[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Philip Hart]

On Thu, 28 Jan 2010, Ken Koester wrote:

> Eminently.  Horse-drawn barges in the 19th century could maintain 6 mph 
> indefinitely, as long as you used relays.  You could easily work up 1-4 mph 
> of current in a big river; you might not even have to travel at night to push 
> 100 miles a day.  But with a 30 hour day, 100 miles is a snap.  Even if you 
> depend on Teckla polemen, not horses.

I'm guessing you'd have to have a lot of Teckla to pole a significant 
load (due to the draft not accelerating the mass) upriver, and several 
shifts, or of course oxen or whatever - I don't know how much it costs 
to feed and maintain such a creature, but I had the idea that it was 
expensive.


> The efficiencies of water-borne transport on planet Earth are enormous.  If 
> you live in the US, you've probably seen/heard ads for the rails boasting of 
> 100 tons of load transported for a gallon of fuel.  They're true.  But ships 
> get anywhere from 250-400 tons for the same gallon of fuel.

This isn't for wooden sailing ships in occasionally disputed water - cargo 
ships have massive efficiencies of scale, and powered loading.  I've been 
wondering about sorcerously-powered ships or boats, maybe that's relevant.

[...]


> It would take something for teleportation to approach the efficiency of water 
> transport for bulk transport of goods.  You'd have to get sorcerors who could 
> pitch tons of goods for coppers, I'm betting, before it would pay off on most 
> items.

Could you flesh out/improve/quantize my 30*5*10 Teckla-hours labor 
lower-bound guessestimate for the route in question?  I don't even know 
how many tons we're talking about moving via barge, how long that would 
take to load from warehouse/unload to warehouse by hand per Teckla, etc.
Do we know what a Teckla makes per hour (not working in e.g. the palace)?