Stuart Bailey wrote:Ref keeping Chinese canals in good condition.......rather than dredgers could you not use sluice's and labour teams lead by trained engineers?
Basically drain the water out of a section of the canal and then a 5000 stout lads with shovels (or 4967 stout lads and 33 Jesuits with shovels) dig out all the silt and spread it on local farmers fields. Some how seems a more "Chinese" solution than importing dredgers.
Think this type of solution should be on offer to all players who can build canals and want to keep them in good condition. This would still however make Anglo-Dutch Spoon Dredgers a valuable labour and cost saving which many would still like to obtain:
ie 5,000 labourers @ £3 year = 5,000 recruits @ £15,000 per year
or 20 spoon dredgers = 200 recruits, £10,000 capital cost & £1,000 per year upkeep
But perhaps for Lord Fong etc it could cause problems with the Honourable Guild of dunnykin & dredger diggers if he puts honest Chinese diggers out of work by importing foreign ways!
Jason2 wrote:The Chinese did have a number of methods for desilting their canals, not "just" a dredger along the lines of a spoon dredger but also a couple of rather interesting gadgets that were towed by barges and either scrapped the silt from the bottom of the canal or rolled along the bottom and kept the silt moving to stop it from settling. They also developed an engineering solution that used additional embankments at the bottom of the canal to increase the speed of the current in such a way that actually stopped the silt from settling in the first place. I think it only worked on certain stretches of canals but still seems pretty ingenious.
I had originally just planned to develop spoon dredgers and thought that it wouldn't take too long as, like you said, the Chinese did have dredgers from long before the Glory period. But it has become clear that plan isn't working. An issue had been the authoritative sources for these technologies, at least in English are few and not easily accessible so, to be frank, I was hoping to avoid having to spend the time finding them to give to Richard to (hopefully) get them into the game fairly quickly. So will need to give in and do that now but I have heard of something that I just need to get hold of that might be useful and be an easy resource to give to Richard.
On the limited access to dredgers at the start, I have always suspected it was a bit of an easy in-game way to limit the growth of canals. Glory is a bit before the canal building mania so if you limit who has the technology to maintain them, you can (in theory) discourage players from building them straight away?
I can see the point about serious canal building being outside the LGDR period, but there are plenty of examples of large scale canals serving particular waterways outside of England/UDP, e.g. the French Canal du Midi, and the Chinese Grand Canal. So for France and China to be denied the dredger technology to maintain canals is an historical anomaly. As Venice (in the early days of G9) I did start to repair the Corinth Canal which is another obvious improvement - nations have been digging canals since the earliest times and must have had the technology to maintain them. At the end of the day a canal is simply a ditch so there would have been low tech solutions either involving manpower (as Stuart suggests), or simple machine type technologies which could be applied. Since I've never played UDP (and am never likely to) I can't be sure, but I imagine that the first turn of every new LGDR game, the UDP player is inundated with requests for dredgers.
Perhaps another compromise would be to allow every player to build canals up to level C, but only get higher if they have dredger technology? It would be assumed that poor relief could cover maintenance of canals as well as roads?
Just occurs ... question for Jason2 - since all Chinese numbers are big, do you make a payment for poor relief in Kwantung and how do government running costs compare to western positions? Are the provinces expected to keep the Emperor in the style to which he would like to be accustomed?