Captain Igloo
Captain (Junior Grade)
Posts: 269
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 4:02 pm
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Weird Harold wrote:isaac_newton wrote:I'm pretty sure that there is textev that the new canals, especialy in the Northlands were bigger than the orginals - I think it was one reason that the GCRaid was possible.
Nope, they're bigger than older, pre-gunpowder, canals, but NOT bigger than the oldest canals dug by the terra-forming crews. Like A Mighty Army .IV. Sarkyn, Tairohn Hills, and Archbishop’s Palace, City of St. Vyrdyn, Princedom of Sarkyn wrote:The Holy Langhorne was one of the world’s most ancient canals, and the oldest canals had the fewest locks. The same chapters of the Writ which detailed the construction practices to be followed by mere mortals made the reason for that scarcity of locks abundantly clear. Where men were forced to detour around mountains, build steep stair steps of locks to carry the canal barges forward, the Archangels hadn’t cared what might have lain in the way. Anyone who doubted that was the case only had to look at the canal cuts right here in the Tairohns. Why, the sides of the Ambyltyn Hill Cut, no more than four miles east of Sarkyn, towered over four hundred feet above canal level at the cut’s deepest point! And smooth, like polished marble!
...
...Lock dimensions meant barges on the older canals had to be smaller than those on some of the newer canals. The Holy Langhorne had been built to accept barges a hundred and thirty feet long, with beams of up to thirty-five feet, but when mortal hands had taken over the task of canal building from divine will, they’d been forced to accept more modest dimensions, at least until the invention of gunpowder. Those canals’ barges were limited to no more than a hundred and ten feet in length, with beams which could not exceed twenty feet, ...
“They’re a bit bigger than the standard mainland river barges, you know,” he said as his pen scratched and abacus beads clicked busily. “We don’t have anywhere near the dependency on barge traffic they do, and we haven’t got anywhere near the same number of canals. A lot of their canals are over five or six hundred years old, though, and making any major changes in them would be an incredible pain, so they worry a lot more about barge interchangeability than we do. The newer canals mostly have bigger locks to let them use bigger barges for purely local traffic, but one of the really old trunk lines—like the Langhorne—can’t accept outsized barges. Since barge owners never know when they’re going to have to use one of the lines with smaller locks, they tend to build small unless it’s for purely local use, like the wheat trade out of Tarikah via the Hildermoss and the New Northland Canal. That limits their really long-haul barges to about a hundred and twenty-five feet. We didn’t have to worry about fitting through something like the Langhorne, though, so we just stole the plans for the New Northland’s locks when we built the Delthak canal.” ... “Anyway, because of the lock size we chose, our barges are a hundred and forty feet long and forty-five feet in the beam with a draft of about six and a half feet and around fifteen or sixteen feet depth of hold, which lets them carry a hell of a lot more than your typical mainland boat. Within limits, of course. They’re basically just big, square boxes with round ends, when you come down to it. We did slightly redesign the sterns for the powered barges, but not enough to change their volume so anyone would notice, so each of them can carry about ninety-five thousand cubic feet of cargo. That comes to around twenty-three hundred tons of coal per barge, which we figured was pretty much the ceiling for animal-drawn loads, even with tow roads as wide as the ones we used. Takes a four-dragon team to move the unpowered ones, and it also just about doubles their draft to twelve feet, which is as deep as you want to go in even one of our canals. The steam-powered boats are a little less than that because of the weight the engine and boilers and the fuel take up, but still.…”
Merlin and Howsmyn about the first ironclads in MTAT
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