5 ms·

Funny. However, I find some assumptions suspect. Unlike rockets, donkeys can consume fuel en-route by grazing. Armies can also consume fuel by hunting, plunder

• igorkraw 4y ago
  The linked source blog goes into that: - grazing costs time, which increases the total amount of food that must be carried - foraging equally costs time, so foraging more means a slower moving army - but an army can only forage as it passes through terrain, so you need to keep moving, otherwise your army will eat the area into starvation, then die
  • Retric 4y ago
    It’s not quite that simple. Horses can eat much faster than they can digest so a few short breaks can represent a lot of food over a day. Further, horses eat significantly more than people. A 30% slower pace that requires 40% less food per day is a net win on distance but not time.
    • throwawayffffas 4y ago
      The main issue, is that the horses of agricultural societies are bred to a large size, and cannot survive by grazing alone, they need to have grains in their diet.
      • Retric 4y ago
        That’s false. Horses doing heavy work can’t survive on grazing alone, but they are perfectly fine when left alone in good pasture. Thus the phrase “put out to pasture,” old animals where often given something of a retirement where they where left to take care of themselves rather than simply be killed.
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • geysersam 4y ago
          But the horses here will be doing work. Carrying men and supplies. Or is that not heavy enough? Admittedly I know very little about horses.
          • Retric 4y ago
            I don’t know that much about horses but it’s something like: A normal horse left to graze in good pasture can get a calorie surplus per hour. That same horse doing work has a calorie deficit per hour based on how strenuous the labor. A horse can get into a maximum calorie debt before issues happen. Thus a few day of hard labor plowing a field isn’t an issue by its self and having redundant horses is useful. In terms of the Wagon equation, taking a nearly empty wagon back is vastly less strenuous than taking a full one out. It may be that taking several times as long to get back significantly extends the total distance you can move the army from your base. It may also be that running a calorie deficit on the outbound trip and then grazing for days before the return trip is useful. But I doubt any army is would actually try and approach any kind of theoretical maximum as in practice flexibility is needed. Granted that’s for the average horse, where extreme athletic performance means significant extra muscle mass and thus higher caloric needs independent of actual work being done. But the extreme athletic horses are expensive to maintain so likely used by messengers etc not wagons or farmers.
            • MichaelZuo 4y ago
              There may be a small net advantage to grazing and foraging enroute but it certainly wouldn't double the available tonnage transported.
              • watwut 4y ago
                Foraging require enough of density of settlements en route. Cause that is what foraging is, taking food from locals by force. The bigger the army, the more and bigger settlements you need to burn and steal from.
• qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  What about the vorbis strategy of placing supplies in hidden caches ahead of time without a return trip along the route? Imagine that applied to the rocket equation. Stationary fuel tanks attaching to the rocket mid rise..
  • JAA1337 4y ago
  • throwawayffffas 4y ago
    Well that was a strategy indeed but it can only go so far, additionally the same logistics apply to the food you place in the cache, you have to transport it there, the meat of the original article was, that really you are constrained in your movement by the terrains agricultural output, in high production terrain, your population and the enemies population as well will stockpile food for themselves that the army can draw upon, in places where the terrain is not suitable for high intensity agriculture the food available is much less and an army would quickly find itself exhausting all the stockpiles, in a matter of weeks, armies eat a lot of food.
  • gibspaulding 4y ago
    Stationary fuel tanks seem problematic for rockets since your rendezvous would have to happen at such high speeds. You'd either have to decelerate the rocket back to zero or accelerate the fuel to the speed of the rocket.
    • philwelch 4y ago
      Remember that all motion is relative. You can’t model space travel as simply going from point to point. Instead, you transfer from orbit to orbit and have to match velocities wherever you go. Relative to the propellant depot you have to reach zero velocity, but the propellant depot will be orbiting something at a very high speed just like you are. You will likely have to go out of your way somewhat to reach a propellant depot, so you don’t want your propellant depots at the bottom of heavy gravity wells or in hard-to-reach orbits. But it’s still a viable strategy.
• thenthenthen 4y ago
  Im missing another option here, ‘edible supply lines’; the donkeys can be eaten. Only meant as last resort ;)
  • NeoTar 4y ago
    I believe this was the 'official' strategy of some early arctic / antarctic expeditions. Kill the sledge dogs and feed them to the other dogs plus humans.
    • cardiffspaceman 4y ago
      That's also part of a sound, but not vegan, anti-scurvy strategy. Someone should do the first vegan trans-Antarctic trek. But I digress.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    Humans are more resilient than we give them credit for. Compared to other mammals we have a lot of coping mechanisms for injuries that are missing from other species. There's a comedian who does a bit about how humans might be the bad guy in horror movies made by aliens, because we can scar in situations that would kill other animals, and we can run in intervals for far longer than most other mammals. We used them down, and that's probably part of our collaboration with dogs. We're all basically Michael Myers. We just keep coming, and as soon as you stop to rest, bam, there we are again. Point is, hoofed animals tend to get injured in ways that will ultimately kill them. At that point if you have a butcher handy, you can be both humane and efficient, without necessarily being in a starvation situation. We talk about agriculture being a pivot point in human development but nobody ever seems to talk much about the power of soup.
    • gruez 4y ago
      >because we can scar in situations that would kill other animals examples? Humans aren't exactly resilient or fast healers in my mind.
      • 4y ago
• throwawayffffas 4y ago
  The original blog goes into a lot more detail, including the mechanics, logistics and risks of foraging. The solution to getting around the wagon equation is ships, ships could carry tremendous amounts of food, with a minimal crew and thus minimum consumption, only problem is ships are expensive. On donkeys, typically armies used mules and draft horses instead of donkeys, because of behavioral and maximum load reasons, and grazing is not enough for mules and large horses, also on certain seasons there is not enough grass for animals to graze in the terrain either. The original blog has also a piece on nomad logistics, who used significantly smaller horses that can be sustained only by grazing, these armies were able to traverse a lot larger distances, hence the success of the mongol armies.
  • antonymy 4y ago
    >only problem is ships are expensive. Well not the only problem, there's also the fact ships are limited to water deep enough to carry them, so you can't go too far from the coast or navigable rivers. Granted, in Europe, there are lots of navigable rivers that make waterborne logistics fairly simple if you have the boats. Ask the Vikings.
    • samatman 4y ago
      This is mitigated by the fact that rivers are attractive places to live, so the odds that a target of conquest is on a navigable river are fairly high. Gets pretty bleak if this isn't true, and if your foe doesn't have to stay put, much worse. The Chinese tried to scour the horse barbarians of the hinterlands a few times. Didn't go well.
    • dmckeon 4y ago
      In the 1200s the eastern horse-hordes used frozen rivers to speed up their rate of advance and took much of the area west of the Urals by surprise.