Best Way to Travel (Overland)

[Vespers War]

Originally Posted by chico20854

Medieval military leaders discovered the limitations of horses for strategic mobility... again, after a few days from home base the need to move fodder forward takes up all your horses' carrying capacity. Their solution was pillaging, which is an all-too T2k approach to things!

Just yesterday I found an article in Volume 21 of Infantry Journal that gave information on the state of transportation immediately post-WWI.

The escort wagon was pulled by four mules, and the rule of thumb was that a mule should not pull more than its weight on bad roads. Based on Quartermaster Corps specifications, 4 mules should weigh between 4,300 and 4,800 pounds, so that's the rough weight limit to work with. The wagon itself weighed 2,236 pounds with tool box and accessories. The estimated weight of the driver was 150 pounds and his equipment 67 pounds, and 2 days of grain for the mules was 72 pounds, for a total of 2,525 pounds. That left a potential cargo capacity of 1,775 to 2,275 pounds, or 2,025 pounds on average. Likewise, this also implies each mule needs 9 pounds of grain per day.

That's actually a fair bit less than British regulations called for in WW1, which was 12-14 pounds of corn for a draft mule (plus 10-16 pounds of chaff), but an article in the April 1910 Cornell Countryman agrees that a mule got 9 pounds of grain, a horse 12 pounds, and both got 14 pounds of hay. Your average wagon could then carry 225 mule-days or 168 horse-days of grain if that was its only cargo, plus the 8 mule-days already included in the load to supply the mules for 2 days.

In a 1912 test of trucks and wagons going from DC to Atlanta to Indianapolis, the mule-drawn wagons traveled no more than 20 miles per day. Averages were lower, and during WWI 10 miles was considered an attainable number for mule-drawn wagons to haul supplies given the road and weather variables they had to deal with. As long as one can graze the mules and find a steady supply of grain, a wagon can maintain slow but steady progress across the landscape at a walking speed of around 2.5 miles per hour. If the wagon has to carry its own fodder for multiple days, it quickly reduces how much it can haul, whether freight or fodder for mounted units.