From: Steve Lieb <steve_at_necadon.com>
> > >I can't believe that somebody on foot is swifter than somebody on horse
> > >(even without remounts). Can it be that here movement on paved ways is
> > >compared against movement in rugged terrain?
> >
> > No. The question was not about speed but about stamina, or rather
> > the energy efficiency of bipedalism over quadrupedalism. Although
> > horses are definitely faster than humans, they cannot travel as far
> > per day and soon the human can overtake them.
>
> I'd be interested in a citation for this factoid. Everything I've seen
> tends to suggest that this isn't the case - the Tevis cup has horses
> finishing 100 miles in roughly 15 hours IIRC "in good condition to continue"
> I think is even part of the charter, but I may be wrong about that.
>
> The Sri Chinmoy (I think this is some foreign tongue for "ungodly long" :)
> Races are ultra-endurance races, where people are running roughly 60 miles
> per day for 50 days or so.
>
> So while these aren't apples to apples comparisons, it just seems that this
> might suggest that horses are roughly 1.5 times "better" even on a macro
> scale, as well as being faster.
>
Since I first came up with this question, I'm not the one to answer it.
But:
I can cite a book (unfortunately in German), that says that Mongol
messengers have taken about 250 km per day (probably with
remount-stations, so this helps nothing).
And I'm fairly sure that the romans were renowned for their long-trained
ability to force-march 50 km with equipment on acceptable terrain.
How about some of the people who work with horses (as far as I read in
this digest). Do horses trot faster than men or roughly the same or are
they slower? Since simple walking should be roughly the same effort for
both, this could give a clue of a ratio.
The opinion of Peter suggest, that the values in the RQ-Rules are false.
While I don't want to upset Peter, I'd also like to see some evidence
before changing these.
Cheers,
Andreas
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #539