[Suggestion] Carniculture Vat

Name: Carniculture Vat

Description:
Sick and tired of grain? Mushrooms getting you down? Farming too 'rural' for you? Too poor to construct your own quantum helmet? Grow your own meat! No more messy clean-up of fecal matter from your animals, no more disgusting cows escaping their pens in your subterranean fortress and wandering freely. For the nominal cost of 75k EU and a small wait period, you can grow your beef in a certified Carniculture Vat. In these fantastically futuristic devices, cows are rapidly raised from generated eggs (DNA sequence extremely secret! heavily encrypted, stored within machine), and slaughtered the instant they can provide enough food for a healthy meal*.

*Any reports of connections between this machine and cancer, mad cow disease, cow spots, and other physical conditions of a disturbing nature are purely coincidental and have not been confirmed by any reliable study.

Basically, a medium tier Mass Generator that produces beef. Replaces the need to grow wheat or set up a farm, and especially useful in scenarios where you are constructing underground or sky bases, have tons of energy and need to keep a workforce (or one very hungry person) fed. Suggested 75k EU across about 1 minute of real time- 15 solar panels shouldn't be too hard to attain and if you want to invest that energy into making 3 raw beefs (and then turning them into steaks), should be able to feed all but those who are constantly swimming/jumping/running.

Quote from MiraiMai

I really like this idea, I'll probably attempt an addon of it when I get time, right now I'm trying to get some agriculture/cropcard stuff done.

I'm thinking a little more creepy though, instead of cows growing inside of the machine, having some big lump of living "mystery meat" sustained by the machine, that you can harvest off of. Possibly using 2 types of blocks, the actual support machine, and then the tanks/vats, similar to buildcraft tanks so you can extend your mutated creation's growing space.

Heck, if I get bored enough, it could be extended to be an animal version of the agriculture system, allowing crossing for strange mutated species with better meat for food or that make some kind of bio-fuel.

this sounds awesome! I was honestly thinking maybe a two block high machine, one that had the floating, deformed cow fetus and the other with the interactive portion and figured that would a long shot.. But your idea of actually watching it grow and then being able to mess with it is ridiculously cool. My only two requests are that it constantly use energy, and that you post how to alter the monstrosities.

The idea is similar to a cloning machine, but really all I'm proposing is artificial meat. A machine that turns EU into food, by a novel process that is scientifically possible but implemented as simply as possible. Stick your machine on a power grid, and watch it churn out raw beef! Farming would still be there for people looking for leather, sheep wool, pork, feathers, etc, but it would allow a player who doesn't like the food bar to simply generate the meat via power generation. This could easily become imbalanced though, nothing comes for free, so charging 10-15k EU per food restored (steak restores 4 food), you come out at 60k EU for the raw beef (plus the energy necessary to cook it). This is by no means hard to achieve with 4 solar panels, and easily makes sense as far as growing an animal (if anything, under charging). The other cost would be time, it couldn't be instant, and it can't take too long unless you don't want people using the machine. So make it take less than 10 minutes, but greater than 2.5.

Also, there is the possibility of harvesting the fecal matter for fertilizer?

As far as the looks should go, I'm pretty sure everybody has seen vats in science fiction cartoons/tv shows/movies/illustrations containing a floating body with tubes sticking out of it. Its not really that odd of a choice at this point. Anybody who doesn't like the idea of eating a baby cow probably doesn't eat a normal cow anyways- there is by no means anybody or anything forcing the player to use the machine. You still have the option of growing a mushroom farm, or an animal farm, or a wheat farm, or even an IC2 farm, to provide your food. I suggest beef because its a happy medium between chicken and pork for restoring food, its a liked food, you don't get leather from the machine (unlike actually farming cows), and its exactly the sort of thing a mad scientist might think of. It doesn't make farming animals irrelevant, but does provide an alternative to fast teching to a quantum helmet or extensive farming just for food.