Pyramid #3/52: Low-Tech II

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

There's one other small thing I didn't factor in since I had zero data, but some things travel terribly. Spices, you can pack up in a chest and ship across the continent. Animals are different. Cattle and pigs can be driven to market, but the exercise burns off some fat, so you need to either sell animals who weigh less (and get less money) or fatten them up again (which costs you more).

On the other hand, the price of meat in places distant from raising country has to cover the price of buying them plus the cost of driving them, whatever condition they tend to arrive in. In an market at equilibrium you will get more at the distant market. Meat will be dearer there; you can't figure back from a supposed universal price of meat.

I had some figures once on the prices of cattle and of pigs in Gloucestershire and London. Because cattle are easier and cheaper to drove than pigs are, the price in London is raised more for pigs than it is for cattle, proportionately.

[DemiBenson]

So Matt,
I've got a few questions about urban carrying capacity.

• Efficiency of transportation: Is "river" supposed to be used if a city sits on a river (and includes the cost of cart transport to river facilities)? Or is it for a city that somehow only gets food by river and not at all by cart? Would it be reasonable to assume that carts come from a small radius, but calculate the river portion as 10% of the difference between the river transport's radius and the cart radius?
• Some question about sea travel. Is sea transport meant to work for a city like London (navigable from the sea, but surrounded by land)? Or are the sea efficiencies mostly for use by the imperial capital calculations?

Also, there's one extra close parenthesis in the formula.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Kromm

If Abraham Lincoln had worn "Judge Bradshaw's Hat" to the theater, history might have gone a different way!

Surely one removes one's hat when one is sitting at the theater, even if one has a private box. :)

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by DemiBenson

Efficiency of transportation: Is "river" supposed to be used if a city sits on a river (and includes the cost of cart transport to river facilities)? Or is it for a city that somehow only gets food by river and not at all by cart?

The latter. This is unlikely to be an actual case. The numbers are provided as an upper limit to what an extensive system of rivers and canals can do, but it's up to the GM to decide how much benefit any given set of waterways provides. For example, a city on a river running through what would otherwise be desert (say, on the Tigris or Euphrates) would gain a modest benefit, giving it a slightly better carrying capacity than a city only supplied by cart. Medieval Pittsburgh (yes, I know, just go with it), which sits at the confluence of three rivers would do slightly better, and a city in a region with many subsidiary streams feeding into a main river, providing easy access to river transport (say, Alexandria at the end of the Nile delta) would do quite well indeed, getting close to the numbers for pure river transport.

Originally Posted by DemiBenson

Some question about sea travel. Is sea transport meant to work for a city like London (navigable from the sea, but surrounded by land)? Or are the sea efficiencies mostly for use by the imperial capital calculations?

Sea efficiencies are largely for imperial capital calculations, but could be used in directly supplying an island city subsisting on fish and kelp. A city being on the sea doesn't help if your farms are all on the landward side.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Surely one removes one's hat when one is sitting at the theater, even if one has a private box. :)

That was PK's line, but . . . If you're so worried about assassination that you wear an armored hat, you leave it on. Nobody is going to tell the freakin' President to take it off.

[SimonAce]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Love the Lord of the Manor stuff but I'm a bit troubled by the way poultry farming blows comparable cash crops out of the water. No setup, tiny land requirement, highest revenue, no drawbacks listed.

From experience here chicken farming really is amazingly efficient and other than predators and disease, pretty issue free.

[SimonAce]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Considering that peasants and serfs were often lucky to have food, I'd say that this is a problem for only a few.

In most areas of Europe that wasn't quite true. City people were lucky to have food and everyone had food issues in the winter or in the occasional famine . On the whole outside of some real horrible places, peasants ate a decent if monotonous diet . Nearer to the era of Black Death after the long summer, things did get tight. Humans kind of reached carrying capacity

There were a lot if reasons peasants usually ate , social compact, the church, peasant uprisings and just common sense. Hungry and sick peasants meant the nobles starved too.

The real awfulness started in modern times with labor specialization, urbanization and surplus population.

Lastly it is suggested that British peasants were better off than many modern Africans!

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandeve...england_twice/

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Sounds like made-up numbers, then.

Actually, I'm not getting an exact fit but it's looking like a root function of MaxDR/WM is a reasonably good first-order approximation.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Brett

The point here is that poultry fatten on scraps, waste, spills, gleanings, and scraps, which are produced in proportion to the production of staple foods and the consumption of the household. Poultry is virtually free up to the amount that is supported by unavoidable waste: raising less that that amount means less production with no reduction in costs and no increase in alternative production. Or looking at that from the other side, raising poultry is a terrifically cheap way to produce food up to the point that is supported by the irreducible waste of handling grain, preparing food etc.

Interestingly, Guinea pigs in Andean cultures seem to follow these same economics. They are fed scraps and waste, and supply welcome meat (although not eggs). In a fantasy world, you may have Guinea pigs instead of or in addition to poultry.

Luke

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Interestingly, Guinea pigs in Andean cultures seem to follow these same economics. They are fed scraps and waste, and supply welcome meat (although not eggs). In a fantasy world, you may have Guinea pigs instead of or in addition to poultry.

Luke

Aid organizations have been introducing guinea pigs to the most unstable areas of the Congo as a source of meat that is small and compliant enough that when the village flees before an incoming militant group, a family can stuff them in a sack and take them with them. They're also small enough and a burrowing species so if you hide them in a crisis in a dark place you can be reasonably sure they won't kick up a fuss and be found (unlike chickens, which tend to object to this sort of treatment).

Lastly there was a (strained) hope that the militants might not recognize them as a food source, or regard them as too low status to be worth stealing.