Re: Tessarakonteres
it had forty oarsmen per...horizontal oar-space? I really don't know how to describe it for somebody who doesn't get the basic concept of tri-/tetr-/pent-/hex-/hept-/etc-eres. So with forty oarsmen we get an average of about 1.2 metres horizontally between oars, which is reasonable (in practice there would have been slightly less space between oars, since the oars wouldn't have come up to the actual prow and stern).
Re: Tessarakonteres
And in practice there'd been quite a few fellows working one oar, for that matter. 'S going to take a lot of horsepower to make a ship that big move anywhere - the 16th-century galeasses weren't even remotely as massive, and were universally noted to tax their rowing-gangs to the limit merely maneuvering at a pace regarded as sluggish even by the standards of big galleys.
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