Future Tech Advice and Assistance Thread [O.O.C.]

[Kyrusia]

Has anyone figured out any FT foodstuff besides, aguaponics, cricket flour, yeastfarms, and those animals from 40K? I want to figure out what these mercs maybe were eating. What about expected calorie or protein count for cricket flour? Any FT IC versions of flour with more calories per hectacre or whatever?

Not precisely related to your question, but tangentially related (insofar as it reminded me of it): you might want to do some research into submarine logistics when it comes to foodstuffs. Given submarines are about as good an analogy as any we can use from the real-world for extended spaceflight, anyway. I remember seeing pictures once of how submarines often had their "floors" consist of many, many layers of canned and other non-perishable food items with rubber mats thrown over the top of them to act as actual flooring, just to accommodate the crew with the necessary food for their journey. Can't remember the era for that, however. I will say, for a certain style of FT aesthetic, I did like that idea for clunkers.

Here (and here) are some nutritional facts on cricket flour, though. ...Google AdSense is going to be giving me very odd returns now. I've also, for a puppet, considered using some form of protein-rich lichen that naturally is wont to grow in low-light, artificial gravity environments, though I have not done much research into the actual nutritional value such a potential food source might provide.

[Ella2 6]

Oh and does anyone have a formula for how to convert volume changes based on length and depth changes?

Generally, with problems like this, it is always possible to extrapolate from real-life objects.

First what you want to do is find out the TEU to tonnage ratio. If 25000 T is equal to 1000 TEU, then that's 25 T per TEU.

Second, you want to find out how big a ship with that much capacity is. I used the OOCL Hong Kong for this one. The OOCL Hong Kong is a capacity of roughly 21000 TEU and is approximately 400 m long, 60 m wide and 30 m tall. You always want to round down for capacity and round up for dimensions because you want to allow room for stuff that isn't cargo, like the machines you need for moving containers in and out of and around the interior of the ship itself.

Okay, so the OOCL Hong Kong has 525000 T of cargo capacity in a volume of 720000 cubic metres. If we find the ratio of tonnage to volume, we can get 0.7291666667 T per cubic metre. All you have to do now is work out how much volume your ship has for cargo and then multiply it by that number (0.7291666667) to get its cargo tonnage.

Civilian ships tend to be bigger than military warships because civilian ships only have to worry about efficiency, not so much getting shot at and bigger machines are almost always more efficient as a general rule. If you have a 2 km long cylinder ship, for example, with a radius of 500 metres, 10% of which can be used for cargo, you're going to end up with some 229074464.3 T of cargo. So approximately 230 million tonnes!

I hope this helps.

[Kyrusia]

[...]

Here's a twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) chart that gives various measurements for the "standard" used in the real-world. Might help with Ella's recommendation as well. (Tis what I used to calculate the Solar-class bulk volume-to-TEU equivalence).

[Ella2 6]

[...]

Here's a twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) chart that gives various measurements for the "standard" used in the real-world. Might help with Ella's recommendation as well. (Tis what I used to calculate the Solar-class bulk volume-to-TEU equivalence).

I saw the chart, but it didn't help with mass, so I had to work that out myself.

[Kyrusia]

Here's a twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) chart that gives various measurements for the "standard" used in the real-world. Might help with Ella's recommendation as well. (Tis what I used to calculate the Solar-class bulk volume-to-TEU equivalence).

I saw the chart, but it didn't help with mass, so I had to work that out myself.

Yaaaaaaa. Also nice to work out from the Hong Kong; she is honkin' biggly.

[Doppio Giudici]

Has anyone figured out any FT foodstuff besides, aguaponics, cricket flour, yeastfarms, and those animals from 40K? I want to figure out what these mercs maybe were eating. What about expected calorie or protein count for cricket flour? Any FT IC versions of flour with more calories per hectacre or whatever?

Not precisely related to your question, but tangentially related (insofar as it reminded me of it): you might want to do some research into submarine logistics when it comes to foodstuffs. Given submarines are about as good an analogy as any we can use from the real-world for extended spaceflight, anyway. I remember seeing pictures once of how submarines often had their "floors" consist of many, many layers of canned and other non-perishable food items with rubber mats thrown over the top of them to act as actual flooring, just to accommodate the crew with the necessary food for their journey. Can't remember the era for that, however. I will say, for a certain style of FT aesthetic, I did like that idea for clunkers.

Here (and here) are some nutritional facts on cricket flour, though. ...Google AdSense is going to be giving me very odd returns now. I've also, for a puppet, considered using some form of protein-rich lichen that naturally is wont to grow in low-light, artificial gravity environments, though I have not done much research into the actual nutritional value such a potential food source might provide.

I remember reading on Atomic Rockets or somewhere similar, that stored food takes up so little space compared to trying to grow your own, that up till some number...six months, it's not even close to practical.

I'm looking at it right now and it says 5 pounds of food per person per day.

"In terms of area, I've seen values ranging from 10 to 40 square meters and perhaps 40-160 cubic meters per person. My own spreadsheet based on densely stacked racks comes to 11.5 m² floor space, 22.14 m² growing area and 46.2 m³ volume for one person (2.5 kg per day), but we want to allow for safety and variety. People don't want to eat tomato and potato for three meals a day simply because they are excellent producers. I also want to leave volume for animal production and associated equipment, so let's start with 30 m² floor space and 120 m³ per person. About 75% of that will be lit, or 43.3 m² of grow area. We need half of 354 watts per m² or 7,667 watts per person for lighting. Additional power will be needed for pumps and fans.

The extra area provides reserve supplies of storable food like rice and beans, indulgence crops like coffee (1.62g/day*m²), tea (1.92g/day*m²) or cocoa (0.42g/day*m²) {all require several years to establish}, animal feed, plastic feedstock and extra O2 for export. One cup of coffee requires about 10 grams of grounds; a cup a day would use 6.17m² of floor space."

Sadly, this is all I found. I can't find where someone did the math and figured out how much space stored food needs to take up, then how much space to grow food, and then calculated how long the journey needs to be for a large growing space.

What I do remember from that video series with the guy who has a lisp, but sounds like Kevin Spacey, is when it comes to growing food indoors with a closed system, the limits are mostly labor and energy. Based on everything I know and everything I can read right now, I'm thinking of trading Aquaponic production containers, for cricket flour.

I also think I can sell a lot more potatoes and carrots then I did before, I just got to get the labor and energy supplies.

As always, I think I need to build a lot of FT batteries and build more fusion or hydrogen generators. Time to do so much math my eyes bleed.

Oh and does anyone have a formula for how to convert volume changes based on length and depth changes?

Generally, with problems like this, it is always possible to extrapolate from real-life objects.

First what you want to do is find out the TEU to tonnage ratio. If 25000 T is equal to 1000 TEU, then that's 25 T per TEU.

Second, you want to find out how big a ship with that much capacity is. I used the OOCL Hong Kong for this one. The OOCL Hong Kong is a capacity of roughly 21000 TEU and is approximately 400 m long, 60 m wide and 30 m tall. You always want to round down for capacity and round up for dimensions because you want to allow room for stuff that isn't cargo, like the machines you need for moving containers in and out of and around the interior of the ship itself.

Okay, so the OOCL Hong Kong has 525000 T of cargo capacity in a volume of 720000 cubic metres. If we find the ratio of tonnage to volume, we can get 0.7291666667 T per cubic metre.

Civi8lian ships tend to be bigger than military warships because civilian ships only have to worry about efficiency, not so much getting shot at and bigger machines are almost always more efficient as a general rule. If you have a 2 km long cylinder ship, for example, with a radius of 500 metres, 10% of which can be used for cargo, you're going to end up with some 229074464.3 T of cargo.

All you have to do now is work out how much volume your ship has for cargo and then multiply it by that number (0.7291666667) to get its cargo tonnage. I hope this helps.

I'm saving that forever. I apologize if I forget to cite you.

Did you figure out what percent of the ship's volume is cargo volume?

[Kyrusia]

Sadly, this is all I found. I can't find where someone did the math and figured out how much space stored food needs to take up, then how much space to grow food, and then calculated how long the journey needs to be for a large growing space.

[...]

As always, I think I need to build a lot of FT batteries and build more fusion or hydrogen generators. Time to do so much math my eyes bleed.

You might just end-up having to do some best guestimates; Atomic Rockets is pretty good with stuff like this, as you found. If six months is what you remember, then I'd just go with that, to be honest. It seems like a reasonable starting point, at least, and I doubt anyone would really question it.

As for how much space to grow, AR seems pretty on-point about variety, and that may be why, in part, finding definitive values is so difficult: different staples have different light, space, and nutritional requirements of their own. Still though, that average, to me at least, seems reasonable and I think you're on the right road about it. Especially for stuff like trading out aquaponics; I can only imagine that sort of set-up would take-up a lot of space all on its own.

...Then again, water is pretty essential, so it may just be worth it for the utilitarianism of recycling.

[Doppio Giudici]

75,000 servings a ton, 25 times that a TCU, 1000 a small container ship: Cricket Flour. 9,000 people get 550 calories and 70 grams of protein from cricket flour alone. A ton is something like 1200-3000 Trade Units, based on my conversions. I see this as a cost effective way of fixing insanely poor people's diets but...

Nutritional Yeast is a carb right? It's not is it...Damnit

I'm back to aquaponic grown potatoes...Come on, something simpler and less delicious.

Sadly, this is all I found. I can't find where someone did the math and figured out how much space stored food needs to take up, then how much space to grow food, and then calculated how long the journey needs to be for a large growing space.

[...]

As always, I think I need to build a lot of FT batteries and build more fusion or hydrogen generators. Time to do so much math my eyes bleed.

You might just end-up having to do some best guestimates; Atomic Rockets is pretty good with stuff like this, as you found. If six months is what you remember, then I'd just go with that, to be honest. It seems like a reasonable starting point, at least, and I doubt anyone would really question it.

As for how much space to grow, AR seems pretty on-point about variety, and that may be why, in part, finding definitive values is so difficult: different staples have different light, space, and nutritional requirements of their own. Still though, that average, to me at least, seems reasonable and I think you're on the right road about it. Especially for stuff like trading out aquaponics; I can only imagine that sort of set-up would take-up a lot of space all on its own.

...Then again, water is pretty essential, so it may just be worth it for the utilitarianism of recycling.

Well, I've run into a kind of problem. The part I wrote before you wrote your part was like ten or something minutes ago, and now that I did some reading and thinking...Kinda not good.

I like protein bars, cricket flour sounds like some magical easy to grow thing that you stuff in protein bars.

Potatoes are incredibly easy to grow, they are delicious, all we need to is figure out how to make bread or pasta out of them.

Carrots when boiled, are sweet, and cold they are crunchy. As the "British Restaurants" of WW2 taught us, these veggies are very easy to grow and affordable.

Nutritional Yeast tastes either like nuts or cheese, so it's a great condiment, it has B vitamins.

You can grow meat and it's only going to get easier and easier in the future.

See, this sounds like a fairly tasty and well balanced diet, someone in a refugee camp would love this. See, I don't want that, this sounds too much like things middle class people would eat and love.

I want stuff that is like ramen without the seasoning packet. I want the people eating it to be paying so little, they get the worse food they can still remain alive on. I want food that people grow, when there is too many people, no space, everything is breaking down, and already a lot of people have died or starved to death.

Am I doomed to be as disappointed, when I found out the only thing keeping us from completely covering a planet in buildings is: technology, energy, labor (Aquaponics), and the fact our own body heat would set the planet on fire (Also greenhouse gasses, but we're ignoring that because we're amazed how many people we can fit into skyscrapers.).

[Kyrusia]

I want stuff that is like ramen without the seasoning packet. I want the people eating it to be paying so little, they get the worse food they can still remain alive on. I want food that people grow, when there is too many people, no space, everything is breaking down, and already a lot of people have died or starved to death.

Sounds like you need SPRAT! xD

Kidding aside... I think you actually have your answer: products made just from cricket flour, but processed with nutritional additives, chemical preservatives, etc. to the point it tastes like, well, nothing. Sure, it provides you with all the necessary amino acids, vitamins, etc. to survive; it's also less preferable to my own hair.

Actually, in the film Snowpiercer they processed cockroaches into largely tasteless, black, nutritional bricks. Maybe something to that.

Also I'd recommend keeping in mind - and NASA has had to address this on the ISS, actually - that nothing is too delicious when it's all you have to eat, all the time, for every meal. With enough repetition, even pressed duck starts tasting like bland shoe leather, but half as appetizing.

[Doppio Giudici]

I want stuff that is like ramen without the seasoning packet. I want the people eating it to be paying so little, they get the worse food they can still remain alive on. I want food that people grow, when there is too many people, no space, everything is breaking down, and already a lot of people have died or starved to death.

Sounds like you need SPRAT! xD

Kidding aside... I think you actually have your answer: products made just from cricket flour, but processed with nutritional additives, chemical preservatives, etc. to the point it tastes like, well, nothing. Sure, it provides you with all the necessary amino acids, vitamins, etc. to survive; it's also less preferable to my own hair.

Actually, in the film Snowpiercer they processed cockroaches into largely tasteless, black, nutritional bricks. Maybe something to that.

Also I'd recommend keeping in mind - and NASA has had to address this on the ISS, actually - that nothing is too delicious when it's all you have to eat, all the time, for every meal. With enough repetition, even pressed duck starts tasting like bland shoe leather, but half as appetizing.

Cricket flour is just protein on protein. I'm pretty sure you can't realistically live off that as your body will get confused trying to turn protein into energy all the time.

[Kyrusia]

Sounds like you need SPRAT! xD

Kidding aside... I think you actually have your answer: products made just from cricket flour, but processed with nutritional additives, chemical preservatives, etc. to the point it tastes like, well, nothing. Sure, it provides you with all the necessary amino acids, vitamins, etc. to survive; it's also less preferable to my own hair.

Actually, in the film Snowpiercer they processed cockroaches into largely tasteless, black, nutritional bricks. Maybe something to that.

Also I'd recommend keeping in mind - and NASA has had to address this on the ISS, actually - that nothing is too delicious when it's all you have to eat, all the time, for every meal. With enough repetition, even pressed duck starts tasting like bland shoe leather, but half as appetizing.

Cricket flour is just protein on protein. I'm pretty sure you can't realistically live off that as your body will get confused trying to turn protein into energy all the time.

You couldn't. You'd actually get protein toxicity protein poisoning eventually. But yes. Hence the "nutritional additives." Crickets are grown on the vessel, processed into flour; nutritional additives (chemicals) are then stored on the vessel and processed into the flour during the process of making cricket-protein bars. Now the largely protein bars have the other necessary additives to survive - and offset protein toxicity poisoning - but by benefit of that chemical processing, taste god awful, too.

[Doppio Giudici]

What is the most cost effective way of producing fat, and fats that are polyunsaturated or monounsaturated?

[Kyrusia]

What is the most cost effective way of producing fat, and fats that are polyunsaturated or monounsaturated?

Peanuts, probably. They're mostly monounsaturated.

[Doppio Giudici]

What is the most cost effective way of producing fat, and fats that are polyunsaturated or monounsaturated?

Peanuts, probably. They're mostly monounsaturated.

Not safflower oil?

[Kyrusia]

Peanuts, probably. They're mostly monounsaturated.

Not safflower oil?

For raw fats? Sure, I suppose. But then again, I'm not a nutritional anthropologist food scientist. /Good Eats_joke

[Sunset]

Not safflower oil?

For raw fats? Sure, I suppose. But then again, I'm not a nutritional anthropologist food scientist. /Good Eats_joke

And peanuts may well be too useful for this particular application; Just ask the Ghost of George Washington Carver (Season 11, Episode 12).

[Doppio Giudici]

Does anyone have a map still with Losieda on it? I forgot where I live in relation to the rest of the galaxy. All I know is I am rimward of Losieda, about 30-50 systems or so.

[A m e n r i a]

Hey, guys, I'm considering an FT altermate account. I have the alien race and the home planet down. I wanna know how to start and possibly learn how to FT.

[Pordlandia]

Hey, guys, I'm considering an FT altermate account. I have the alien race and the home planet down. I wanna know how to start and possibly learn how to FT.

Do elaborate.

[A m e n r i a]

Hey, guys, I'm considering an FT altermate account. I have the alien race and the home planet down. I wanna know how to start and possibly learn how to FT.

Do elaborate.

Okay, so the home planet is just like Earth, only smaller(2/3 size) and with different continents. The aliens are anthropomorphic cats with really advanced technology, who are peaceful and diplomatic, and as a result, trusted by neighbouring civilizations.

[Sunset]

Do elaborate.

Okay, so the home planet is just like Earth, only smaller(2/3 size) and with different continents. The aliens are anthropomorphic cats with really advanced technology, who are peaceful and diplomatic, and as a result, trusted by neighbouring civilizations.

Sounds good to me! I'd suggest joining one of the many FT oriented Discord servers if you can, and building out a small factbook. Nothing elaborate, just enough to let people interested know who 'you' are. Discord (See the First Post in this thread for others!) will let you connect with the active roleplayers and find a thread or two. But off the top of my head I can point you to two open threads that might interest your diplomatic felinoids...

In Case of Emergency IV

An Empire in an Empire

I would also recommend that you try writing a solo short story set in your nation. It doesn't need to be very long, but something to let you get a feel for your nation and its people and see if you like writing them. If you do, this can form the basis for your own Nation Maintenance Thread later on!

[Doppio Giudici]

Might also want to figure out if you have a federation, confederation, or unitary states.

[A m e n r i a]

Okay, so the home planet is just like Earth, only smaller(2/3 size) and with different continents. The aliens are anthropomorphic cats with really advanced technology, who are peaceful and diplomatic, and as a result, trusted by neighbouring civilizations.

Sounds good to me! I'd suggest joining one of the many FT oriented Discord servers if you can, and building out a small factbook. Nothing elaborate, just enough to let people interested know who 'you' are. Discord (See the First Post in this thread for others!) will let you connect with the active roleplayers and find a thread or two. But off the top of my head I can point you to two open threads that might interest your diplomatic felinoids...

In Case of Emergency IV

An Empire in an Empire

I would also recommend that you try writing a solo short story set in your nation. It doesn't need to be very long, but something to let you get a feel for your nation and its people and see if you like writing them. If you do, this can form the basis for your own Nation Maintenance Thread later on!

Alright, that's two taggable threads for me. I'm probably gonna introduce these cats in my main nation maintenance before going deeper with the FT account.

Might also want to figure out if you have a federation, confederation, or unitary states.

A unified technocracy led by a council similar to Green Lanterns' Guardians.

[Halcyonis]

What’s a feasible RCS system for a semirealistic oversized spacecraft?

Monopropellant just isn’t powerful or efficient enough

[Kyrusia]

Does anyone have a map still with Losieda on it? I forgot where I live in relation to the rest of the galaxy. All I know is I am rimward of Losieda, about 30-50 systems or so.

As the creator of Losieda, it's both on my (woefully un-updated) map, and Stormwrath's.

What’s a feasible RCS system for a semirealistic oversized spacecraft?

Monopropellant just isn’t powerful or efficient enough

Assuming you mean a reaction control system, the following three articles will likely be of some assistance in helping you design such for your spacecraft: [1], [2], and [3]. Atomic Rockets is a great resource for those with the more... The Martian aesthetic. Just do a Ctrl+F search for "reaction control system" and "RCS."