Greetings, all!
I'm designing a somewhat unusual high-TL culture for my campaign. Overall TL is around 9, or TL6+3^, to be precise; campaign is mildly cinematic, but I'm trying to make things mostly make sense at least for superficial analysis. The culture in question is semi-nomadic for reasons that border on the religious. Economies of scale can be largely disregarded thanks to an invention of semi-universal fabricators/super-3D-printer analogues, which are good at making stuff, but require an operator skilled in making that sort of stuff, e.g. Electronics Repair (Comm) for building radios. Yes, that means that a car repair shop is probably assembled from 4 vehicles worth of walls, components and tools.
The members of the culture are loosely grouped into 'clans' that consist of about 200 ground vehicles, with at least one adult person per vehicle. Clans largely cooperate, so a single clan doesn't need to build everything they need; they can exchange goods between each other as needed, subject to issues of movement distance.
The land they live in has shifting paranormal phenomena that temporarily make areas inhospitable. Assume that anywhere between 10% and 50% of the whole region is inhospitable at any one time. Assume that a correctly picked place for a camp will remain hospitable for something between 6 and 24 months, and that advance warning of inhospitality will arrive at least half a month before the clan needs to move. Hospitable areas tend to have Poor, Typical or Good grades of environment (LTC3:4-5), with no trees (plants tend to have shorter life cycles than those of trees), and somewhat nastier wildlife than usual (think Australia, but poisons grant an extra -3 on poison resistance rolls).
Now, surely such conditions make ground-based agriculture a not very viable approach. But then the question comes up, how good are the alternatives? First, there's the idea of mobile greenhouses with hydroponic/aeroponic farms in them. According to Spaceships, an Open Space dedicated to that takes about 5% of a vehicle tends to be enough to feed the crew of that vehicle. Even the more pessimistic Total Life Support tends to result in doubling of habitat mass in order to provide the inhabitants with food in addition to air. But on-the-ground vehicles using such systems would probably be more compact, cheap, and easy to employ, since they can afford to be open-cycle (most of the time), occasionally refill required chemicals from the patches of good soil around them, enjoy real solar light etc. How easy can mobile farming get at TL9, assuming you can build the farm systems themselves?
The other thing is high-TL hunter-gathering, which is probably quite odd as an idea, but is certainly cool-sounding. I admit that I first encountered it in EABA's Stuff!, where it is mentioned that while higher TL hunting is somewhat more efficient than low-TL, it quickly runs into sustainability limits. So, how viable is this approach? Is it reasonable to expect that the requisite 3 square miles per person can be efficiently covered by using electric buggies for mobility, thus allowing a small number of hunterman-hours to feed the whole clan?
Overall, are there other considerations for how much surface area would be required for the clans? I'm trying to estimate the top limits on sustainable population under these conditions.
Thanks in advance!
I'm designing a somewhat unusual high-TL culture for my campaign. Overall TL is around 9, or TL6+3^, to be precise; campaign is mildly cinematic, but I'm trying to make things mostly make sense at least for superficial analysis. The culture in question is semi-nomadic for reasons that border on the religious. Economies of scale can be largely disregarded thanks to an invention of semi-universal fabricators/super-3D-printer analogues, which are good at making stuff, but require an operator skilled in making that sort of stuff, e.g. Electronics Repair (Comm) for building radios. Yes, that means that a car repair shop is probably assembled from 4 vehicles worth of walls, components and tools.
The members of the culture are loosely grouped into 'clans' that consist of about 200 ground vehicles, with at least one adult person per vehicle. Clans largely cooperate, so a single clan doesn't need to build everything they need; they can exchange goods between each other as needed, subject to issues of movement distance.
The land they live in has shifting paranormal phenomena that temporarily make areas inhospitable. Assume that anywhere between 10% and 50% of the whole region is inhospitable at any one time. Assume that a correctly picked place for a camp will remain hospitable for something between 6 and 24 months, and that advance warning of inhospitality will arrive at least half a month before the clan needs to move. Hospitable areas tend to have Poor, Typical or Good grades of environment (LTC3:4-5), with no trees (plants tend to have shorter life cycles than those of trees), and somewhat nastier wildlife than usual (think Australia, but poisons grant an extra -3 on poison resistance rolls).
Now, surely such conditions make ground-based agriculture a not very viable approach. But then the question comes up, how good are the alternatives? First, there's the idea of mobile greenhouses with hydroponic/aeroponic farms in them. According to Spaceships, an Open Space dedicated to that takes about 5% of a vehicle tends to be enough to feed the crew of that vehicle. Even the more pessimistic Total Life Support tends to result in doubling of habitat mass in order to provide the inhabitants with food in addition to air. But on-the-ground vehicles using such systems would probably be more compact, cheap, and easy to employ, since they can afford to be open-cycle (most of the time), occasionally refill required chemicals from the patches of good soil around them, enjoy real solar light etc. How easy can mobile farming get at TL9, assuming you can build the farm systems themselves?
The other thing is high-TL hunter-gathering, which is probably quite odd as an idea, but is certainly cool-sounding. I admit that I first encountered it in EABA's Stuff!, where it is mentioned that while higher TL hunting is somewhat more efficient than low-TL, it quickly runs into sustainability limits. So, how viable is this approach? Is it reasonable to expect that the requisite 3 square miles per person can be efficiently covered by using electric buggies for mobility, thus allowing a small number of hunterman-hours to feed the whole clan?
Overall, are there other considerations for how much surface area would be required for the clans? I'm trying to estimate the top limits on sustainable population under these conditions.
Thanks in advance!
[LTC3] [UT] Mobile trailer greenhouse farms and skiffy hunter-gatherers
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