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wyltok:

--- Quote from: knnn on October 09, 2015, 07:09:10 PM ---Nice references!

I think I agree that it would pretty much have to be hydorponics.  There's simply not enough depth of soil in the ground to grow things.  No rivers to move minerals around, etc.  Then again, even with hydroponics, you still need nutrients and water to grow things.  I suppose the water can be extracted from the clouds outside the spire, but you still need the nutrient solution.  I think it's sustainable with steam-tech, but I submit that to start up the process would require advanced understanding of how things work.  Just another example of how things have degraded since "the Builders".

--- End quote ---

Wikipedia's article on hydroponics and its history is surprisingly interesting:


--- Quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics#Origin ---The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum by Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. Water culture became a popular research technique after that. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and the discoveries of the German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop, in the years 1859-65, resulted in a development of the technique of soilless cultivation.
--- End quote ---

That seems pretty contemporary to steampunk to me.

knnn:

--- Quote from: wyltok on October 09, 2015, 08:07:45 PM ---That seems pretty contemporary to steampunk to me.

--- End quote ---

You still need some sort nutrient solution do grow things, but yes, I agree it is within steampunk.

wyltok:
Hoagland solution was developed in 1938, improved in 1950, and remains in use to this day. That's a little later than steampunk, though.

knnn:

--- Quote from: wyltok on October 09, 2015, 08:32:24 PM ---Hoagland solution was developed in 1938, improved in 1950, and remains in use to this day. That's a little later than steampunk, though.

--- End quote ---

It also uses a lot of specific minerals that I think would be hard to find within a spire.  Any natural deposits would be quickly depleted and I don't think you'd be able to recycle things efficiently.

...actually, that raises an interesting point -- if they are using hydroponics, then what happens to all the human waste?  In our world they get recycled back into the earth, but here I don't see the mechanism.   Maybe there's pipes leading into the vatteries?

crusher_bob:

--- Quote from: knnn on October 09, 2015, 08:20:39 PM ---You still need some sort nutrient solution do grow things, but yes, I agree it is within steampunk.

--- End quote ---

Or you could attach a fish tank to your hydroponics plumbing and let the fish poop do the job.  It's not perfect, and you are still left with the problem of taking care of the fish, but you can eat the fish every now and then too.

It may be possible to extract various elements from the oceans using the apparently endless electricity provided by power crystals.  Assuming there are oceans, and you can safely hover an airship over them for long periods of time.

I suppose it's also possible to work mines, use power crystals to smelt the ore, and then ship the refined metal to the spire in airships.  Not sure how safe mining would be, but I'd guess that the mining tunnels wouldn't be so bad to keep secure.

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