Grayson orbital industry.

OK, the Graysons had food production for 1,5 billion people in orbit. That's a lot. But just how much is "a lot"?


1,5 billion people x 2 kilos/day = 3 megatons/day. They produced a medium sized freighter's load of food each day. That is, for slow-producing space-manufactured goods a really large amount.

The total size of those stations are also an issue. With current agricultural techniques, we can feed ~400 people per square kilometer. Assume that Grayson techniques would yield over twice as much as our best techniques today, feeding 1000 people per square kilometer. You still need 1,5 million square kilometers of estate for that. If those stations were each superdreadnought-sized and had 3-meter ceilings, you'd need roughly 75.000 of them. That's seventy-five thousand superdreadnought-sized stations to fit in that amount of agriculture. That is a lot.

Last but not least, orbital workers. That amount of farms and its support stations would need a huge amount of workers, especially with the lack of automation and nanotechnology Grayson used to have (people using typewriters are unlikely to have full automation, let alone nanite farms). Even if only 10% of Grayson's male population worked in space, that would still amount to 50 million.




Is there an issue with the numbers anywhere I can't see? Because a casual guesstimation gives more space workers for Grayson than for the whole Manticore system.

It's likely that the farm stations were MUCH larger than SDs, so your numbers estimates would be off there by a lot.

I still agree that Grayson has LOTS of orbital workers and infrastructure.

The orbital farms were never there to feed everyone on the planet. It is only a supplement that did not need to be decontaminated.

I think Honor was told in HotQ that all the food server was from the Orbital farms.
It implies usually the Graysons eat surface food.

Light intensity in space is 3x surface of our planet. Therefore the surface area of collected light can be diffused to 3x the "land" area equivalent in said space station via mirrors.

So, "only 25,000" SD sized orbital "farms".

Uh, WE can feed far more than 400 people per square kilometer today when using greenhouses. The number is well over 1000. So, Grayson would be 2000 per your post. Now if we want to quibble about the type of food produced etc, well

So, "only 10,000" SD sized orbital "farms".

Now, did you add that the OPPOSITE side of said orbital farm is ALSO a farm? So, divide by 2 once again.

So, "only 5000" SD sized orbital "farms".

Now, did you forget that said farm gets sun 24/7? Alaska produces cabbages etc easily 4X as large as down here in the contiguous United States. Lets just say total light collected is 2X "normal" summer.

So, "only 2500" SD sized orbital "farms."

Still that is a "TON" of orbital infrastructure. But not exactly an unthinkable amount.

The real question is: Where are they getting all of their C02?

1) Surface area needed is irrelevant of higher sunlight intensity; the plants themselves take up physical space. You can't put more plants per square meter than a given maximum - and most greenhouses usually reach said maximum.

2) Just checked some experimental greenhouses. Production as high as 40-50 kilos per square meter per year is possible. So it's possible to feed some 20.000 people per square kilometer with the best experimental techniques. That's an order of magnitude or more than for normal farmland numbers I used in my calculation...



Still, the clasmatic distillation of CO2 from planetary atmosphere and carrying it into orbit, providing water and nitrogen compounds and so on and so forth is still a humongous number of people. Also, I doubt even Manticore could build automated gatherers for greenhouses. Lots of farmers doing orbital work.

Relax wrote:The real question is: Where are they getting all of their C02?

From the cows, of course.

Honor of the Queen
Chapter Five. wrote:She shook her head and turned her attention to the nearest complete habitat. It rotated slowly about its central axis, but it obviously boasted internal grav generators, for the spin was far too slow to produce anything like a useful gravity. In fact, there was something peculiar about that leisurely, almost trickling movement. Could it be that—?

She punched a query into her tactical display, and her puzzlement grew as CIC confirmed her suspicion. That structure was spinning on its axis exactly once per local planetary day, which seemed very odd, and it glittered like a huge, faceted gem as Yeltsin’s light bounced off unusually vast stretches of transparent hull. She frowned and leaned closer to her visual display, zooming in on an enormous surface dome, a blister of transparency over a kilometer across, and her eyes widened. The designers had used something like old-fashioned Venetian blinds, not the self-polarizing anti-rad armorplast Honor was used to; now the “blinds” were half-open on the nearer side of the dome as it rotated its way towards “evening,” and she stared at the image for a long, disbelieving moment.

That wasn’t an orbital habitat after all. Or, rather, it wasn’t a habitat for people. She watched the herd of cattle graze across a knee-high meadow on what had to be one of the most expensive “farms” in the explored galaxy, then shook her head again—this time with slowly dawning comprehension. So that was why they were building so many orbital installations!

Something tells me that in order to accommodate herds of cows, the orbital farms have to be much larger than an SD be a couple of orders of magnitude.

A few more nits, by the way.

First, not all of Grayson's food production is in orbit, just a high chunk of it that doesn't it well in small spaces. (Honor saw a cattle farm in HotQ, for example), and I'd suspect that percentage of crops in orbit will fall further as Skydomes keeps rolling along in the "farm domes" production business.

So... by example a 2 Km radius sphere has a surface area of 50 sq Km, and out there in space, the thing can be practically hollow. So it's not uber-massive intensive even compared to a 2 km radius dome on the planetary surface. That's about a 4:1 investment in land area, yes? for that matter, with a "nifty enough design that would allow enough sunlight into interior spaces, then you'd be talking about "volume of the sphere" as well, and I'd bet you could get close to an 8:1 ratio.

Let's make some of the orbital farms produce forage foods like moringa oleifera, for example. The seeds are good for water purification, the leaves for forage for animals especially when the plants are small (shrubbish), and that plant's not a water hog either. Feed the forage to your animals (orbital or on planet) and use their feces for further soil nutrition and development. Whatever CO2 you need to keep the ecosphere balanced for the plants is produced by burning excess production of a woodstock, the forage & crops recycle the CO2 back to oxygen, yada yada yada.

Give the thing an idealized daily rotational speed, and you've got a nearly self sustaining habitat requiring only a counter-grav based carbohydrate / soil resupply matching the food exports by weight down to the surface.

Next.... If you're familiar with what they call "square foot gardening techinques, then you'd know that you can just about feed a family of four all the foodstuffs they need except grains in an area as small 3-4 meters, be liberal and say 5 meters squared (45 sq ft). That doesn't even count vertical hydroponic based gardens like they're growing on supermarket roofs nowadays that are about 4x more efficient in terms of "ground space" to food produced.

Finally, two kilos of food a day? I'm a 200 lb feller and don't eat nearly that much on most days, unless you count the weight of some of the "food fluids" like juice and milk. So far I don't read about the Grayson's having either fast metabolisms or extreme rotundness/obesity, so let's drop that back a bit and recalculate. Have fun y'all!

Belial666 wrote: Also, I doubt even Manticore could build automated gatherers for greenhouses. Lots of farmers doing orbital work.

In a beautiful friendship, 'automated farm equipment' was so cheap that the Harringtons had it in their personal green house.

Garth 2 wrote:

Belial666 wrote: Also, I doubt even Manticore could build automated gatherers for greenhouses. Lots of farmers doing orbital work.

In a beautiful friendship, 'automated farm equipment' was so cheap that the Harringtons had it in their personal green house.

Didn't Farragut (and maybe Nimitz too) do something regarding automated farming equipment, a stuffed treecat toy (doll), and messing with the gardener? Might be just a little more recent, but there's definitely more than a couple references to automated farming equipment.

Although when it comes to gardening, scripted robots would likely only come into play after a gardener, with X years experience strolls through checking first, and then the robots just handle the actual gathering because that's just repetitive as hell, and so easily programmed.

I'd like to know how much work went into lifting (millions of?) tons of decontaminated soil into orbit for those farms. It can't have been a minor effort, even over generations.
Cheers
John