Dr. Bret Devereaux

You ought to build your galleys of aged dry wood too, but you don't have to.

You can build galleys out of green wood.

They won't be as good, but they won't fall apart.

But if you try and build a man of war out of green wood, it's going to go poorly for you.

And so part of what may be happening here is that the need to construct a sort of age of sale style navy from scratch demanded a lot of time.

There really isn't a way to speed up the process of fully drying and aging wood.

You just sort of have to put it on blocks and wait.

I also, well, again, one wonders, like this is one of those timeframes where I think Tolkien often when dealing with the Numenoreans shifts into almost like heroic time where stuff just takes longer for reasons that aren't entirely clear.

I mean, you see this again, like you see this in The Mariner's Wife where like Eldarion decides to do something and then he's doing it for 15 years.

And you're like, was that 15 years of stuff you had to do?

Because they're heroic and bigger than life in this way.

So it takes a long time.

And so rather than a long time being 18 months, a long time is five years.

But if the Numenoreans have neglected their naval preparations and really do need to build a large fleet from scratch, this might take a really long time.

And one of the challenges here is that they are moving a large army.

The logistics of moving an army by sea, especially if you need to move it all at once rather than doing shuttle runs, get pretty wild pretty fast.

Because a large sailing ship, you can put a few hundred men on that, which sounds like a lot until you're talking about an army of 20, 30, 40, 50,000 men, and you're suddenly talking about dozens, hundreds of ships.

The Roman invasion force that carries their army to North Africa during the First Punic War, this is 256, 255 BC, is some 350 ships.

wow transports and warships all total they have less marine carrying capacity because they're all warships so they have more rowers but you really large number of ships in order to move a large army and it might be a real scramble to get them the way your historical sort of early modern european rulers with age of stale style fleets would do this is that they would draft every merchant ship they could get a hold of right you'd hand some amount of money to the captain

Maybe it's a reasonable amount.