Had fun looking at the World tamer's book, but wanted to make a few Hydroponic pods, to increase food production per square kilometer, at a higher price and resource demand.
Each Hydroponics unit has values as follows:
Cost: 2000 Cr (Agricultural Capital averages 500 Cr per, but is only useful for half the year) (half from Heavy Industry, half from Construction)
Laborers needed: One Laborer can monitor 2*rations for that Tech level (fully enclosed farms make for easier monitoring). Figure the maximum monitoring rate, multiply that by the number of Laborers assigned, and that is the maximum production in Rations.
Power: Needs 1 kiloWatt per Ration (humans need 2000 calories per day, that is 100 Watts, and assuming 10:1 for solar power -> food means 1 kiloWatt supports one human)
Resources: Need .4 Resources per Ration (TL 10-12 use .3 Resources per Ration, and they are the highest)
Richness: agricultural Richness of the hex is treated as 1.0 for Hydroponics.
Limit per km^2
You can have a maximum number of hydroponic rations per square kilometer equal to:
Maximum population per square km from Housing * Rations produced for that tech level
divided by:
10,000 times land needed for that Agri TL.
(The maximum population is divided by 10,000 - the max population of TL 0. I am figuring that the Housing improvement per square kilometer is a matter of extra stories, and the Hydroponics would be multiple stories as well)
So a TL 10 Hydroponics setup that could be run by one person would look like:
Cost: 156,000
Output: 78
Power: 78 kW
Resources: 31.2
Area needed:
Max capacity = 200,000 * 39 / (10,000 * 1) = 780
It only outputs 78 Rations, so .1 km².
While a TL 10 Agricultural Capital would be:
Price: 21,000 Credits
Resources: 12
Land: 1.0
Output: 39
The Agricultural Capital costs less than one sixth, outputs half, needs no power, a third the resources, but takes up ten times the surface area. The key is if the local agriculture richness or land area available is low enough, Hydroponics is better.