Part of Phase 3: Small Group
Settlement Planning splits into surveying — the larger half, 26 articles — and the settlement-scale buildings and infrastructure that surveying makes possible. Leveling appeared twice with the same display name for two genuinely different articles: one covers the historical tools (water, plumb bobs, the A-frame and chorobates), the other covers the four leveling methods (differential, profile, cross-section, reciprocal) — relabeled below to tell them apart.
A-Frame Level, Builder’s Level, Chain and Tape, Measuring Rod, Plumb Bob, Simple Goniometer, Standard Units, Surveying Tools, Transit Instrument, and Water Level cover the toolkit. Three sticks and a plumb bob make an A-frame level reading within 2-5 mm over a 1-meter spread; a 100-500 gram plumb bob on fine string finds true vertical within 2-3 mm by eye, and a tube filled with water gives a perfectly horizontal reference across any terrain, around corners, with no instrument needed at all. A meter itself can be checked against a pendulum — a string and weight 99.4 cm long swings a 2-second period, accurate to within 0.6%, with no manufactured standard required.
Surveying, Distance Measurement, Bearing and Azimuth, Leveling Tools and History, Leveling Methods, Pacing Calibration, and Grade Calculation cover the core measurements. Every road, building, canal, and property line begins with surveying distance, angle, and elevation, then recording it as a usable map. Pacing gets 2-10% accuracy with no equipment at all; a surveyor’s chain gets 0.1-0.5%, and a 10-degree slope alone introduces a 1.5% error if it goes unaccounted for. Getting a road or canal’s grade wrong either strands loaded carts on too steep a climb or leaves water pooling where it’s too flat.
Baseline Establishment, Benchmarks, Chain Surveying, Triangulation, Triangulation Network, and Contour Mapping cover building a trustworthy control network. Every accurate survey starts from one carefully measured straight line between two fixed points — get the baseline wrong and the error compounds everywhere, which is why a 1% baseline error must be measured twice and agree within 1 part in 3,000. A single triangle locates one point; a triangulation network links many into a web of control points that lets separate surveys, years apart, still agree.
Field Notes, Plotting and Recording, and Scale Drawing cover making the survey useful to someone else. Survey measurements that aren’t correctly recorded might as well not exist, since field notes are the only record a surveyor will ever have, even decades later, and at a scale of 1:500 a 75-meter wall becomes 15 centimeters on paper, with a graphical scale bar surviving a wrong-size photocopy in a way text never does.
Community Gathering Hall, Multi-Family Housing Design, Settlement Layout for 150 People, Defensive Architecture, Fire Prevention in Settlements, Building Maintenance Schedules, Workshop & Forge Design, Road Layout, and Property Boundaries cover what gets built once the land is surveyed. Dunbar’s number puts about 150 as the largest group where everyone can maintain a personal relationship with everyone else, the basis for the five-zone settlement layout that Community Gathering Hall and Fire Prevention in Settlements both feed into as prerequisites. Ninety percent of building failures trace back to water damage, and every hour of preventive maintenance saves roughly ten hours of emergency repair later. Unclear land boundaries have caused more conflict through history than almost any other issue, and smithies, carpentry shops, and pottery studios belong downwind of housing, since workshops generate noise, smoke, dust, and fire risk.
Surveying Tools
The instruments a surveyor builds before taking a single measurement.
- A-Frame Level
- Builder’s Level
- Chain and Tape
- Measuring Rod
- Plumb Bob
- Simple Goniometer
- Standard Units
- Surveying Tools
- Transit Instrument
- Water Level
Core Measurements
Distance, angle, elevation, and grade — the quantities every survey is built from.
- Surveying
- Distance Measurement
- Bearing and Azimuth
- Leveling Tools and History
- Leveling Methods
- Pacing Calibration
- Grade Calculation
Triangulation and Control Networks
Anchoring a survey to one measured baseline, then extending it so separate surveys still agree.
- Baseline Establishment
- Benchmarks
- Chain Surveying
- Triangulation
- Triangulation Network
- Contour Mapping
Recording the Survey
Turning raw field measurements into something another surveyor can trust decades later.
Settlement Buildings and Infrastructure
What gets built on surveyed land: housing, shared buildings, defense, and upkeep.