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[GreatWyrmGold]

and we live on a riverside that is not walled.

Oh, yes, because we will always be in control of the river, and of course said river has the same icthic density as a manmade fish farm.

I could respond with equal sarcasm, but I'm tired of that. You won't get "icthic density" of a modern fish farm unless you have modern feed and filtration systems.

By your logic, raising cattle rather than hunting aurochs or whatever in the wilderness is stupid, because you won't get the bovine density of modern cattle farms.

Your belief that this would be viable for more than a few days of siege don't pass simple back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Firstly, even if it only gives us a few days...it gives us a few days.
Second, do the words "greater surplus of food production" mean anything to you?

That's two points you concede on and three (3, 4, 7) which you seem to have ignored. You could also argue that you ignored 6, because you failed to realize that I was talking about the future.

I was conceding a few points to keep a good tone to the argument, but you seem to have abused my intentions.
I don't line-by-line and pick out every point. If you make an effort, you'll see your basic assumptions on "icthic density" were shattered, and your unaddressed points all fail. Don't tell me that I have to respond to every point, or it defaults to agreement. That's grossly unfair. It's not an efficient food source. Period.

Firstly, my poi t of making those arguments was that there are many reasons to do so. If you concede or ignore more than half of my points, you can hardly claim to be being thorough.
Secondly, I'm not claiming this will be an awesome gamechanger. I'm saying it would help. You don't need to pull out your calculator to realize that farm+fish>farm...you just need basic algebra knowledge. Now, if I was claiming that we should abandon agriculture for aquaculture you'd have quite a point, but...I'm not.

The only thing about farming fish is that it isn't actually that easy. Especially if you have large populations of fish. They will use up all the oxygen in the water or get disease, or something like that. I think we do need an expert or something.

Yeah, finding someone who knows a bit about aquaculture would be a good first step.

Yeah, someone who knows a bit about modern aquaculture, and filtration systems pumped by electric engines. Could just build fighter aircraft with the same knowledge. 

Perhaps "aquaculture" is being misused. I meant any large-scale kind of fish raising, not specifically modern techniques.


Dear everyone, stop assuming people are referring to anachronisms when chronisms are just as possible.

[Gervassen]

It's not realistic that you'd feed 300 people from a fish pond for more than one day.

Care to provide calculations? As far as I know fish ponds were quite common for the medieval castles exactly as a food storage that required almost no maintenance

This

Which castles? I know of none with ponds inside the walls.

One football field is good enough. Aesthetics and fire safety will improve considerably from this.
Yes I know that it's 1\12 of the space. I am sure it worth it

This is madness.

and we live on a riverside that is not walled.

Is that's true? If it is than It should be changed because it makes us vulnerable to infiltrations and forces with a better fleet

River chain stops that. The build time for the wall would be even longer, otherwise. Closer to three years. It was good enough for London and Chepstow Castle. Among many other riverside forts.

basic Fish farming is very simple and relatively risk-free. Dig a hole, fill it with water, not let it dry, make holes in ice during winter and use resistant fish like carps  and you'll be fine.

How many carp in an unaerated ditch filled with stagnant water and not fed?

[Talvara]

The Hippy in me mostly likes fish farming because it doesn't drain natural fishstock from the river, In mediaeval times overfishing probably wasn't as much an issue as it is nowadays. but I still see moving away from exploiting natural resources without putting effort into maintaining/replacing them as general good stewardship. 

The Magna Carta has a section that explicitedly prohibits the construction of certain types of fish traps because of their disastrous effectiviness.

hmm cool, I most definitely didn't know that.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_weir) I guess they were more concerned with 'sustainability' than I had imagined.

of course there were fewer people so our impact on the world was also smaller, Thanks for sharing that

[Gervassen]

Maldevious, are there any commonly cultivated flora which prefer wet environments in this region?
(I know an answer's not coming for a while, but now we'll get a WoG on the subject.)

Lol. When i read this, I just burst out laughing. Poor Maldevious. We ask him such specific nuances.

[10ebbor10]

One football field is good enough. Aesthetics and fire safety will improve considerably from this.
Yes I know that it's 1\12 of the space. I am sure it worth it

This is madness.

For a multitude of reasons.
    A) That land is probably fields now. And certainly going to be construction ground later on.
    B) We're a riverside, so it's quite probably sloped, as well as letting water through easily.(alluvial plain)
    C) Grain storage is much more effective than fish storage.
    D) If I believe correctly, our main food source is cattle and sheep. If we direct that place to meadows rather than fish storage, we can bring the cattle in during a siege. This means that we have additional food, and then enemy doesn't.
    E) A water tank might be beneficial, but not when there's fish swimming in it.

[GreatWyrmGold]

A and D: We're talking about land INSIDE our city. Our land is rather larger than 12 football fields...

And I don't think anyone is suggesting that we can ignore the fish and they'll flourish. However,

I'm seeing a lot of peasants around the area who have kind of a crap life. As long as we give them work and/or a living, they will flock to us.

Besides, in historical medieval times, labor tended to be  cheap and abundant.

[Truean]

A and D: We're talking about land INSIDE our city. Our land is rather larger than 12 football fields...

And I don't think anyone is suggesting that we can ignore the fish and they'll flourish. However,

I'm seeing a lot of peasants around the area who have kind of a crap life. As long as we give them work and/or a living, they will flock to us.

Besides, in historical medieval times, labor tended to be  cheap and abundant.

This stuff we're going over now is all about land usage and food production.

Labor is where we are going to make a killing, hence the comment about how several peasants have crap lives and how we can give them better to attract them. Also, it totally fits with our storyline about being a peasant with a crap life ourselves at one point....

So, the question becomes, what would be better than the crap lives these peasants have/how can we attract them? What do we do with them once we have them?

Welcome to economy and military building.... Our constraints are (basically, I mean let's not make this econ here)
1.) Physical space
2.) Defense
3.) Food
4.) Support and maintenance of anybody we have come around.

Well, concerning constraint #1, physical space, we can get around that fairly easily through the obvious proper planning and also through taking advantage of the ocean (once the river dredging is done so we can have sufficiently large ships for fishing out there). That of course doesn't take into account the idea of acquiring more land in the future.

Constraint #2 is all about attracting some more of those peasants living crap lives and enticing them into our infantry, cavalry, archery, scouts, and perhaps later our navy. Also walls, lots of walls.

Constraint #3 is what all this talking stuff is about. I say we go full on sheep, because wool is a valuable trade good supporting several other industries and also mutton is delicious. Also, if we're careful, we can perhaps graze on other people's lands (or even negotiate for the right to do so). The crapy thing about fish is, they need water sources and it's a pain to move our fish to other people's water sources. But, we can move our sheep all over the place. Hey, in a siege we herd our easily herded herd of sheep inside the walls and slaughter / sheer as needed. Bandages and dinner, hurray! Also we can be stylish and develop a textile industry, so there's that.

If we get really bored, we can set one of the sheep on fire and have it run at the enemy. We seem to like that idea in a naval context, so why not on land? Let's see a fish do that. j/k.

Constraint #4 is basically just building large capacity buildings, which we have the brick (walls) and timber (multiple floors) for so.... We just need an architect or something.  Seriously, let's get some apartments going or something. We've gotta house all those soldiers and laborers we're gonna want to do all the things we're gonna want to do.

[tryrar]

...I didn't consider the sheep idea, we ARE sponsoring a wool merchant, so increasing our patronage of him sounds like a good idea +1

[10ebbor10]

A and D: We're talking about land INSIDE our city. Our land is rather larger than 12 football fields...

As was I. The walled in land was part of the old town, hence fields. Turning those to fish probably means disowning someone. Also, as we appear to have a large cattle stock, so my plan was to use those fields inside the city as a meadow during a siege. Ie, normally the beasts just run around wherever they want, but during a siege we stuff as much animals as possible inside the city. Pretty sure we get a significantly larger food supply than if we were using fish.

[Truean]

Also, we can grow something to feed to the sheep, like clover or winter wheat or something, as part of our crop rotation, thus giving us more versatile land usage and livestock feed for when we bring the flock inside during a siege. It also appears they milk sheep so there's cheese ahoy. Don't worry, we'll just trade that away to other people, because why not.

http://www.sheep101.info/eating.html

ooooOOOOO, also we can have sheepdogs, which bite things that probably aren't us, so you know there's that. We can feed them a dogbread made out of breadish things and parts of the sheep we don't wanna eat, because what else are we gonna do with a sheep innard? (I don't care about spelling it right, why would you?). We can have a whole kennel of dogs to bite things that want to get us or our sheepies. They can eat sheep pancreas or whatever the crap goes into dogbread. Also, there's a defense portion of that, because every second an enemy spends fighting off a pack of pissed off dogs is a second they're distracted from us.

It worked for the British, so meh, close enough.

[GreatWyrmGold]

A and D: We're talking about land INSIDE our city. Our land is rather larger than 12 football fields...

As was I. The walled in land was part of the old town, hence fields. Turning those to fish probably means disowning someone. Also, as we appear to have a large cattle stock, so my plan was to use those fields inside the city as a meadow during a siege. Ie, normally the beasts just run around wherever they want, but during a siege we stuff as much animals as possible inside the city. Pretty sure we get a significantly larger food supply than if we were using fish.

How many farms are typically located inside city walls?
Parks, definitely. Buildings, of course. Lawns, unless anachronistic (when did the modern concept of a law appear?). Farms? Seems like it would require too much of a town or city's limited space and work better in the nearby countryside.

[Mlamlah]

Definitely keep farms outside city limits. They don't need much protection, and while we arn't having space issues now it may one day become a problem.

"But Mlamlah, we can easily just build overtop them and move the agriculture ourside when it gets to that point."

Sure i guess, but we would also be destroying the hard work of the people maintaining the farms. and if the relocation doesn't work we've just destroyed the livlihood of those poor people.


I think we might want to think about improving the living conditions of our serf miners.

[GreatWyrmGold]

How far is it from the mines to town again?

[Iituem]

+1 to Sheep.  A long-term textile industry should definitely be in the works, we'd just need to get a few cottage weavers set up.

And yeah, since a good proportion of our miners aren't convicts, we might as well try and do what we can for them condition-wise.  The silver mines are a big source of income for us, after all, and we are playing on the Light Side. 

[10ebbor10]

A and D: We're talking about land INSIDE our city. Our land is rather larger than 12 football fields...

As was I. The walled in land was part of the old town, hence fields. Turning those to fish probably means disowning someone. Also, as we appear to have a large cattle stock, so my plan was to use those fields inside the city as a meadow during a siege. Ie, normally the beasts just run around wherever they want, but during a siege we stuff as much animals as possible inside the city. Pretty sure we get a significantly larger food supply than if we were using fish.

How many farms are typically located inside city walls?
Parks, definitely. Buildings, of course. Lawns, unless anachronistic (when did the modern concept of a law appear?). Farms? Seems like it would require too much of a town or city's limited space and work better in the nearby countryside.

All the land that doesn't have house build upon is almost always farm land. It was farmland before, and then the walls got build around it, remember. Usually, the farming space is slowly consumed by the city, till the walls need to be expanded again.

Lawns are, I think, 18-19 century England.

Spoiler: Maps of Brugge and Bruxelles, respectively (click to show/hide)

Definitely keep farms outside city limits. They don't need much protection, and while we arn't having space issues now it may one day become a problem.

"But Mlamlah, we can easily just build overtop them and move the agriculture ourside when it gets to that point."

Sure i guess, but we would also be destroying the hard work of the people maintaining the farms. and if the relocation doesn't work we've just destroyed the livlihood of those poor people.

I think we might want to think about improving the living conditions of our serf miners.

Just as a note, those farms were already there. We just build the wall around them. After all, there's no reason to place the fields far away from your home. There's also the common farm, of which I'm certain that it's placed inside the city walls. And I'm pretty sure that removing the farming piecewise as our infrastructure expands will have significantly less impact than throwing them all out now. Also, in, a siege they can provide a bit of food. Vegetables grow rather fast.