[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[andy]

>
>
> On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, Bryan Newell wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, Philip Hart wrote:
>
>> the dangerously-close-to-vaporware Release 2 of my Map
>
> This is unfortunate.
>
>
>> Down river, that works out to a little over 100 miles per day (I don't 
>> know
>> enough about barges and rivers to say whether that is reasonable or not).
>
> Locks?  Portages/places where one has to transfer to a different barge 
> system?
>
> I think the competition between barges and rail was important during the 
> industrial revolution, which is by analogue a fairly important theme in 
> the Texts; maybe SKZB had something like this discussion in mind.

not sure if its been noted yet, but a huge percentage of grain from the 
midwest US is shipped via barge.  this has been on an 18 year decline 
however, for reasons hotly debated.  down river shipping is ridiculously 
efficient if the waterways are maintained. so it would happen no matter how 
cheap teleportation got I think.... now if there were stationary gates you 
could set up something like morrolan's window where you could just walk 
through and be 'elsewhere' reliably, but big enough to drive a wagon 
through.....

as far as teleportation in war... that would be ugly.  IIRC, sethra's 
descriptions of battle sorceries in dragon described a lot of back and forth 
between offensive advancements/defensive advancements, almost all at the 
cost of troops's lives.   Sure, someone would figure out how to air drop 
3000 troopers into your floating castle, then you'd figure out how to route 
the port into the closest pool of lava etc etc.