How would magic interact with late TL5 naval warfare? & Campaign idea

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

The rough conversion of GURPS $ to 1880s British pounds is about 1:2,000.

That seems way off. In the 1860s a labourer in London was paid about 20 shillings a week. That's 1040 pennies a month, and TL5's monthly income for average wealth is $1100/month. A labourer is probably not of average wealth, though they might be doing better than the base level of Struggling. A farm labourer got 14/0 a week, or 728p/month and probably was Struggling.

If we put the farm worker in the middle of Struggling and the Londoner towards the top end, we get $1 buying ~0.75p (three farthings), and thus a pound (240p) is $320.

If a mage is wealthy they'll be getting paid $5500/month, or 17 pounds, 3/9. This is about double what an engineer (exact job unspecified) got, so not unreasonable.

This makes a mage's daily pay 15/10 (190p), and a 250-energy golem about 200 pounds.

But... you'll need more than one stoker per boiler. While the boilers of those old ships might've only need one stoker to shovel coal into the boiler, you needed other stokers to move coal from the bunkers to where the 'boiler stoker' could easily reach it.

Warrior's coal bunkers held 853 long tone of coal (just under 1,000 short tons), and this was good for 190 hours of steaming, so she consumed 5 short tons of coal per hour. Coal has a density of about 50 pounds per cubic foot, so this is 200 cubic feet per hour. According to the rules on digging, a person can move their BL in cubic feet of broken up rock per hour (and that's what coal is), assuming proper tools. So Warrior would need ten stokers working whenever steaming to feed the boilers (as she had ten boilers that works out nicely), plus ten more to move coal once the bunkers right by the boilers have been emptied, and possibly another set of ten when using the coal from the furthermost bunkers (or a half-set and have them move the distant coal as soon as there's space for it in the nearer bunkers). All this per shift, but golems don't work in shifts, so we don't need to worry about that.

Now, golems have ST15 and thus BL45, and the 15-20 stokers that just move coal can be replaced by 8-9 golems. The stokers fuelling the boilers could be replaced by 5 golems with each one could servicing two boilers adjacent to each other (given the layout common at the time, probably one each of port and starboard boilers, fuelled from the accessway down the centreline between them). Overall you're looking at about 14 golems, plus supervisors (but you'd need those for a human crew as well, so no change there).

That's 2800 pounds for the golem stokers. It seems stokers were paid about the same as labourers, so the three dozen or so you'd need for continuous steaming would cost more over only two years than the cost of the golems, never mind the reduction in rations, and the reduced chances of mutiny.

Given that the stokers were a small portion of the crew of early ironclads, I don't think there'd be much savings in berthing and messing spaces, especially as the crews generally did these things in spaces already required for the guns, etc. Later ironclads would benefit more - they had much larger stokers complements, much smaller gun crews, and berthing and messing was no longer in a huge gundeck that's required for the guns anyway.

Note that stores for the crew took up a lot less weight and space than the coal and boiler feed water did, so the savings there are actually very minor.