[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Ken Koester]

Philip Hart wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>
I'm guessing you wouldn't.  My boat displaces 2600lbs, plus probably 
another 400+ lbs of gear.  I can move it through the water with one 
hand, at speeds approaching 3 mph.  Losing friction *enormously* 
increases the load that can be manhandled.  1-2 men crew routinely move 
multiple tons on land by hand--once they put an air cushion underneath 
it.  Granted, this is not upriver.  I'd bet that 6 men could pole 30 
tons upriver at a respectable rate; the limiting factor would be adverse 
current.  You'd want to keep out of it, but next to the bank you'd avoid 
the worst.  You'd also want to avoid stopping, obviously.  Alternately, 
2 horse-equivalents would do the job.  Admittedly, canals do away with 
current.  So you'd probably need more frequent relays.  And bank 
conditions, river profile, etc., would come heavily into play.  But you 
still move a pretty good load for the effort, even upstream.

>
>> 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.
>
No, for wooden sailing ships, it's an infinite load per gallon of fuel, 
there being no fuel to begin with.  As far back as you can trace 
transport records, water transport rules, hands down.  Consider a 3rd 
rate 74:  74 24 or 32 lb guns (ie, very heavy), vs hardly any more in 
number 12 lb-ers on land for an entire army (ie, roughly smae number but 
much lighter guns).  You couldn't begin to haul the sailing vessels guns 
around with any pretense of making a difference.  substitute any cargo 
you like for the guns, same difference.

> [...]
>
>
>> 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)?
>
Not right now.  I'm not sure how you are making it, to begin with & 
don't have enough time.  But if I think on it a few days I might.  How 
about refreshing us with your base assumptions, for starters?  I'll see 
if I can scare up some better estimate of barge capacities as well. . . .

Snarkhunter