ATST Snippet #2

Hi JRM,

Good idea, but since corduroy roads are so obvious to us, especially RFC [since Sherman's army made some almost all the way across the Carolina's S to N, IIRC] the question becomes why isn't Hanth and his engineers already using them?

Given control of the Seridahn, barges carrying 2000-3000 tons of timber should unloading at the nearest piers if the canal has consumed the nearest forests.

Two lanes would permit faster traffic so double your 23 per mile rate for the 5 miles for some 230 loads or 2300 tons, for a maximum of two barges being needed.

There are WW2 references to Sommerfeld Tracking, a portable wire reinforced roadway [128" X 906"] invented by a German engineer in England being use in Iraq, North Africa and Italy, besides Great Britain in 1941 if not earlier for roads and airfields, that often used a layer of coir as base since it absorbed quite a bit of water, which might be very useful to the engineers.

Evidently there are no Safehold equivalents to coir available to Hanth at the moment, but a bamboo type of Sommerfeld tracking or corduroy does seem indicated.

The fact that Green Valley is not concerned about the mess Hanth is in implies there's nothing more he can do to help or mitigate it.

L

JRM wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi All,

I must have been sleepier than I thought.

Because I forgot to mention that a dragon wagon barely a third full, ie only 18-20,000 lbs would be only 4 cubic yards or 108 to 120 cubic feet; enough to fill several large pot holes, or a 6" layer of aggregate only 18 feet wide by 12-13&1/3 feet long.

if there were 12 per hour that could be up to 160 feet per hour, but I suspect at least 2 if not three, are needed for each nominal 12-13&1/3 feet section, for and an half improved road increase of at most ~1000' feet per day.

I also forgot to suggest they might increase the wagon load by adding an extra set of wagon wheels outboard of the current set to support increasing the load by 50-66%, which would help a lot, the main cost or obstacle being the increased turning circle required.

Given how torn up the high road seems to be, its quite possible General Rychtyr may have more drafted civilians tearing it up than Hanth has repairing it; until that changes, possibly by adding some of his infantry to the workforce, he's not going to get ahead of the problem.

Rychtyr was supposed to be reinforced by another 40-50,000 men in September according to HFQ, so Hanth is outnumbered from the numbers we have.

Rychtyr might counter attack, yet driving Hanth back 10-20+ miles, if that far in this muck, wouldn't really improve things from the Dohlar PoV strategically, though morale and propaganda might override that, although possibly reversing the supply situation is probably the last thing Rychtyr wants to do.

Who's going to be smart and go into winter quarters first?

L

Hi Lyonhart,

I think a better action would be corduroy roads.

Lieutenant Klymynt Hahrlys (designated "Bigfoot") gets stuck about five miles from the front. The freight wagons are carrying only a third of the 30 tons that a decent road would allow. If each wagon or articulated wagons brings 20 tons of green lumber 4"x12"x16' to the end of the decent road, it can drop off the beams and proceed with the 10 tons of supply that is currently getting through.

Each beam is laid perpendicular to the direction of the road on top of a couple of beams running in the direction of the road laid at approximately the width of the wagon wheels. Each perpendicular beam is bolted to the underlying beams. Soft ground would be an advantage as it would allow the beams to spread the load.

Twenty tons of green lumber beams would amount to 230 beams. That would mean that it would take 23 loads to cover a mile of road. As soon, as the corduroy road reaches the front, the transports can be returned to usual contents and weight.

James

lyonheart wrote:Hi JRM,

Good idea, but since corduroy roads are so obvious to us, especially RFC [since Sherman's army made some almost all the way across the Carolina's S to N, IIRC] the question becomes why isn't Hanth and his engineers already using them?

L

Because someone has to go cut down the trees and trim them and deliver them and load them on the barges to be shipped?

Another rapid roadbuilding variant is the perforated steel mat - called the "Marston Mat" that has been used since WWII in various forms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Mat

I remember landing on the SATS airfield at MCAF 29 Palms many years ago - the "expeditionary field" they had out there. A bit slick when wet, but otherwise fine.

At the Wikipedia site, you'll note that a small team of Seabees could build a 200 ft by 5000 ft runway in a couple of days. So a 20-foot-wide road X 50,000-foot long road could be built in that time (OK, a bit shorter due to adverse current conditions).

As to the weight issue, a 15-inch by 10-foot segment weighed only 66 pounds. A LOT less than gravel, and a LOT smoother than corduroy...

I suspect it's a lot of lumber he didn't know he was going to need and the local industry/economy can't produce it at the drop of a hat. Apart from finding the forest, JRM specifies regularly shaped boards and that means a lumber mill. Where is the nearest intact one of those? It's not like Hanth can run out some diesel generators and a collection of ripsaws.

As for specially designed steel roadway sections, dream on. Steel is still in critically short supply everywhere except Charis (and even there ...) and pretty much all of it is already earmarked for something or other.

Randomiser wrote:I suspect it's a lot of lumber he didn't know he was going to need and the local industry/economy can't produce it at the drop of a hat. Apart from finding the forest, JRM specifies regularly shaped boards and that means a lumber mill. Where is the nearest intact one of those? It's not like Hanth can run out some diesel generators and a collection of ripsaws.

As for specially designed steel roadway sections, dream on. Steel is still in critically short supply everywhere except Charis (and even there ...) and pretty much all of it is already earmarked for something or other.

I don't recall saying what and how the engineers were using and doing to repair the roadways.

Marston mats aren't practical yet (to much other demand for steel) and there aren't a bunch of trees locally available for corduroying them, but the engineers are basically doing two things: (1) they are using whatever resources are locally available (including trees/timbers ) to produce temporary surfaces and (2) simultaneously working to rebuild the high roads to Holy Writ standards. One problem they face, though, is that their standard freight vehicles are a lot bigger and individually heavier than any Sherman had to provide with roadways, which rules out (or greatly diminishes the utility of) a lot of possibilities. Sherman had enough trouble keeping his logistics moving, and Civil War-era temporary road expedients are not going to stand up well to 30-ton wagons.

I know we've touched on this in other threads, but the difference between draft dragons and mules is a heck of a lot more than incremental! A single specially bred draft dragon can haul 30-ton weights over good roads. The standard "6-mule wagon" of the Federal Army could carry perhaps 2,500 hundred pounds of cargo and was good for about 2.5 miles per day cross country in decent going. A dragon can pull around 25 times that much cargo (allowing for the difference in the weight of the wagons themselves) and can manage around 4-5 miles per day cross country as opposed to 40-50 miles on the high roads and perhaps 10-12 miles, max per day on secondary/farm track roads in almost perfect weather. In bad weather, the farm roads basically turn into nothing more than places where the trees are already gone and the ground's fairly flat. In other words, they might as well be cross country travel in a lot of ways with the proviso that their road beds offer openings in bad terrain (like forests) which wouldn't otherwise be available. That's precisely the reason Rainbow Waters has paid such attention to high road demolition. The sheer size and weight of the transport vehicles used also make the engineers' jobs one hell of a lot harder when they hit weather like the weather Hanth is encountering in the current snippets.

For those who are interested, here's a link to a very good article on Civil War logistics in general. I highly recommend it.

http://www.transportation.army.mil/Hist ... icle_1.pdf

The standard "6-mule wagon" of the Federal Army could carry perhaps 2,500 hundred pounds of cargo and was good for about 2.5 miles per day cross country in decent going.

That's a lot of weight - 125 short tons.

runsforcelery wrote:
I don't recall saying what and how the engineers were using and doing to repair the roadways.


I know we've touched on this in other threads, but the difference between draft dragons and mules is a heck of a lot more than incremental! A single specially bred draft dragon can haul 30-ton weights over good roads. The standard "6-mule wagon" of the Federal Army could carry perhaps 2,500 hundred pounds of cargo and was good for about 2.5 miles per day cross country in decent going. A dragon can pull around 25 times that much cargo (allowing for the difference in the weight of the wagons themselves) and can manage around 4-5 miles per day cross country as opposed to 40-50 miles on the high roads and perhaps 10-12 miles, max per day on secondary/farm track roads in almost perfect weather. In bad weather, the farm roads basically turn into nothing more than places where the trees are already gone and the ground's fairly flat. In other words, they might as well be cross country travel in a lot of ways with the proviso that their road beds offer openings in bad terrain (like forests) which wouldn't otherwise be available. That's precisely the reason Rainbow Waters has paid such attention to high road demolition. The sheer size and weight of the transport vehicles used also make the engineers' jobs one hell of a lot harder when they hit weather like the weather Hanth is encountering in the current snippets.

For those who are interested, here's a link to a very good article on Civil War logistics in general. I highly recommend it.

http://www.transportation.army.mil/Hist ... icle_1.pdf

Hi RFC,

I guess I made some assumptions when you said that dragons can haul 30-ton weights. That is the maximum weight of a 40 foot container. Federal regulation limits truck weight to 20,000 pounds per axle. Each axle has four nice large wide tires to spread the load on the road. This still adversely affects our freeways.

My assumption was that you spread that 30-tons in multiple wagons, to avoid ripping up the road with iron wheels carrying 30,000 pounds per axle.

James

JRM wrote:SNIP

http://www.transportation.army.mil/Hist ... icle_1.pdf

SNIP/quote]
If you go here, be sure to pack a lunch!!

EdThomas wrote:

JRM wrote:SNIP

http://www.transportation.army.mil/Hist ... icle_1.pdf

SNIP/quote]
If you go here, be sure to pack a lunch!!

Indeed! I figured the implicit statement that went with the URL was "Here is a hay stack, there could be a needle in there somewhere." Or possibly, "You want to get bogged down in detail, I'll show you detail."

James

Hi Weberfan,

I'm quite familiar with PSP or 'Marston Mat', but given it's made out of steel, it will be a rather long while before such will be used on Safehold, especially in the 2 million ton volume made during WW2.

The small team of Seabees you refer to was usually a battalion of several hundred men tasked with building a fighter airfield in 2-4 weeks depending on various factors.

The Seabees in question were laying the PSP or 'Pieced Steel Planking' on top of the prepared load bearing surface they had spent at least a couple of weeks preparing; sometimes under very bad conditions it took monthes to get to that stage; it was extremely rare where the Seabees or anyone else could lay PSP on a sandy beach and have it hold up or last for more than a couple of weeks, and since a 200' X 5000' runway required some 2640 tons of Marston Matting [most fighter runways were 150' X 3000'], it obviously involved quite a bit of prior planning and preparation, with the 48 hour straight marathon of finally laying the PSP being a culmination of both a challenge to set a new construction or assembly record and a celebration of sorts, ie almost everyone released from all other duties to get the job finally done as quickly as possible.

Just laying it on top of an unprepared surface could lead to messes like Foggia, Italy; from the fall of '43 through the winter of'44, where the whole airfield complex had to be rebuilt of much sturdier stuff.

Since even the typical 'small' fighter airfield involved linking 3 of the above runways in a triangle, such an airfield with it its wider taxiways could run to 5,000 tons of PSP, which often took a while to assemble.

That didn't include the tens of thousands of tons of gravel [often by dredging coral reefs] used as a base, that had to found and processed first, so it was not a substitute for gravel.

I'm afraid my only suggestion that survived RFC's 'vicious gang of facts' was adding an extra set of wheels outboard of the originals to spread the current 10 ton load further.

L

WeberFan wrote:Another rapid roadbuilding variant is the perforated steel mat - called the "Marston Mat" that has been used since WWII in various forms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Mat

I remember landing on the SATS airfield at MCAF 29 Palms many years ago - the "expeditionary field" they had out there. A bit slick when wet, but otherwise fine.

At the Wikipedia site, you'll note that a small team of Seabees could build a 200 ft by 5000 ft runway in a couple of days. So a 20-foot-wide road X 50,000-foot long road could be built in that time (OK, a bit shorter due to adverse current conditions).

As to the weight issue, a 15-inch by 10-foot segment weighed only 66 pounds. A LOT less than gravel, and a LOT smoother than corduroy...