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Old 11-04-2017, 12:19 AM
cosmicfish cosmicfish is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
Food seeds routinely get treated in a number of methods to inhibit molds and other pathogens that hamper seed germination. It is not outside the realm of possibility that, given the prevalence of nanotechnology in the Project, a graphene treatment is used that helps mitigate moisture loss and thereby improving seed viability. While this would not make the seeds immortal, such a treatment could help achieve the 40% viability at 150 years that would make such a cache still useful.
But why would the Project work on this? They were expecting to activate well within the reasonable lifespan of the seeds with even modest preservation, and they have the ability to do deeper cryogenic storage for a smaller quantity of seeds at select sites. This effort certainly makes sense if the Project predicts failure, but I don't see why they would otherwise spend limited research resources on such a topic.

And without that strangely prescient and expensive focus on preserving seed stock for 30x longer than it was expected to be needed, the stored seeds are almost entirely dead, with only a small percentage of a few varieties still viable. So why worry about the SWAP constraints of dead seeds?

Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
The whole seed issue does need to be addressed in some manner, as they are present in so much of game canon. Third edition has agricultural teams and seeds explicitly listed in Delta Base. Fourth edition also has agricultural teams and says they have seed stores and frozen livestock as well. So all these agricultural teams are either just some additional farmers with a supply of fertilizer trying to improve on some wild plants they find or they have the ability to quickly start up some new farms with their supply of seeds and start churning out lots of food and surplus seeds within three years. Either way could be a scenario for your game.
The presence of the seeds and the teams and the facilities makes absolute sense - that they would be present is not an issue for me. But just because those resources were laid down doesn't mean that they will be able to do their jobs 145 years after they were expected to operate.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
As to who would use the seeds in game, back in 1981 my group used them to help a community that had recently be attacked by raiders that burned their fields. So play group vary too.
And did the variety or mass or volume of those seeds factor in any significant way to game play? How about the percentage of viable seeds? I've had teams that distributed seeds to communities as well (mostly at Starnaman) but never in circumstances where the details would be anything but a way to unnecessarily complicate part of the game that no one cared about.
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