"Scifi crop fields" Topic

So I foolishly used some money from a recent trade on bartertown to buy a new video game. Annon 2070. I like the series and the more scifi theme has me hopelessly hooked.

In the game you have various crops you can plant. They all are harvested by automated arms. So the question is, would there be interest in an upgrade to the JR minis style rubber fields that surrounded them with a fence and had a gantry over it for spraying and harvesting?

Not sure I'd be able to make arms and stuff but just a frame work and some cool detail. I figure it would be something a futuristic colony would bring with them to aid in the setup and reduce the required number of people for the first run.

Let me know what you all think.

or some kind of greenhouse glass dome over the field for non M class planets.

I still have not worked out a good material that is cheap and thin but laser cut friendly. I've got to experiment with PETG some more. Maybe my new supplier carries it for a decent price/quantity.

Domes are also trouble. I suspect that few non-M class planets will not have sufficient temp/sunlight to justify a green house. Probably just an enclosed artificial hydroponics plant.

A rolling gantry would be intresting, you could have more then one field as well, may have to pinch the idea.

Add robots to your fields, for tending and picking/planting.

The large, vehicle kind.

Supposedly, that's going to supplant manual labor soon, in those areas that it hasn't already. You won't need drivers for the vehicles either, with onboard computer control, GPS, etc.

I think we already have some robotic field tending. I don't remember if they ever got into production but I think I remember seeing GPS controlled tractors. Same principle as a roomba but BIG. I think they required a human to sit in them for safety. Like the Google Car.

Yes, lot of the big combine harvesters run more or less automatically these days. The operator comes along for the ride most of the time.

Can you make something I can add transparent panels to, using slots that I could slide pieces of transparency sheet into? Clear transparency film is widely available at office supply houses. It would work for greenhouses, if there were some kind of rigid frame to hold it.

I could laser cut a frame easy enough. It gets tricky. A dome probably isn't feasible. Just a regular green house wouldn't be a problem. I'd probably do a central support structure and then make the actual window frames out of styrene to keep it low profile.

It occurs to me that a geodesic dome with a drame holding triangles of clear material would:

a) look fantastic
b) be fairly easy to manufacture the components for (there being only three, by my estimations: some identical triangles of clear sheet; some arms of a fixed length to stick together as a framework; a nexus/hub to connect said arms together at the intersctions)

Would that work?

It would also be fairly not scale specific – fix a different sized door to and entrance panel and a big greenhouse dome in 6mm becomes a small habitat dome in 28mm

John T

Great ideas!

Dan
PS. When I first read the title of the thread, crop circles was the first thing I thought of:
TMP link

It sounds simple till you start looking at the design limitations. It has to be easy to assemble. You can only cut vertically and your material thickness is a constant 3mm. We are over coming some of that by using the styrene but it's not strong enough to stand on it's own. I might try something. It could be an stretch goal for the kickstarter.I need to work on a few more of those.

I saw a 15mm SF field made up of solar panels once. Pretty sure it was just strips of 10cm x 1cm plastic sheet sprayed silver with some supports to hold them at 45 degrees. Looked excellent.

Until terraforming is complete, farming will have to be limited to domes and then "wet" craters:

Plants may not look at all like we know them here on Earth. Genetic engineering may make them glow in the dark, or even have the texture of freeze-resistant codfish or frog meat, depending on the splicing.

Yummy!

Dan
TMP link

CorSecEng:

What if you did a tiered approach? A circular base that is where the crops are, and then you have a central pillar, and then you have three or four circles that get smaller as the go up.

You could laser engrave a "solar energy collector" design on top of the circles and then you could cut channels in them as well, to give it more "texture" and it could be like a sci-fi green house.

This might work…

link

Mr. Harold, I am so stealing that idea! Genius it is…

As Etranger said, most of the big harvesters running today have a human along for when something breaks (or driving between fields).

There are ways to grow crops in more arid areas, but a lot of them are presently very labor-intensive to set up. (Drip irrigation systems, for example) They run pretty much automatically once the lines are laid out, but I suspect that the amount of hose needed for a commercial field would be cost-prohibitive.

I'm honestly expecting things more like 'arcology buildings', where there are either green roofs or even farming floors inside the high-rise.

I have been pondering the Hydroponic/greenhouse truck farm/Garden for a whiles now. What I plan to do is get a tube of clear plastic and cut it 1st to my required length and then in half lengthwise (so I end with two half tubes. Then build the garden to fit under said tube inside the frame that holds the tube….

Cheap sorce for tubes Tap Plastics; link