[ Incoming Transmission ]
Identification: Taskmaster-Adjutant Harold Kane
Affiliation: Natio Octavarium
To: Gen'an Chrysanthemums
Subject: RE: Internal Biodome Upgrade
Encryption: Synth Can't Know We're On To Them
Location: Canberra Star City, Tau-44
Matriarch Kiri,
Always a pleasure to hear from the Gen'an. I've recently spent some time with Canberra Star City's ecological engineering department, the team responsible for the station's closed ecological life support systems. I believe I can describe to you what their system is like, and how it can be adapted to Kinkaku-ji.
To start, the system does not require biodomes, which is both not exactly what you were asking for and something of a blessing for your station, as it means your existing food production biodomes can be repurposed for recreational purposes if you so wish. The core of the system is the algae bioreactor complex, which breeds chemical- and carbon-scrubbing algae for the air and water filtration systems. Near-perfect efficiency can be achieved with a combination of the algae filtration and standard shipborne air particle filters. Carbon removed through the air scrubbers can be used in another bioreactor to produce new activated carbon filters for the water treatment system. Between the two of these, your oxygen and water losses will be negligible.
Food is a bit trickier, but efficient hydroponics and, you guessed it, algae bioreactors are the combination of systems that resolve your problem. For the core of your foodstuffs, we have something that is effectively algae tofu; it is not particularly flavourful on its own, but it is high in protein, fibres, and incidental nutrients, and is capable of taking on and matching the flavour of whatever it is cooked with. Some of our culinary team believes that what we have come up with is more or less Synth Paste, just more rigid and capable of being used to relatively faithfully emulate solid foods.
Bootleg Not-Synth Tofu is of course rather boring, and not suitable for long-term use on its own, so we use a few dozen hydroponics centres with thorough use of vertical stacking to ensure maximum space utilization and automatic climate control in tuned to the specific crop being grown in each hydroponics centre. A series of calcium nitrate rich liquid fertilizers are dispensed at different levels for different crops automatically depending on what stage of growth they're in, maximizing crop output and decreasing the length of growth cycles versus manual hydroponics work. It's an effective way to grow all sorts of fruits, vegetables, and lighter grains to improve your dishes.
Traditional biodomes are only effective for growth in two dimensions, but we are in space. We can put crops, filtration systems, and water reclamation in all three. I'm sending over some examples of fresh foodstuffs from Canberra's ecological systems for you to sample and have your cooks experiment with. If the produce is sufficient for your needs, we can get some folks from the ecological engineering team over to survey possible locations in the station to install bioreactor complexes and hydroponics centres.
And if for some reason you miss the texture of Synth Paste, I'm pretty sure that a blended mix of three parts of our algae tofu to one part water is damn near the exact same thing.
Warmest regards,
Taskmaster-Adjutant Harold Kane
Natio Octavarium
[ Transmission Ended ]