Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

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Zor
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Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Zor »

In this scenario, you and seven of your close friends and family members (as well as any dogs and cats you might have) wake up in large and comfortable but strange beds to the muffled sounds of Mooing. You find yourself in a well appointed modernist style four story house with 512 square meters of floorspace as well as a good view of the surrounding enviroment. The source of the mooing is soon obvious as outside this house and a front lawn area there are a herd of 512 Highland Cattle around an outdoor watering trough...
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...and more strikingly is the fact that the land curves up and around in a ring being only broken up by a set of structural pylons. All of which is under a multi layer transparent canopy. Beyond that you can see the stars, sun, Luna and the Earth.

You are now on a toroidal space station at the L2 Lagrange Point. It has a habitation ring which has a circumference of 128 km and is four kilometers across. You possess a farm that occupies an area of 1600 hectares of that which includes grazing land for 512 cattle taking up about a forth of that with another quarter section given over to potatoes, another quarter has some young tea bushes and another section simply has grass growing on it, but can be adapted to whatever crop you feel is nice. To get around your section you have a 2 tonne electric pickup truck and Mr Poops, a friendly Australian Stock Horse. Aiding you in your agricultural endeavors is your Lagrange Jessie, your section's Coordinating AI with a cartoon cowgirl as her avatar. She has a fleet of 128 robots including a sect of quad rotor scout bots and a truck sized potato harvester, but most of which are treaded vehicles a meter long, 50cm tall, 25cm across with a turret that can be outfitted with either one large or four small robotic arms and a hopper which are based in a drone garage. There is a control room on the top floor of the building in which Lagrange Jessie's activities can be coordinated. Five hundred meters from your home is The Grange, a processing facility for the agricultural produce as well as silos and cold rooms. The temperature of the torus is kept at 25° and rain is regularly scheduled based on what crops you want to grow. Chemical plants and bioreactors on the outside of the torus provide soil and fertilizer. It has an extensive gene bank of terran cultivars. Water is also distrusted via drip irrigation networks and fertilizers can provided elsewhere. Consumer goods such as laptops, shampoo and toy dinosaurs can be fabricated internally.

There are fifteen other sections like this one on the Torus each with their own. Spinward from your location is a Japanese Family growing Rice, Tea and in a large saltwater lake kelp and fish and past them an Italian Family with wheat, tomatoes and grapes. Antispinward are some Australians with Peach Orchards, Sheep and Tomatoes and past them some Germans growing wheat, barley and pigs. The remaining 64 square km is somewhat unusual as it is all one unit has a small village in it's center home to 128 transplanted Kibbutzniks from Israel. Each farm has an elevator and suspended 250 meters above each farm are two monorail lines for transporting people and supplies around the Torus. There are also elevators which lead to The Hub, which includes a spaceport and fabrication systems which can build drop pods for food delivery up to 300 tonnes to the earth's surface. These drop pods take a week to make a safe descent and are not designed for use by humans. Similarly slugs of cometary material are brought in to replace lost biomass. The Kibbutz has two MDs and a Dentist. There are also a married pair of RCMP constables to keep law and order on this station. Nobody has COVID 19. There is radio contact between earth and the Torus, though with a noticeable delay.

What do you do?

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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by LadyTevar »

Beg to go home, because I've got NO CLUE how to take care of anything larger than a dog. Cattle take a LOT OF WORK.

EDIT: And now there's a HORSE, one of the most delicate things to ever be bred. Do you know how much worse a HORSE is? Feed it the wrong thing, and it'll founder and die. Have it move the wrong way, it'll break its leg, and you might as well kill it then
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Solauren »

Tell the AI that it better get my group back to Earth IMMEDIATELY. 2 police is not enough to keep law an order.
If the AI is argumentative, I get creative.

Basically, cause enough unrest that the AI gives in to my demands.

Also, given some familiar health concerns, and the lack of specialist medical facilities and supplies, this is basically a death sentence for me. So, if Aliens kidnap me and leave me on a station this badly defended, it's their own damn fault.

Now, that being said, if I was approached before hand for this as an experiment, I might be interested in participating, but I frown on being kidnapped to do a job I have no skill for, into an environment where my allergies are going to make my life miserable, with out specialist medical facilities. However, if they cured all my health problems, my friends + families health problems, and gave us jobs we're more suitable for then cattle ranching, I'm open to discussions.
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Formless »

By four kilometers across do you mean four kilometers in diameter or radius? The surface area doesn't necessarily answer that question since you didn't give the inner diameter of the torus.

Either way, what a waste. A two kilometer radius ring would be slightly larger than the Stanford Torus, which was designed for a population of about 10,000. This is larger than that, so if its got a kilometer of 4k, it could easily have a small city AND farmland in it, but noooo you decided to populate it like a ranch with cattle and merely hundreds of humans rather than the thousands that can easily live here even IF its mostly farmland. This setup only makes sense if there is a second torus out there with the actual city in it that this hab is meant to feed. Because what is the point otherwise of having a ranch in space?

If there is, I immediately ask to be transferred to the other station. I have no skills relevant to ranching. I barely have any skills relevant to farming; at best I'm a gardener. These are things which colleges offer bachelors degrees in, but my degree is in psychology. I might very well be useful as a researcher on the effects of living in this kind of environment, but I would need a college to finish getting my PhD and the larger population of people to study, because most space colonies aren't going to be full of cattle. At the very lowest conceivable population density you should be looking at a suburban environment if its not a full on arcology.

If this is the only station, its existence is pointless, and I ask to be sent home to Earth. Its nice that its here, though, since that means humans can eventually find it and repurpose it for something other than fucking cattle. That reminds me, I was thinking of doing a thread about what kinds of food people would actually want to farm in space...
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Batman »

Since I can see Earth and the moon we're pretty close to Earth so I just use my JLA communicator to call for a pickup.
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Solauren »

Batman wrote: 2021-01-06 04:58pm Since I can see Earth and the moon we're pretty close to Earth so I just use my JLA communicator to call for a pickup.
Wouldn't you be concerned aliens kidnapped you from Wayne Manor without alerting you or the JLA?
(And what if they didn't bring your JLA communicator?)

Wouldn't you want to do some investigation?
I've been asked why I still follow a few of the people I know on Facebook with 'interesting political habits and view points'.

It's so when they comment on or approve of something, I know what pages to block/what not to vote for.
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Formless »

PS I meant to say that a station with a diameter of 4k would still be bigger than a Stanford Torus. The classic Stanford Torus has a radius of 1 mile or 1.6 kilometers, which comes out to a circumference of about 10k; but one with a radius of 2k is about 12.5k in circumference, or 20% more surface area inside assuming the inner diameter of the torus is the same. A torus with a radius of 4k has a circumference of 25.1k, or 150% more land area on the inside assuming an equivalent inner diameter! And in reality, you would likely want to scale up the inner diameter of the torus as you scale up the station's diameter, meaning the increase in potential living space (and thus possible inhabitants) goes up by much more than 150%. This isn't even accounting for how many more people you can fit in if you put the floor of the torus halfway up the inner diameter and make the station multi-level, thus making more efficient use of the habitat's volume. A habitat like this could easily house tens of thousands (perhaps a hundred thousand!) so long as it has the ability to feed them, which is easily solved by adding habitat rings closer to the station's center and doing farming there (plants won't care as much about the decrease in felt gravity and increased Coriolis effect from being closer to the center of the station).

Which is why its so baffling to end up in a station so huge but so sparsely populated. I'm pretty sure only the cattle need to be in the "naturalistic" part of the hab, and then you stuff the ten thousand actual humans into the "lower" arcology-like basement. They'll have more radiation shielding there too, and can pop up to enjoy the various ranches and farms at their leisure. This just feels like a weird social experiment by some aliens who only know about human space station designs, but hasn't got a clue about the underlying logic of the designs.
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Batman »

Solauren wrote: 2021-01-06 06:21pm
Batman wrote: 2021-01-06 04:58pm Since I can see Earth and the moon we're pretty close to Earth so I just use my JLA communicator to call for a pickup.
Wouldn't you be concerned aliens kidnapped you from Wayne Manor without alerting you or the JLA?
(And what if they didn't bring your JLA communicator?)
Wouldn't you want to do some investigation?
Being kidnapped by aliens is 'is it April again?' for me and half the time they DO let me keep my gear.
And frankly for the DCU kidnapping a handful of people to play cowboy is pretty benign. We probably have bigger fish to fry.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Zor »

Formless wrote: 2021-01-06 04:43pm By four kilometers across do you mean four kilometers in diameter or radius? The surface area doesn't necessarily answer that question since you didn't give the inner diameter of the torus.
The Torus is 20.37 km in diameter (hence a circumference of 128 km as listed in the OP) and is four kilometers across. The internal Surface Area is 512km^2. You have a plot that's 4km by 4km, or 1600 hectares/16km^2. Two opposing sides of that plot end with the walls of the Torus's habitat section. The other two sides of the plot (spinward and anti-spinward) are the boundries between your plot and the plot of your neighbors. There are sixteen plots on one half of the torus and the Kibbutz which takes up the other half.

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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Formless »

Holy fuck that's huge. At that size we're talking about a torus that can house hundreds of thousands of people (assume each person needs about 100m^2 and do the math yourself), and your talking about a population under 200. Even compared to rural states like Wyoming, that's a ridiculously low population density. There has to be another colony or habitat, that's the only explanation that would make sense. If not the only thing to do is call Earth and invite New Zealand (because they've got Covid under control last I checked) to start sending people up to fill this station to its true capacity. There is no reason something as valuable as a finished space colony should be wasted on cattle, pigs, and random Zionists.
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"To Err is Human; to Arrr is Pirate." — Skallagrim
“I would suggest "Schmuckulating", which is what Futurists do and, by extension, what they are." — Commenter "Rayneau"
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Solauren »

Batman wrote: 2021-01-06 07:19pm
Solauren wrote: 2021-01-06 06:21pm
Batman wrote: 2021-01-06 04:58pm Since I can see Earth and the moon we're pretty close to Earth so I just use my JLA communicator to call for a pickup.
Wouldn't you be concerned aliens kidnapped you from Wayne Manor without alerting you or the JLA?
(And what if they didn't bring your JLA communicator?)
Wouldn't you want to do some investigation?
Being kidnapped by aliens is 'is it April again?' for me and half the time they DO let me keep my gear.
And frankly for the DCU kidnapping a handful of people to play cowboy is pretty benign. We probably have bigger fish to fry.
And it it happened in the continually of the Bale movies? Say the night before Alfred picks you up in the Jet after you left the League of Shadows?
I've been asked why I still follow a few of the people I know on Facebook with 'interesting political habits and view points'.

It's so when they comment on or approve of something, I know what pages to block/what not to vote for.
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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by Raw Shark »

I always wanted to live in space, so the first thing I do is trade some cattle to the Italians for a crate of Chianti and celebrate. My sister and I are experienced pot farmers who know dick about ranching, so if Lagrange Janet Jessie can hook us up with the right seeds and the two cops and my winning personality can actually keep us from getting robbed all the time, our economic niche is secure. Mr. Poops becomes a fawned-over pet. The End.

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Re: Home, home on Lagrange (RAR!)

Post by bilateralrope »

I've got two big problems with making it work:
- The first is that I'll have no clue what I'm doing.
- The second is that, due to a medical condition I have, I'm taking a medication that puts me at a higher risk of skin cancer from UV.

Solve those and I'll try to make it work.
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