[Low-Tech] Landing Craft at TL2 to TL4

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

I hadn't noticed that an article about airships had Oars as a system for the Spaceship design system. Neat.

I can't help but notice how excessively favourable it seems, compared to real life, though.

First of all, why would there be 144+ rowers on historical rowing ships, going up to 420 rowers or so for the biggest galleys that can't be explained as hyperbole in ancient sources, if 120 rowers could attain the maximum speed for a ship up to 300 tons in weight?

And 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)?

Also, what prevents a SM +8 ships from having oars, given that GURPS already gives the vast majority of historical galleys SM +8? Except the SM +9 'turtle ship', of course.

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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).