alt Hacker NewsWell, as the article says:
> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber
Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!
Yea, this is like the early railroads making steel cheaper via cheaper transport of bulk ore/coal, that made cheaper railroads, that then ship more products made of steel to larger markets opened by the extended rail networks, etc.
This happened with tin all the way back in the Bronze Age, where a lot of it was shipped as ingots from industrial-scale mines / smelters in Cornwall all the way to the Mediterranean empires to mix with copper to make Bronze.
A cog-based auto-catalytic wood industry is super interesting.