A Hydroponics-based Agriculture System

[voidbeetles]

Hi!

One of my current writing projects is set in a civilization that has, for thousands of years, lived in a sort of large scifi underground bunker. They have easy access to water, very little access to soil (they're able to compost biomass, add minerals, etc, but that will only get you so far), and no access to sunlight (grow lights will have to suffice) - for these reasons, I imagine that their agriculture system is mostly hydroponics-based. Though I've done a little research on hydroponics, I'm having difficulty extrapolating this information to my worldbuilding, mostly because a lot of the info I've found relates to singular plants without giving a good sense of what fares better/worse compared to others. And also just because I have a hard time wrapping my head around plant cultivation in general, I think. I was wondering if anyone here had any insights! (Or suggestions of topics/resources to look into more!)

The big questions I'm thinking most about are:

• Compared to, say, the modern Western world, would certain foods/food groups be underrepresented or over-represented in this fictional world's cuisine? (for example, I imagine that rice might be the main staple, as flooding rice fields is pretty important to cultivating it... and that potatoes might not be such a good choice, as their "main thing" is growing beneath the soil?)
• What effect would this have on the plant fibers that are most commonly used for making clothes (and other fiber technology like rope)? That is: how would cotton, linen, hemp, etc fare? Would a certain one of these plants be more common? More expensive? Quicker/easier to grow/harvest on large scales? (This question is especially relevant because my protagonist has an interest in textiles.)

Comments

[voidbeetles]

Thank you so much again!! This is all incredibly interesting.

The story is indeed very soft scifi, plus, these sorts of details flesh out the background rather than the main content of the plot, but I thought it would be important (and fun!) to get a sense of the details of the science and logistics before I relegate it to that background role… or even bring some of it into the foreground. (If I ultimately decide to solve these problems with scifi BS, I want to know I’m BS’ing it, you know?)

One final question for now… do you have any recommendations for other scifi novels with a similar setting? :D

[hamatebones]

I have one, pretty obscure but a soft-science approach to a completely insular sci-fi situation: Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day. It's about Esperanto-speaking Quakers on a generation ship seeking a new homeworld, but "how do the logistics work" is kind of not the point, except the interpersonal logistics I guess.

However, sprinkled through the book are little asides, like the fact that all the cats went extinct at one point due to a new/unknown disease, and they all miss cats. They'd brought cats with them, and kept them for generations, but then they got unlucky. There isn't even an explanation of, you know, probably it was something the cats already had that wasn't that bad, that mutated and became lethal, and the cats all being interbred were in their own genetic bottleneck so might have been genetically weaker... but you can infer that if you're so inclined.