Why did it take so long to deal with Silesia?

hanuman wrote:

KNick wrote:I know. My family is from the Poplar/Culbertson area. My grandfather took his railroad retirement from the Northern Pacific Railroad Co. in land in that area. My cousin still farms all five sections. It takes that many to support a family. It is all dryland farming with the lower yields that implies. The farm was set up before the building of the Fort Peck dam, and was never included in the irrigation district from the dam. (Mainly because it is a couple of hundred feet above the maximum height of the reservoir). One of the features of "flat" land is that the rivers have carved their channels down into the rock, leaving the farmable land high and dry. Any irrigation setup for his land would have to start somewhere around 100 miles upstream.

My uncle's ranch (west of Great Falls) gets the water for the irrigated portions from the Rockies, over thirty five miles away. This is in spite of the fact that you can throw a rock into the closest river from the edge of one of his grain/alfalfa fields. It is "only" two hundred feet below the property.

Why don't they install a pump system to get water up from the river level? Sorry, it's just that there are parts of Africa where people have devised manual systems to move water in sufficient quantities from rivers to farmlands several hundred meters above.

At a guess, either it is not economical enough (cost exceeds additional revenue) or the water rights belong to someone else. Or both.

I suppose if we knew how much stuff could be moved with a single counter grav lift we could know how much stuff we could move on a planet with it.

With counter grav you don't need to use other engines to move stuff, you move it like we currently go to planets. Not direct like in the honorverse but in orbits and adjusted travel loops.

To move X million tonnes of stuff from NYC to LA direct would use lots of fuel and the like. be it on a train or truck or grav plane with a jet or rocket engine.... But in an orbit movement, one just goes up, orbits a few minutes to line up with were you are going then descends to the new location. Stuff rises into the sky to orbit, then falls from the sky at the destination. Takes very little time less than an hour and is very stable and easy.

As for how small Washington is to how small Iowa is or how small Kansas is, they are all tiny small compared to Canadian provinces. Texas might have a chance but then Texas is all hot and sandy. Alberta is a lot like Kansas Texas and Washington and Montana mixed together. With a really big rodeo (the biggest this year we had 1,263,428 people attend over 10 days) which just ended. Only one 12 year old died during the rodeo his name was Denny. Ironically Denny Crane, AKA Bill Shatner was the parade Marshall this year. He is fine.

Alberta is 95% the size of Texas and Very much like it, a lot less people % of population that are cowboys is likely greater. Less guns out in the open and we are friendly. We also have more oil than any state even Alaska.

hanuman wrote:Why don't they install a pump system to get water up from the river level? Sorry, it's just that there are parts of Africa where people have devised manual systems to move water in sufficient quantities from rivers to farmlands several hundred meters above.

A very good question. But remember, we are talking about the USA, Land of the Lazy.

All joking aside, we are talking about a huge quantity of water. The irrigation ditch that runs past my house is 20 feet wide and ten feet deep. Allowing for irregularities in the sides and bottom, let's call it a cross-section of 160 square feet. It flows at a rate between one and two feet per second, or between 160 and 320 cubic feet per second. So, rough figure, we are talking about 10,000 and 20,000 cubic feet per minute. Using a figure of 5,100 feet per mile (I know, I know, low), there are 26,000,000 sq. ft. in a section. To cover that much ground in one inch of water takes over 2,000,000 cubic feet of water. So that means to irrigate one section takes somewhere between 2 & 1/2 hours (at 10,000 CF/M) to an hour and 45 minutes (at 20,000 CF/M) using the total flow of that ditch. Using the partial flow that the average feeder ditches carry, it takes days to water one field. But it does not take many manhours to do it. And each field has to be watered 4 to 6 times a year. That ditch probably is responsible for irrigating 3 to 4 hundred square miles of crops.

So, to get back to your question. Are any of the systems you are talking about capable of delivering 10,000,000 cubic feet of water 200 feet uphill? Enough to irrigate 1 sq. mile for a year. Times 3 or 4 hundred.

This goes back a ways, but I had a couple of irrigating jobs when I was a kid. One of them was damming up irrigation ditches that used water from the snow melt in the mountains. We used canvas dams that we would mud in and cut sluices out the side of the ditch to get the water to flood the field -- usually alfalfa-- where we wanted it to go. The drawback to that was that invaribly there were high spots in the field where you couldn't get water no matter how hard you tried. Result: bare spots in the middle of otherwise lush alfalfa fields to highlight your failure to get water there.

The other job involved sprinklers which drew water out of the irrigation ditch by means of a rather powerful pump that could feed a quarter mile of pipe. The drawback to that was that you had to change the pipe twice a day. Not for the faint hearted. I was a big, strong kid as a teenaqer and was still exhausted after a pipe change.

Now the dominant system seems to be pivot sprinkler systems that draw water out of an irrigation ditch, stream or river when available. Also, the occasional artesian well. I know a family of potato farmers who plant fields in the higher part of the northcentral Gallatin Valley west of Bozeman who use two artesian wells to pipe up water to big fields that are on the side of hills... I helped them harvest one fall and it proved a quite a challenge to keep the truck under the potato elevator because the heavier the load got, the more the truck wanted to slide down hill. Sooo... not everybody is lazy...

Don

PS.Oh by the way KNick, I drove past Billings on the way to Helena where we put my folks into assisted living a couple of weeks ago. Stayed there two nights once coming, once going from Southeastern South Dakota where we currently live.

n7axw wrote:This goes back a ways, but I had a couple of irrigating jobs when I was a kid. One of them was damming up irrigation ditches that used water from the snow melt in the mountains. We used canvas dams that we would mud in and cut sluices out the side of the ditch to get the water to flood the field -- usually alfalfa-- where we wanted it to go. The drawback to that was that invaribly there were high spots in the field where you couldn't get water no matter how hard you tried. Result: bare spots in the middle of otherwise lush alfalfa fields to highlight your failure to get water there.

The other job involved sprinklers which drew water out of the irrigation ditch by means of a rather powerful pump that could feed a quarter mile of pipe. The drawback to that was that you had to change the pipe twice a day. Not for the faint hearted. I was a big, strong kid as a teenaqer and was still exhausted after a pipe change.

Now the dominant system seems to be pivot sprinkler systems that draw water out of an irrigation ditch, stream or river when available. Also, the occasional artesian well. I know a family of potato farmers who plant fields in the higher part of the northcentral Gallatin Valley west of Bozeman who use two artesian wells to pipe up water to big fields that are on the side of hills... I helped them harvest one fall and it proved a quite a challenge to keep the truck under the potato elevator because the heavier the load got, the more the truck wanted to slide down hill. Sooo... not everybody is lazy...

Don

PS.Oh by the way KNick, I drove past Billings on the way to Helena where we put my folks into assisted living a couple of weeks ago. Stayed there two nights once coming, once going from Southeastern South Dakota where we currently live.

The pivot sprinkler system was invented by a lazy kid who had to change the pipe twice a day.

The pipe sprinkler system was invented by a lazy kid who didn't like setting and pulling dams.

The potato elevator was invented by a lazy man whose wife got tired of walking behind him and the plow picking up the potatoes by hand. So she nagged him until he came up with a better idea.

KNick wrote:

n7axw wrote:This goes back a ways, but I had a couple of irrigating jobs when I was a kid. One of them was damming up irrigation ditches that used water from the snow melt in the mountains. We used canvas dams that we would mud in and cut sluices out the side of the ditch to get the water to flood the field -- usually alfalfa-- where we wanted it to go. The drawback to that was that invaribly there were high spots in the field where you couldn't get water no matter how hard you tried. Result: bare spots in the middle of otherwise lush alfalfa fields to highlight your failure to get water there.

The other job involved sprinklers which drew water out of the irrigation ditch by means of a rather powerful pump that could feed a quarter mile of pipe. The drawback to that was that you had to change the pipe twice a day. Not for the faint hearted. I was a big, strong kid as a teenaqer and was still exhausted after a pipe change.

Now the dominant system seems to be pivot sprinkler systems that draw water out of an irrigation ditch, stream or river when available. Also, the occasional artesian well. I know a family of potato farmers who plant fields in the higher part of the northcentral Gallatin Valley west of Bozeman who use two artesian wells to pipe up water to big fields that are on the side of hills... I helped them harvest one fall and it proved a quite a challenge to keep the truck under the potato elevator because the heavier the load got, the more the truck wanted to slide down hill. Sooo... not everybody is lazy...

Don

PS.Oh by the way KNick, I drove past Billings on the way to Helena where we put my folks into assisted living a couple of weeks ago. Stayed there two nights once coming, once going from Southeastern South Dakota where we currently live.

The pivot sprinkler system was invented by a lazy kid who had to change the pipe twice a day.

The pipe sprinkler system was invented by a lazy kid who didn't like setting and pulling dams.

The potato elevator was invented by a lazy man whose wife got tired of walking behind him and the plow picking up the potatoes by hand. So she nagged him until he came up with a better idea.

Kudos on a wonderful post. Tell it like it is... No point in calling a spade an agricultural intrument...


Don

Zakharra wrote: Washington also produces a lot of other foods, and is at or near the top in production of raspberries and apples. But the discussion we were having, in context, was in regards to wheat. And Washington is near the top 5 in overall wheat production. Which is very good for a state that has a lot of forested areas, mountains and high arid plains/desert areas. Over all though, saying Washington is a piker in regards to grain (wheat) production is kind of being obstinate for the sake of being obstinate, when it does produce a lot of wheat and other foods itself.

Zak. The discussion was never non perishable foods nor containerized goods. The discussion was also not wheat. It was grain. Bulk dry/wet food goods. Wheat is part of the grain family. Both corn and soybeans are larger crops than wheat in terms of production. When shipping, these bulk cargo carriers carry multiple types of grain.

Knick: Washington does indeed have water. Lots of water. Most of those water rights are reserved exclusively for power production. Gotta love the Columbia River. This water is not used for grain production generally(A little sweet corn for local table consumption). Rather for produce like Asparagus, onions, potatoes, beets, apples, etc. Quite a bit for apples as apples are able to be grown on very rocky hilly ground near the Columbia River making irrigation possible where nothing else can be grown other than other fruit trees like Cherries, Pears, and Peaches. I generally go fruit gleaning every other year and then can them.

Washington/Idaho/Oregon grain(mostly wheat) production is a dry operation mostly centered in the Palouse region and in Lincoln/Grant etc counties up on the Mesa's above the Grand Coulee which were carved/deposited in the Missoula floods. These dry regions sit 700 feet above the Grand Coulee Dam which provides most all the water for irrigation. Even then the water has to be pumped several hundred feet up via massive pumps for this amount of irrigation. The Palouse region is high above the Snake River as well.

It is only because of the VERY fertile Palouse region due the Missoula Floods and other floods out of the Snake River basin(think Great Salt Lake) and from the Okanogan Lobe of glaciers out of Canada that this relatively small region can produce so much wheat due to its very fertile soil. Top soil over 100 feet deep in many places. Of course these same floods turned 1/3 of E. Washington into scab lands good for at best a little dry wheat farming or cattle raising. Take a Look at Google earth and see all the Mesa's, Coulee's, odd placed lakes in the middle of nowhere(desert) with at best a trickle of water in them during a raining year. Kinda like the Badlands of S. Dakota, but in volcanic rock instead of clays.

KNick wrote:

hanuman wrote:Why don't they install a pump system to get water up from the river level? Sorry, it's just that there are parts of Africa where people have devised manual systems to move water in sufficient quantities from rivers to farmlands several hundred meters above.

A very good question. But remember, we are talking about the USA, Land of the Lazy.

All joking aside, we are talking about a huge quantity of water. The irrigation ditch that runs past my house is 20 feet wide and ten feet deep. Allowing for irregularities in the sides and bottom, let's call it a cross-section of 160 square feet. It flows at a rate between one and two feet per second, or between 160 and 320 cubic feet per second. So, rough figure, we are talking about 10,000 and 20,000 cubic feet per minute. Using a figure of 5,100 feet per mile (I know, I know, low), there are 26,000,000 sq. ft. in a section. To cover that much ground in one inch of water takes over 2,000,000 cubic feet of water. So that means to irrigate one section takes somewhere between 2 & 1/2 hours (at 10,000 CF/M) to an hour and 45 minutes (at 20,000 CF/M) using the total flow of that ditch. Using the partial flow that the average feeder ditches carry, it takes days to water one field. But it does not take many manhours to do it. And each field has to be watered 4 to 6 times a year. That ditch probably is responsible for irrigating 3 to 4 hundred square miles of crops.

So, to get back to your question. Are any of the systems you are talking about capable of delivering 10,000,000 cubic feet of water 200 feet uphill? Enough to irrigate 1 sq. mile for a year. Times 3 or 4 hundred.

Huh, I sometimes forget the differences between agriculture in the West and here in Africa. South Africa is mostly an exception to the rule, as we are developed enough to enable large-scale farming with all the technological doodads that's common in Western countries. Don't get me wrong - there are parts of the country (especially in the former 'bantustans') where smallholdings are more common.

But elsewhere in Africa it is most often the case that each family owns and cultivates only a small parcel of land - it's truly amazing how sophisticated African farming methods really are. Not only do families manage to feed themselves, but they also produce surpluses for trade - at least, when they aren't driven off their lands by war or civil conflict. One drawback is, unfortunately, that their surpluses are usually too small to generate enough cash to buy modern equipment or to pay for expensive luxuries such as health care or education.

"one just goes up, orbits a few minutes to line up with were you are going then descends"

Did someone forget to read the free essays?

Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists by by Terry Burlison
part2

That "few minutes to line up" ain't going to be a free lunch. It's going to take either a wedge, or some serious thrusters besides that grav plate, and there is going to be an energy budget, especially thrusters.

And I have to wonder: you ain't allowed to run a ship-sized wedge close to a station, could it be it is also illegal to run one just outside the atmosphere; in which case the much more fuel-inefficient thrusters would need be used to shift your orbit.

Of course if you want to make the orbital shift-and-relocation in a few minutes, you are probably going to have to put inertial compensators on that shipping container too.

At which point the amount of stuff needed to move the cargo is going to start adding up to a significant fraction (or multiple) of the mass of the trainload (or truckload ... let's not even mention a partial-pallet load) you need shipped from whole-seller A to retailer B.

Most shipments don't involve shifting lots of 1+ million tonnes between specific points, and with the Honorverse planetary population averaging lower than Earth of toway, such shipments would be rare indeed outside of a relative few League core worlds.

And operating a frigate-sized cargo hauler, scaled for more "reasonable" cargoes of say 20,000 tonnes (obtained by removing a FF's hyperdrive & Alpha nodes, and downsizing bunkerage & all other components to commercial grade) is most likely going to be uneconomical compared to waiting a few hours or overnight to get the wares by your 'slow-poking fuel-guzzling surface haulers'.

Lord Skimper wrote:[snip]
To move X million tonnes of stuff from NYC to LA direct would use lots of fuel and the like. be it on a train or truck or grav plane with a jet or rocket engine.... But in an orbit movement, one just goes up, orbits a few minutes to line up with were you are going then descends to the new location. Stuff rises into the sky to orbit, then falls from the sky at the destination. Takes very little time less than an hour and is very stable and easy.
[snip]

hvb wrote:"one just goes up, orbits a few minutes to line up with were you are going then descends"

Did someone forget to read the free essays?

Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists by by Terry Burlison
part2

That "few minutes to line up" ain't going to be a free lunch. It's going to take either a wedge, or some serious thrusters besides that grav plate, and there is going to be an energy budget, especially thrusters.

+snip+
Most shipments don't involve shifting lots of 1+ million tonnes between specific points, and with the Honorverse planetary population averaging lower than Earth of toway, such shipments would be rare indeed outside of a relative few League core worlds.

And operating a frigate-sized cargo hauler, scaled for more "reasonable" cargoes of say 20,000 tonnes (obtained by removing a FF's hyperdrive & Alpha nodes, and downsizing bunkerage & all other components to commercial grade) is most likely going to be uneconomical compared to waiting a few hours or overnight to get the wares by your 'slow-poking fuel-guzzling surface haulers'.

I suspect that there will be a decent number of 1+million ton loads carried between locations on the planet, but I envision such loads in practice being more of large load collected from manufacturer or space port, lofted to orbital warehouse, repacked, large load delivered to spaceport/manufacturer, with a different load picked up for transfer to orbital warehouse. Basically there would be orbital warehouses and spaceports doing what is currently done in shipports and intermodal hubs on earth today.