Road structure and representation...

[Ascension]

Whatever you decide just make sure that you don't let the drunken orcs build the roads or else they will be all over the place

[Juggernaut1981]

Juggernaut1981,
Nice idea! Unfortunately Rock to Mud didn't make the cut to 4e but there's no reason it or something similar couldn't have been used by the engineering teams who built the roads.

Surfarcher:
Just one more reason why I think 4E = Epic Fail. (Or at least the bare minimum... not D&D anymore, just like D&D is not tabletop wargaming).

[nill]

Hi!
The reason of avoiding straight parts of the road are that driving on the straight road is actually more tiring for driver. The driver's concentration and focus are harder to achieve and with today's speeds, accidents are more often.
That's what when designing roads there's a limit in length of straight parts and it is actually preferred to directly connect two curves (with clothoid transition curve or similar).

Since in ancient times there weren't cars or other fast means of transport, there wasn't reason not create straight roads where possible.

[waldronate]

My observation on roads is that it's a tradeoff between energy and time. Classical roads tend to follow the path of least work*time between two locations. That means that they don't go up steep slopes or across rivers unless they absolutely have to and will prefer straightish segments if possible. If your culture values time more than work then roads will invest lots of work in making roads that take less time to traverse (good pavement, straight segments, architecture that bypasses slow areas with bridges and road cuts, etc.) As the engineering capabilities of the civilization become more advenced, road networks get faster until some inflection point. When things get "fast enough" and folks start whining about "envionrmental issues" or there is a major technological shift such as instant transport devices then I would expect the road networks to stagnate. In a highly-advanced civilization there might be minimal road networks purely for the sake of entertainment.

One of the reasons that the interstates in the US are more straight than curved is (if I recall correctly) a requirement that one mile out of every three be straight so that they can serve as runways in time of war. The US interstates were designed by the military and for the military as infrastructure in case of war. Merchants then used them to reduce time to market and to destroy regional American culture. The same sort of thing happened in Roman times with the extension of the Roman road network.

[RobA]

This has turned into an interesting discussion on evolution of transportation systems. A fellow engineer has often told me that if there were no pre-existing paved roads and the question of developing large scale local and distance goods and person transport, no same person would come up with the idea of paving over millions of square km's in flat smooth surfaces so that a generic 3 box wheeled device could travel on it. The three boxes being a box to hold motive power, a box to hold people, an a box to hold cargo, usually arranged in that linear order, with the size ratios depending on the actual function.

Bit of a side track here, but I would think for a future/alien/alternate history world, roads might just not have happened, or (as Waldonrate stated) survived.

-Rob A>

[icosahedron]

This has turned into an interesting discussion on evolution of transportation systems. A fellow engineer has often told me that if there were no pre-existing paved roads and the question of developing large scale local and distance goods and person transport, no same person would come up with the idea of paving over millions of square km's in flat smooth surfaces so that a generic 3 box wheeled device could travel on it. The three boxes being a box to hold motive power, a box to hold people, an a box to hold cargo, usually arranged in that linear order, with the size ratios depending on the actual function.

Bit of a side track here, but I would think for a future/alien/alternate history world, roads might just not have happened, or (as Waldonrate stated) survived.

-Rob A>

I'm curious, what does your friend propose as an alternative?

[Juggernaut1981]

What are the other two main forms of human transport: Rail & Shipping. Basically imagine a world where there was light, medium and heavy rail dominating the landscape. Buses would not exist, they'd have been replaced with light rail. Commuters would use medium rail systems and all cargo would be transported by a heavy rail network.

Goods would probably get transported around at the final point by either human power, animal power, or by some kind of over-glorified forklift.

Then of course, that reveals little else except my general belief in public transport being superior to private transport.

[gilgamec]

What are the other two main forms of human transport: Rail & Shipping. Basically imagine a world where there was light, medium and heavy rail dominating the landscape. Buses would not exist, they'd have been replaced with light rail. Commuters would use medium rail systems and all cargo would be transported by a heavy rail network.

OK, that seems reasonable, up to this point:

Goods would probably get transported around at the final point by either human power, animal power, or by some kind of over-glorified forklift.

I don't buy this. I see that the amount of effort needed to transport goods at the endpoints of the system depends on how close they are to the final destination. But that's not going to be so close! Look at the extreme case: a rail spur in everyone's backyard. Can you imagine the logistical nightmare of a train stopping every couple of houses to pick up or drop off cargo? (Plus, you've essentially recreated the problem, with iron rails instead of asphalt.)

It seems more likely to me that the stops will be more widely distributed: at the inside, maybe every few blocks in an urban area? In that case, I pity the human power that has to deliver my new fridge a block or two from the nearest station! (Let alone deliver hundreds of pounds of fruit daily to the local greengrocer, or make any of a thousand different large commercial deliveries.) And a society at the technological level of our own isn't going to use wagons pulled by draught animals for that kind of thing; they're messy, expensive to keep up, and rightly obsolete. As for an "over-glorified forklift", I think you're nearly there: the phrase you're looking for, though, is probably closer to "light cargo truck".

We've been over-exposed to the bad things about automobiles for so long that we tend to forget that they're the best solution to a whole raft of problems; more flexible than rail, faster and more powerful than bicycles, much cleaner than animals (small quantities of diesel fumes vs. great wads of dung dropped sporadically down the street). And while I think that, if the rail system was flexible (and cheap!) enough, it's quite possible that automobiles wouldn't ever move out of light commercial roles, I find it hard to buy that they would never be used. (I bet they'd also find a role in transportation to and from isolated areas that are worth a gravel road but not a rail line.)

[Juggernaut1981]

Gilgamec> I'd be guessing you've never visited a non-first world nation. I've been to a number of places where fridges and large goods are delivered short distances (less than 1 or 2km) by people-power. China is a really good case in point.

The only thing that really facilitates modern personal transport is oil. If we hadn't really developed oil to run vehicles, we'd probably not be driving cars at all.

This was all based on a thought experiment of "What happens if nobody really designed a car...?"

Conclusion: Rail becomes more "graduated", people transport goods around by a combination of rail, hand vehicles (carts, etc), bicycle-based devices and animal power.

To give you the delivery cycle of white goods, since they seem to be an issue of note.

"Westinghouse makes a Fridge in (Insert Town A) and loads it into a cargo carriage sitting on rails outside their factory. Their factory is like almost every other and has a rail-line immediately behind it.

The (Insert Rail Company Here) sends an engine to collect the various goods along the rail line behind the Westinghouse Factory that are to be delivered to (Metropolis B). Heavy rail transports the white goods, along with numerous other goods, to (Metropolis B).

At (Metropolis B), a number of haulage companies have warehouses immediately next to the rail line and unload into their warehouses from the cargo train. The train leaves.

Hand-based pallette jacks and hydraulic forklifts move and store the goods until they are distributed to the next step in the chain. In particular, the Westinghouse Goods are stored for shipment tomorrow.

The Westinghouse Goods are then moved from the warehouse out onto a hand-operated hydraulic cart, allowing the goods to be easily placed on with hand-operated vehicles. This if fine since the store selling this shipment is only a few blocks away.

Another shipment of Westinghouse Goods needs to be transported roughly 4km away. These get placed on the back of a bicycle-powered cart, like an over glorified goods rickshaw. Also loaded is a hydraulic-hand-palette-jack. The cart will be lowered down and the goods removed from the back along a gangway into the store. As the Westinghouse delivery is coming in, some of the store's delivery staff are leaving on another bicycle-powered cart to deliver what appears to be a washing machine, an armchair and a study desk."

[Juggernaut1981]

From the semi modern era (post industrial revolution, and post development of working steam engines) RAIL is the major military transport tool for all resources that can't move a decent speed under their own power. Most infantry movements were made during WWII by a combination of large trucks and heavy rail. The Germans transported the majority of semi-mobile artiller via rail, significant amounts of goods and more. Most of the time things were only transported by road after they'd been transported by rail to a major hub and then distributed.

RE: 3.xE D&D. I was a 2nd-Ed player. I loved the streamlined nature of the 3.xEditions, but the problem for me about 4E is the way that it seriously feels like there is no "risk of death/failure" in the system. Heroes need to have the chance for massive catastrophic failure, or they are nothing but "corrective devices within the system" (like Neo is intended to be in the Matrix, a self correcting fault that restores the world to order).