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The article makes me wonder what the maximum range for a horse would be if carrying its own meals, never grazing, but drinking water along the way as needed. S
by jewel 4y ago
The article makes me wonder what the maximum range for a horse would be if carrying its own meals, never grazing, but drinking water along the way as needed.
Seems like it'd sort of be like the rocket equation, but more forgiving.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoidk if you're joking or what but there was literally on article about exactly this on the front page today.
- gerdesj 4y agoAssume a spherical horse ... OK are we talking a Mustang or a Shire or Clydesdale? Carrying the food or dragging a wagon? I don't know enough about horses but a heavy horse (Shirehorse, Suffolk Punch or Clydesdale in the UK) can drag quite a decent load. Granddad's Clydesdale "Damson" could make a furrow with a plough all day, back in the day - bloody hard work. Ironically, that was in Devon - Scottish horse in Shire land! He got a Ferguson tractor later but they kept the horses as well. I think we would run out of UK for a single horse load unless doing the full Land's End to John o'Groats (or trying to cross the Irish Sea) but a bigger land might need a re-fuel or two.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> I don't know enough about horses but a heavy horse (Shirehorse, Suffolk Punch or Clydesdale in the UK) can drag quite a decent load. A heavy horse also needs to eat a lot more than a normal horse.
- gerdesj 4y ago... but it can also drag a lot more too. Now, can our nag drag enough fodder to do the job? I suggest yes.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoYes, a heavy horse can drag more. But the question here is how far the horse can go on a single load of food. We're purely trying to convert food into work via the horse. And if you assume that the conversion of potential energy stored in the food to actual energy produced by the horse is less than perfectly efficient, then it will always be better to avoid doing work than to try to make up for doing extra work by starting with more food. That would be true even if starting with more food didn't require doing even more extra work to move the extra food. Improvements in strength aren't helpful to this problem; what you need is higher efficiency.
- sleightofmind 4y agore: dragging a decent load My father, born in 1930 in Minnesota, told of watching farmers bringing out a team of horses to help pull stuck tractors out of the springtime mud -- it wasn't only about their not-insignificant strength, but their superior traction. In his teens -- which would have been in the forties, he worked with teams of horses, which seems oddly late in the 20th century, but he did, as did my paternal grandfather. The terms for the various parts of the, to me, very-complicated-looking harnesses were as fresh in his mind in his eighties as they had been in his teens.
- nradov 4y agoA healthy horse just walking (not doing heavy work) can keep going on fat reserves for several days. Just like most other large mammals.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y agoIf the horse is spherical, I'm sure he's got plenty more fat reserves than that!
- csdvrx 4y ago> If the horse is spherical, I'm sure he's got plenty more fat reserves than that! If we assume a spherical horse, we can also assume lack of friction. Then for about 50% of the mountainous part, the horse can just roll downhill not even using any of its precious fat!
- elcomet 4y agoand for flat areas, it just needs the energy for initial acceleration, then it can continue in a uniform rectilinear motion
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
- b112 4y agoIf a man dragged a little cart behind him, and also wore a backpack, he could go months on dense food. Even if you just put two 10kg bags of oats in your backpack, that's going to last. 20kg? Soldiers have that much to carry, and often more, with weight of gun, ammo, rations, bedroll, and more... yet march day long.
- gbronner 4y agoLong distance hikers do this all the time. I think I carried 50# of stuff including food and water made it around 200 miles with leftovers. If I'd been willing to carry more and started out in better shape and was willing to go a bit slower, that distance could have been augmented significantly
- hammock 4y agoA typical rule of thumb for backpacking is 2lb of food a day. With a 15lb base weight and a maximum of say 95 lbs backpack weight, that’s 40 days worth. (Yes I have carried a 95lb pack on 2week mountaineering expeditions)
- jamiek88 4y agoHumans are u uniquely good at covering distance, our only competitors are horses really ‘cos we both sweat effectively. it would be interesting to calculate for a horse. There’s a lot of variables though!
- b112 4y agoIndeed. The fall in Canada, cool sunny days, 5C to 10C, is great for a brisk walk, without loads of sweat. A far cry from 35C, as another option. 35C, you'd almost have to factor in the weight of salt you'd take on a month's trip.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoIf you allow cold weather to help out (no sweating needed), Huskies are really good at covering long distances too.
- whimsicalism 4y agoMore forgiving? Sounds rather morbid to me, at least at the end stages.
- undersuit 4y agoThere's a reality show, Alone, where the contestants compete to see who can survive the longest in the wilderness. One of the strategies is to come in heavy and hope the additional fat you're carrying gives you the runway to beat the people with lighter frames. It's very morbid, contestants are disqualified every season for health reasons when they start starving with no fat reserves.
- stevage 4y agoYeah I really liked the show until I saw the starvation pattern being repeated.
- jlawson 4y agoWell, no amount of weight can make the horse slide backwards and there's no cost to taking more time. So under a simple model, you just want to add so much food that the horse can barely move. If the horse eats 20lbs per day (as noted in the article), say it can barely pull 2000lbs on a good quality cart. So 100 days of food. Then just figure out how far it can go in 100 days. In one day horses can go 80-160km, but they need rest after a few days of this. So say it can do 50km per day sustained and unweighted, 25km at high weight (early in the journey). Split roughly in half into weight/unweighted days, we get a total distance of about 3,750km for a self-powered horse. That's almost Lisbon to Moscow, or almost New York to Seattle.
- Retric 4y agoHorses can pull significantly more than 2,000lbs on good roads, though it’s dependent on how steep the hills are. Horse pulls use sleds rather than carts and break 5,000 lb per horse. Pulling a cart on level ground should allow for almost arbitrary weigh as shown by people pulling trains with their teeth etc. The most extreme version of this historically is horses pulling boats through canals, which could hit 50+ tons of cargo per horse across very long distances.
- jlawson 4y agoGood info! So I guess the answer depends entirely on the precise journey you want the horse to take - specifically the terrain, elevation, surface, and cart wheels/bearings.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- technothrasher 4y ago> never grazing Ha! Good luck. Horses are masters at sneaking a graze wherever and whenever, the instant you stop paying attention.
- Melatonic 4y agoBut what would get farther carrying their own meals - a horse sized duck or a thousand duck sized horses?
- messe 4y agoOf course, horse sized ducks are non-migratory...
- BlueTemplar 4y ago"Tyranny of the wagon equation" ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566 Note how non-steppe horses were too big to subsist on grazing alone ! P.S.: Typically *less* forgiving because it's easier to dump parts of the rocket, especially for a return trip ?
- naniwaduni 4y agoHorses are easier to eat than rocket parts if you can afford them, too.
- closedloop129 4y agoLogistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566 That earlier submission has the data.
- perihelions 4y agoLike the rocket equation, it'd be a logarithmic function with no upper bound (assuming an unlimited starting supply of horses). You start off with a large caravan and gradually jettison horses as the food runs out. Both food and horse count decay exponentially, but they decay together at the same rate, so there's always the correct amount of food for the remainers. The same law applies to global fuel transport: can you export oil halfway around the planet, on a boat that itself runs on oil? There's a rocket equation hidden in that. But the constants are really good (oil is energy-dense; planets are small); so it's not an important law that's ever-present in economics, in the way the rocket equation is ever-present in space. (Was it ever, in history?) I read a short story once about a world where oceans were too large for oil-powered ships to cross. Anyone know which story I'm thinking of? It was an impossibly large planet too vast for humans to comprehend, and we could only just scratch the surface exploring small corners of it. I remember it had nuclear-powered ekranoplans.
- hoseja 4y agoLooks like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Gap
- perihelions 4y agoThanks! That's the one.
- JetAlone 4y agoI like a little too much this morbid idea of a big ball of domesticated horses, passengers and food, slowly cutting loose bits of its horse-o-sphere to reach an absurdly far away destination. The ecological impact of the horses released to fend for themselves would be profound at the outset... But you could just go Mongolian and have the humans make jerky out of and otherwise consume the horses, for extra mileage.
- InitialLastName 4y agoNot just kill them to make jerky, but bring nursing mares along, using them to convert human-inedible plants into milk products. You can also make a small slit and drink their blood for the same effect.
- Archelaos 4y agoBret Devereaux recently blogged about military logistics and gave some figures: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-... He also pointed to Wayne E. Lee's article on grass as a limiting factor in Mongol warfare, which I found very interesting: https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistics-of-grass/ https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistic...
- Maultasche 4y agoI find his writing to be very interesting. I hadn't realize that most types of horses used in Europe had evolved to be large enough to not get enough calories from just eating grass, and needed their food to be supplemented with grain. That was the very first thing I thought of when I read this article about horse bread.
- panick21_ 4y agoThe horse was always evolving. Going into the truly modern wars like the Crimea war (dumb name) the Russians were very impressed with the abilities of British horses. The Brits had really worked on scientific horse breeding and made some really high endurance horses that also reach amazing speeds. If you had those horses in the middle ages your army would be insane.
- golergka 4y ago> Seems like it'd sort of be like the rocket equation, but more forgiving. You're absolutely right: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-... > The problem in a nutshell is that anything available to these armies prior to the advent of the railroad that can carry food, also eats food (except for boats, but rivers and coastlines may well not go where you want to go). We may call this problem the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation’ as a number of readers have noticed the similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation.