RE: Sailing War (was: Re: (TFT) Hirst Arts Melee/Wizard Arena)

["maou_tsaou1@netzero.net" <maou_tsaou1@netzero.net>]

Land
In general, crops require at least 10 inches of topsoil to be productive at agricultural levels, 12 to 15 inches is better.
Workable land must be fairly level, else if erosion will render the property "unproductive" quickly.
The founding fathers tore up the land with cheep labour and wasteful practices.

"Though only fifty to seventy inches (of rain) might fall on Monticello, it came in such violent bursts that it rushed to the rivers. We have no precise statistics of the volume of silt it carried in the eighteenth century, but it is likely that it was even greater than it was in the mid-twentieth, when, after much reforestation, the Potomac flooded down from such a bare watershed that half the rain falling upon it was not absorbed - and still is not. Down it goes into the Chesapeake Bay, at 220,000 feet per second in Spring flood (the low-water rate is about a thousand), carrying "a total of 400 pounds of soil from every acre in its drainage basin." In 1950 the Shenandoah ranged from 380 feet per second in quiet times to 140,000 in flood; the James from 600 feet to 97,800. When the water is high they flow as conduits of silt."
"Mr. Jefferson' s Lost Cause; Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase" - Roger G. Kennedy

Jefferson supported himself in old age by selling slaves west.
Monticello lived her productive years in a generation.
Albemarle and Bedford counties had not recovered a century later and were Federal restoration sites (out of five total for Virginia) during the Depression.
Little harbors like Dumfries and Port Tobacco were completely choked in silt, while upstream thousands of acres were left derelict.

Of considerable note here is the fact that the native Indians had been farming thin soils in heavy rains for a long time. They had domesticated wild plants on what a thousand years later the European "Planters" would call fresh ground.

The point of this is that players practicing unsustainable agriculture for pure profit are gonna suffer consequences.
Remember, when ticking off generations, your offspring becomes a sortta meta-character.

So after the obvious question of water supply, next most important is questions of drainage.

Plants that indicate water.
Rushes and Cattails indicate fresh surface water or marsh.
Pickleweed indicates saltwater marsh.
Saltbush indicates poor quality surface water.
Reeds signify good quality surface water.
Mesquite indicates water 10 to 50 feet down.
Black greasewood generally means there is mineralized water between 10 to 40 feet down.
Rabbit brush will grow only where there is water within 15 feet of the surface.
Elderberry shrubs are a sign of water at about 10 feet.

Lay of the land (Map)
Bearing strength (pST) of the ground
Drainage 
Frost depth
Sources of drinking water
Height of the water table
Amount of annual sunlight
Direction of prevailing winds
Wood, minerals and other special features

A large measure of what makes a particular area of land "workable" is the technology of the culture and the availability of labor.

For embankments and features like dunes the following are angles of repose (when the stuff stops sliding) 
Gravel and predominately gravel mixes at 40 to 55 degrees
Sand and predominately sand mixes at 50 to 60 degrees
Silts and clay at 55 to 70 degrees
Peat or organic soils at 40 to 45 degrees
I suggest anything over about 45 degrees is climbing, especially over ground that isn't smooth and firm.

The material I have suggests nothing over a 10 percent grade for roads, excepting very brief periods.

World Book says that U.S. farm production roughly trebled from 1900 to 2000 (5 generations), income increased thirty fold, while actual acreage remained roughly constant and actual farm population fell off over 3 and a half times from it's 1900 figure.
When accounting for the total U.S. population in 1900, World Book data suggests about 40% of the population engaged as farmers.
Projected data suggests about 3 to 4% farmers today.
Compare to a figure of about 90% farmers in the Roman Empire (World Book).

Here's a funny coinkedink.

Best I can tell, farm yealds in the middle ages ran on the order of 1:3 for the 1300's 1:4 for the 1400's and so on through the early 1800's.

Long time scale map changes (between ages) are done with a hex version of Conway's Life.
See Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"

I'll do soil types later...


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