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Map help! Need telephone pole grogs


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You all are an invaluable resource and I appreciate your inputs.

How far apart should telephone poles be in Sicily in 1943?

Do all towns get them or again is this like the ring road and only limited areas were in "cell coverage".

The front of my 10 acre property is about 400 feet across and so I have 200 foot between poles here in Texas.

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I'd hazard a guess main towns and on roads linking between with connections to even small villages between. Here's some photos.

5817973173_6b4d972e69.jpg

tigerinrxxxxspzabt504pi.jpg

44RTRSicily.jpg

weapon_flak38_40.jpg

Bit of a biggie

http://www.desertrats.org.uk/bde/images/Pictures/4thArmouredBrigade/ASqn3CLYPedaraSicilyAugust1943.jpg

With telephone wires in background - but showing other street furniture.

In Sicily, Messerschmitts circled a nearby hill, but Technical Sergeant Richard Redding, stringing wire atop a telephone pole and a perfect target, worked on. Someone yelled up from below: "What are you doing up that pole?"

"Working," said Redding, too engrossed to glance down.

"How long you been there?"

"About 20 minutes."

"Don't the planes bother you?"

"Hell, no—but you do!"

At the foot of the pole, Lieut. General George S. Patton, who had been doing the yelling, kept his peace.

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Utility poles may contain electric wires (4.5-6.9kv single-phase) as well as telephone wires (based on the thick insulators and transformer, this is the case in the photos Wicky has shown). Sicily wasn't heavily industrialized in 1943 (not many native generation resources either..... hydro, coal, wood, oil... you'd barge in fuels for small power plants sited adjacent to the (coastal) town load centres), so I'd guess that most of what you'd see is pure phome poles (more useful to an agrarian economy than power) with a few power feeders running out from the power centers to other nearby towns. Dunno if that helps you but it's probably safest not to go overboard on poles. Oh, and about 40m of spacing ought to do.

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Utility poles may contain electric wires (4.5-6.9kv single-phase) as well as telephone wires (based on the thick insulators and transformer, this is the case in the photos Wicky has shown). Sicily wasn't heavily industrialized in 1943 (not many native generation resources either..... hydro, coal, wood, oil... you'd barge in fuels for small power plants sited adjacent to the (coastal) town load centres), so I'd guess that most of what you'd see is pure phome poles (more useful to an agrarian economy than power) with a few power feeders running out from the power centers to other nearby towns. Dunno if that helps you but it's probably safest not to go overboard on poles. Oh, and about 40m of spacing ought to do.

Yeah what he said!

Telephone wire gauge is quite small compared to electrical and unlike today, back then you didn't have individual phone lines for every house. (meaning if you are strictly talking phone, the distance between poles could be quite far. For electrical the weight of the wire would require moving them closer.) At best you'd have a party line, at worst only telegraph or maybe a phone line to the local gov't office.

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12 tiles between poles? Yowser!

The last thing I need is the lines snapping during a battle and the solicitors at the PWU (pixeltruppen workers union) serve me with a lawsuit as the scenario author and map maker of record.

I am gonna play it safe and go with 6 tiles between poles.

Thanks for the inputs.

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I usually go for 10-12 tiles (80-100m) between poles.

Augh! Don't apply for a job in Capital Recovery at my shop any time soon, brotha!

Lower gauge wire means lower weight but also lower strength; while icing isn't a big issue in Sicily, you do get those weird desert wind gusts (hence also my persnicketicitegeriness in insisting on windbreak treelines to shield all those nice vineyards). So OK, for telephone only poles, 6 (50m) is probably reasonable. But 100m? No way -- that line will be drooping to the ground in a few years unless you make your poles really tall.

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Meh. I had a look at some really old power/phone line runs around where I live, and they were spaced at about 80m.

Also, I think that while ~50m might be more accurate, visually it looks cluttered. 80-100m looks about right, to me.

As a tangential suggestion, whatever spacing you settle on, if you keep fairly rigidly to it across the entire map you could mention it in your briefing as a scaling tool for the player; "oh, that junction is 2 power poles away - that means it's about x00m." (and having the poles at a 100m pitch makes that mental calculation really easy ;) )

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I cannot vouch for Sicily considering that I've never been there, but I can give you an idea of the design parameters...

Many years ago, I was working for a small engineering firm who subcontracted to design a cross-country power line for the regional company. I was the lucky one that got to handle the project. I can recall two criteria which had to be met:

1) Maximum spacing between poles was 400'

2) There was a minimum clear distance above the ground that had to be maintained. This was calculated from the sag caused by the weight of the line over "X" distance. 27 feet sticks in my head for some reason, but it's been close to thirty years since I worked on this.

I'm also sure there was a maximum pole/mounting height, but I have no clue what this was.

The design area was hilly to mountainous and crossed many spurs and "hollers" (it was in southwestern Virginny :D ). It was often difficult to obtain the maximum spacing due to the irregularity of the ground profile along the right-of-way. Spacing between the poles was basically set by trial and error... I'd place a few poles, calculate the minimum ground clearance of the wires and, if all was good, try placing another two or three. If everything worked to maintain the design parameters, great! But, usually I'd have to go back and make adjustments to get the required ground clearance.

I'd expect that JonS is probably pretty close with his 80 - 100 meters between poles... except possibly in urban areas. If there was power in a built up area, it likely ran down one side of every block, meaning a pole near each intersection, maybe one near mid-block in a long run. In rolling terrain, placing a pole near the high point helps maintain the ground clearance. In any event, in CM, I'd tend to think less is more.

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Sounds like a subtransmission system (23kv+) to me; so you'd naturally have greater pole height for safety reasons, plus thicker conductor; almost certainly three-phase circuit (crossarms). All of which would allow more pole spacing. Bit of a different animal to this, though. But I suspect all answers given above are defensible.

One more note since this has been done to death by utility grogs. In built-up areas of Continental Europe, power and phone lines are strung directly on brackets on the sides of multistorey buildings. Safety and eminent domain weren't as big a deal back then it seems. You can still see the rusty brackets today.

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One more note since this has been done to death

Never! There's a bit of life in this old pony yet!

*thwack*thwack*

See? It moved!

In built-up areas of Continental Europe, power and phone lines are strung directly on brackets on the sides of multistorey buildings.

I'm pretty sure you can sort-of do this in CM. Place a building, then place a power pole beside it. Go into the 3D editor space, and click on the pole till the - er - cross arm things that support the wire are at right angles to the buidling wall. The SHIFT+CLICK on the pole to nudge it sideways. When you get the angle right you should be able to nudge it so that the vertical pole ends up embedded in the building wall, with just the cross arm thingys sticking out.

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I have been to Sicily, many times. I would contend that early power/telephone pole layout in the field had NOTHING in common with any sort of plan, if any, laid out on how it _should_ be done.

Roman era plumbing which has been added on to for, literally, millenia. Pretty cool when the flows reverse. At a minimum, it gets you out of your room and out on the town. I've seen wiring with the neutral screwed into a shower frame, and the hot going to the lightbulb over the shower. Hey, it worked, and no one got shocked. If it took a strong stick to hold the wires over a gate, well, there'd be a stick there.

The more unique the placement of the poles, the closer you'll be to Sicily. (Ever see the pictures of NYC/Chicago wiring from the 20's and 30's? Sicily would be similar, just less dense.) String 'em if you got 'em.

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I was in Chennai India in June. Power cable that fed several large high rise buildings comes out of the ground, runs along the curb up to a transformer then back down to the ground. Cars are driving over the cable all day long...and that one was actually done well. Meanwhile the fiber cable feeding this IT complex is on a special utility pole - commonly called a tree. Feeds over the roadway to another of these special utility poles. Gotta love the engineering though. They left plenty of extra coils of cable to insure they could accomodate the growth of the special utility pole.

Here you go if you want to see some beautiful work.

https://www.google.com/search?q=india+electrical+wiring&hl=en&qscrl=1&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS443US444&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Jrx8UKbHNYzuigKw5oGYDA&ved=0CC0QsAQ&biw=1600&bih=783

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Yeah, although did you also notice that the ONE place outdoors in India you could eat off the ground (and not be chomping on some form of human ordure) was the floor (pad, really) of a transmission substation? They keep those babies amazingly tidy. Hundreds of kv running through there helps a bit, I suppose. (Hmm, perhaps I will be squatting to pinch the ol' loaf a few metres over that way....)

OK Jon, if that imagery doesn't awkwardly kill this conversation, nothing will.

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