Practical questions plague me today.
Picture a wagon train consisting of ten wagons. Average four people per wagon. Each wagon is 12' long when unhitched. How do we camp?
The math is easy. Ten 12' wagons gives us a circle that is 120' in circumference and about 38' across. This lets me begin to picture the space. We have forty people who need supper, and one campfire in the center of this isn't going to cut it. I can give them a little more room by putting three feet between each wagon, but that only comes to 47'. This is big enough we can't camp just anywhere--trees, streams, boulders, etc. And we don't want too much space between wagons or wolves can come in. And bugbears.
Anyway, it's supper and sleeping that concern me here. One campfire per wagon? No way we can fit ten campfires into this space and still have room for people. So now we share campfires, which means we share cooks and we share food. You see how the practicalities have implications for social interaction? I can fudge some. Maybe three wagons carry supplies, cutting down on the number of people.
Anyways (plural of anyway), how many camp fires are needed to feed forty people? And yes, I could have added that without the preamble. Prologue. First chapter. ...
Picture a wagon train consisting of ten wagons. Average four people per wagon. Each wagon is 12' long when unhitched. How do we camp?
The math is easy. Ten 12' wagons gives us a circle that is 120' in circumference and about 38' across. This lets me begin to picture the space. We have forty people who need supper, and one campfire in the center of this isn't going to cut it. I can give them a little more room by putting three feet between each wagon, but that only comes to 47'. This is big enough we can't camp just anywhere--trees, streams, boulders, etc. And we don't want too much space between wagons or wolves can come in. And bugbears.
Anyway, it's supper and sleeping that concern me here. One campfire per wagon? No way we can fit ten campfires into this space and still have room for people. So now we share campfires, which means we share cooks and we share food. You see how the practicalities have implications for social interaction? I can fudge some. Maybe three wagons carry supplies, cutting down on the number of people.
Anyways (plural of anyway), how many camp fires are needed to feed forty people? And yes, I could have added that without the preamble. Prologue. First chapter. ...