Planets/Systems on the fringes of Periphery states -- come and go?

[Archangel]

I thought it was supposed to taste like chicken?

[MrJake]

Assuming that bar weighs a kilo (for convenience), a family of five, and 30 days per month, then each bar provides 150 nutrition days per kilo, or 150,000 nutrition days per ton.

There's a couple of different ways to look at it:

400 years of food for one person.

1 year of food for 400 people.

365 tons provides all nutrients (but not water) for 150,000 for an entire year.

365 tons provides the same for 10% of a marginal world with 1.5 million mouths to feed that needs a little help.

3,650 tons would provide the same world with all nutrients for all citizens for a year. Still no water, tho.

A planet with 1.5 billion citizens, entirely reliant on imports, would require 3,650,00 tons.  That's still a lot, but definitely doable.


Also, please be gentle if my math is wrong. It's late.

[skiltao]

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).

[Iracundus]

The House Marik Handbook says Irian is dependent on imports (though not from where).  AToW attempts to reconcile this by writing this as off-world imports but not from another star system:

Irian, one of the most famous food importers in the Inner Sphere, managed to survive the early Succession Wars through the rapid construction of orbital and lunar farms.  To this day, more than half the food for Irian's 2 billion inhabitants comes from off-world sources, though very little comes from other star systems. 

Irian is given an Agricultural rating of D.  It says more than half of its food came from off-world, but it does not say all.  So we can interpret a D agri rating as <50% being produced on the world itself, though the exact percentage is unknown.  So that means Irian itself still produces enough food to feed somewhere under a billion people, which ameliorates somewhat the amount of daily food shipments needed.

[skiltao]

Whoops. :-[  I knew I saw it somewhere, I just didn't think it was in the USILR explanations. Thanks for the correction.

[Kovax]

"Guv'mint Cheese" protein blocks.  Not edible unless you boil or otherwise process them for a few days.  Also usable as building materials in a pinch, except that they're brittle until they absorb some moisture.  Qualifies as "assault with a blunt instrument" if thrown while unprocessed, or "assault with a deadly weapon" if shattered into sharp fragments before throwing or feeding to humans.

Irian: less than 50% of its food comes from on-planet, with MOST of the shortfall grown in-system.  That puts outside shipments below 25% of the total requirement, although it doesn't specify how much less than 25%.

[Maingunnery]

Campaign Operations has some interesting things to say about Agricultural Dependence (p 128).

In short, almost all planets that couldn't feed themselves died off in the early Succession Wars. Only small settlements/outposts and extremely wealthy planets import significant amounts of food.

[Shin Ji]

I gotta say, I love the idea of the Inner Sphere running on Lembas Bread.   ;D

[jackson123]

Bugs could be used as processed food. high in protein.

[idea weenie]

Wasn't there something about nutrient patches that could be applied to one's skin and would provide the nutrition one needed, though you were hungry all the time?  If I could remember the book I saw it in that would provide endurance, mass, and cost.

So a local planet would grow something that is fairly easy to produce and keeps one feeling full, but the shipments of nutri-patches are what keeps the population alive and relatively healthy.  Now they just need an additive to the patch that overrides hunger signals so the person using the patch never feels hungry.

[Archangel]

Patches are meant as short-term solutions not long-term.

[MrJake]

I gotta say, I love the idea of the Inner Sphere running on Lembas Bread.   ;D

And now I'm picturing an unusually graceful Archer and an unusually short Hatchetman arguing over who got the most kills....

"Bah! When you run out of LRMs, we'll see what your impossibly high Gunnery skill gets you!"

[Greyhind]

Not modern bugs: the endo-steel tastes funny.

[Øystein]

And the fallout of Fasanomics continues.  The attempts to clean up issues regarding to food import dependency have only been partially successful.  According to the USILR, planets with an Agricultural Rating of C, D and F are dependent upon food imports.  The degree of dependency ranges from marginally dependent (C) to heavily dependent (D) to critically dependent (F) upon food imports.  During the FedCom Civil War, Katherine Steiner-Davion attempted to bully Galax and its people into supporting her regiment by restricting food shipments to the planet.  Fortunately, due to the generosity of nearby planets, "Galax remained supplied with the food its people needed." (HB:HD, p94).

Unfortunately for planets in the Periphery, limited transportation capability as well limited number of agriculturally strong worlds plus the economic collapse of many planets' economies after they were suddenly cut off from their primary source of income (the Star League and the member-states) resulted in many worlds suffering from famine in the early Succession Wars.  It didn't help that neither the periphery governments nor the planetary governments were prepared for the crisis.

I'll tell you a little secret.

Noone cares about Fasanomics. TPTB have never cared about it, and never factored it into anything. It's just a pretty statistic no one uses for anything :)

If anyone even suggested using them for anything in a product, they would in all likelyhood never be heard from again. Just another unmarked grave in Death Valley. Kind of like the Objective Raids/Reports. ;)

Planets have always been added/removed from the map as the story needs it. An excuse can always be made up after the fact if needed.

Øystein

[rebs]

I've always thought of it like this:

The maps are documented "in-universe" by canon organizations and interstellar nations.  What gets listed and marked on a map and what does not depends a lot on how much importance a given planet has to those who "make" the maps.

That's a great example of what Oystein is saying.  Some call these excuses, others call them reasons, but it's all the same.  Just because a name disappears from a map does not necessarily mean that planet is no longer inhabited.  Most of the time, if a planet is truly 'gone', it rather deserves explanation for gaming purposes, and receives that explanation in the fluff.  Names of planets that are on one map but not on another are still there, it's just no longer important to the map makers in-universe to show all of them.

[snewsom2997]

I've always thought of it like this:

The maps are documented "in-universe" by canon organizations and interstellar nations.  What gets listed and marked on a map and what does not depends a lot on how much importance a given planet has to those who "make" the maps.

That's a great example of what Oystein is saying.  Some call these excuses, others call them reasons, but it's all the same.  Just because a name disappears from a map does not necessarily mean that planet is no longer inhabited.  Most of the time, if a planet is truly 'gone', it rather deserves explanation for gaming purposes, and receives that explanation in the fluff.  Names of planets that are on one map but not on another are still there, it's just no longer important to the map makers in-universe to show all of them.

One only need to look at Pre industrial colonization efforts to see the same thing in real life. Think of the Viking Settlements in Canada and Greenland 400 years before Chris C.

[kato]

One only need to look at Pre industrial colonization efforts to see the same thing in real life.

An even closer match would be European forts in Africa pre-18th century, especially on the West African coast. They'd pop up on maps in Europe, even be important for a while, then silently vanish as if they never existed.