How do I move excess food from one planet to the one with a shortage?

[wundte]

It's an intentional design decision.

There is no universe in which it is cost effective to resolve a food shortage equivalent to 1 billion people worth of consumption by shipping from somewhere else. (Each -1 food of shortage represents roughly enough for 1 billion people.)

If your planet has a shortage you need to upgrade or build more food structures.

On one hand your are right. But in stellaris now planets are to similar right now. First you mass out mines and powerplants and then labs. It will be kind of cool if we could have more meaningful differences between planets. And things like one of them beenig agrarian and the other one industrial would help. Imagine enemy ships blockading your biggest farmworld and forcing main part of your empire to starvation. IMO it creates some great strategic possebilities.

Also it is not impossible that with current level of technologies we have in stellaris ine can easily transport food from one planet to another.

 

[Subbak]

It's certainly possible to move food from orbit down to the planet, because of the Orbital Hydroponics Farm starport module, so in theory, you could have ships bringing food to the starport, to distribute onto the planet. (I'm not sure on the mechanics of moving stuff down to the planet - is there a space elevator ? or surface-to-orbit shuttles ?)

I think the expensive part is moving food from surface to orbit.

When you think about it, the amount of food it takes to make one unit is probably quite heavy, probably much more so than 1 unit of minerals (you need 90 of them for a research/mining station, assuming those are not more than twice the size of the ISS it's a million kilograms, let's assume 90% loss (huge) in the construction, so a unit would be somewhere around 100 000kg. Obviously you don't feed a whole pop for a month with that.

Also even with the same mass, food tends to occupy more volume than metal, which means it's still more expensive to ship.

 

[BebopCola]

I think the expensive part is moving food from surface to orbit.

When you think about it, the amount of food it takes to make one unit is probably quite heavy, probably much more so than 1 unit of minerals (you need 90 of them for a research/mining station, assuming those are not more than twice the size of the ISS it's a million kilograms, let's assume 90% loss (huge) in the construction, so a unit would be somewhere around 100 000kg. Obviously you don't feed a whole pop for a month with that.

Also even with the same mass, food tends to occupy more volume than metal, which means it's still more expensive to ship.

We talked about that earlier in the thread, actually. Page 4, if you're interested.

Basically, any civilization capable of utilizing anti-gravity technology is unlikely to have the same concerns about getting stuff into orbit as we might. Expense-to-orbit is a big concern for us, as we use rocketry to push a payload up there. If you can nullify the effects of gravity on your ship and cargo, however, lifting it is hardly a big concern.

Regardless, Orbital Hydroponics completely bypasses that concern. Food is produced in orbit, making the transport to orbit costs nill.

 

[Cethanis]

Well but even on Earth there are so many ships, that I dont see a single reason why you cant send that many ships so there can be delivery each day.Its a np.

You can of course keep going to compare Sea and Spaceships.... but this are 2 completly different things. If you must compare a theoretic Spaceborne Transport, do it with Airplanes. Planes and Spaceships will be probably much closer to each other in costs to transport goods then Seaships and Spaceships will be.

 

[Cethanis]

Because we don't grow food in our factories and research labs.
We don't grow food in our industrial zones and our school zones.
We import it to all of these places from our agricultural areas, so that our production and learning facilities can focus on production and learning instead of agriculture.

Creating Food in our Factorys is exactly what we do. And again.... you just can't compare planet bound transport to a transport where the goods have to leave the planetary gravity. It's 2 different Worlds (literally).

 

[CrowScape]

Planes and Spaceships will be probably much closer to each other in costs to transport goods then Seaships and Spaceships will be.

Planes need to continuously burn fuel just to move. Spaceships burn fuel only to accelerate. Jets have to carry their fuel with them. Spaceships can use solar sails or be propelled via orbital-based lasers. Or use nuclear power generation tied to an ion drive (or, if it pans out, an em-drive). Planes have to deal with weather and turbulence. Space vessels... not so much.

In fact, a "cargo ship" in space could be little more than a giant, disposable bag, with a spaceport just a giant cling-wrap machine that bundles the goods together and shoots it towards its destination. Try that with a cargo plane.

Really, an ocean-going ship is a better comparison, but once the technology matures to the point where it's commonplace, space transport will be even cheaper.

 

[DJFariel]

Creating Food in our Factorys is exactly what we do. And again.... you just can't compare planet bound transport to a transport where the goods have to leave the planetary gravity. It's 2 different Worlds (literally).

I guess there are technically "food factories" on earth that produce massive quantities of processed goods, but I would still lump them in to the agricultural portion of our society in terms of Stellaris, and not the mineral-producing side. Besides, the argument was more that all if our factories do not have a garden in the with the express purpose of feeding its workers.

We're going to have to agree to disagree in terms of the costs of putting things in orbit. We do it at no mineral expense. We migrate populations at no mineral expense. Why does moving food cost a prohibitive amount?

It can't be due to spoilage. We already have tech to make food products last upwards of a hundred years, and I doubt that is the pinnacle of our technology. Plus, according to the tech images, we have the tech to move people by freezing them, and that has no additional cost associated with it.

It can't be due to quantity, because if pops represent a billion people, we move a billion people in a ship. If we assume that our people aren't living off of high-tech nutrient paste and actually eat their volume in food a month, or even five times their volume, that's still at minimum one ship. Compare the size of a battleship to the size of a colony ship. Imagine how many massive freighters the private sector own.

On that note, the majority of these complaints assume there is a private sector to begin with. A collective or spiritual society would likely feed their people across the board regardless of the inherent costs.

So the only problem that remains is the cost of getting it off of the planet, which we can safely assume is near zero. A space elevator would make the cost of raising anything to orbit next to zero (time and electricity) and space elevators are "laughably primitive" according to events in the game. Therefore, by association, the cost of raising materials, whether minerals, people, or food, is laughable negligible, lest we would still be using space elevators.