Cardboard? Chicken? So what's the chalk-flavored one supposed to be...
@MrJake: yeah, depending on how many highly-populated worlds FanPro & Catalyst added, that might be the way to go. Unless we can just say "terrible, terrible famine on this, the eve of the Jihad" without worrying how the 3067 populations go so big in the first place.
@ArchAngel: I forgot to dehydrate the rations! Apparently that could reduce their mass from 2.13kg to
0.617kg, so it would only take
twenty Monoliths to feed Irian.
- 2- Replace as many Monoliths with Star Lords as you feel necessary. At worst Irian goes up to using
1/4 1/13th of the FWL's ships. - 3a- Players don't know how fast or slow the interstellar economy is going. We don't know how many ships is "a little" or "a lot" for a given planet or civilian good. You can halve or double the economy and players are still only interacting with it through random encounter tables. Hundreds of ships doing arbitrary shipping off-screen isn't distinguishable from hundreds of ships doing slightly different arbitrary shipping off-screen.
- 3b- The old Marik book does mention how foolish IrTech is for staying on Irian, yeah. :)
- 4a- Make the food sticky enough to hold together on its own. You can add packaging after the Ryan jump.
- 4b- You might want to review the Handbook entry for Irian before making any claims about orbital farming.
- 5- The USILR ratings are pretty vague. Worlds with a rating of "D" seem like excellent candidates for the vitamin solution discussed earlier.
- 1- Loading and unloading aren't slow enough to make a difference.
Say a Monolith arrives at Irian's jump point, carrying a Mammoth and four Behemoths; Behemoth engines are bad, so we'll give them 10 days to make the 7.5-day transit. The rules don't put an upper limit on how fast you can shove cargo out a door, so let's say each of the Behemoth's twenty cargo decks has its own door and that five tons of cargo move through each door per minute.
The planet sends shuttles with 50-ton cargo bays (you don't need steerage quarters for a surface-to-orbit run). When the Behemoth arrives, the first shuttle takes 2.5 minutes to dock, ten minutes to fill its bay, half a minute to undock, some minutes (say five) to reach the planet's surface, maybe another ten minutes to unload, and another few minutes to return to the Behemoth. The round trip is thirty or forty minutes, so figure three or four shuttles per door, taking turns every thirteen minutes. The Behemoth is empty in about 18 hours.
Remembering now to use dehydrated food, that's 63 Behemoths heading for Irian, 5 unloading in orbit, 63 leaving, then all that again in another star system. So: loading times don't matter. The transit time matters. And if Irian has a moon like Earth's, then well-mapped pirate points would let you shave
that down to almost nothing. (Before saying "but we never see cartels use pirate points," see response 3a).