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Ok so I know that the IoM has space stations for building and repairing their space fleet but what about agricultural stations, basically a massive station built for the purpose of growing food. I know that there are whole planets dedicated to such tasks in the current lore but those are usually located in different star systems.

Well, afaik there's nothing stopping the IOM from doing that, other than particularly obtuse tech-adepts. My main concern would be that the IOM lacks the precision to manage such a thing without getting it covered in servitor grease.

If it helps, odds are that Imperial spacecraft likely have hydroponics facilities - as they would struggle to feed their human cargo for 3-12 month's travel otherwise.

Never heard of them having hydroponics aboard ships. What I've heard is a mixture of conventional storage(refrigeration, drying, etc...), stasis pods preserving fresh food(wealthy only), and food recyclers that turn waste into nutrient paste(soylent green).

There almost certainly are hydroponic stations growing food in space. But a lot of food comes from agriworlds and gets shipped around. And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

 Grey Templar wrote:
And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

True. The Imperial authorities are very serious about environmental policies. Recycling is an important cornerstone in the Imperium's effort to preserve mother nature. We wouldn't want to see your hive world's beautiful, pristine ash wastes all polluted now, would we?

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

True. The Imperial authorities are very serious about environmental policies. Recycling is an important cornerstone in the Imperium's effort to preserve mother nature. We wouldn't want to see your hive world's beautiful, pristine ash wastes all polluted now, would we?

Nah mate, we hear ya. Oi've got me junker up in them wastes getting an 'ole load of that black tar stuff, so's we can feed the poor.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Never heard of them having hydroponics aboard ships. What I've heard is a mixture of conventional storage(refrigeration, drying, etc...), stasis pods preserving fresh food(wealthy only), and food recyclers that turn waste into nutrient paste(soylent green).

There almost certainly are hydroponic stations growing food in space. But a lot of food comes from agriworlds and gets shipped around. And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

I'm almost positive I've heard referance of hydroponics on ships in a novel,

BrianDavion wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Never heard of them having hydroponics aboard ships. What I've heard is a mixture of conventional storage(refrigeration, drying, etc...), stasis pods preserving fresh food(wealthy only), and food recyclers that turn waste into nutrient paste(soylent green).

There almost certainly are hydroponic stations growing food in space. But a lot of food comes from agriworlds and gets shipped around. And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

I'm almost positive I've heard referance of hydroponics on ships in a novel,

I think there's one here:
http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/
A Dark Heresy game follows a group of hapless Guardsmen on a broken Imperial vessel, and iirc there is a hydroponics facility on their ship, The Occurrence Border.

 Selym wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Never heard of them having hydroponics aboard ships. What I've heard is a mixture of conventional storage(refrigeration, drying, etc...), stasis pods preserving fresh food(wealthy only), and food recyclers that turn waste into nutrient paste(soylent green).

There almost certainly are hydroponic stations growing food in space. But a lot of food comes from agriworlds and gets shipped around. And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

I'm almost positive I've heard referance of hydroponics on ships in a novel,

I think there's one here:
http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/
A Dark Heresy game follows a group of hapless Guardsmen on a broken Imperial vessel, and iirc there is a hydroponics facility on their ship, The Occurrence Border.

On the ship . Restricted to officers of course.
Bar maybe a once a year feast.

That also looks like an unofficial adventure.

I can believe that some ships would have hydroponic facilities. They're certainly big enough. But it wouldn't be the primary source of food. More like a supplemental thing, largely reserved for higher ranks. Everybody else gets preserved rations or recycled nutrient paste.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Never heard of them having hydroponics aboard ships. What I've heard is a mixture of conventional storage(refrigeration, drying, etc...), stasis pods preserving fresh food(wealthy only), and food recyclers that turn waste into nutrient paste(soylent green).

There almost certainly are hydroponic stations growing food in space. But a lot of food comes from agriworlds and gets shipped around. And then lots of people simply live off nutrient paste from recyclers.

I'm almost positive I've heard referance of hydroponics on ships in a novel,

I'm fairly certain it's mentioned in the second last chancers novel. It's said to be out of the ordinary and a very uncommon thing. "techno sorcery to have things growing in a ship". It's worth mentioning that I don't think that hydroponics are available in the rouge trader FF rpg.

I doubt that Imperial ships wouldn't have some form of hydroponics, it's not only crucial for them to grow their own food, but also to produce their own oxygen.

 mondo80 wrote:
Ok so I know that the IoM has space stations for building and repairing their space fleet but what about agricultural stations, basically a massive station built for the purpose of growing food. I know that there are whole planets dedicated to such tasks in the current lore but those are usually located in different star systems.

It's a big galaxy. There are probably all sorts of things floating around from the DAoT. I dont think the IoM at present has the resources to build such luxuries anymore and it does have o so many planets that need development. Even if they could build massive orbital stations to grow food, it would probably be a better investment to just colonize and industrialize a feudal/feral world to increase it's agricultural production.

but if it was already built during the DAoT, and the IoM is just using it.....yeah that is right up their alley.

 Malika2 wrote:
I doubt that Imperial ships wouldn't have some form of hydroponics, it's not only crucial for them to grow their own food, but also to produce their own oxygen.

Agreed... I think it's realistic. But no one cares about flowers and grass. We just care about war. So no one rly thinks of it.

usmcmidn wrote:
We just care about war.

Excuse me! I'm not only interested in war :-/

Sometimes I even write short scenes that have nothing to do with war...

 Selym wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
We just care about war.

Excuse me! I'm not only interested in war :-/

Sometimes I even write short scenes that have nothing to do with war...

We not only care about war. There's also battles, skirmishes, seiges, we are more varied than mere war.

 jhe90 wrote:

 Selym wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
We just care about war.

Excuse me! I'm not only interested in war :-/

Sometimes I even write short scenes that have nothing to do with war...

We not only care about war. There's also battles, skirmishes, seiges, we are more varied than mere war.

Sometimes there's even exterminatus <3

 Selym wrote:

 jhe90 wrote:

 Selym wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
We just care about war.

Excuse me! I'm not only interested in war :-/

Sometimes I even write short scenes that have nothing to do with war...

We not only care about war. There's also battles, skirmishes, seiges, we are more varied than mere war.

Sometimes there's even exterminatus <3

I know! Wr are consours of it. Not mere war. We have better taste than that

 mondo80 wrote:
Ok so I know that the IoM has space stations for building and repairing their space fleet but what about agricultural stations, basically a massive station built for the purpose of growing food. I know that there are whole planets dedicated to such tasks in the current lore but those are usually located in different star systems.

Yes, the mechanicum will often build an agridome station to support the nutritional needs of their serfs when there isn't an agri-world nearby, and you can get a hydroponics bay as an add-on for ships in the Rogue Trader RPG to extend your ships endurance.

 Malika2 wrote:
I doubt that Imperial ships wouldn't have some form of hydroponics, it's not only crucial for them to grow their own food, but also to produce their own oxygen.

Such things can be accomplished without plants. Even today, we have the ability to make machines which can convert CO2 into O2 and C. In the 41st millennium, such a device would be trivially common, and indeed necessary for long distance space travel. You'd need an obscene amount of space devoted to plants to actually recycle enough oxygen to keep a hundred thousand people alive. A few machines which cycle the air, and turns that siphoned off carbon back into food, would be a basic necessity.

Personally I love the idea of hydroponics aboard Imperial ships. Lots of really cool evocative potential there. The way I see most Imperial ships is less as traditional space craft, but more like void-borne cities or even small nations depending on the size of them. Each ship is less a vessel, and more a whole narrative setting in of itself.

Options for making them really damn cool:

1. The hydroponics are run by a sort of botanist biomechanical cult, sort of like the Green Mechanicum/Linnaean Brotherhood from Iron Sleet: https://ironsleet.com/2016/01/09/the-pilgrym-botanist-uno-pip/

2. The ship (and it's hydroponics suite) has been around for 10,000 years or more. During that time, as with everything in the Imperium, the ship has fallen into various states of dereliction including the hydroponics lab. The gene-modified creepers and vines have escaped their confinement and claimed large portions of the vessel, creating treacherous thick masses of foliage throughout the ship. Whatsmore, due to the nutrient-poor environment of the ship the plants that have survived have had to adapt. Echoing the adaptations of the poor-nutrient plants of ancient Terra, the survivors have developed a method for procuring nutrients from...other sources. Man-traps and strangler-vines dominate the landscape. Not only that, but hideously evolved descendants of former livestock stalk these tangled depths.

3. The ship's hydroponics deck has been the locus for an incursion by the Plaguefather. At first unnoticed, the warped fungal spores infected a number of crewmen who disabled the engines. Cast adrift in the void of space, the crew are trapped on their vessel in a desperate struggle for survival against their plagued former shipmates while the daemonic vegetation slowly engulfs the ship itself.

Lastly, given the sheer baroqueness of Imperial vessels I'm not certain they're overly concerned (or aware of) operating efficiencies. Yes it would make much more sense to have oxygen and carbon recycling machines, but it's just so much more 40k to have vast swathes of wild hydroponics feeding and supplying their baroque void-fortresses, in addition to draining the supplies of worlds they visit to maintain their massive populations.

There was an old Space Crusade campaign that featured research space stations (adeptus mechanicus funded, I believe).

Incidentally, there was also a "genestealer virus" -possibly it takes over a hosts mind and turns them into brood brothers.

Given they can still build starforts, abrt very slowly.

And fact 40k had beaten the whole cost of build of getting mqterals to space.

Then you can build a space station fairly easily. Its just a oversized ship. Lots of metal. Reactors and such..

They probbly have a semi stc type general space station design somewhere about.

The Imperium would have to have standard templates for space stations. They don't have the know-how to invent a new kind of tank- they need to discover an ancient rhino STC- very much less something as complex as a space station.


Now- I'm thinking that agriculture space stations are probably really inefficient. I mean, it is easy enough to bring the plant seeds into space, but you need a lot of soil- and that gets heavy and takes up a lot of room in shuttles.

On top of that, you need a lot of water for agriculture, and that gets REALLY heavy, really fast. Large amounts of water in space will be pretty damn expensive.

So much so that people have already been looking into mining water off of comets rather than shooting it into space.


40k isn't exactly a "cold calculations' type setting. The fluff certainly doesn't deal with things like this, but there aren't any small shuttles shown, and the Imperial fleet was clearly constructed in space and never land on planets (otherwise, they'd need to be aerodynamic).

There needs to be some way for people to move between a planet and a space ship- and an aerodynamic shuttle is the only real option. The only trouble is, the Imperium has an allergy to all things aerodynamic. They'd probably make a metal crate with wings that would be torn to bits in the atmosphere.

Did the Rogue Trader RPG deal with this?

 odinsgrandson wrote:
They don't have the know-how to invent a new kind of tank- they need to discover an ancient rhino STC- very much less something as complex as a space station.

They invented just Primaris Everything. Also, what's to stop the IOM finding an STC for void-farming?

Now- I'm thinking that agriculture space stations are probably really inefficient. I mean, it is easy enough to bring the plant seeds into space, but you need a lot of soil- and that gets heavy and takes up a lot of room in shuttles.

On top of that, you need a lot of water for agriculture, and that gets REALLY heavy, really fast. Large amounts of water in space will be pretty damn expensive.

So much so that people have already been looking into mining water off of comets rather than shooting it into space

Hydroponics are specifically designed to not need soil, and just grow out of liquid solutions - it's in the name. And the water-carrying issue must have already been solved, otherwise long-term space habitation would be impossible in this setting. Water is incredibly plentiful on a galactic scale, and the IOM is no stranger to mass producing containers the size of battle-titans (otherwise they'd all be on Forgeworlds gathering dust).
At our current level of technology, here in M3, we're already pretty close to solving interstellar logistics (barring FTL, ofc). The IOM is so far beyond our level of technology that to think that spacelifting an entire agricultural ecosystem is beyond them is more an issue of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale.

The only thing stopping them, imo, is their religious dogma. Which is probably not even the case in large areas of the IOM.

Agreed. Should be fairly simple to provide the raw basics required for mass-scale void agriculture. Steer some ice-comets your way, and then use your phenomenal man power to do the rest. It's amazing what you can achieve with a near-limitless supply of slave labour.

Plus, there are some significant advantages to agriculture on an orbital. You can point it towards the sun for its entire rotation, resulting in massive growth and yields. Plus, if you don't need artificial gravity then transporting it off-world is a whole lot simpler.

The other option is why would the Imperium have to make them? If they have Hives that pre-date the Imperium, why not have agriculture orbitals too? Even if the Imperium don't have an STC for them, presumably there was one at some point. They might be derelict or in disrepair, but they could still be being used.

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
Agreed. Should be fairly simple to provide the raw basics required for mass-scale void agriculture. Steer some ice-comets your way, and then use your phenomenal man power to do the rest. It's amazing what you can achieve with a near-limitless supply of slave labour.

Plus, there are some significant advantages to agriculture on an orbital. You can point it towards the sun for its entire rotation, resulting in massive growth and yields. Plus, if you don't need artificial gravity then transporting it off-world is a whole lot simpler.

The other option is why would the Imperium have to make them? If they have Hives that pre-date the Imperium, why not have agriculture orbitals too? Even if the Imperium don't have an STC for them, presumably there was one at some point. They might be derelict or in disrepair, but they could still be being used.

Plenty be deralict and decrepid.
But making them. Even they can slowly manufacture a star fort, ot battleships.
They take centuries but they can.

They could spend a few generations of works working om building a space station for food production.

Always thought Ag ships were a cool concept in Star frontiers and there are lots of great possibilities for one in 40! Great idea. And an Ag station sounds just like an STC type item to me. Move it into orbit until a colony can survive on its own. Mine the elements you need from a gas giant periodically, solves the water problem.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
**snipped**
40k isn't exactly a "cold calculations' type setting. The fluff certainly doesn't deal with things like this, but there aren't any small shuttles shown, and the Imperial fleet was clearly constructed in space and never land on planets (otherwise, they'd need to be aerodynamic).

There needs to be some way for people to move between a planet and a space ship- and an aerodynamic shuttle is the only real option. The only trouble is, the Imperium has an allergy to all things aerodynamic. They'd probably make a metal crate with wings that would be torn to bits in the atmosphere.

Did the Rogue Trader RPG deal with this?

There are loads of small space capable craft in the background already. The Aquila lander through Valkyries (i think), thunderhawks and stormhawks. The Imperium has access to energy shields and anti-gravity technology. Aerodynamics is for suckers

One of the Battlefleet Gothic scenarios was for escort sized craft to enter atmospheres to combat ground defences in support of a planetary landing, so they can do it. Also I imagine that the landers used for the Titan Legions are pretty hefty.

we have seen some shuttlecraft in 40k, the most obvious being thunderhawks, storm ravens, and Aqualla Landers

the rogue trader rpg had stats for "mass barges" caplable of hauling hundreds of dudes and tonnes of cargo at a time.

Battlefleet gothic does state that frigate-class sgphips and smaller are atmosphere capable. Remember that (1) they're capable of 4+ g acceleration, (2) artificial gravity can provide lift without aerodynamic surfaces (which is why few imperial aircraft are at all aerodynamic, using a mix of ag and brute engine power), and (3) to void shields designed to resist lance fire, reentry heat is just a mildly warm breeze.

In the rpg, air and water is maintained by a ship component called "vitae sustainers" - whether it's plants or chemical scrubbers isnt confirmed butit's implied to be the latter.

Ships subsist off stored food - generally carying 6 months worth of provisions, with the "extended supply vaults" allowing 12 months.

The "arboretum" does exist as an optional component, which is described as both a green space and a source of fresh food, and helps morale, implying they exist but are not universal.

By comparison, the generic space station has a "hydroponics" component which allows indefinite sustainment of its crew (but is a lot bigger than a normal vitae sustainer deck)