[WRG]Notes on Weights and Measures

These are some notes that I made regarding weights and measures which may be useful in designing a system for using WRG Ancients and Medieval rules for roleplaying purposes.

Weights:

Silver Pound: 349.91g (the historic Tower Pound)
Metal Pound: 373.24g (Troy Pound)
Pound Weight: 453.59g (Avoirdupois Pound)
Bundle Weight: 1270.05g (1/5 of a Stone Weight)
Stone Weight: 6350.26g (14 Pound Weight)
Coin Weight: 1.46g (1/240 of a Silver Pound)

Value of Gold:Silver:Copper: 1:50:200

Silver Penny: 1.46g (310 per pound weight; 14.73mm diameter; 1.28mm thick)
Copper Farthing: 1.46g (310 per pound weight; 15.51mm diameter; 1.35mm thick) (= ¼ penny)
(Both are 4340 coins per stone weight)
Gold Crown: 7.00g (65 per pound weight; 17.55mm diameter; 1.50mm thick) (= 240 pennies)
(910 per stone weight; 4.77 times as heavy as penny or farthing)
Silver Shilling: 17.52g (26 per pound weight; 30.94mm diameter; 2.22mm thick) (= 12 pennies)
(364 per stone weight; 12 times as heavy as a penny or farthing; shillings may be a coin of account only)

Rounded off: 4500 coins (pennies or farthings) per stone weight, or 900 per Bundle Weight; 900 crowns (each counts as five coin weight) per stone weight, or 180 per Bundle Weight; 375 shillings (each counts as twelve coin weight) per stone weight, or 75 per Bundle Weight

Distance:

Pace: 30” (2 ½ feet)
Rope: 20 Paces (50 feet)
Stade: 250 Paces or 12 ½ Ropes (625 feet)
Mille: 2000 Paces or 8 Stades (5000 feet, about 0.947 miles)
League: 3 Milles (15,000 feet, about 2.841 miles, roughly the distance traveled in an hour on good roads)

Time:

Moment: 3 seconds
Period: 30 seconds
Turn: 5 minutes

Area:

Acre: 43,560 square feet
Oxgang: 15 Acres (the area one ox can plow in a plowing season)
Hex: about 4480 Acres (4473.27 Acres, but round it off); a Hex is one League from face to opposite face (comes to about 298 ⅔ oxgangs; might round these to 4500 acres and 300 oxgangs, as the actual distance difference would be less than 18 paces from hexside to hexside, about a 0.3% difference)

Justifications: weights are centered around trying to simulate traditional English coins as a baseline, and also using a system of encumbrance which will not be particularly intrusive. The decisions there are influenced by recent experiments with "stone encumbrance", but I don't think that those are impossible to have come to be in a game designed from whole cloth. The relative values of metals are based on their historic relationships, and are basically considered as an impression of the average values. Distances and times are derived from values in the WRG rules, which use paces as the base for distance measures (I take the 30" length from Swordbearer, but I think that's a pretty obvious choice) and note that the events of a game turn are roughly what could occur in 30 seconds of real time. The area measures are basically because I'm pretty sure that I'd like to include some sort of Baronial/Dynastic level play, à la Pendragon or some iterations of Chivalry & Sorcery.