[Low-Tech] Landing Craft at TL2 to TL4

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm principally interested in what kind of Move one can expect, with maybe 12 rowers for the smaller versions, up to 30 for the largests.

You might be able to use Ghostdancer's Sailing the Open Skies article (Pyramid #3/64) here. Briefly, a vessel can have up to 3 oar systems, with one giving it Move 1/3 and each additional increasing maximum speed by +1. An SM +5 (30 ton) ship needs 4 rowers per system, SM+6 (100 ton) needs 12 per system, and SM+7 (300 ton, the largest that can use oars) needs 40 per system. The article suggests, in a cinematic campaign, allowing strong characters to count as more than one rower - each doubling of BL from 20 counts as an additional rower (EDIT: If you want to allow characters to have a fractional effect, log base 2 of BL/10 will give you your multiplier. An ST 12 character thus counts as 1.5 rowers. Note this will mean characters with ST 7 or lower can't contribute).

In a highly cinematic setting, or one where humans can be superhuman thanks to magic, it might be appropriate to allow very strong rowers to function as though the ship had more systems than it does. That is, if you have a 30 ton ship with 4 ST 20 rowers, each of those rowers is functionally equal to 3 normal rowers (they double BL 20 twice), so the ship has Move 1/5 as though it had three systems. If the above ship did have three systems, and each of the 12 rowers had ST 20, they'd count as 36 rowers. That's 9 systems, for something like Move 1/11.