Why dedicate a planet to agriculture and fly corn thousands of light years to feed mega-cities when you could build a...

Because mass consumpyion leads to mass demand and mass production get cheaper per item produced the more massive it is and how stable the market for it is.

It allows planets that lack population, industry, or exploitable mineral resources to contribute to the overall interstellar economy, and frees space on the hiveworld for more valuable operations than agriculture.

For the same reason you don't have farms in cities: it's logistically easier to grow your produce elsewhere and ship it in.

Farmer subsidies.

Because that space is being ised for the private stocks of the planetary upper class. That corn is lower class junk meant as a hand out to the poor that can't afford food. Which is basically all of them.

fucking Unions

Self-sustaining worlds are prone to rebellions

Maybe they already do that and it isn't enough

Or property is too expensive to be worthwhile on the scale needed for food-autonomy

Trucks aren't priceless relics that regularly open portals to hell.

Because that doesn't parallel the Roman empire's use of Egypt to sail wheat all the way across the mediterannean to feed megacities.

Why the fuck do you dumb burgers always default to corn, when quorn or yeast or insects make much more sense?

>Why is fish from less than an hour away frozen and carted to a distribution centre 5 hours away before being trucked down to a local distribution centre again?
Because supply chains are hard and have bedeviled armies and traders since time immemorial. Also same-day delivery is a relatively recent phenomenon.

>tfw no fisher drone to take wild fish alive and directly airlift them to the restaurant to be consumed within minutes of capture

Good question!

I don't see how that's relevant, though, since Warhams is a British property.

>eats yeast and insects
>thinks WH40k is made by americans
>tries to call us dumb

It's like a window into the life of the typical ameriphobe

Hey, yeast and insects would genuinely make much more sense as something for agriworlds to grow; they're much more efficient in terms of calories and nutrients output per space and resources input, and the whole point of agriworlds is to produce as much as possible.

And if the Imperium cared that much about not eating weird stuff because it was gross, then why would corpse-flour be a thing? Really, having everyone subsist off of cricket meat and microorganism sludge would be even more grimdark.

...but then again, I suppose it making sense is exactly why you wouldn't expect Warhams to do it.

>M41.
>Growing anything in a hive city
Lyl

And there we have the answer.

Ya'll niggas don't know about the motherfucking corpse starch.

Yeah, because setting like that are known for having "Make Sense" as one of their top priorities.

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>Ya'll niggas don't know about the motherfucking corpse starch.
>corpse flour mentioned literally two posts up

Why have mega-cities and planets, when you can live on a spaceship and eat your ship-grown food?

i would not like a space setting where space travel is so cheap that space-trading food between star system is actually viable over other methods.
sounds freaking retarded.Of course it may be necessary for small outposts,colonies that are still being terraformed, or perhaps an extremely rich and opulent empire's capital.

It's far cheaper to create more space on the planet and fill it with what OP is talking about.
no more space? dig further down you motherfucker. or build taller buildings, or build metal islands on the oceans.Even Building an orbital greenhouse should be cheaper than interstellar travel(that also require loading into and from a planet)

Isn't that exactly what craftworld Eldar do? And don't they fucking hate living like that?

Don't know about Eldar, but I think nomadic life in spacetravelling era would be better than sedentism. What would motivate you to stay at one place when you can carry all the agriculture with you?

If we follow this to the logical conclusion even with cheap and easy FTL trade and war is borderline pointless. Any solar system can supply its own material needs for millennia by cannibalising asteroids and comets. Space pirates make no sense 99% of the time either. The idea that a space navy would have only a few dozen capital ships when robot factories could churn out 5km long battleships from asteroids rapidly is also unrealistic.

However none of this is very fun.

A single planet has more to see than you could do in a 1000 years.

Also its pretty obvious that a lot of people will prefer living on an actual planet instead of a relatively fragile and insubstantial spacecraft.

because this is new technology IRL and nobody gives a shit about a sci fi setting unless its been established for at least a decade.

>he doesn't want to live out of a 40k space-trailer

>What is America

Literally our whole country is dedicated to being a corn field because all the rich people said, "Wow corn grows really well here! Fill it with corn!"

They grew the corn and grew better than they thought possible so they ended up with a massive surplus. Instead of realizing their mistakes, the rich bastards, shitting in logic's face, poured their resources (corn) into finding new uses for corn.

They filled prisons with corn meal, sold cornbread to every negro, put corn syrup in everything, developed corn based fuels, fed all livestock corn, etc.

A lot of the crazier ideas never stuck but you can blame a lot of stuff wrong in America on the corn industry. Agri-worlds are hyper woke BritBongs poking fun at the cornfed Amerifarmers.

>Literally our whole country is dedicated to being a corn field
modernfarmer.com/2017/12/soy-set-become-biggest-crop-acreage-soy/
We do sell most of the soy to other countries though.

Also just stop. You don't know what you're talking about. Corn is very heavily subsidized partly because it's been seen (correctly or otherwise) as a job creator due to the many steps involved in it, as well as a food-security priority, policy tool (to make other markets dependent on our cheap food), and a national symbol.

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96-16 is a very short window when you take into account how long the corn industry has been a growin'.

Like I said, we made our country dependant on a plant because of an initial explosive success. Very similar to the gold rush, except our currency is backed by corn instead of gold. We could dump just as much money into anything and find as much success.

I'm ready for insect based Soylent, idk why you're defending a several hundred year old machine.

The corn industry has successfully lobbied for massive government subsidies that keep most other crops from being economically viable.

Literally none of what you just said contradicts anything he just said, but I'm glad you found a way to feel superior to the plebs anyway.

>shipping corn 1000miles is the same as shipping it 50,000 light years.

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>50k light years is the same as a week to a year in the imaterium

Nice try, senpai. I'm talking about real world interaction. I know confusing real life with fiction is a very popular troll tactic (uh what do you mean your PLAYERS met a dragon? Lol) but some of us are having an actual conversation here so at least bring some exaggerated information with your bait

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If there's no self sufficient planets then it's harder for a given planet to rebel.

Racks, sprinklers and electric lights are beyond them?

k light years is the same as a week to a year in the imaterium

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>He lives in an area of the world where time and distance aren't synonymous

Yes I'm aware that a light year is a measurement of distance, not time, but here it's not uncommon for someone to refer to a distance as a unit of time. I.e. The Tim's is only five minutes from the farm.

No, but unless the Adeptus Mechanicus says that agroponics is permitted by the Omnissiah, it's tech-heresy that can get your entire planet killed.

40k is such a retarded setting

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I'm not talking about GW you retards, I'm talking about OP. What? Did you think GW hadn't considered insects and fungus?

Corn syrup isn't in everything because corn is cheap, but sugar is very expensive in the united states, as a result of high tariffs on sugar and the unsuitable of sugar cane for growth in virtually the entire land area of the united states. American table and baking sugars are mostly derived from sugar beats, which cost way more to get sugar out of than cane does. The price difference is a bit of who cares if your just buying a bag for making cookies at home or for the office coffee pot, but if you run a bottling plant or other industrial scale food site the price gap is enormous.

You have to find something for other planets to do.

Also, such facilities take up too much space and require too much energy. The nobles aren't going to not put a 20th wing on their part of the spire just so the plebs on the lower level don't have to eat rations made from their dead cousin.

Because the IoM is based around trying to force dependency on most of its planets.

No really think about it.

Well yeah. if a planet had the means to self sustain itself then it has the ability to break away so you shackle them to the cause of the imperium by having them hyper-focus their resources towards one role and make sure that the majority of their food stuffs come from other loyal worlds so that you can cut them off if need be if they disobey

This actually. Also this is pretty much a fantasy game set in space. Technology is all over the fucking place.

Other way around. The ethinol fuel fiasco had the government pressure farmers to grow even more corn with the promise it would be bought for fuel use. Now that the fuel situation is not as much as a cure all as previously thought you have farmers with a cap load of corn that needs to be used.

Same reason this doesn't happen today.
Costs involved in building, running & maintaining the vertical farm means you either have very expensive food or you lose money.

Except food or pretty much anything (other than maybe peopel) is valuable enough to justify interstellar trade. Even moving it outside the gravity well of the planet is pretty expensive.

24 hour green houses are an iffy subject. You can grow plants with Leds but at a certain wavelength, but even then, only certain food can be grown. If this is the future, it might have been solved, but who knows.

Heres a paper to read up on shit

emr.gov.yk.ca/agriculture/pdf/Greenhouses_for_the_Northern_Climate.pdf

Yeah I know. I've lived in the middle of a rotating field my entire life that was either corn or sugar beets. Sometimes soy. Turns out that farming nothing but corn in one area turns the soil to shit and you gotta grow something else there for a while.

But what you said about corn not being cheap is dumb. I said earlier that if the US subsidized anything as hard as they did with corn they'd find as much success.

Also kinda surprised ther're no ancap memes about patented seeds and trademarked crop species in this thread. That's not even a sci-fi or dystopian future thing that's a now thing.

Isn't the W40K woefully shite in terms of technology though?

Whose to say they don't already do that ?
Maybe they just import the delicacies.

This really is the best option in lore.

even if he's talking about 40k the answer is still because the power requirements of those lights is vast as is the oxygen cost

you can't just plug in a 1w LED above a corn stalk and expect it to produce enough corn to feed anybody (or any corn at all) because it's still bound by the laws of thermodynamics - energy in = potential energy out; you need to equivalate the sunlight those plants evolved (or I suppose were genetically altered) to need; but the underlying energy costs don't change, as you need to be able to get sufficient energy from them in order to sustain yourself, which means you cannot low-power lights and expect to do anything but starve; which means you have to dedicate huge areas of your world just to power generation to keep the lights on

this is a problem typically overcome by the most commonly encountered real-world mass-producers by stealing power from their neighbors or municipal sources (such as lighting grids), which is usually how pot farms are discovered by the authorities

plants are also carbon-based lifeforms which means that they don't in fact gather all their energy or mass from sunlight - they respire, like you and me - which means that the more biomass you produce on a single planet, the more of the atmosphere is tied directly up in that biomass

sure you're scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but it's being used to create plant structures and those structures also require water (which you want too) and eventually disposal (which releases their carbon mass back to atmosphere unless you bury them very deep indeed)

as a corollary to the atmosphere problem we have the oxygen problem; over-production of oxygen is a Very Bad Thing; at 30% (about the highest it's ever been on this planet), long-term exposure causes oxygen narcosis and other hi-O2 health problems in humans (and other creatures which evolved in 20% O2), and also makes things like forest fires... explosive

it's not a good idea

Pretty much this. Only place you'd find a farm on a Hive city is in the nobility sections and those will be dedicated to making garden plants or crops used in luxury goods like berries for wine or mushrooms for rich sauces.

I'd argue that you actually DO have a lot of food-production in Hive Cities, it's just rarely or never mentioned because not interesting/important enough for the story/background/fluff.

Imperialism is seldom about functionality and always about ego.

This, thermodynamics is usually the answer to any question in science.
It's far, far cheaper to dedicate an entire planet to agriculture, have all its blue skies be clear and open to the plants, and then ship that food to a neighbouring planet. Sure, interplanetary travel is expensive, but with a proper orbital ring infrastructure and only shipping within the system, or star cluster, costs can be kept much lower than expected, and it's insanely easy to balance your plant agriculture with animal agriculture, to balance the planet's overall biosphere naturally.
Compare that to the nightmare of dedicating large portions of prime real estate to vertical farms, trying to keep all those plants properly fed and watered artificially, trying to dump all that energy into them in a busy, competitive, and expensive grid, and trying to keep the biosphere of the planet balanced.
Plus, think of the market. Food produced in a vertical farm would be both expensive and low quality. Everyone would want offworld food if it were both cheaper AND higher quality. There would be no market space for vertical food unless they could produce it insanely cheaply or to an insanely high quality.

And if you're asking why 40K does it, it's because Trantor did it first. And they ran into the same problems as mentioned, because all of Asimov's works follow the following formula:
>1: Establish really imaginative, interesting futuristic ideas that you know people will plagarise
>2: Explain why they wouldn't work