The Travis’ are back with another installment of our series on Warfare. We’ve been analyzing a writer’s perspective on calculating the cost of war, developing some tools and thumbrules you might start with when calculating the cost of war in your story, and seeing how this mundane task can yield helpful ideas for your writing. At the very least, your effort to make your warfare come across as thoughtful and realistic (by your story world’s gauge of consistency) will be appreciated by the discerning uber-fans your serving. Travis C here. Last time we left off with a detailed approach to calculating how much food both human and non-human fighters might consume and began a illustration using those calculations to gauge the financial impact of war in a fictional world. Our purpose wasn’t to delve into all possible fine details, but to give you an example where doing a bit of math can provide some values for you to work from. This week we’re going to dive into another significant expen...
Travis P. here. I'm continuing re-posting this old series with the intent of eventually finishing the entire thing. This week's post is based on my previous post on how much food a combatant needs . This week runs through the numbers as a practical exercise, giving you an example of how, if you ever chose to do so, to calculate what an army needs. My fellow Travis is lead the way for this post: Travis C here. As you saw last post, this topic is huge, and rather than try and combine informational content with illustration, we’re going to split things up for a bit. Travis P introduced us to food supplies over the ages. He covered a spectrum of periods and practices from ancient days till modern times and speculated upon futuristic scenarios in sciences fiction and fantasy environments. This week, I want to build an example calculation using data that he provided along with some other resources. I’ll keep the story going as we discuss varying forms of supply a...