A Lesson in Echonomics · 9:18am May 7th, 2016

Last night I saw a picture of a big tent

And went online trying to find more details about it, how much floor space, was it multi storied etc. I didn't find any of that, though I found a few discussions on it and they annoyed me because they were talking about how much it would cost, how much effort to set up etc.

That is the wrong question.

I don't know how many people this sleeps, but let's suppose 400. The scenario of having this tent then assumes that you have 400 guys going on a camping trip. The question should be: will this tent cost more than 100 times as much as a 4 man tent.

Basic geometry suggests that it wouldn't. If fencing a field of one square mile, you need 4 miles of fence. If there's 100 square miles (10 by 10) you only need 40, meaning you protect each mile for one tenth of the cost. The same applies to making building/ships etc. Now it's probable that the bigger tent would need higher grade materials, and the extended roof is another variable; but generally the more technology grows, the bigger things get and the more efficient they are.

I ran into the same situation almost exactly a year ago, when I spent weeks designing a theoretical floating island/ fortress ship. Almost everyone I suggested it too said it wouldn't work on the basis of cost etc, but this story would be predicated on the idea that you had 100,000 soldiers you wanted to invade overseas with. There have been fleets with that many men before and the question isn't, 'could you afford this', the question is would it be better to build 2,000 longboats with 50 guys each, or one gigantic super-ship with 100 longboats as support craft. It would take more organization and knowledge, but building the super-ship would take less wood than an armada of little ships.

This applies to a lot of other things. Take vaccinations for example: The question shouldn't be 'Are there risks?' There are, but that's not a reason to not do them. The question should be, 'do the risks outweigh the benefits?' which I don't believe they do.

Is there a third option which is better then either: buying 20, 20 man tents; making 200, 500 man ships; is there an alternative supplier of vaccinations?

P.S. Wonderful news fellas. I didn't get to sleep last night until about 5Am and all that while my mind was thinking. My Blog tells me it's been 53 weeks since I first started working on the castle-ship idea and last night I think I finally came up with a plausible way you could attack it; (without inventing gargantuan sea monsters, super-powerful magic, or anything else that might be considered a normal strategy.)