Travel Speeds

[Risa Moontide]

Hey guys!
I wasn't sure where to put this so I figured this would be the best forum to get advice and other thoughts about traveling our world. I've been putting a lot of thought into traveling the world, going from different cities, and the like. Many people don't want to travel because of the seeming impossibility of it all. I figured if I gave a concise attempt to piece together realistic figures and numbers it would aid travel and give people a more realistic idea of how travel could work.

First off was figuring out the different types of travel. The first type would be walking on a flat surface like plains, then hiking through hills, then traveling through mountains. Next would be horses and then caravans. The final type of travel is by sea depending on the boat you're using. I'm going to cover all the types ahead and go over average speeds, obstacles, and the like.

All figures will be based on an average of 8 hours of travel per day. The speed will also be based on the mean, so good days of travel will counteract bad days of travel and vise versa. Therefore everything will be fair and will count enough time for food, setting up camp, breaks, disasters, etc.

Walking - Plains
Walking over relatively flat distances is the easiest out of the bunch. The average human travels at between 4.5 and 5.5 kilometers per hour, or about 3mph. That means the average person should only travel about 24 miles per day.

Hiking - Hills
These stats are based on an average hilly area having a bunch of different types of hills (or sand dunes) that aren't all of uniform height. A good rule of thumb is to add 30 minutes of hiking time for every 1,000 feet of elevation gained. And a hill cannot be greater than 3000 ft before it's considered a mountain. Speed doesn't increase enough going downhill to offshoot how much it decreased going uphill. Overall based on this a person's speed would be decreased to roughly 60% of the normal speed, to an estimate of about 2mp or 16 miles per day.

Travel through Mountains
This travel is definitely the most difficult on the list. Mountainous travel is hazardous, can be steep, and often needs long detours around mountains and the like so straight travel is unlikely. Established routes through mountain passes are more like Hiking - Hills usually, but if a character needs to get through mountains they're already facing chances stacked against them. These stats assume they're not taking even more time to mountain climb and are just worried about finding the quickest safest route. Based on my research including obstacles you should expect to go no faster than 1mp on average, or a measly 8 miles a day.

Horse Riding
Horses are not built for much endurance. If you trained a human and a horse for endurance running a human could easily outlast a horse. Still, if you mix up your types of speeds, walking slower and faster when needed, and let the horse have plenty of breaks on the average you can maintain a good speed of about 7mph for a day of travel. That means riding can let you travel for roughly 56 miles per day.

Caravans
Caravans typically move at a fairly slow pace as not to overwork the animals pulling the carts. They also often have people walking alongside them as guards and travelers, so they rarely travel over walking speed. I'd still expect a caravan to only travel at about 3 mph or 24 miles per day as well.

Caravans did have the advantages of traveling for more than 8 hours a day, swapping out drivers and travelers for other ones, and packing food etc. They still couldn't travel 24 hours a day because of the animals but they still could go for more hours.

Boats - Rowboats/Canoes
First off I'm going to explore river travel. Traveling downstream in a boat with oars is the fastest way to take a rowboat, but that depends on the speed of a river. River speeds are determined by rainfall, the tide, elevation, and other factors. Heavy rain and tide could mean the river shoots up to 7 mph. A river flowing down steep hills could naturally move around 5 mph. A slow gradual river could only move at 1 mph. At average a river would move at around 2.5 mph, and the boat isn't going the full speed. Rowing a boat through a river means you'd probably only average 2mp, or 16 miles per day.

Now when it comes to ocean travel things don't change too much except you won't always have a single direction to travel. Currents and tides have a much bigger effect here as do waves and underwater topography effecting the water flow. Using muscle power and counting for the ocean not always leading you where you want to go, you would only be able to travel at about 1mph, or 8 miles a day.

Boats - Sailboats
Sailboats also have to worry about tides, currents, underwater topography, waves, as well as wind speed and direction. However even accounting for that plus the weather the average sailboat can travel 6.5 knots per hour, or about 7.5 mph. This means traveling by sail boat should average about 60 miles of travel per day.

Also sailboats can also get the benefit for traveling longer than 8 hours per day, especially if there is more than one sailor aboard. They still shouldn't travel at night, however, unless they are traveling open water rather than coastal areas.

Boats - Ships
Ships are the quickest way to travel based on the stats. Ships always have several sailors aboard and their size adds speed. They do have the same concerns as sailboats but even then they average around 10 knots per hour or 11mph. This means you should be able to travel an astonishing 88 miles per day on a ship.

Ships do benefit from extra travel time, especially over open ocean where they don't have to stop.

Overall I think this explores all aspects of travel throughout Mizahar. The stats have all been collected from the internet and I made sure to check every statistic in two places to make sure I had accurate results. Let me know what you think!
Risa

[Zuriel]

Heya, first I would like to say that this is an awesome idea, getting all this information out on the wiki will be extremely useful when completed.

The part about sailing ships caught my eye though, I'm not entirely sure of your numbers in this section, just that the number seemed a little slow. I took a quick look around (once again this was a quick look so maybe I'm missing something).

So, the ship I found was a cargo stocked, 113 year old, English, sailing ship.

For the purpose of this I assumed that most every ship would be well stocked in Mizahar, given they are mostly trade vessels or packed with people. but if this assumption is wrong then I would imagine 10 knots is perfectly reasonable.

However, moving at ~8 knots (~9.2 mph) and travelling most every hour of the day (which as far as I can tell they did), Would mean that in a 24 hour day the ship would travel ~220.8 miles. Now obviously you could take out any amount of hours they didn't travel if you have information which I lack (very much possible). However, even moving only 12 hours a day at 8 knots they would manage ~110.4 miles. I just cant seem to find where the 88m/d comes in, especially if moving at 10, rather than 8 knots.

At 10 knots, I find that the ship would only be moving 7 hours and 39 minutes per day in order to line up with 88m/d.

Now, on a completely separate note, and maybe this is a question for Gillar rather than something I should post on here but:

As a zith, I can fly. This is another form of travel and is present in Inarta eagle riding also, however I will focus on the zith for the time being.

One of the largest bat species on earth is the "Grey-headed Flying-fox". Their average flight speed for long distance travelling is ~26 kph (~16 mph). In a wind tunnel a grey-headed flying-fox maintained a speed of 26 kph for 4 hrs.

Flying eliminates terrain, trees, even the majority of problems with mountains, allowing the practitioner of flight a "beeline" to their destination.

Zith are known to have spread colonies over all of mizahar and with stats anything similar to that this is not surprising in the least, it would be great to see some flying stats for eagle-riders and zith up here.

I reviewed only the ship speed because it seemed off to me (grandfather was a sailor and the numbers didn't match up in my head), it caught my eye and I got a little carried into it so I only skimmed the rest. I will go over the others later if this is well-received and correct.

I love the idea of a speed and travel chart being around as this will make all the difference to travelling PC's, I will be back later with more to say no doubt and I wish you all the best in getting this filled out and published.

[Gossamer]

Hi there.

This project is currently underway already.

http://www.mizahar.com/forums/topic25920.html

Goss