Something to consider.

How frequent and reliable are the wind currents? Are they seasonal? How strong can and do they get?

From this you can get things like weather diviners who can more or less accurately predict the currents on a given day.

Ohh wind deviners.  I like that. To me thats an interesting Guild in and increasingly detailed world.

Sail formulas just sounds tedious.  If you want to go that route look for a book on elementry sail navigation.

Me I would just read books on Nautical miltary fiction.  Master and Comander might be a good one.  There is a tedious David Webber serries that starts with Off Armageddon Reef, a super advanced space robot from the past is theaching them to sail better in a couple of those books.

The Brothergood of Wind Deviners.

The Honorable Order of Wheel Wrights.

The Ancient and Honourable Porters Guild

The math can and should be front-loaded, unless you're making a computer simulation.

You can use understanding of what's going on in the physics and its math, combined with real-world examples, and extrapolate and estimate to get typical stats based on size, weight, and rigging, and make tables for them that show, for a variety of typical designs, what speed and/or acceleration to expect for each angle of wind direction relative to the wheels. See for example Avalon Hill's Wooden Ships & Iron Men, where every ship has a maneuver class that tells you what table to use, and you look up the current relative wind direction there to find the max speed, modified for rigging settings and damage.

I wouldn't even go so far. I just want to check if the designs are viable at all, and then estimate the rest.

Apparently they were used a fair amount in China and later theres this from the 1600s

At wind strength 4 (moderate breeze), the cargo wagon goes ~20 km/h, even perpendicular to the wind, and can go slightly upwind wind, too - if empty.
Fully loaded, top speed drops to ~15 km/h, but the wind has to blow diagonally from the back for that. Perpendicular to the wind, speed is around 7 km/h, and going upwind is impossible.

Cool thread!

Was going to make a similar thread but never got around to it. So here seems as good a place as any.

The velocipede struck me as the sort of riding vehicle you might see in some fantasy settings.



Its essentially a foot-powered bike. Made of wood and the sort of thing dwarves or elves might make. Especially dwarves.

And then theres this. Just because its so fantastical that it should be in a fantasy setting.

My PCs were trying to haul their loot, supplies and wounded in a wagon. They were attacked on the road near a frozen lake and their mules were killed. So they rigged up the wagon like a big sled, built sails* and crossed the lake to safety -launching a couple of fireballs at the ice under the giants and winter wolves chasing them. I gave out big XP bonuses for taking the howling winds I mentioned in passing just to describe the wintry weather and surprising me with their ingenuity.

* An extra bonus for the PC who insisted on taking the tapestries even though they were bulky and a pain in the ass to carry, and everyone else wanted to leave them behind.

Sail wagons are cool as fuck and I only wish I'd thought of them way back when.

I really hope the valuable resource they are all delivering at high speeds, and even warranting piracy and boarding actions, is produce or chilled confections. Somehow Mad Max over lettuce and ice cream seems like a thing that needs to happen.
:cool:

Shipping ice was one adventure one of my characters ended up on once. In that case it was a sand-sled style sail ship rather than a wagon. I believe the DM was inspired by the ones from Martian Chronicles. The ice was mined through a gate to the plane of ice and shipped fast to the capitol and some other major cities.

What was it for? I never found out.

Smoothies and ice-cream man. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/01/ancient-ice-houses-of-iran.html

"flying yankee velocipede".  Man oh man.

Quote from: RPGPundit;969496"flying yankee velocipede".  Man oh man.

I guess "Hand Powered Monowheel" was too mundane for the tabloids.

You may find this useful: http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/05/the-physics-of-sailing-how-does.html

TL;DR:  Much of what makes sailing work is unique to the naval medium (water drag, shape of the hull, the keel).  You can't tack in a landship, for instance.  This makes using them for regular trade routes fairly pointless, as you can pretty much only run before a following wind.

Personally I wouldn't bother with that level of physics detail, though.  Once you start looking into vector mechanics and sail positions, it gets harder and harder to ignore the fact that the whole notion is impractical.

One option is catamaran style hulls with knife keels on a very fine silt sea or something.