Pulling wagons

[FeiLin]

I’m a bit confused about pulling/dragging and wagons.

I assume the wagon on B464 is pulled by draft horses on B459. The wagon weighs fully loaded 1680 lbs, and has 4 wheels. According to pulling and dragging on B353, that means I divide weight by 20, and by 2 again if on flat, smooth surface such as a good road. The effective weight ends at 42 lbs, and the horses would share the load evenly, so 21 lbs/horse. The horses have ST 25, so BL 125 lbs each. Is it just me, or does that mean they are easily unencumbered, which means they can walk virtually indefinitely (well, save sleep and food breaks, but at least without FP concerns for load)? Although, it seems the wagon has a top speed of 8, so are they drawn by cavalry horses (aka light warhorse)? That would seem a bit counterintuitive (apart from that it’s really ”your average horse” and somewhat misnamed). Still, they have a BL of 97, so they are also unencumbered.

How can I use Enhanced Move in this? Does it factor in as intuitively as one would expect, ie if on a ”relatively straight, smooth course” (B52) it kicks in? So, given that good road, a draft horse would effectively move at 12 yards/s. To find how fast characters travel daily in ”ideal” conditions, speed is half Move in mph, so 6 mph for a draft horse with Enhanced Move 12. With no load to make it fatigued, that means it can draw the wagon 16 h/day, minus food/drink breaks, let’s say 1 h. That would mean 90 miles/day, which seems high to the point I doubt it’s correct. Also, why not let a single horse draw 3 wagons and still trudge along unfatigued (assuming there are ropes or such to hold it all together)...?

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by FeiLin

and by 2 again if on flat, smooth surface such as a good road.

That probably doesn't apply on any road a low tech wagon would use, unless it is travelling on ice.
That modifier is for a concrete or macadam road, or a frozen lake – not a packed earth, gravel or pavement surfacing.

The top speed is 8 ... if the horse can give it. Over 8, you will have problems, but it doesn't means you will reach 8 with any old horse.

Also, don't forget that the rider do lose fp also !

But yes, around 80 miles/day is possible on a decent road, but I think daily average would be lower in practice.
remember that horse *need* frequent stop, even unencumbered.

[FeiLin]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

That probably doesn't apply on any road a low tech wagon would use, unless it is travelling on ice.
That modifier is for a concrete or macadam road, or a frozen lake – not a packed earth, gravel or pavement surfacing.

Yeah, I was also thinking about that. I figured a roman highway or equivalent might count, but maybe your right. Although, it doesn't change the encumbrance.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

The top speed is 8 ... if the horse can give it. Over 8, you will have problems, but it doesn't means you will reach 8 with any old horse.

Ah, that makes sense. So even with EM, horses are limited by the quality of the wagon.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Also, don't forget that the rider do lose fp also !

I can't recall; does that also apply to drivers of wagons, or rather how much? I think I've seen it, but I can't remember where.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

But yes, around 80 miles/day is possible on a decent road, but I think daily average would be lower in practice.
remember that horse *need* frequent stop, even unencumbered.

I realise now that I missed something: actual fatigue... B426 says that each battle costs 1 FP even unencumbered, and Hiking assesses FP as combat per hour (and I guess pulling wagons is Hiking for horses). With 11 FP and 1 FP/h, avoiding 1/3 FP means 7 h followed by 70 min rest. Lets assume the road isn't good enough for the draft horses' EM, so 3 mph. That means about 2.57 mph throughout the day, and a total of 38.57 miles after 15 h. That seems more in the ballpark, although on the high end.

To me, a rider would fairly easily put a cavalry horse/light warhorse in medium encumbrance, which gives it a move of 4.8, or 2.4 mph with 3 FP/h. That gives 2 h of travel, followed by 1 h rest, and an average speed of 1.6 mph or 24 miles/day. That a wagon pulled by horses should be almost twice as fast as a horse ridden seems counterintuitive. If that same horse would be used to pull the wagon (which I find nothing that suggests it couldn't), the difference would be bigger...

So I guess, that pulls at the original issue I implicitly had: why is a full wagon load far from encumbering a standard horse?

[Anders]

Do you mean - why don't people build larger carts if the horses can take it? My guess is that the limiting factor is the cart-building technology. But also, these are rough and ready rules designed to give somewhat-plausible results. It's not a reality simulator... :o)

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by FeiLin

I can't recall; does that also apply to drivers of wagons, or rather how much? I think I've seen it, but I can't remember where.

The rider fatigue is in low-tech p136, and probably elsewhere.

Riders in a vehicle with wooden wheels endure considerable jolting. With spoked wheels, this costs 1 FP/hour on Good terrain, 2 FP/hour on Average terrain; with solid wheels, double these costs.

Originally Posted by FeiLin

Lets assume the road isn't good enough for the draft horses' EM, so 3 mph.

On a good road, I think you can use EM.

On the other hand, 15h/day of travel is very unlikely.

--An horse must eat at least twice a day, more likely 3 or 4 times under effort, and will need about one hour and a half for cooling down, eating then digesting before starting again. So you need bigger meal breaks. (And that assume you are carrying food instead of letting them graze !)
You can ignore that ... for a while. Then you have no horse and a ton of meat.

--An horse must drink - lots of water. This is separately from eating. Again, unless you are on a well serviced road, you will need time to find the water.

--Few teamster will drive without light, although it can be done. Depending on the location, that can mean short days.

[Celjabba]

As for why you don't have the horse pulling heavier load :

A horse team that pull a load at effective no encumbrance at a walking pace (half move including EM) on a good road can do so for weeks.

If you start at light encumbrance or more, per Campaign p426, your horse is burning twice the fp, so you need more rest, more food, more time to eat the food .. not to mention increasing the risk of injuries (a horse will go lame easily enough without pushing it ...).

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Anders

Do you mean - why don't people build larger carts if the horses can take it? My guess is that the limiting factor is the cart-building technology.

In part, no doubt. One of the largest wagons for draft animals was the "20 mule team" wagons used to haul borax out of Death Valley in California. Tech wise, they're wood with steel axles, which weren't impossible at earlier times, but might have been judged too expensive. Those hauled ten tons of borax; the wheels are 5 and 7 feet tall. There was a 24-mule team version in limited use (even by the standard of this already fairly specialized application) that could haul 30 tons.

Which points out another couple of reasons for a size limit: (1) the wagon has to fit on the road, under trees, and go around corners in villages or wooded paths, which limit width, height, and length; and (2) human beings on either end have to load and unload the wagons. Ten tons is a lot to move, especially if it's over waist high Your transportation network won't need just a big wagon; it'll need depots with block-and-tackle gantries and stevedores. And such a design also presumes you even have ten tons of stuff that you want to move at one time. Works fine for 19th century mass mining extraction for industrial products. But in a medieval economy, you just plain don't have as much stuff to move in and out. Even during that 20-mule-team era, that wasn't a typical size of wagons, and people weren't building depots to collect up shipments into one mass shipment as we do for trucking. (They already had ships and later, rail, for mass transport.)

I think it's likely that it's not so much that 12th-18th century societies were technologically unable to build a wagon to handle larger loads as they just saw no reason to do so.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

--An horse must eat at least twice a day, more likely 3 or 4 times, and will need about one hour and a half for cooling down, eating then digesting before starting again. So you need bigger meal breaks. (And that assume you are carrying food instead of letting them graze !)
You can ignore that ... for a while. Then you have no horse and a ton of meat.

--An horse must drink - lots of water. This is separately for eating. Again, unless you are on a well serviced road, you will need time to find the water.

Yup. Horses should have Slow Eater (p. B155), which is a disadvantage that probably should come in levels (-5 for each level, each level adds ½ hour to each meal).

[FeiLin]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

On the other hand, 15h/day of travel is very unlikely.

--An horse must eat at least twice a day, more likely 3 or 4 times under effort, and will need about one hour and a half for cooling down, eating then digesting before starting again. So you need bigger meal breaks. (And that assume you are carrying food instead of letting them graze !)
You can ignore that ... for a while. Then you have no horse and a ton of meat.

--An horse must drink - lots of water. This is separately from eating. Again, unless you are on a well serviced road, you will need time to find the water.

--Few teamster will drive without light, although it can be done. Depending on the location, that can mean short days.

Hmm, horses seem to be inconvenient to the extent I start to wonder why they are used as mounts and draft animals in the first place...

Jokes aside, if 15 h would be too much for horses, what would be a more fair estimate?

Also, is it reasonable that the wagon example above is (substantially) faster than a horse with a rider or how should the two relate?

[Anders]

Originally Posted by FeiLin

Hmm, horses seem to be inconvenient to the extent I start to wonder why they are used as mounts and draft animals in the first place...

I mean, what's the alternative? Oxen? They're even slower.