OK, lets play with a few numbers.
Prax is roughly the same size as Sartar although the wastes are considerably larger.
The population of Sartar is roughly 200-250 thousand but that's an established agricultural area with several decent cities. For a nomadic population with equivelent quality land you will be talking 10% or less of the population density and Prax is far less fertile and the wastes worse.
So I'd guess a total population of 10,000 animal nomads - maybe 2,000 each of Bison, Impala, Sable and High Llama. Which leaves 2,000 for all the rest.
The Book of Drastic Resolutions (Prax) gives clan sizes for the Impala tribe of 100-300. That seems reasonable so we have about ten clans. Let's say each clan has a bowyer. Assuming he has sufficent materials and knows there is a market for the bows how many could he make? And how many can he work on at once given that he's on the move? Certainly each bow is going to take several weeks allowing for glue to dry etc.
My feeling is that a total production of 100-200 bows per season is going to be the maximum. Of course some of them will be used by the nomads themselves.
>> Then there's the issue of training, you don't train archers quickly
>> and even retraining existing archers to use the new weapon will
>> take some time.
>
>Not if you stick to the standard draw, not the horse draw. I've tried
>switching from longbow to recurve to one of those: it took under 1/2
>hour to decide that I did not want to change back.
OK. But looking up details I'm reminded that the Impala tribe are pygmies which means the design of the bows will be small for normal sized people.
>> >The armour, incidentally, I can only explain by thinking of exotic
>> >hides. Rhino-hide armour, that sort of thing.
>
>> Again how much of this is there going to be? The Rhino tribe is
>> one of the smallest and rhinos take a fair time to grow to maturity.
>
>Dunno. Probably not enough.
On the above figures there are maybe 500 Rhino riders. According to BoDR(P) they don't have herds but one or two rhinos for a family group. That's about 200-300 animals. Maybe twenty adult carcasses per year for making armour. If someone is getting that all together it's going to be a Lunar trader who's selling it to the army. No way is that being shipped to Sartarite rebels - it's just too noticeable an operation.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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