[Low-Tech] Landing Craft at TL2 to TL4

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Icelander

... why would the sole historical war galley design to demonstratably attain Move 5 use significantly more than 120 rowers (170) and weigh less than a third of 300 tons (less than 80 tons fully loaded)?

If you'd prefer, you could probably use that as a guideline. As a warship, chances are good the number of rowers is more than what are actually required, in order to allow it to more readily soak up casualties. Let's say the ship might be able to lose up to 20 men and still function normally - that puts it at 150, for 50 men per system. The weight of the ship (which is what SS cares about) is appropriate for an SM+6 vessel, so for the sort of performance seen in the article some more appropriate numbers might be 15 (SM+5), 50 (SM+6), and 150 (SM+7). Unfortunately, following this progression we find the penteconter (SM+4 by weight) should need only 10 rowers for its Move 1/4, when in reality it has 50. Maintaining the same percent extras, the penteconter might be able to lose 6 men without losing performance, implying 22 men per system. That implies something like +1 SSR (rather than the above +3 SSR) per +1 SM, for a progression of 30 (SM+5), 50 (SM+6), 70 (SM+7). If we assume a decent number of the slaves on that 420+ men galley (at least, I'm assuming that's a slave galley) have ST less than 10, this progression might work decently well.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Realistically, attention needs to be paid to matching rowing power on both sides, but there is nothing inherently unrealistic or cinematic about scaling the motive power generated by each rower by his strength (or indeed, by some combination of strength and skill).

Personally, I'd be more inclined to just total up everyone's BL and divide by 20 to determine the effective number of rowers, rather than doing the above log business, but I don't know what gives more realistic values.