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Old 06-01-2016, 11:31 PM   #111
tshiggins
 
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

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Originally Posted by Minuteman37 View Post
What is this?1?!?! Some kind of vegan space magic?


On a related note, (E) I'm wondering about the status of civilian food in an AtE game where the old word had reached TL10 many years before the End.

I don't think supermarkets would exist in the same fashion as now, but I lack the knowledge to adequately describe a TL10 supermarket or just what useful things people would fined in it assuming the End left it relatively intact.

A hypothetical scenario I'd like you to describe is what kind loot cou
Assume the population stabilizes at about 10-11 billion people, which is a lot but not implausible. While the planet could easily support that population, were the governments stable, wealth more evenly distributed, and transportation systems reliable and uninterrupted, assume that won't be the case.

However, vegetables and cereals make better use of resources than animal proteins. People can get four times the calories, at least, if they just eat the grains rather than feed them to the cattle. Given unequal distribution of wealth, but an advance in technology, I think there would be more food available, but the diets of most poor people will include very little in the way of resource-intensive red meat.

Figure a lot of people in poorer areas eat veggie-burgers/sausages, poultry and vat-grown fish proteins, supplemented with fresh fruit and vegetables, and all the cereals they want. They eat adequately (no famine, ever), but don't have a huge variety. Sauces and spices will be important.

People also like to shop and get out of their homes, so maybe big-box stores remain in place, and that's where they get the mass-produced items -- bread, veggie-proteins, vat-grown fish and processed foods (pot pies and tv dinners). However, each neighborhood also has its own fresh produce market.

Wealthier people have better quality veggie burgers and sometimes eat farmed fish, and the local market not only has fresh produce, but also a good bakery. They have a greater variety of poultry available, and sometimes buy a ham for special occasions.

The well-to-do basically eat anything they want, and have access to red meat of all sorts, grown on "organic" farms, free of steroids and antibiotics. Essentially, they shop at big-box versions of Whole Foods or Alfalfas, and the quality of the food is superb.

The wealthy live even better, and very likely enjoy deliveries of top-notch foodstuffs of all sorts, right to their doors, if the so choose. However, wealthy neighborhoods will very likely have their own produce markets, bakeries and butchers, all of which provide top-quality goods.

Lots of people simply like to shop, and market-places have been popular meeting places since prehistory. I see no reason why that would change, even if other options are available. Moreover, a stable population means providers earn money by providing quality, rather than increased quantity.

At that point, you need to decide the cause of your "End," because that makes a huge difference. For instance, the above scenario doesn't work, at all, if the end is caused by global warming. Loss of coastal areas and widespread desertification makes it more difficult to grow enough food.

Moreover, since 80 percent of the population of the planet lives in coastal regions, rises in sea levels would trigger massive refugee migrations that completely hose transportation networks.

Additionally, since frightened, desperate people are more likely to listen to extremist demagogues, then stable governments may be in short supply. If that's the case, then transportation-dependent big-box markets may disappear.

That would mean most of the food is produced in the nearby rural hinterlands, which urban areas work hard to protect for as long as possible. That means carefully-guarded central markets substitute for big-box stores.

The problem with that scenario is that it becomes highly unlikely that the society makes it to TL 10, at all. Technological advancement mostly takes place in stable societies with enough wealth to support the sort of specialization that leads to scientific discovery and innovation.
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Old 06-02-2016, 06:34 PM   #112
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

Because bad guys need to eat too, thanks to evileeyore for sparking the idea.

The Bunkertech Waste Reclamation unit mark 2

Just before the world went away some of the creators of the Bunkertech modular food(tm) production system realized that some of the margins in their systems where a bit tight or even non existent. To make up for the short fall they quickly developed this unit to take advantage of the last major gap in the biomass recycling side of the system. While this new unit completely removes the risk of Kuru there is the chance that small deficiencies creep into the system subtly altering the brain chemistry of those individuals who rely completely on this system for food.

The Bunkertech Final Rest and Recycling unit

This larger unit includes a grinder, dehydrator and separator
Produces
- A moderate quantity of the raw materials used for the Bunkertech Food(tm) production system.

Requires
- A human cadaver
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Old 06-02-2016, 06:38 PM   #113
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

So far I have been leaving the TL 10 food production on the back burner, getting specific numbers for Ultra tech situations is a whole can of worms and wild guesses. That said I might look a few details regarding projected future developments.
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Old 06-02-2016, 07:40 PM   #114
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

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So far I have been leaving the TL 10 food production on the back burner, getting specific numbers for Ultra tech situations is a whole can of worms and wild guesses. That said I might look a few details regarding projected future developments.
That's probably a good idea, because you have to make a lot of assumptions about how TL10 looks, overall -- including population levels, genetic engineering of all sorts, the presence of space habitats (if any) and how the need to grow food on them affected terrestrial agriculture, power sources....
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Old 06-03-2016, 04:29 AM   #115
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Thoughts on Polydamas' AtE "If this goes on-"
- High TL8 End
- global climate see sawing between global warming and nuclear winter, very warm (but cooling) oceans. Increased albedo on the continents from post nuclear winter snow cover.
- savage storms, moist climate, large temperature range.
- most communities are slowly expanding from or coalescing around a shelter of some sort. (There are exceptions)
- there is a tax man.
- radiation threat.
- would make life very difficult for bees
One big issue would be the state of the fisheries (salmon especially, but also shellfish, seals, and whales). This map of the Agricultural Land Reserve give a pretty good idea of the parts of BC which were good for farming in the middle of the 20th century: the east coast of Vancouver island, the lower Fraser River watershed, the valleys around Kelowna and Kamloops, and a few other watersheds. The first two will be in bad shape from bombs, tsunami, and the millions of people who died in Vancouver. Before the smallpox came it was the salmon (and ability to move timber by water) which supported complex societies ... the people in the interior tended to be poorer and have less durable goods.

Before the smallpox, the sea gave food and transport and goods to trade for exotic goods, while the cedar gave canoes and houses and boxes and barkcloth but helped to block off the coastal and valley communities from the inland. The settlers tended to take over the land which the natives used for summer camps, or hunting, or gathering plant foods and turn it into towns or wheatfields or cattle ranches or pear orchards. In this setting, much of that has been bombed or destroyed by desperate hungry people (BC is something of a hippie province today, but in the last war it was the one which pushed for rounding up all the Japanese, confiscating their property, and throwing them in camps, and where editorials talked about solving the French-Canadian problem by conscripting all their men and making them learn English ... and in this scenario, things have been very bad for a long time).

A relative was a fisher early in his life, but I don't know anything about post-apocalyptic fishing. And your family is more important than designing RPG settings ;)
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Old 06-03-2016, 07:46 PM   #116
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

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And your family is more important than designing RPG settings ;)
At the moment the only thing this will do is provide me with a very welcome respite from doing my business (farm) taxes. ;)

Thinking about the setting, high water temperatures combined with increased run off will create a wonderful environment for an algal bloom. Thick algae choked waterways might be the norm. There is one exception though, in areas with high freshwater run off a cool water microclimate can develop (needs clean or tannin rich water). This happens most commonly in fjords. The fresh water floats on top of the salt water and cools it down/shades it. A feature of such environments (loved by divers) is the sea life that exists matches that of much deeper water.

So my call would be good fishing is limited to specific locations, i.e. coastal, where clean run off exists. The rest would be a mess of red algal gunge with toxic buildup in the sea life that does exist.
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Old 06-03-2016, 08:01 PM   #117
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

Gonna be honest, I'm a massive fan of GURPS and I'm really lost with these traits and conditions.

Though I admit I haven't read After the End yet, which I assume is exactly what I should have done.

I suppose this is the sequel: Agricultralists Till Earth. :D

PS I too, will steal the hell out of this for a Fallout clone, if that's okay. :)
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Old 06-04-2016, 08:19 PM   #118
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

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Gonna be honest, I'm a massive fan of GURPS and I'm really lost with these traits and conditions.

(Snip)

To be perfectly honest, here, we're playing forum games, more than GURPS, really.

GURPS has little in the way of rules for farming, since adventurers seldom do that sort of thing. As a GM, you could always take the George Miller approach as seen in The Road Warrior, handwave the issue of how the settlements survive, and focus on the action.

However, as you may know, lots of GURPS players like to wonk out on esoterica, and the topic of "GURPS: Medieval/Fantasy/Space Merchant/Survival Economics" does "crop up" every now and then, and this is mostly just the latest iteration.

That said, the expertise of "E" has made this thread pretty awesome, and those who want some verisimilitude in their AtE settings have certainly gotten a lot out of it. I know I have, at any rate.
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Old 06-05-2016, 03:07 AM   #119
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

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At the moment the only thing this will do is provide me with a very welcome respite from doing my business (farm) taxes. ;)

Thinking about the setting, high water temperatures combined with increased run off will create a wonderful environment for an algal bloom. Thick algae choked waterways might be the norm. There is one exception though, in areas with high freshwater run off a cool water microclimate can develop (needs clean or tannin rich water). This happens most commonly in fjords. The fresh water floats on top of the salt water and cools it down/shades it. A feature of such environments (loved by divers) is the sea life that exists matches that of much deeper water.

So my call would be good fishing is limited to specific locations, i.e. coastal, where clean run off exists. The rest would be a mess of red algal gunge with toxic buildup in the sea life that does exist.
The salmon swim quite far out into the Pacific for most of their lives, and I wonder how that interacts with warming and acidifying seas, some fallout and runoff in coastal water, and the effects of botched attempts at geoengineering and biological warfare. Excess nitrates from fertilizer probably won't be a problem, and the last atomic bombs went off decades ago, but there has probably been a period of even more excessive fishing than the fishing today, when people got really desperate but still had resources.

Not sure about the mix of fresh and salt in the fijords (which we usually call "inlets" or "arms"); they are often quite deep and narrow.

The most productive coastal ecosystems tended to be fijords with a salmon stream at the end. Bears (and humans, and eagles) carry the salmon away from the streambed and into the woods, where their bones provide fertilizer for the cedar quite far upstream. A community which could harvest and dry the salmon as they ran upstream could get more food than they needed for the rest of the year, leaving some to trade or hold in reserve.

BC still has pretty extensive fossil fuel resources, and one source of conflict in this setting could be between people who want to exploit what is left and people who are scared that if they try God will smite them or the bombs will start falling again. This setting has quite a few stories like the American virus which blew up a Soviet oil refinery in the 1980s, or the various Israeli airstrikes and murders against nuclear and aerospace programs which they don't like, and quite a few about technical fixes which seemed clever but ended in disaster, and less formal education and mass media than our world to help build a consensus about why these horrible things happen.
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Old 06-05-2016, 06:30 PM   #120
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Default Re: [ATE] Farming example

"Good fishing" was a slip of keyboard, "nontoxic fishing" may have been a better choice of words.

There are a few switches that could go either way, primarily weather related, warm oceans means more storms, these could be massively powerful, possibly enough to cause deforestation in some locations. They would certainly have a huge impact on reforestation though. Increased rainfall will cause erosion to increase and it was this rather than nitrate run off that I was speculating would feed the algae.

So is the forest cover intact after global warming and the other issues? If so cleaner water, better fishing and more available land to farm. If not murky water and more localized farming and fishing.

Edit
Another switch.
Not sure about the Salmon's diet on it's return to it spawning grounds either, it may eat other fish that have algal toxins in their system. (Botulism??)
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