Alternate history transport

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Of course, you can build a road much more quickly than you can a canal, at least if your workforce has Magery 1 (to allow them to use Earth to Stone). Shape Earth has 1/3 of the cost of Earth to Stone, but a road doesn't need to be nearly as deep as a canal. I think canals also need to be wider than roads, but we'll ignore that and just put each at 6 yards wide. A 6-inch thick stone road should be more than sufficient (the first concrete highway in the US was apparently 5 inches thick back in 1916). A single 6 FP casting of Shape Earth for a 18'x4' canal gets you 3 yards of canal. A single 6 FP casting of Earth to Stone for a 18'x0.5' road gets you 8 yards of roadway. Thus, the road can be made a bit shy of 3x faster than the canal - and that's with a probably excessively thick road (you could probably get away with 3 inches thick, for 16 yards per casting).

Unless you plan on going back every year and rebuild your road, you probably want to do more than just put down 6" of rock and call it a day. You're going to want a proper bed and drainage and all that good stuff.

Still, a good road requires the ground down the depth of 3-5 feet to be prepared. A small canal needs to be 9' deep, at a minimum. A 20' wide road is good enough for foot traffic or wagons, though you'd really want about 40' if you wanted bidirectional foot and wagon traffic. A 20' wide canal can support a small ship (early Age of Sail caravels had beam around 15-18') but more is better. Just on the volume analysis, 1 linear yard of road requires dealing with about 10 yards of earth, 1 linear yard of canal is 20-40 yards of earth.

Which makes me kind of doubt the idea that the early navvys were moving 12 cubic yards/day. It took ~200,000 man-years of effort to dig the Suez Canal, with a ~100 mile run, 9 yards deep, and 24 yards wide at the bottom and ~80 yards wide at the top. That's ~90M cubic yards, which implies the sustained labor rate was closer to 1-2 cy/day. On the other hand, maybe the Suez canal really could have built in 1-2 years if the construction company hadn't tried to do it on the cheap with forced labor and didn't have to deal with constant political interference.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Suez Canal used forced labor, in desert conditions, probably with inadequate food, shelter, and water for the workers (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal). It had only 30,000 workers at any given time (1.5 million total), which means that the average worker only spent two or three months working on the canal. With only 30,000 workers (300,000 man-years of labor), 90 million cubic yards meaning 300 cubic yards per worker per year, or around 1 cubic yard per worker per day. Remember though that is only new Earth moved, you also have to calculate the transfer of earth, which probably ends up being 10 cubic yards per worker per day.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Unless you plan on going back every year and rebuild your road, you probably want to do more than just put down 6" of rock and call it a day. You're going to want a proper bed and drainage and all that good stuff.

For organized magic armies like Megalos has this is really useful for campaigns. Yeah it only lasts a season without a lot of maintenance but is worth it for the logistics during the campaign season. If you are going to be there permanently you upgrade it to a proper imperial road later.