I’m taking a break from the long-running series Travis Chapman and I are doing on the Speculative Fiction Writers Guide to War. It’s interesting to note though that he and I both work with the military on a continuing basis, including military members trained for combat, though neither of us work directly with the infantry troops most people usually think of when the subject of war comes up.

It’s my interactions with military members that in fact inspires this week’s post. Nothing I have to say here relates to fiction at all, or is speculative–other than me speculating on human nature. All of what follows below is based on my personal thoughts and observations, especially observations I’ve made in the military.

You see, military members on average are younger than the populace at large. I’m getting to be quite old for the service–and I think I observe differences between how the people I work with now act versus those I worked with when I first enlisted in the Army (which was, by the way, 1989).

I think I need to say up front that I see two general tendencies on how to see the generations younger than my own. The first tendency, coming from people who deeply believe in social progress, sees younger people as more open-minded, more tolerant, as making steady social progress over the past, as “woke,” or in short, as morally better than the past. (Notleia, who regularly comments on Speculative Faith posts, probably is a fair representation of this group.)

The second general tendency is to see that society is going downhill. To see the current generation as full of vices that the past didn’t suffer from. According to the people who hold this view, younger generations are more obsessed with their own pleasure in this view, tolerant only with those who agree with them, too thin-skinned, too “snowflake.” It’s usually older men who are the most open at expressing this point of view, guys like Mike Duran, also a regular contributor to Speculative Faith. (Notleia might be eager to add older white men here, but I think anybody who believes that hasn’t had enough conversations with older Black and Hispanic and other ethnicity men.)

My very use of the term “generation snowflake” implies I’m with Mike and the other older guys who we might fairly call “crusty,” who gripe about the youth. But I want to say up front, “No, not really.” I in fact increasingly see a sort of Law of Conservation of Evil in play in society–like how energy in a closed system neither increases or decreases but simply changes form, it seems to me evil in societies actually has a tendency to neither increase nor decrease, but simply to change form. (Though I would also say our society is not really a closed system and it is possible to add evil to the overall mix, even though it’s not easy…but that observation moves away from my point here…)

I explain this to say that I’m not with either general tendency on how to see youth. I’m not predisposed to see people younger than me (Millennials plus Generation Y people or whatever you wish to call them) in a negative light–nor in a positive one. My first thought is to notice how they are different from me, without assuming such differences are good or bad.

Differences in the military as I see it between my generation and the past are pretty striking. In the old days, military culture embraced a lot of consumption of alcohol. As someone who out of personal conviction does not drink alcohol at all, it used to be rather difficult to avoid military social gatherings without drinking. Oh, you could avoid drinking, but some people would always treat an abstainer with contempt. That’s not really an issue now.

Old-school military culture also engaged in quite a lot of cussing. I think military culture cusses somewhat less now–but I’d say the choice of curse words have changed. “G-d d-mn” and “J-sus” as curse words used to be extremely common. Now the cuss word of choice stems from all the multitude of variants of the F word. Note this change has accompanied a military that increasingly less religious (as judged by how few people attend chapel services now) and more marked by sexual liaisons between military members (yeah, that didn’t happen much in the old, mostly male, overtly hetero military of the past). Which is rather ironic. The past military, which believed in God more, profaned his name more, whereas the present military, which believes in sex more, uses a word referencing sex as their go-to profane word.

One thing though that I especially notice is that military culture in the United States very much believed in overt confrontation. It was common to have a sergeant yell at a soldier in front of everybody–and this still happens, but far less. Sure, this kind of open confrontation usually went from senior members downhill to juniors, but it was also considered normal for peers to take peers aside and give direct advice about what you should and should not do. Even subordinates could and did directly confront superiors under certain controlled situations.

I’m finding–and this is what really inspires this post–that people younger than me in the military reflect the society as a whole in that they are much less likely to confront someone. Which at first may seem like a more pleasant environment to work it–a whole lot less yelling is going on, that’s for certain. But my “Law of Conservation of Evil” is at play–people are not necessarily nicer or kinder or actually like other people more. They just deal with disagreement or problems differently.

So people today are more likely to punish someone who is perceived to have done wrong by denying a person access to a service or by refusing to speak to a person than by a face-to-face confrontation. And people are more likely to talk about someone rather than to someone.

I can’t help but think social media affects this kind of reaction. Having a problem with someone online? Just block or unfriend. Or maintain as a friend, but “unfollow” so someone you don’t actually tell is not really a friend of yours is someone you never want to hear from. These tools make it easy to isolate yourself from social criticism if you choose to use them. And to surround yourself with a bubble of people who agree with you–and it’s this tendency to isolate self from criticism that attracts my use of the term “generation snowflake.” People can certain seem too sensitive to criticism from my point of view. Yet please understand the whole context of what I’m saying–I do not believe generations younger than mine are inherently worse people than my generation. Even if they are in some ways more sensitive.

On the other hand, speaking of sensitivity, I should note that the current generation can at times be hyper-aggressive under specific circumstances. Instead of yelling in public where a person might be criticized for behavior, it’s possible to adopt a pseudonym like “Sandy Balz” or something, where it’s possible to attack, attack, attack, without anyone knowing who is doing it. The Internet troll is the flip side of the technological liberty expressed in a person who isolates himself or herself from everyone who disagrees with him or her.

People directly confront less, yet still deal with people they don’t like. How? Usually by means of exclusion of some kind, often permanent exclusion. Such a system encourages being unforgiving, encourages refusing to see others as being capable of change, and even goes in the direction of shutting out nuance of meaning, since social exclusion can and often does take place before you even know what other people really mean by what they’re saying.

Note I’m not saying it’s always better to yell at people. No, that culture was toxic in many ways. But current culture is also toxic, just in different ways. The way I’ve phrased this brings to mind the commonly used modern term “toxic masculinity.” The thing is, I’m not disagreeing that many aspects of masculinity have been toxic–yet by attacking these old attitudes, what are we (as an overall society) replacing these values of the past with? Looks to me like a lot of it is non-masculine toxicity.

By the way, I’m glad to have a military that is more accepting of what we might consider a female point of view–yet that doesn’t in and of itself make the military more effective or morally better. Not automatically. Yes, sexual assault and harassment is much more frowned on, yet “hooking up,” which includes an inherent devaluing of commitment and truthfulness, is on the rise. Evil in a society changes forms, so it’s awfully hard to get rid of, even when people are trying to enact positive change. (It seems to literally take a miracle of God for someone to actually put aside personal evil…)

On the single issue of confronting others, does the Bible and Christian tradition offer any guidelines? Yes, it does. With emphasis on how to treat other believers (but applicable elsewhere), we are to look at individuals as individuals and give a person a chance at reconciliation according to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18:15-17. If the person refuses, then you take a second person. Then if the person refuses again, you bring in a group to help. And only if a person refuses to deal with an issue three times do you adopt social exclusion. (Note I would say Christ’s command is to be a general rule and needs to be applied with wisdom, meaning sometime a private confrontation is a bad idea–but only on occasion, only rarely is that true.)

Let’s observe that yelling at someone in front of everyone, like the old-school military did, was not Christ’s way. But neither is the new-school means of social punishment by exclusion without confrontation Christ’s way.

“Narrow is the way that leads to life and there are few who find it,” in Matthew 7 expresses more in my mind than just a relative few finding salvation through Christ, though that is true. It also means the world picks the broad way that leads to destruction–the world does everything wrong in God’s eyes. And the world didn’t just start doing that recently–it’s always been true and still is, even though in new and different ways.

Yet Christ calls on us to walk a different path. He meant us to stand up against the evils of the past–and he also calls on so-called “generation snowflake” to stand against the evils of the present. We are not promised that everyone will agree with us, or that life will become pleasant and easy if we chose to do what is right no matter what. Yet we are still called to a higher moral calling, whatever the society around us is doing.

In that way, nothing has changed at all.

I recently finished season one of National Geographic’s scifi drama Mars, now streaming on Netflix. Part modern-day Elon Musk documentary, part near-future hopefulness, 100% marketing, Mars is about as realistic as a scifi show can get, to its credit and its detriment. Comparisons to the blockbuster movie The Martian are inevitable, but unlike Matt Damon’s gee-shucks-I’m-going-to-science-the-s***-out-of-this American hero character, the cast of Mars play everything totally straight-faced, and the emotional and psychological toll of extra-planetary travel results in unforeseen and sometimes tragic consequences.

Image copyright National Geographic

If you’ve read my articles before, you probably know that I’m quite cynical about space travel as a whole. I don’t believe humankind will ever leave Earth and establish a colony on another world. I don’t believe we will ever journey to the stars. The Earth is our home and always will be, even after Christ’s return. Part of my cynicism is rooted in the Bible, which places such keen emphasis on Earth as humanity’s first and final destination, but I also find the desperation to leave Earth and make a new home for ourselves to be fatally humanistic, like we’re just not just leaving pollution and poverty and disease behind, but we’re also running away from God and religion and seeking to make a New World for ourselves, all to ourselves. I gladly applaud the demise of any such endeavors.

But what if we were to make a break for it and leave this rock for another? Would God be invited along for the ride?

The scientific community is largely atheistic, and it stands to reason that the people who would make such an adventure possible would have little room for God in their lives. But there would also likely be many who would be religious. After all, most of humanity believes in some form of deity. It would be callous for those seeking to make a new start for humanity to insist that one of the core elements of human existence be left behind.

So what place would religion have on a new world? Ships, jails, universities, hospitals, virtually every institution aside from banks and businesses have traditionally had priests, chaplains, monks, etc. I would bet that any space-faring project would be forced to bring along religious leaders of some sort. The scientists would probably grumble and complain but the governments sponsoring such a project would need to appease its taxpaying citizenry, who would probably not be thrilled to send a godless exploration party into the heavens. There would certainly be tension between those who would seek to minimize the presence of religion on the voyage, such as selecting atheistic or agnostic crew members, and those who would insist that God be brought along, in some form or fashion, since He/She/It/They are responsible for bringing humanity this far. Plus, think of the PR opportunity: a Muslim imam, a Jewish rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a Hindu guru, a Baptist preacher, and a Catholic priest lifting off together to bring God to the stars.

Could the world’s religions coexist in the stars?

But what use would God be on a cold and hostile world? Would people really take time to pray and read their Bibles while they’re trying to stay alive on a barren and hostile world? Or would those ancient notions of a higher power finally be put to rest when people realize that they don’t need God to achieve their dreams for humanity? After all, God didn’t build the rockets that brought them to this new world. God didn’t calculate fuel ranges and radiation spikes and atmospheric entry velocities. These intrepid explorers got to this new world and built this new home through grit and sweat and sacrifice and intelligence. Why would they need God anymore?

Only a fool would think such thoughts (Psalms 14:1). The One True God rules the heavens and the Earth (Job 38). All things were created for Him, by Him, and rely on Him for continued existence (Col. 1:16-17). God does not dwell on Earth. His power and glory and dominion are just as strong on the farthest moon of the farthest planet orbiting the farthest star in the universe as they are in a church on Sunday morning.

It doesn’t matter if we bring God along with us or not. He’s already there.

Over the weekend, Lorehaven Magazine closed its first book giveaway for a copy of Thomas Locke’s Enclave.

The winner: Esther LoPresto!

Our friends at Revell Books will send our winner a copy of Thomas Locke’s novel Enclave.

From Lorehaven Magazine‘s featured review:

People like to complain that the United States is doomed to collapse. But who’s doing anything to plan recovery for the post-post-apocalypse?

Enter Kevin and Caleb from Thomas Locke’s novel Enclave. They’re two normal yet virtuous young men from the former nation. Several generations ago America fell into financial ruin. Now in the South, life has taken a frontier turn. Corrupt mayors rule the bigger cities called enclaves. What’s left of the federal government is off hunting down super-gifted people. These come from rumored genetic testing and are called “specials” or “adepts.”

Think Louis L’amour meets The Hunger Games–lite with a sprinkle of X-Men.

Explore the full review in our recent issue. As always, it’s free to subscribe.

Meanwhile . . .

You can explore Lorehaven Magazine’s debut issue right now. For this one, you don’t even need to get a free subscription.

Also coming up this year:

• Next month, when the spring 2019 issue releases, we’ll give away a copy of Tosca Lee’s newest release, The Line Between. (I personally just finished this novel. You definitely want this novel.)
• I’ll be helping Lorehaven and our friends at Realm Makers at the Realm Makers Bookstore, March 7–9 at the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, Texas. If you’re there, look for Realm Makers in booth spaces 906–908. You can also meet novelist Gillian Bronte Adams, who will sign copies of her Songkeeper Chronicles series.
• Lorehaven will showcase the magazine with all these great book reviews, April 11–13 at the Teach Them Diligently conference in Waco, Texas.
• This July, we’ll return to the Realm Makers conference, July 18–20 in St. Louis, Missouri.
• Issues 5 through 8, in March, June, September, and December this year.

Lorehaven serves Christian fans by finding biblical truth in fantastic stories. Book clubs, free webzines, and a web-based community offer flash reviews, articles, and news about Christian fantasy, science fiction, and other fantastical genres.

Further up and further in!

Today in the US we are celebrating Presidents’ Day, so there will not be a new article posted here. However, I hope this occasion gives our visitors the opportunity to read or re-read articles from our archives. The past posts are sorted in multiple ways: by category, by date, by most popular. You can even read articles by a particular author if you click on the author’s name. Past articles will appear below the author bio.

I hope you enjoy this chance to browse various articles of interest from the archives—ones you may have missed and ones you want to read again—as well as other features Spec Faith has to offer, including the library.

Travis P here. In spite of the original date of this post, nothing we say has any direct connection to Valentine’s Day or romance (sorry!). Instead we’re continuing on with providing you a set of numbers you can use, if you ever chose to do so, in order to calculate what an army needs. My fellow Travis is leading the way this week:

Travis C here. As you saw last week, this topic is huge, and rather than try and combine informational content with illustration, we’re going to split things up for a bit. Travis P introduced us to food supplies over the ages. He covered a spectrum of periods and practices from ancient days till modern times and speculated upon futuristic scenarios in sciences fiction and fantasy environments.

This week, I want to build an example calculation using data that he provided along with some other resources. I’ll keep the story going as we discuss varying forms of supply and support, capital costs, and other cost-of-war-related themes. This post will accomplish two purposes: first, to give you a story context and second, to develop a relative cost estimate based on Travis P’s food post last week and how that might influence a story.

My entering assumptions:

Fantasy worlds are often modeled after the Middle Ages as we perceive them, ranging from the Dark Ages through the High Middle Ages. Because of the interesting data available for this time period, I used the time of the Hundred Year’s War, the 1415’s specifically. Several factors impact these calculations that don’t necessarily “scale,” but it was a place to start from. (Note that futuristic science fiction story worlds would be better modeled based on the needs of armies from our own times.)

Morning of the Battle of Agincourt, 25 October 1415, painted by Sir John Gilbert in the 19th century

For medieval warfare, two types of activity dominate: putting armies in the field, and castle warfare (i.e., occupation politics). For castle warfare, we have both a defensive mode, building castles to preserve or hold a condition, and an offensive mode where castles are used as a strong base of operations from which to launch expeditions. We’ll start with fielding an army.

The purpose of this exercise is to develop enough information about the logistics of an activity in warfare so my story can be told without the reader assuming unbelievable events and to see if the logistics of a war can be used to develop interesting plot points, tension, and conflict. This exercise might be a starting place if I were to write a military fantasy, but as we’ll see, this will be insufficient to satisfy the superfan of that genre.

When we get to it, we’ll base our currency off the English system and maintain similar relative values to the 1400’s:
1 pound (£1) = 20 shillings (20s)
1 crown = 5 shillings (5s)
1 shilling = 12 pence (12d for denarius)

Scenario: Lady Katie and the Mad King Crabcakes

The Queen of New Landia, the Lady Katie, is in trouble. The neighboring realm of Old Seaside has made a claim on the throne of her realm and rallied their banners to wage war against her own baronesses and herself. She has firm control of lands surrounding the capital city, Awesomeness, but her border with Old Seaside is relatively unprotected and vaguely defined by a forest. Wide rivers defend her remaining borders.

Rumors from her spies indicate the Mad King Crabcakes can field an army of 500 horse, 3000 foot, and 2000 archers plus attendants and that he plans to launch a major campaign within a year while testing New Landia’s defenses in the meantime. The strength of King Crabcakes’ forces drops significantly away from his stronghold on the coast, but there are at least 6 minor and 3 major fortifications between her border and King Crabcakes’ stronghold.

Clearly there’s a lot left missing, but let’s go with this until we need to create more. Lady Katie must face a hard choice to begin with: does she meet the Mad King in the field, or does she put up a strong defense through building or capturing castles? Either method will cost her time and money and she’s limited in both. She gathers her advisers to assess the situation. For this post, we will only look at the first of her options.

Fielding an Army

Like all good rulers, noble Lady Katie knows her baronesses and the condition of their lands. Clearly, Lady Katie needs to draw forces if she meets Crabcakes in the field. Her advisers suggest she wants at least a 10% greater force to assure victory, so she’s trying to field 550 horse, 3300 foot, and 2200 archers. Plus all the support services necessary to remain afield for no less than 6 months (we’ll assume the fighting season lasts 6 months and then, by traditional obligation, she allows vassals to return home, necessitating the length of the campaign.) We’ll exercise our endothermic assumptions by fielding a dozen sapient war wolves, and to further challenge our ectothermic assumptions, she gains access to a dragon to lock up her chances.

I think we’ll delve into this in future posts, but let’s make a couple of assumptions to get us an army to put in the field, and some conditions she and her advisers will consider when calculating the cost of food:

1) When we say 550 horse, we’ll assume 400 knights and 150 skirmishing-capable riders (for pickets, scouts, messengers, and skirmishing duties.) Each knight has at least two attendants (squire/pages) in the field, and three horses (a warhorse, a riding horse, and a pack horse). At this point, we’ll assume the attendants will not have their own mounts. The skirmishing force each require two horses for their duties.

Total knights: 400
Total attendants for the knights: 800
Total skirmishers: 150
Total number of horses: 1500 (we’ll un-conservatively assume a horse is a horse, of course. That’s not true, as a charger’s needs will vary compared to palfreys, coursers, and pack animals.)

Lady Katie gets these through her baronesses as a feudal obligation. We’ll discuss their cost later.

2) The 3300 foot come from various sources. Some are her standing forces that occupy her lands’ castles and fortifications, which she draws down to provide soldiers for the army (let’s assume 300 of them). 2000 will come from feudal obligations from her baronesses’ lands. Another 1000 will be paid soldiers from other lands performing as mercenaries. She’ll pay for these via scuttage that we’ll discuss when we talk wages. While the majority of these soldiers will travel afoot, some portion do have horses to be used for their unit’s obligations. Let’s assume that’s 5% of the non-garrison force.

Total foot soldiers: 3300 (1000 mercenaries)
Total number of horses: 150

3) The 2200 archers come from her land’s feudal obligations as well, as every person is expected to shoot on Sundays by tradition. Half of this force have horses (one per soldier) to enable rapid deployment across the battle space, the remainder are afoot.

Total archers: 2200
Total number of horses: 1100

So just the regular fighting forces, not logistics support or engineers or anything else (other than squires), we end up with:

Total soldiers to feed: 6850
Total horses to feed: 2750

How much food?

Let’s look at the horses first. We may revisit this topic, and I don’t intend to provide a rigorous analysis of horse use in combat at this point, but according to a World War I source on horse care, I’ll use a median value of 11 lbs of oats and 10 lbs of fodder for each horse every day (irrespective of type; clearly an incorrect assumption, but sufficient for now).

2750 horse x 11 lbs oats = 30,250 lbs per day
2750 horse x 10 lbs fodder = 27,500 lbs per day

At 2500 lbs per wagon drawn by a brace of oxen, that’s about 12 wagons a day for oats, and 11 for fodder if it’s not available. Let’s assume she wants to have the horses forage for fodder to the maximum extent possible to extend her supplies. If I use a simple assumption that we can look at in more detail later that an acre of grass can produce 2000 lbs of fodder in a year, with a 9 month season it can be relied on for fodder, we can consume about 7.5 lbs per day per acre without leaving the land decimated. Lady Katie’s horses could consume as much as 3700 acres per day (about 5.8 square miles per day). Historical accounts suggest swaths of up to 10 miles wide being destroyed by a passing army, and now we can understand why.

Since in today’s market, wheat is about twice as expensive as oats, I’m using this reference to estimate my cost of oats at 4d/bushel, and a bushel of oats is about 32 lbs, so my daily cost of oats is:
30,250 lbs x (1 bushel / 32 lbs) x (4d / bushel) = 3781d, or 315s or £16/day
= ~ £2900 for a 6 month campaign (I’ve also found references that suggest this could be at least twice as high!)

For the people, let’s start with the simpler scenario: humans.

Using Travis P’s estimates from last week, I made some simple estimates for how much a person will consume per day:
1 loaf of bread @ 800 grams (this is higher than necessary)
⅕ of a chicken @ ~150 grams
1 qt of ale
1 qt of milk
Modify the costs by a factor of 150% to account for error, any supplements like sauces, etc.
Modify that result again by 150% for the knights assuming they will eat better fare
Estimate this all weights in around 5.5 lbs/person/day

Based on a mix of 1300’s prices (which we will share later), that works out to:
0.3 pence for bread
0.4 pence for chicken
0.2 pence for ale
0.05 pence for milk (assume ¼ the cost of ale)
Total: 0.95 pence x 1.5 = 1.425d (let’s round to 1.5 pence per soldier per day)
And lastly, 1.5 pence x 1.5 = 2.25d for nobles and knights

So with our merry band of 6450 human soldiers and 400 knights, we get:

1.5d x 6450 soldiers = 9675d, or 806s, or £40.
2.25d x 400 knights = about £4.

Let’s round that to £45 per day. In 2019, that seems cheap. If I use a simple relative conversion though, we see it’s pretty significant: in modern times, a loaf of bread alone costs about £0.25, or 60 pence a loaf, compared to our 0.3 pence. So that army costs a modern estimate of £9000 per day, or £1.6 million for our 6 month campaign! And think of everything we didn’t factor in:
Transport of the foodstuffs
Actual variability in the menu we purchased
Preparation, cooking, serving, clean-up
Any of our camp followers and support staff
Whether that food is immediately available when we want it

I want to check my math here and use a different measure, from a resource we will share in a future post:
Price in 1380 to feed each member of a household: lord, 7d; esquire, 4d; yeoman, 3d; and groom, 1d.

400 knights x 7d = 2,800 pence/day
6,450 soldiers x 3d = 19,350 pence/day (I lumped my squires into the yeoman category)
= 22,150d, 1,845s, £92/day (about twice what I estimated first)
= £16,600 for a 6 month campaign!

I’ll assume the higher amount for now to be conservative.

Endothermic Creature Calculation

Dire Wolves (an extinct species of very large wolf). Source: US National Park Service

Bear in mind that our standard Medieval figures only apply to creatures who actually lived in the medieval era. So how do we account for fictional creatures, like Lady Katie’s war wolves? I think we’ve got two possible approaches. She’s bringing a dozen in the field with her, and let’s say they weight in around 200 lbs (a little larger than the extinct species of dire wolves that once lived on Earth). The first thing we could do would be to scale up the average consumption of the closest living animal to our fictional creature, in this case a real wolf: our war wolf is a little more than 100% larger, and wolves consume around 10 lbs of meat per day (not necessarily in a single day though), so we can assume the war wolves will need twice that amount.

12 war wolves x 20 lbs meat/day = 240 lbs of meat per day

Based on assumptions about cows that follow, I can anticipate 1 cow lasting 3 days, so we need another 60 cows for a cost of about £25 for the campaign to feed the wolves. Alternatively, I could use Travis P’s recommendation on BMR and attempt to scale the caloric intake for our war wolves. Since the 200 pound figure I’ve been using equals about 90 kilograms, a BMR for a war wolf would amount to approximately 90 kilograms ^.75, but such a figure is so general that it would have the wolf wind up with the same approximate BMR as a 200 pound human!

While a war wolf weighs in near the size of a large man, for whom Travis P listed a figure of 2,500 calories per day as a reasonable calorie per day intake, my sense is a wolf will have higher caloric intake than a man. Travis P may have accounted for this by mentioning that creatures with higher metabolisms use more calories per hour than creatures with lower metabolisms. One way we would know if a creature has a higher metabolism is if its internal body temperature were higher than a human beings. Is that the case for wolves? According to one online source, the answer is no, because humans and wolves have the same internal body temperature, 37° C / 98.6° F.

The other way Travis P may have accounted for this was by mentioning that while humans rarely exceed more than twice BMR while active, many other creatures have a much higher multiple for their BMR when energetic. He stated the BMR for a healthy adult human male is “about” 1800 calories–let’s round up to 2000 for simplicity. A human working hard may double that caloric intake a day or possibly even go over double by a significant degree, but an active wolf may go much higher, perhaps as high as 4 to 5 times that amount, based on a comment Travis P made in the previous article. That would mean a war wolf would use approximately between 8,000 and 10,000 calories per day.

Based on the figure of approximately 1,100 calories in a pound of meat from the list of Colonial rations in last week’s post, that would mean a war wolf would require between 7 and 10 pounds (3.2 and 4.5 kg) per day of meat. Which is about half the figure obtained from the simpler calculation based on what wolves eat per day, though that figure came from a source that may have referenced what wolves eat when given the chance as opposed to their minimum needs.

In any case we now have two figures, one pointing at a minimum of about 10 pounds a day and the other at 20. To conservatively ensure we have enough food, we’ll use the figure of 20 lbs of meat per day.

Ectothermic Creature Calculation

Since in the story world of Lady Katie a dragon is an endothermic creature rather than an animal with a minimum BMR like a wolf, the kind of calculation we just did won’t really work here. Thankfully Travis P gave us some relief when considering ectothermic creatures. Since they cannot regulate their internal body temperature and rely on the environment, we have some thumb rules for how to calculate their caloric intake. We’ll use those estimates to gauge our dragon’s consumption costs.

I’ll approach this the simpler of two ways: using the example of the 300-some kg crocodile Travis P gave (as opposed to more thorough calculations using his breathing rates). I also will assume out of that 6 month campaign that the dragon is lazy (for which I will use the SMR for 10° C /50° F that Travis P gave) and active for 3 months (for which I will use the SMR for 30° C / 86° F), respectively. If it were our crocodile:

3 months x 30 days/month x 180 calories/day = 16,200 calories
3 months x 30 days/month x 720 calories/day = 64,800 calories
81,000 calories (the sum) x ~720 calories/300 grams of meat = 194.4 kg, or about 430 lbs.

Source: Naominovik.com

Now for my crocodile-to-dragon conversion: I’ll assume a 15 tonne (15,000 kg) dragon based on Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and assume that caloric intake scales directly. Our crocodile weighs in at the upper end of the scale at 390 kg, so:

430 lbs of meat x (15,000 kg / 390 kg ) = ~16,500 lbs of edible meat

From my earlier reference, a good cow costs about 9s and we’ll assume I get ⅔ of the ~1300 lbs average weight of a range cow down our dragon’s gullet.

Number of cows for the six months = 16,500 lbs / 867 lbs/cow = 19 cows
Cost of cows = 9s/cow x 19 cows = 171s or about £8.5

In practice, this looks like 1 cow every 9 days or so. I suspect Lady Katie’s dragon will exert more energy because he will be more active in combat and require a full cow per day (if I were a dragon I wouldn’t work for any less).

Cost of cows for the dragon = 6 months x 30 days/month x 1 cow/day x 9s/cow = 1,620s or ~£80

Total Cost for 6 Months Afield

Let’s wrap this up and do a quick analysis:

Total food costs:
Soldiers: £16,600 (I’m going with our higher end estimate for conservatism)
Horses: £2,900
War wolves: £25
Dragon: £80

Total £19,605

Again, remember that Lady Katie has paid no wages, hired no combat support, nor provided for any form of logistics to get this food to the army, and this assumes she allows the horses to forage for fodder every day. This is therefore an estimate based on the cost of food alone, not including anything else.

This feels like a long nerded-out math problem that has little direct relevance to us as authors. I certainly don’t suggest that we all need to have spreadsheets capable of doing this math, nor that we must be highly accurate when doing it. You are all likely great Googlers and can do research relevant to your story. But some things stand out in my mind:

The cost/horse (£1.05/horse) for food is lower than the cost/person (£2.50/person). This surprised me, and gave me a rough estimate that a horse-born soldier costs about 40% more than a foot soldier to support (in cost of food alone). It’s also much lower than £80/dragon but comparable to £2.08/war wolf.

Changes in food sources, especially access to grazing for horses and good range cows for dragons, can have a significant impact on the food budget; no surprise there.

Assuming a wagon can carry ~2500 lbs of goods, this army needs at least 20 wagons to support the horse feed alone, and nearly 13 to support the soldier’s food per day. Once we factor in drovers and teamsters, I have an entire storyline just related to the potential transportation of foodstuffs.

Inflation will impact these figures, so I should have some measure of relative worth to compare to. We’d call this something like useful purchase power, which we will address in a future post.

Any of those can be exploited for world building exposition or for a unique plot point. Maybe even a great secondary character like the drover for wagon number 17. We’ll keep delving into Lady Katie’s fictional war as we explore paying for her soldiers and later with the costs of castle warfare.

There is nothing categorically wrong with labels. Labels are short-hand descriptions, a fast and easy method of classification – much like words. There is nothing wrong with labels just as labels. But labels, like everything else in this world, can go wrong. Some labels are active lies; others (not nearly so bad) are so insufficient they create more confusion than clarity, or so vague they are almost useless in conveying information.

Which brings us to the label “a creative”. As you know, this word (recently converted from an adjective to a noun) has become a popular self-label in recent years. It’s thrown out in blog posts, claimed in profiles. It appears to be roughly synonymous with “artist” – not by definition but by use (one senses that the “creatives” are not accountants).

The primary failing of this label is that it lacks a clear and specific definition. If you tell me that you’re a creative, I believe you, but I don’t know what you mean by it. Are you a musician, a writer, a painter, an actor? Or is it less a single talent or pursuit and more a way of thinking? Let me put it this way: An artist is defined by what he does (art). Is a creative likewise defined by what he does, or is he defined by what he is (creative)? I don’t know. I don’t understand the label.

I’ve poked around the Internet and discovered eloquent and elaborate definitions of what a creative is; these people aren’t pulling definitions out of a Dictionary. Some people understand the label. But they don’t always understand it the same. If they were operating out of a Dictionary, we would have a simple and reigning definition. But since they are instead spilling four hundred words to define a creative as they understand one to be, the meaning of the label is fluid. And the usefulness of a label is inversely proportional to the fluidity of its meaning.

While the label of “a creative” is in one way too vague, it is in another too exclusive. The label is generally applied to people who are creative in an artistic sense, but there are a thousand other ways to be creative. A person who can take a recipe off the Internet and make it twice as good is creative. People who come up with new and better operating procedures, that engineer or programmer or CEO who can see the way around the obstacle – they are all creative. Whoever first invented the assembly line was very creative. By God’s many and marvelous gifts, the world is overrun by creative people. A label for creatives that acknowledges only one kind of creativity is flawed; it encourages a false distinction, an unhelpful delineation between us and them.

Labels matter – because they are categories, because they are descriptions in brief, because they share the fundamental purpose of all words: to build a bridge. It is important, then, to choose your labels carefully. Before adopting, or bestowing, a label, we must consider what information the label conveys, and what judgments it implies.

Today begins Lorehaven Magazine’s first contest: to win a copy of Thomas Locke’s novel Enclave. Through this Friday, Feb. 15, you can enter our free drawing at Lorehaven.com. Or you can use the same form echoed here:

Lorehaven Magazine: win a copy of Thomas Locke’s Enclave from Revell Books!

Enter the giveaway here. Then get more chances to win by doing any of these five options. Each option gets you different numbers of “points” that increase your winning chances:

• Subscribe to Lorehaven Magazine—five points.
  (Existing subscribers count! Just provide your email address so we can check.)
• Tweet about the giveaway—three points.
  (Be sure to tag @Lorehaven and @RevellBooks and use the #Enclave hashtag.)
• Tweet what you love about Christian-made fantastical novels—three points.
  (Tag the same accounts as mentioned above!)
• Visit Lorehaven Magazine’s page on Facebook—one point.
• Follow @Lorehaven on Twitter—one point.

The contest closes Friday, Feb. 15. We’ll plan to notify our winner over the weekend. Then on Tuesday, Feb. 19, we’ll announce the winner.

Enclave: ‘Think Louis L’amour meets The Hunger Games . . .’

From Enclave‘s back cover:

It’s been 50 years since the Great Crash and what was once America is now a collection of enclaves, governed on the local level and only loosely tied together by the farce of a federal government. Catawba, one of the largest and most affluent enclaves in the southern states, is relatively stable and maintains a successful business of trade with nearby enclaves, including the one at Charlotte Township. But when a new vein of gold is found beneath the feet of those in Catawba, it’s only a matter of time before trouble finds them.

Now the future of Catawba may be in the hands of an untried 21-year-old trader named Caleb. And Caleb knows that if his secret were ever to come out, he would never see another dawn.

Lorehaven Magazine’s winter 2018 issue reviews Enclave:

Think Louis L’amour meets The Hunger Games–lite with a sprinkle of X-Men. . . . It leaves young readers without the despair often associated with the “dystopian” genre and with hope to regain a better society.

Meanwhile . . .

You can explore Lorehaven Magazine’s debut issue (spring 2018) without even a free subscription.

And see what else we’re planning for this year. This includes:

• Another book contest, for Tosca Lee’s pre-apocalyptic The Line Between. (It’s already great and you should read it.)
• A conference appearance in Fort Worth, joining the Realm Makers Bookstore.
• Another conference appearance in Waco, Texas.
• Our return to the Realm Makers conference this July in St. Louis.

Lorehaven serves Christian fans by finding biblical truth in fantastic stories. Book clubs, free webzines, and a web-based community offer flash reviews, articles, and news about Christian fantasy, science fiction, and other fantastical genres

Further up and further in!

Congratulations to our 2019 Spec Faith Winter Writing Challenge winner:

Sarah Daffy.

For details about your prize, Sarah, please contact me via Facebook messaging, either at my personal site or through the Spec Faith page.