Improvements to Transporting Goods

[Savanik]

I've seen a lot of talk about promoting trade between cities recently, so I thought I'd throw in the following suggestions and comments.

The biggest obstacle to trade is the incredible amount of resources it takes to become viable. A pickup is a fantastic vehicle for a trader - but it requires such a huge investment of resources and manufacturing, there already has to be a fairly well developed industry. Even a small bicycle requires a large amount of fairly hard to get resources!

How about wooden carts? You can construct a simple cart entirely from wood. You'll need some leather for the harness - if you're going to be hauling it by tame animals in the first place, which is a good idea, but not the topic of this thread, and an entirely different level of coding complexity. Wooden cart = new entries in the database. Tame animals = entire new game concept, skills, tasks, possibly even buildings (corrals), etc.

So, wooden carts. Pulled by people. Slow, but large amounts, and low-tech. Thoughts?

Savanik

[Sho]

Domestication, while it's been sort of accepted (I think I've heard Prog. Dept. people dropping hints), will take a lot of work to implement. Best not to count on its happening anytime soon.

A wooden cart pulled by people is an interesting idea. My concept, based loosely on Savanik's:

Wooden cart
Can travel on any type of road.
Materials: 5000 wood
Tools: Hammer
Production time: 5 days
Speed: Walking speed, maybe somewhat less
Passengers: 1
Carryon weight: Very high (say, 50000 grams, or higher)

Obviously the numbers are open to tweaking. I made these up on the spot.

Basically a startup vehicle for an individual or small group that wants to make a living out of trading bulky stuff, like limestone.

[Surly]

We have a thread for suggesting new vehicles...

It makes it much easier for RD to ignore the suggestion if they're all in the same thread...

[SekoETC]

I think you could combine the pull-cart to dragging people on roads. Naturally a pull-cart wouldn't fight back and with wheels it would be moving quite swiftly, but it would be slower to drag with more load. Several people should be able to participate in the dragging and pushing.

Edit: It's not a vehicle if it doesn't have a driver! People don't go inside the cart, they're moving it from the outside. So not a vehicle.

[nitefyre]

Isn't that basically what a riskshaw is?

[Surly]

A rickshaw has a bike of sorts... for the peddling.

A cart would just be pulled...

[Sho]

True, there's no driver in the regular sense. But this is by far the simplest way of implementing a pull-cart (essentially no new coding required), at a very low cost of realism. It's not as if you go inside a bicycle to ride it, either, and nobody has complained about that.

Now, if you want to use the pull-cart concept as a vehicle (heh heh) for all of your other big ideas for Cantr, go ahead. I like those ideas too. But I'm promoting the pull-cart as a way of transporting resources, not as a way to use domesticated animals or a way to drag people on roads. I don't like to look that far ahead.

[SekoETC]

The problem is that how do you stop a second person from going inside if the passenger limit is totally dependant on the weight limit? If you put 50 kilos cargo limit the there'll be three people jumping in. Especially when I suppose this cart to be all wood so it wouldn't have a lock. Ok then again it IS possible to several people ride in a cart. Or to push it. But anyway if we imagine people riding in it then it should be less than walking speed. LOL Imagine if pull carts were really really slow and of course you couldn't ditch it unless you're in a town, so there was like HEY, THAT GUY IS STEALING MY WOODEN CART!! GET HIM!!! And the guy was trying to "ride" away when in fact dragging 50 kilos load behind him, good target practice lol.

[Agar]

As per the Wiki, people weigh 60 kilos, so that "very high" carryon weight of 50 kilos means you can triple your own carrying capacity, but you can't take on passengers

[Sho]

Correct; that was why I proposed that weight. And I did say the cart should move more slowly than an unburdened character on foot.

Most people who build the cart won't be able to lock it. That has to be balanced by the difficulty of stealing a vehicle that moves more slowly than its pursuers.

[Savanik]

How would you lock an open-air cart? Stick a toe-boot on it?

What people would be doing would be jumping on the cart, looting it, then hopping off and running with their stolen goods... which is what you'd expect. These aren't really supposed to be secure transport, in any case.

Savanik

[Surly]

How would you lock a longboat? Or a dinghy?

Cantr doesn't make sense... unfortunately.

[SekoETC]

Bikes and such shouldn't be used as containers, the lock should only be there to keep the vehicle from being taken out of town. But then again you cannot drag people from outside of a vehichle and if some jerk went sitting on your bike and refused to come down even if they couldn't ride off with it, you'd have to kill them. Open boats would be locked to the shore with chains but could also be entered freely. Bigger boats would have lockable cabins and trunks for storage.

[Nick]

Correct; that was why I proposed that weight. And I did say the cart should move more slowly than an unburdened character on foot.

Most people who build the cart won't be able to lock it. That has to be balanced by the difficulty of stealing a vehicle that moves more slowly than its pursuers.

All veichles come premade with locks, unfortunately for realism's sake.

[Sho]

Then theft's not a problem for the cart. Good!