evilauthor wrote:captinjoehenry wrote:Ok so the spit of land that conects charis to margets land is only 34 miles wide at it's narrowest and there is now area engines so there are steam shovels soon enough and there is also TNT so I believe that Charis is now capable of blasting a canal through that spit of land and that would offer a lot of advantages in cut down travel time.
But is it worth the effort? IIRC, Charis is nowhere near as large as the Americas or the Europe/Asia/Africa trifecta. A ship doesn't have to cross half a hemisphere to get sail from one side of Charis to the other. So the cost and time savings from going around Charis and/or Margaret's Land would be far less than a ship going around South America or Africa.
A better Panama candidate I've heard is the small strip of land that connects Northern and Southern Howard (or whatever the mainland continents are called). People talk about how capturing and holding that land would cut Desnair off from the CoGA. So if the land is really that narrow, then it's narrow enough to put a canal there... assuming there isn't one there already.
People have built canals to cut off far smaller amounts of travel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Canal
As far as I am concerned its not a question of if but of when. I am actually shocked they haven't started any work on it, we have been talking about building a canal there for years now, RFC can't possibly have missed all the discussions. They have the explosives, they have the steam engines, build the damn thing.