Phil,

Most likely yes, there would be at least some indigenous food production
- Trantor works out as pretty weak beer for an ecumenopolis.  (Capital
and Terra both have canonical populations of the same order of magnitude).

I was aiming somewhere between the tek revolt and the Sack of Trantor,
where (IIUC) there was no indigenous food production - it all had to be
imported.

Timeline concerns aside, full food import does give an upper bound on
what would be needed, cost and infrastructure-wise.

Thank you to those who have replied - it's helped me organise my
thoughts further.  I can work out the per-dton transfer cost via shuttle
service - that will serve as an upper bound on the actual cost, while I
wander off and try to find beanstalk cost data.

For these volumes, if an alternative method - such as catapult launch -
works out cheaper, it will be used, and if it's more expensive, it won't.

Alex

On 4/5/20 8:55 am, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> In the TU it all probably would be grown & raised "down there"
> somewhere, underneath everything else.
> Just like it would on an O'Neill/L5 Society space habitat.
>
> On Sunday, May 3, 2020, 02:12:23 PM MST, Timothy Collinson - timothy.
> collinson at port. ac. uk <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
>
> Oh dear
>
> I'm afraid I have  no means of helping with the numbers, but please
> rest assured you're not alone in being interested in the answer. :-)
>
> (Though if you made me guess we don't have the data to work it out
> properly.)
>
> tc
>
> On Sun, 3 May 2020, 18:30 Alex Goodwin, <xxxxxx@multitel.com.au
> <mailto:xxxxxx@multitel.com.au>> wrote:
>
>     Hello all,
>
>     I'm in the middle of taking Asimov's description of Trantor and trying
>     to Travellerise it.
>
>     Long story short, the food imports account for ~12 million dton/day of
>     cargo that needs to be shifted from orbit to groundside.
>
>     GURPS Traveller: Starports, p 63, mentions both beanstalks and
>     catapults
>     as alternatives to shuttle service for transferring cargo, but doesn't
>     go much further.  I get the impression that both are substantially
>     more
>     capital-intensive than shuttle service but substantially cheaper
>     to run.
>
>     As I'm the type of obsessive wombat who wants to figure out how
>     much it
>     _costs_ to import that food, does anyone have any ideas on how
>     much such
>     an array of beanstalks would end up costing at GTL 11/12?  (TTL
>     D-F, if
>     I've got it right).
>
>     Sure, for trivial amounts of cargo, shuttle service might work out
>     cheaper (although shuttle service will need ~3 million dton of shuttle
>     cargo volume, per GT:SP p64).  This is feeding a _planet_.
>
>
>     Alex
>
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