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Old 01-28-2015, 10:42 AM   #20
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: [Low-Tech] Landing Craft at TL2 to TL4

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
I suspect there's a limit to the number of men you can use on a given size of ship.
Most certainly. But that limit will not be less than ten for even the smallest war galley, which means that working in shifts, it seems that most war galleys would take less than a month.

Of course, it is highly plausible that triremes or other very fast galleys are actually higher quality than simple cargo ships of comparable tonnage, requiring more hours of work and a higher proportion of skilled man-hours to unskilled.

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Also, there's the question of the availability of seasoned timber. That doesn't matter much for ships that are expected to be expended in a current conflict, but it is important in peacetime shipbuilding, because seasoning takes months to years, depending on the kind of wood.
This is indeed a significant limit for both sides.

For the PCs' allies, it merely means that good warships (as opposed to rafts or scaled-up boats from green wood) require fairly expensive imports of seasoned wood, which imposes the above limit of 'as much of a fleet they can afford'. Being able to trade with all the Inner Sea means not having to cut and season your own lumber, especially as you control rich mines, irrigated plains, coastal land, river valley, huge lake, hills and mountains, but no significant forests.*

The Empire on the other side, however, has already been using all the sources of seasoned timber that they can tap for the last five years. Huge building projects, exponential growth in naval tonnage, truly frightening amounts of ox carts, massive demand for bows, spears, arrows, scorpion bolts, etc.

Any more wood they import would need to be transported through quite a lot of sea lanes controlled by the enemy or alternatively, transported overland for a thousand miles or more.

I've already estimated that a lot of their emergency naval building will use green wood and they've also been scavenging wood from less vital sources to turn out sorely needed hulls to replace losses.

Of course, imperfect raw materials means heavy, slow and clumsy galleys, which leads to further losses at sea.

*The land has been settled for almost 4,000 years, they've all been utilised already.
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