Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Just like to point out that plant that take in very little nutrients, in turn, contain very little nutrients as well.
Depends on the plants. There are lots of high energy plants out there (don't know any specific ones off hand), and like aldo said, they've got 300 years on us, so they might have developed higher energy foods.
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
Just as a comparison, my parents have a vegetable garden, about 600 square meters. They plant tomatoes, turnips, potatoes, and other such bulbs. Now, you know how much food that garden produces in a year? About enough to feed a family of 4 for a week, at most! Do your math.
First of all, your parents are limited to a specific range of times when such plants can grow, usually between March (at the earliest) to Septemeber or so, perhaps six months, on one section of land with all the trials and tribulations which come with gardening outdoors. Now, lets say that you can plant year round with no problems, no bugs, no random rainstorms or animals to interfer with the growth cycle, as well as 24 hour sunlight. Now you're looking at a crop of food every 3-6 months (depending on the response of the plants to constant sunlight and near ideal growth conditions). That, based on your example, would feed 4 people for 4 weeks at maximum, or 16 for one.
Not a lot, true, but the numbers start going up from there. A proper hydroponics bay will use shelves and remove the soil completely. That 600 square meters now increases by several fold in size thanks to stacking (how much would depend on the design of the the bay). Assume 4 shelves, which increases things to 64 for a week. Now, an Orion is 2.2 kilometers long, and if we make the bay about 25x24 meters (not a perfect square, but those are hard to work with), we can get, in a row for half a kilometer (500 meters) something like 20 bays, cranking it up to 1280 people per week.
Of course, we don't know how many bays an Orion could actually have compared to the other equipment on board ship, including food stores, weaponry, recycling equipment, fighter bays, the main reactor, communications and, of course, sleeping quarters for the crew. Still, 1280 people a week is nothing to sneeze at, and that's assuming you give them a full ration of product from the fields and don't suppliment them with dehydrated food, stored food, recycled rations etc, etc etc. And on top of all that, we're forgeting that they are 300 years in the future, having probably developed high energy, high yield fruits and vegatbles for the various colonies of the Terran race, which could increase it significantly. Plus you have rotating crops, growth cycles, and effectively a near constant crop cycle for the entire cruise and while you probably couldn't feed the entire crew fresh corn every day, you could do it often enough to treat them, or just serve it to the officers, which would easily match the numbers we have.
Could they live on it exclusivily? Nah, probably not, but it would certainlly help on extreamly long term cruises.
