Re: Magic to aid farming in space

>Or IOW, to support an urban population of 10,000, you need 6,000 square
>miles of land devoted to grain farming on the colonial American model.
>That's the entire surface area of a spherical asteroid 40 miles across -
>not
>many of which exist in *our* asteroid belt.  And you'd like to devote how
>many of these to low-efficiency herding?

[unlurk] What if an asteroid had extensive tunnels, where crops were grown?
That would increase the possible yield of a given size asteroid
dramatically, and, if most canon material is to be believed, there are few
sizeable planetoids that *don't* have caverns and passages riddling them.
All that would be needed is a variant light spell that produces light with
all the features of sunlight, and is appropriate for photosynthesis. In 2e,
I made one of those myself, called Continual Sunlight. It basically made
light in a cycle, so for 12 hours a day, it was dark. In 3e, I'd say some
permanent daylight spells would do it, or a higher level version of the
same.

(This idea came from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)[/unlurk]


--
"So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?"
          -- Jethro Tull, "Thick as a Brick"

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail