ATKH
Scribe
In my fantasy world, there is a small continent where dragons used to be at the top of the food chain. Humans had tried to settle it a number of times over the past few centuries because of the wealth of natural resources (mainly metal) they expected to find there, but the extremely dangerous conditions together with a long voyage by sea made it impossible to make full use of the land. Instead it became a place to send prisoners; There was one human town and port on the coast, and a mine where those sentenced to hard labour worked, but apart from that the land remained off-limits until a type of rifle heavy enough to kill a dragon with a few shots was introduced.
Modernly equipped troops were quickly sent there by a significant world power, and in a few decades humans had decimated the dragon population, built enough infrastructure to support an army of 300 000 men (i.e. a few roads and bridges for marching and trade, some farms and garrisons that would later become settlements) and created good-quality maps - meaning half of the country was now ready enough for large-scale immigration and exploitation of resources.
Assuming the land is about three quarters the size of Australia, how long could it realistically take for a steady influx of settlers to transform one half of it from a bunch of military outposts into a habitable, productive country with towns, roads and an industrial railway network? The technology would, at the start, resemble that of mid-19th-century Earth, and there would be significant state investments for the construction of railroads and such.
How long would it take to construct 2000 kilometres of railroad if there was no shortage of workers? Or begin making use of a large oil field? I have found it very difficult to determine whether I am looking at a period of years, decades, or perhaps a century.
This is my very first post on the discussion side of this forum, so please feel free to ask me to expand on something in case I've been less than clear with where I'm headed.
Modernly equipped troops were quickly sent there by a significant world power, and in a few decades humans had decimated the dragon population, built enough infrastructure to support an army of 300 000 men (i.e. a few roads and bridges for marching and trade, some farms and garrisons that would later become settlements) and created good-quality maps - meaning half of the country was now ready enough for large-scale immigration and exploitation of resources.
Assuming the land is about three quarters the size of Australia, how long could it realistically take for a steady influx of settlers to transform one half of it from a bunch of military outposts into a habitable, productive country with towns, roads and an industrial railway network? The technology would, at the start, resemble that of mid-19th-century Earth, and there would be significant state investments for the construction of railroads and such.
How long would it take to construct 2000 kilometres of railroad if there was no shortage of workers? Or begin making use of a large oil field? I have found it very difficult to determine whether I am looking at a period of years, decades, or perhaps a century.
This is my very first post on the discussion side of this forum, so please feel free to ask me to expand on something in case I've been less than clear with where I'm headed.