day per person. Once the station is paid off, it drops to a very reasonable 0.77 cr per person per day. Problem is, it's TL12. I'm sure finding an asteroid of the appropriate size wouldn't be hard in any of the systems we were looking at, but you would need to bring in a TL12 building ship and crew and I've no idea how much that would cost or how long it would take to build. And that only feeds 8000 people. Which means for each million population, you need 125 of these. And enough transport capacity to move 24 tons a day from each one to the population center. So that's 125 50t cutter flights each day.
If you ship in 1 million tons of foodstuff from 1 jump away, it will cost you 1.5 billion credits and feed 1 million people for a bit less than a year, 333 days. That's about 4.5 cr a day per person. So if you can afford to pay 3.5x for each ton over 40 years, you will eventually get much cheaper food, but that's a huge investment over 40 years. The actual cost of the station over 40 years is 53 billion credits or so. Cost for food shipped in over that time would be over 60 billion credits.
Anyway, I wanted to get you all's thoughts on this. I can't see any way to lower the cost or the tech level for the station. Other than huge enclosed biomes on the planet surface, where there is a planet and not asteroids only and that I have no idea how to calculate the costs for, transporting food from another system seems to be the only real economical way to do feed the people but it's much cheaper in the long run to build the stations.
An average adult human needs about 3 L of water and 3 Kg of mixed calories a day. In Traveller, a Biosphere feeds 2 people per ton per day, requires 1 power per ton and likely has a mix of vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains and proteins (probably legumes). It doesn't need to process them further, you can eat directly from the biosphere, though some preparation is probably done in the kitchen. The biosphere also provides for the purified water and air needs for those 2 people.
After some work with Terry Mixon, we came up with the idea that you need about 90 dtons of high-yield advanced crop farming per person per day but no additional power requirement. This provides food only, though presumably it would supply some oxygen as well. It requires natural sunlight for at least part of the day. No idea on water use but it isn't self purifying like in a biosphere so you would need an independent water supply and water treatment for your recycling.
I built a 1 million dton station in a planetoid hull to see I could build anything even remotely economical and it's not, sort of. It can feed 8000 people a day (24 tons of food produced and processed per day), at a cost of about 18 cr a day per person. Once the station is paid off, it drops to a very reasonable 0.77 cr per person per day. Problem is, it's TL12. I'm sure finding an asteroid of the appropriate size wouldn't be hard in any of the systems we were looking at, but you would need to bring in a TL12 building ship and crew and I've no idea how much that would cost or how long it would take to build. And that only feeds 8000 people. Which means for each million population, you need 125 of these. And enough transport capacity to move 24 tons a day from each one to the population center. So that's 125 50t cutter flights each day.
If you ship in 1 million tons of foodstuff from 1 jump away, it will cost you 1.5 billion credits and feed 1 million people for a bit less than a year, 333 days. That's about 4.5 cr a day per person. So if you can afford to pay 3.5x for each ton over 40 years, you will eventually get much cheaper food, but that's a huge investment over 40 years. The actual cost of the station over 40 years is 53 billion credits or so. Cost for food shipped in over that time would be over 60 billion credits.
Anyway, I wanted to get you all's thoughts on this. I can't see any way to lower the cost or the tech level for the station. Other than huge enclosed biomes on the planet surface, where there is a planet and not asteroids only and that I have no idea how to calculate the costs for, transporting food from another system seems to be the only real economical way to do feed the people but it's much cheaper in the long run to build the stations.
