Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX

[Pauly]

If you go looking for a kitchen knife today, you will find thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different types, from hundreds of countries and dozens schools of thought, because Google and internet (and catalogs in mail before that) are like that. But in pre-industrial era? If you want a kitchen knife, you have maybe two or three local knife-makers, all of whom make knives roughly the same way, simply because they are trying to compete with each other and if something becomes popular, they all switch to it.
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But when you’re searching for a kitchen knife you just get a simple breakdown into broad functional categories - e.g. paring knife, boning knife, salmon slicer, chef’s knife, filleting knife, or yanagiba (sashimi knife).
If you want to differentiate any further in detail you need to start applying descriptors, not categories. If I want a chef’s knife with a French style blade, a German style handle made from Japanese style high hardness steel, google doesn’t help me because it’s search algorithms don’t use categories, only descriptors.

Coming back to poleaxes if you were a 15th century noble looking to buy a new poleaxe you’d say to the merchant or weaponsmith ‘I want a poleaxe with these features’ not ‘I want [category type] poleaxe’.

[Pauly]

Made worse by the tendency of the Aristotle mindset (inherited from Plato), in which the "scientific" (quotes used intentionally here) approach was basically "if you don't know something about something, fill it in with <something descriptive>". The thought was that it was more important to be "complete" with a description of something than "accurate". There's a whole lot of descriptive nonsense that you basically have to toss out the window that came from that approach. Sadly, I suspect the Victorians just ate it up, which in turn lead to a whole new round of "fanciful" thinking during that era. Add in the telephone game process when dealing with historical accounts/descriptions, and it could get pretty ridiculous.

The Greek mindset was to find the most succinct unambiguous expression. Which makes sense when the major method of transferring information was oral and the major method of storing information was memory.

Hence the chreia of Plato arriving at a definition of a man as a ‘featherless biped’ and being greatly praised for such clever definition. Diogenes then came to Plato’s academy whilst Plato was instructing his students, threw in a plucked rooster saying ‘behold, Plato’s man’. After which Plato amended his definition of a man to a ‘featherless biped with broad nails’.

[Khedrac]

A thought occurred to me - how easy is/was it to store a strung bow?

I believe some historical groups had scabbard-type containers for recurved composite bows, but I think they were horse-scabbards not person ones (if they existed at all)?
The relatively common fantasy picture of carrying a strung bow by putting one's head and arm through so it sits diagonally across the torso - bow on the back, string on the front - doesn't seem practical when I think about it.

So, were strung bows carried around (except for in hand when they are directly ready for use)?

[Vinyadan]

I suspect it depends on culture, place, and time. Many weapons were carried in hand without a sheath, and a Duehrer print of Irish soldiers hints that this was the case with bows, too. https://www.wikiart.org/en/albrecht-durer/irish-soldiers-and-peasants

There also is a Greek vase showing a Scythian carrying his bow in a sheath. https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/news-photo/black-figured-plate-depicts-an-archer-blowing-a-trumpet-news-photo/543542594 And photos of Mongolian archers with a sheath and a strung bow https://www.jstor.org/stable/48578005 How much it was for pose, that's a different matter.

One with more time or experience could give you a more complete answer. I've never really got how a bow can be carried like in fantasy movies, however. I would expect it to get too low for comfort, unless it squeezes the bearer really well.

[Khedrac]

I suspect it depends on culture, place, and time. Many weapons were carried in hand without a sheath, and a Duehrer print of Irish soldiers hints that this was the case with bows, too. https://www.wikiart.org/en/albrecht-durer/irish-soldiers-and-peasants

There also is a Greek vase showing a Scythian carrying his bow in a sheath. https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/news-photo/black-figured-plate-depicts-an-archer-blowing-a-trumpet-news-photo/543542594 And photos of Mongolian archers with a sheath and a strung bow https://www.jstor.org/stable/48578005 How much it was for pose, that's a different matter.

One with more time or experience could give you a more complete answer. I've never really got how a bow can be carried like in fantasy movies, however. I would expect it to get too low for comfort, unless it squeezes the bearer really well.

Thank-you - I think the first picture you showed supports our general position that you cannot carry a bow in the fantasy over the shoulder/body method.
The second picture shows nicely that recurve bows can be compact enough to fit in sheathes of various sorts whilst the third gives an excellent way to store a bow for a long walk/march, but not one that woud be practical in enclosed spaces.

[Grim Portent]

Been a while since I did any archery, but I'm pretty sure slinging the bow over yourself with the bowstring would negatively impact the bow. You aren't really supposed to keep them stretched beyond their normal resting but strung position, it stretches the string and can make it more slack, and can warp the bow itself in a way that proper use doesn't. Hunters do it for convenience sometimes to my knowledge, but target shooters frown on the practice.

It's not going to cause catastrophic damage in a short time or anything, but a good bow isn't cheap, so unnecessary wear and tear isn't something you want to happen. It's the sort of behaviour a professional military bowman would probably give his son a slap around the head for doing.

[Pauly]

A thought occurred to me - how easy is/was it to store a strung bow?

I believe some historical groups had scabbard-type containers for recurved composite bows, but I think they were horse-scabbards not person ones (if they existed at all)?
The relatively common fantasy picture of carrying a strung bow by putting one's head and arm through so it sits diagonally across the torso - bow on the back, string on the front - doesn't seem practical when I think about it.

So, were strung bows carried around (except for in hand when they are directly ready for use)?

Archery isn’t my speciality, but all I have read is that historical bows were kept unstrung until needed
A number of reasons have been cited including.
- stress on the bow is bad for it, so you want to limit the amount of stress it sees.
- bowstrings becoming stretched.
- danger of getting wet, which was generally considered catastrophic for the bow string and bad for the bow.

I remember sources specifically mentioning English Longbowmen stringing their bows just before action during the 100 Years War and the War of the Roses.

[VoxRationis]

The second picture shows nicely that recurve bows can be compact enough to fit in sheathes of various sorts whilst the third gives an excellent way to store a bow for a long walk/march, but not one that woud be practical in enclosed spaces.

Although really, when was the last time one needed to conveniently carry a composite bow indoors? Check it at the door. If a bow-carrying method works on a hike and not at a dance party, it's of only negligibly less usefulness than some hypothetical method that works for both.

[Martin Greywolf]

A thought occurred to me - how easy is/was it to store a strung bow?

Pretty damn easy, it's just a stick with some string. Put it on a scabbard, hang it from wherever. That's not he problem.

The problem is that the stick is relatively thin, and if you keep it like that for weeks on end, it's going to steadily loose power. That's a bit of a problem if you want to arm your army with a weapon that will last them a few years, and doubly so if you want to stock your armory with some reserve gear.


I believe some historical groups had scabbard-type containers for recurved composite bows, but I think they were horse-scabbards not person ones (if they existed at all)?

This is a pretty easy to answer question - every culture that used a short bow put it in a scabbard at their hip, sometimes switching it to the saddle when on horseback. It's a result of the bow's shortness rather than anything related to horses or nomads.

This is why you sometimes see plains Indians in America using scabbards as well, their bows were not composite, but relatively short, and relatively weak.


The relatively common fantasy picture of carrying a strung bow by putting one's head and arm through so it sits diagonally across the torso - bow on the back, string on the front - doesn't seem practical when I think about it.

Not only is it hard to get the bow out from there, but it also interferes with your hood, possibly shield straps and to top it off, a long bow will get caught on ground and/or shrubs. Which I know, because I tried it.

Another issue is that the bow is your main weapon, kind of like a spear or a pollaxe, so there is no reason to have it sheated, really. You are going out there to shoot something/someone, may as well just keep it in your hand. It's a bit like asking why does modern infantry not have a holster for their assault rifles.


So, were strung bows carried around (except for in hand when they are directly ready for use)?

Well, there was the ever popular in the hand and strung, even used by nomads sometimes

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/K%C3%A9pes_kr%C3%B3nika_-_1.oldal_-_Lajos_kir%C3%A1ly_a_tr%C3%B3non_%282%29.jpg
You can see it is clearly strung from the shape, and I can see the actual string drawn on the picture in my facisimile

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/9680/1000

If you had a short enough bow, you could have it strung and in a sheat:

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2BAFBD8/american-indian-native-american-boy-poses-with-bow-arrows-in-a-sheath-or-quiver-on-his-back-around-1907-he-wears-a-fine-collection-of-beautifully-designed-beaded-clothing-including-leggings-a-breechcloth-moccasins-not-visible-strings-of-beads-around-his-neck-he-does-not-look-happy-in-fact-as-was-somewhat-common-in-those-days-the-white-photographer-had-the-boy-put-on-all-that-authentic-but-not-everyday-clothing-only-to-pose-so-the-photographer-could-sell-a-romanticized-indian-image-to-tourists-to-see-my-other-vintage-images-search-prestor-vintage-west-2BAFBD8.jpg

https://armourinart.com/image/384/1000

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/20881/1000

If you were expecting no trouble, or had it stored, you could just have it unstrung and carry it that way:

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/15590/1000

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/12092/1000

And if you had a bow that was long, and expected no trouble, and were travelling by horse, you could always just tie it to the saddle or the quiver.

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/22777/1000

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Khedrac
A thought occurred to me - how easy is/was it to store a strung bow?

I just now came here to ask a remarkably similar question, but expanded to other kinds of weapons as well:

In general, how were weapons like swords, axes, spears, etc. physically stored? I’m mainly thinking of weapons that would be stockpiled for the defense of a fortification, but I’m open to other cases of weapon storage as well. What kinds of spaces were they kept in, and under what conditions?

And as a second part to this question—how long could these weapons remain combat-viable when stored in these spaces and under these conditions? Were there any approaches taken to try to extend their lifespans when stored? How effective were those efforts to prolong the weapons’ storage lives, and can we estimate what their maximum “shelf life” might have been?

Obviously this varies widely depending on culture, climate, period in history and many other factors, so I’m open to whatever answers anyone can provide.

[Vinyadan]

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/20881/1000

I spent some time looking for info about this image, because I didn't recognise the scene (there is a radiant knight, but the Decameron doesn't leave much room for the supernatural, although it does rarely come up -- see Botticelli's cycle about Nastagio degli Onesti). As it turns out, it's from a lesser-known work by Boccaccio, the Filocolo, the first prose novel of Italian literature. I really like the miniatures, there is something opulent about the scenes, with all the details on hats and fabrics and armour, but without taking away from the action. Apparently, the manuscript (https://orka.bibliothek.uni-kassel.de/viewer/fullscreen/1310108562243/7/) was made in Northern Italy.

[snowblizz]

I just now came here to ask a remarkably similar question, but expanded to other kinds of weapons as well:

In general, how were weapons like swords, axes, spears, etc. physically stored? I’m mainly thinking of weapons that would be stockpiled for the defense of a fortification, but I’m open to other cases of weapon storage as well. What kinds of spaces were they kept in, and under what conditions?

And as a second part to this question—how long could these weapons remain combat-viable when stored in these spaces and under these conditions? Were there any approaches taken to try to extend their lifespans when stored? How effective were those efforts to prolong the weapons’ storage lives, and can we estimate what their maximum “shelf life” might have been?

Obviously this varies widely depending on culture, climate, period in history and many other factors, so I’m open to whatever answers anyone can provide.

Well the obvious answer to how long can you store stuff in good conditions is of course literally centuries. Because we have extant medieval weaponry that was kept in armouries from when they were actually relevant to modern days.

There are also plenty of old agricultural tools like scythes and such that remain store in barns and outhouses.

There are plenty of stories of generational weapons. When the peasantry fought the battle of Visby in 1361 their gear was old fashioned. At least a generation out of date compared to the Danish enemies. These would have been stored in attics and outhouses, not museum quality housing.
Steel weapons and armour doesn't just rot away by themselves. They do rust, but that is a surface problem which in fact helps preserve them as long as it's not constantly rubbed away. In some cases you used controlled oxidation as rustproofing on armours. So you can easily take grandpa's pollaxe or spear from your attic and polish it up and it's probably fine enough.

[Martin Greywolf]

In general, how were weapons like swords, axes, spears, etc. physically stored? I’m mainly thinking of weapons that would be stockpiled for the defense of a fortification, but I’m open to other cases of weapon storage as well. What kinds of spaces were they kept in, and under what conditions?

Obviously this varies widely depending on culture, climate, period in history and many other factors, so I’m open to whatever answers anyone can provide.

You'd be surprised how uniform that was. There aren't that many ways to make steel/iron no rust, and we figured them out pretty quickly.

The answer is, put it in as dry a room you can manage, put some sand (or salt if feeling real fancy) on the floor to suck out the moisture and cover the metal bits with a fairly thick layer of lard. There were some slight variations, usually involving cloth soaked in oil or lard to serve as additional layer of protection.



And as a second part to this question—how long could these weapons remain combat-viable when stored in these spaces and under these conditions? Were there any approaches taken to try to extend their lifespans when stored? How effective were those efforts to prolong the weapons’ storage lives, and can we estimate what their maximum “shelf life” might have been?


The shelf life for metal is ludicrously massive, to a point where talking about it is pointless. Well, unless it rusts, but if you did you lard thing and didn't let any dogs in to lick it off...

That is actually the number one issue, keeping animals out of the storage, not just to not lick the lard off, but to protect the wooden and leather bits from termites and vermin.

Protecting wood is probably going to be your greatest challenge otherwise. The wooden bits should already be cured in some way to help with this (soaked in boiling wax or oil, usually), but if enough moisture gets in over time, they will weaken. The way this was usually solved was by regular inspection (once a year, if that) and replacement of damaged parts.

You don't see a lot of pictures of this, because it is hardly a sexy thing to draw, what few images we have are usually from workshops rather than storage, but the storage was probably built in a similar way.

https://forgeofsvan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Armor-making-1.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c5/9d/a5/c59da51f8b7fbd7e015cc022d44fa134--medieval-crafts-b-w-photos.jpg

[Vinyadan]

Some years ago, I asked what would happen if a soldier was shot with a granade: would the grenade blow up, or would it perforate the soldier and keep flying? According to the BBC, recent events show that there's a chance that a VOG grenade will simply get lodged inside the soldier and not blow up, something that is also portayed in the movie Black Hawk Down as happening to a soldier hit by an RPG.



https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c5/9d/a5/c59da51f8b7fbd7e015cc022d44fa134--medieval-crafts-b-w-photos.jpg

I feel that this isn't a safe working environment by modern standards :smalltongue:

[Vinyadan]

I just now came here to ask a remarkably similar question, but expanded to other kinds of weapons as well:

In general, how were weapons like swords, axes, spears, etc. physically stored? I’m mainly thinking of weapons that would be stockpiled for the defense of a fortification, but I’m open to other cases of weapon storage as well. What kinds of spaces were they kept in, and under what conditions?

And as a second part to this question—how long could these weapons remain combat-viable when stored in these spaces and under these conditions? Were there any approaches taken to try to extend their lifespans when stored? How effective were those efforts to prolong the weapons’ storage lives, and can we estimate what their maximum “shelf life” might have been?

Obviously this varies widely depending on culture, climate, period in history and many other factors, so I’m open to whatever answers anyone can provide.

A good place to start looking for detailed info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styrian_Armoury

[Khedrac]

Some years ago, I asked what would happen if a soldier was shot with a granade: would the grenade blow up, or would it perforate the soldier and keep flying? According to the BBC, recent events show that there's a chance that a VOG grenade will simply get lodged inside the soldier and not blow up, something that is also portayed in the movie Black Hawk Down as happening to a soldier hit by an RPG.

I feel that this isn't a safe working environment by modern standards :smalltongue:

I read the BBC News article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64247159) - who thought that surgery and bomb disposal were overlapping fields? I notice that the military had personnel in the operating theatre - presumably to intervene or advise depending on the condition of the grenade.

PS Posting at work so unable to see anything inside your spoiler.

[Martin Greywolf]

Some years ago, I asked what would happen if a soldier was shot with a granade: would the grenade blow up, or would it perforate the soldier and keep flying? According to the BBC, recent events show that there's a chance that a VOG grenade will simply get lodged inside the soldier and not blow up, something that is also portayed in the movie Black Hawk Down as happening to a soldier hit by an RPG.

Well, yeah, there is always a chance. The question is if that was a result of the human body being too soft to trigger the grenade, or whether it just had a bad fuse/was inside the arming distance.

I suspect that one was the bad fuse case, because VOG grenades are supposed to self-destruct after 20 seconds.

[Vinyadan]

I read the BBC News article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64247159) - who thought that surgery and bomb disposal were overlapping fields?

That's actually an interesting thing: I believe that one of the reasons that that brought to the Declaration of St Petersburg, which in 1868 forbade the use of explosive projectiles below 400g by troops, was that, when lodged in a soldier without exploding, they represented a serious danger for medical personell, which isn't supposed to get harmed while performing humanitarian activities.

[Saint-Just]

That's actually an interesting thing: I believe that one of the reasons that that brought to the Declaration of St Petersburg, which in 1868 forbade the use of explosive projectiles below 400g by troops, was that, when lodged in a soldier without exploding, they represented a serious danger for medical personell, which isn't supposed to get harmed while performing humanitarian activities.

That got me thinking - all those explosive HMG rounds, and most importantly modern grenades for for grenade launchers weigh significantly less than 400 gram. I heard that that 400 grams were an important consideration for design of weaponry pre-WWI, that Nordenfelt's 1-inch guns were used with solid shot because of it, that French 37mm mle.1916 TRP was in that caliber because it was the smallest explosive shell in the French inventory, that pilots with incendiary ammunition in WWI were instructed not to use it on planes, only on balloons. I cannot find any of the signatories explicitly disclaiming it but by the WWII explosive ammo is everywhere. I heard explanations that it is because the weapons are not man-portable or not intended to be used against infantry, but surely modern grenades for grenade launchers are both of that. So how does it square with the St. Petersburg Declaration?

[Gnoman]

That got me thinking - all those explosive HMG rounds, and most importantly modern grenades for for grenade launchers weigh significantly less than 400 gram. I heard that that 400 grams were an important consideration for design of weaponry pre-WWI, that Nordenfelt's 1-inch guns were used with solid shot because of it, that French 37mm mle.1916 TRP was in that caliber because it was the smallest explosive shell in the French inventory, that pilots with incendiary ammunition in WWI were instructed not to use it on planes, only on balloons. I cannot find any of the signatories explicitly disclaiming it but by the WWII explosive ammo is everywhere. I heard explanations that it is because the weapons are not man-portable or not intended to be used against infantry, but surely modern grenades for grenade launchers are both of that. So how does it square with the St. Petersburg Declaration?

The claim of WWI incendiaries being balloon only, if true, would have more to do with other considerations (most of the guns firing incendiaries were larger than the standard ones for aircraft, less reliable, and both ammunition and guns were in very short supply) than St. Petersburg - balloons were manned, after all. "Not intended for infantry" is a common explanation, but a purely nonsense one. The main factor is that grenade launchers and autocannon are not "small arms" for the purposes of the rule in question (which remains active in spirit even if it has somewhat been superceded). The rule was intended to apply to standard infantry rifles, specifically because ammunition for such rifles had been developed and there was a risk of a very ugly armaments race.

[halfeye]

The claim of WWI incendiaries being balloon only, if true, would have more to do with other considerations (most of the guns firing incendiaries were larger than the standard ones for aircraft, less reliable, and both ammunition and guns were in very short supply) than St. Petersburg - balloons were manned, after all. "Not intended for infantry" is a common explanation, but a purely nonsense one. The main factor is that grenade launchers and autocannon are not "small arms" for the purposes of the rule in question (which remains active in spirit even if it has somewhat been superceded). The rule was intended to apply to standard infantry rifles, specifically because ammunition for such rifles had been developed and there was a risk of a very ugly armaments race.

There is a possible confusion when talking about explosive bullets. Dumdum rounds usually contain no explosive, but are intended to expand considerably when encountering flesh, they were banned, and hopefully still are, for warfare.

[Gnoman]

There is a possible confusion when talking about explosive bullets. Dumdum rounds usually contain no explosive, but are intended to expand considerably when encountering flesh, they were banned, and hopefully still are, for warfare.

These are a separate protocol. Dum Dum rounds (named after a specific British arsenal, where a bullet with part of the jacket removed to expose the soft lead for expansion) were prohibited as part of the Hague conventions (1899). Explosive and incendiary rounds were restricted by theSt Petersburg Declaration of 1868. The rationales are different -St Petersburg was primarily a "wow, we just invented this thing, and this will get really ugly if we don't put a stop to it!" thing, while the Hague conventions were a much broader attempt to civilize warfare.

[Martin Greywolf]

that pilots with incendiary ammunition in WWI were instructed not to use it on planes, only on balloons.

You're probably imagining something like an explosive round filled with phosphorous, but that's not what these early incendiaries were - the closest modern equivalent is tracers, they were high-velocity torches used to ignite balloons' canvases or gasses. They weren't used against planes because there wasn't much point to do so, since even canvass planes were made from much heavier and less flammable fabrics than balloons.


I cannot find any of the signatories explicitly disclaiming it but by the WWII explosive ammo is everywhere. I heard explanations that it is because the weapons are not man-portable or not intended to be used against infantry, but surely modern grenades for grenade launchers are both of that. So how does it square with the St. Petersburg Declaration?

Well, this is the realm of realpolitik. Try to ban explosive rounds outright and everyone will smile, nod, turn away and promptly ignore the ban. Knowing that, you need to come up with a compromise that accomplishes at least something.

What you see in this case is acknowledging that explosive projectiles (whether large bullets/shells or grenades) are there to stay, so you try to mitigate the damage. What you want at that point is to make sure that these explosives are the kind that is very unlikely to get stuck in someone, and even if it does so, it is large enough that anyone can recognize the danger at a glance. While this does nothing for the poor bastard that got hit by one of these, you are at least unlikely to wheel an injured guy into the hospital while he unknowingly has a small bomb inside.

You will still get bad luck cases where it does happen and no one notices until it is too late, but again, this is about having something rather than nothing.

[Saint-Just]

The claim of WWI incendiaries being balloon only, if true, would have more to do with other considerations (most of the guns firing incendiaries were larger than the standard ones for aircraft, less reliable, and both ammunition and guns were in very short supply) than St. Petersburg - balloons were manned, after all. "Not intended for infantry" is a common explanation, but a purely nonsense one. The main factor is that grenade launchers and autocannon are not "small arms" for the purposes of the rule in question (which remains active in spirit even if it has somewhat been superceded). The rule was intended to apply to standard infantry rifles, specifically because ammunition for such rifles had been developed and there was a risk of a very ugly armaments race.

The idea that an underbarrel grenade launcher is not a small arm baffles me. Surely there should be more to the definition than "I know it when I see it"?

(Context: I have been informed that for the purposes of arming a medical vehicle with the Red Cross protection a machine gun is a small arm - there are photos of Western armies doing it openly).

[Martin Greywolf]

The idea that an underbarrel grenade launcher is not a small arm baffles me. Surely there should be more to the definition than "I know it when I see it"?


Well, not to burst your bubble but UBGL isn't a small arm in and of itself according to the UN:


any man-portable lethal weapon that expels or launches, is designed to expel or launch, or may be readily converted to expel or launch a shot, bullet or projectile by the action of an explosive, excluding antique small arms and light weapons or their replicas. Antique small arms and light weapons and their replicas will be defined in accordance with domestic law.

Emphasis mine. Neither is a bow or a crossbow by that definition. Or that air-powered machinegun someone made during US civil war era.

But by US Army definition for maintenance purposes, small arms include 25mm chainguns on a Bradley, so it really depends on who you ask. Sometimes the definition is "if one guy can use it effectively, it counts", sometimes it is "basically anything that isn't artillery". If it is codified in law, you will usually see some sort of pretty convoluted definition (because "use effectively" isn't very precise) that has loopholes open, especially if the law in question is old.

As an example how dumb some of the laws can get, my country had a prohibition on selling bows and crossbows above a certain draw weight to people under 18. Problem is, they defined that by "has a projectile with kinetic energy of X", which seems nice and science-y, until you realize that you could go above and below that limit at will simply be changing the weight of the arrow - the weight wasn't defined anywhere. (this isn't terribly relevant, I just remembered this bit of idiocy and wanted to share it)

[Saint-Just]

Well, not to burst your bubble but UBGL isn't a small arm in and of itself according to the UN:

Emphasis mine. Neither is a bow or a crossbow by that definition. Or that air-powered machinegun someone made during US civil war era.


You emphasized "by the action of an explosive" which is confusing, because UBGLs surely work by using the same/comparable gunpowders as the other firearms. I do feel like it is mostly sideways to the line of inquiry about the lightweight explosive weapons, but it seems there is a some sort of technical miscommunication at play.

[Pauly]

That got me thinking - all those explosive HMG rounds, and most importantly modern grenades for for grenade launchers weigh significantly less than 400 gram. I heard that that 400 grams were an important consideration for design of weaponry pre-WWI, that Nordenfelt's 1-inch guns were used with solid shot because of it, that French 37mm mle.1916 TRP was in that caliber because it was the smallest explosive shell in the French inventory, that pilots with incendiary ammunition in WWI were instructed not to use it on planes, only on balloons. I cannot find any of the signatories explicitly disclaiming it but by the WWII explosive ammo is everywhere. I heard explanations that it is because the weapons are not man-portable or not intended to be used against infantry, but surely modern grenades for grenade launchers are both of that. So how does it square with the St. Petersburg Declaration?

Re incendiary ammunition in WW1.

The British developed the Birmingham bullet which used phosphorous as an ignition source. I also believe the French also developed a similar bullet, but my sources aren’t easily to hand right now.
The Germans considered this a breach of the St Petersburg treaty and threatened to execute anyone found using the ammunition. RFC memoirs indicate that flyers would carry written orders authorizing the use of Birmingham ammunition when balloon busting, but pilots believed they would be executed if they were captured with Birmingham ammunition. I have no sources that indicate any British pilots were actually executed for carrying incendiary bullets, but it was widely accepted by British pilots that the Germans would do so. It is also important to remember that due to engine unreliability, difficulty with navigation, lack of radios and the relatively close and slow nature of WW1 air combat that capturing of aircraft intact with their aircrew was much more common in WW1 than in later conflicts.
British legal experts considered that the incendiary ammunition did not violate the St Petersburg or Hague treaties.
It is important to note that the Germans did not develop their own incendiary ammunition in WW1.

The case of Captain Fryatt showed the Germans were serious about executing individuals who they believed crossed the rules of war.

The Germans also threatened to execute US soldiers using trench shotguns because they considered them a breach of the Hague convention. It is to be noted again that the Germans hadn’t developed their own trench shotgun.

By WW2 every combatant had developed incendiary bullets and no combatant thought they violated the St Petersburg or Hague conventions at that time.

[fusilier]

Re incendiary ammunition in WW1.
. . .
It is important to note that the Germans did not develop their own incendiary ammunition in WW1.

Are you sure about this? I've seen several references to Germans using incendiary ammo in their aircraft, during WW1. Such as a reference to the ammo being unstable and tending to "cook off" on hot days! Fokker D.VII's were sometimes flown with the engine panels off when armed with incendiary ammo in an attempt to keep the ammo cool. I think incendiary ammo became standard for balloon busting on all sides in the war. Although some aircraft could be fitted with Le Prieur rockets (again on both sides), they seem to have been gradually replaced by incendiary bullets.

[Pauly]

Are you sure about this? I've seen several references to Germans using incendiary ammo in their aircraft, during WW1. Such as a reference to the ammo being unstable and tending to "cook off" on hot days! Fokker D.VII's were sometimes flown with the engine panels off when armed with incendiary ammo in an attempt to keep the ammo cool. I think incendiary ammo became standard for balloon busting on all sides in the war. Although some aircraft could be fitted with Le Prieur rockets (again on both sides), they seem to have been gradually replaced by incendiary bullets.

Not 100%, but I haven’t found any reliable information that the Germans had a viable incendiary round. Doing some digging there were some German balloon buster aces so it’s hard to believe they’d be successful balloon busters without incendiary ammo. Tracer could do it, but you have to be pretty lucky to light up a balloon using only tracers.

The Austrians had 8mm Mannlicher incendiary rounds, which was considered not as effective as the British Buckingham.

[Kriegspiel]

The idea that an underbarrel grenade launcher is not a small arm baffles me. Surely there should be more to the definition than "I know it when I see it"?.

Generally speaking grenade launchers are grouped as 'light weapons' which generally refers to crew served weapons (belt fed machine guns) and includes portable weapons up to MANPADS.

When you look at international discussions of arms you'll commonly see the abbrevation SALW referring to Small Arms & Light Weapons which lumps them all together for arms control purposes.

[Gnoman]

Re incendiary ammunition in WW1.

The British developed the Birmingham bullet which used phosphorous as an ignition source. I also believe the French also developed a similar bullet, but my sources aren’t easily to hand right now.
The Germans considered this a breach of the St Petersburg treaty and threatened to execute anyone found using the ammunition. RFC memoirs indicate that flyers would carry written orders authorizing the use of Birmingham ammunition when balloon busting, but pilots believed they would be executed if they were captured with Birmingham ammunition. I have no sources that indicate any British pilots were actually executed for carrying incendiary bullets, but it was widely accepted by British pilots that the Germans would do so.


Reliable sourcing for this claim (note that it was a "Buckingham bullet") is hard to find - every source for any claim points back to a single memoir. It is important to remember that memoirs are usually written well after the fact, and even if the author is young enough to remain in sound mind (the infamous Death Traps, for example, was written when the "author" was extremely old, possibly in the early stages of senility, and much of the content was added by the "co-author"), memory is a pretty fickle thing. It is very easy for you to remember something wrongly after twenty years, especially if it relates to a Good Story that's been passed around and around.

What I can find is that there was an issue with them, but it was not their filler. They were flat-pointed - thus potentially falling under the definition of "expanding round".


It is important to note that the Germans did not develop their own incendiary ammunition in WW1.

I can't find anything to dispute that - all tracer or incendiary rounds in their common calibers appears to have been introduced in the interbellum. Even information on the Austrian round you mentioned is extremely sparse. This is largely irrelevant to the broader claim, however, as the Germans used flamethrowers extensively on the ground starting in 1915.




The case of Captain Fryatt showed the Germans were serious about executing individuals who they believed crossed the rules of war.

The Germans also threatened to execute US soldiers using trench shotguns because they considered them a breach of the Hague convention. It is to be noted again that the Germans hadn’t developed their own trench shotgun.


Fryatt was a civilian who allegedly dared to fight back. Experiences with partisan activity in the Franco-Prussian War made the Germans extremely paranoid about such things.


Nobody except the Americans used trench shotguns. Shotguns were a civilian weapon, with only the US having them in military inventory due to unique aspects of the prewar US military situation. In close range they were quite effective -each 00 shell contained 9 .32 caliber pellets, so each shot was the equivalent of dumping an entire magazine from common service pistols, the pump action system allowed for very rapid firing, and they were short and handy in tight places. This exhausts their virtues. Both gun and ammunition were very poorly suited to trench conditions - at this time shotgun shells were made of waxed cardboard that didn't stand up that well to long-term wetness, and a pump action tends to leave very large gaps for mud to enter and gum up the mechanism. The short range was a major liability on both attack and defense - you can't contribute to suppressive fire when advancing, and your weapon has no ability to reach out and help break up an attack the other guy is launching. You will see a common claim that shotgunner would aid everyone else by shooting grenades out of the air, but this is a myth - even if you had the reaction to spot a grenade and shoot at it (very difficult to do in the middle of a battle!), hitting one with buckshot (the only ammunition issued) under such conditions is nearly impossible. Experience trap shooters have tried it with replicas under ideal conditions (knowing exactly the path it will take and when it is coming) and could barely do it.

Here, the claim you're making is genuinely substantiated - the Germans did file a complaint with the Hague that the shotgun pellets constituted an illegal expanding round (because they were made of lead, which naturally deforms), and did issue a threat of retaliation. There's no evidence that any attempt to carry out said threat was ever attempted, the Hague rejected the complaint outright, and the strongest theory is that they primarily issued it because it was clear the war was going to end. The German use of poison gas (explicitly prohibited by those same conventions) would be a thorny one in any peace negotiations, and if they could produce Entente violations it would help muddy the waters.

[gbaji]

Fryatt was a civilian who allegedly dared to fight back. Experiences with partisan activity in the Franco-Prussian War made the Germans extremely paranoid about such things.

Article 5 of the 4th Geneva Convention exists to clarify such things. And IIRC allows for charges and whatnot against civilians who take part in military style actions, but expressly forbids death penalties in such cases.

[Gnoman]

Article 5 of the 4th Geneva Convention exists to clarify such things. And IIRC allows for charges and whatnot against civilians who take part in military style actions, but expressly forbids death penalties in such cases.

Note that that was a 1949 convention.

[fusilier]

Not 100%, but I haven’t found any reliable information that the Germans had a viable incendiary round. Doing some digging there were some German balloon buster aces so it’s hard to believe they’d be successful balloon busters without incendiary ammo. Tracer could do it, but you have to be pretty lucky to light up a balloon using only tracers.

The Austrians had 8mm Mannlicher incendiary rounds, which was considered not as effective as the British Buckingham.

Unfortunately, I'm in the process of moving, and my books are packed up at a different location. The internet is being rather vague on this subject, with some websites claiming only the British really had an incendiary round, but this seems to be nonsense. Or perhaps a muddled claim that WW1 incendiary rounds were generally pretty poor by later standards, and only the British had a "good" incendiary . . .

Anyway, if you dig enough you will find references to German incendiaries:
http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52920


From 'The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Volume VIII, The Australian Flying Corps'
APPENDIX No. 9.
USE OF INCENDIARY BULLETS.
. . .
Captured German aeroplanes were found to have their machine-gun belts loaded with incendiary ammunition. This was the case, for example, with the L.V.G. captured after it had shot down Lieutenant Walker in flames (Chapter XI.), and with the Halberstadt driven in by No. 3 Squadron in June, 1918


The context here, was aircraft using incendiary rounds to shoot down other aircraft, instead of the "acceptable" use of incendiary rounds to attack balloons.

However, I have yet to see good technical data . . . well . . . really of any WW1 incendiary round. Tracers seem to be pretty well documented. It seems that WW1 incendiary rounds were constructed like tracers but with a different burning compound. Perhaps this is why some consider them not to be proper incendiary bullets?? My curiosity is piqued, but I'm also finding this to be somewhat frustrating -- I figured it would be better documented than it is.

[fusilier]

Re: German Incendiary Ammunition in WW1

Some more digging around on the extensive forums at the aerodrome:
http://www.theaerodrome.com/aces/germany/putter.php

"After nearly a month in a military hospital, he died from severe burns received when his Fokker's incendiary ammunition ignited on 16 July 1918."

As noted before, this seems to have been a particular hazard on Fokker D.VII's.

Another thing is that the phosphorous based incendiary bullets, created a white trail of smoke when fired -- sometimes they were referred to as "smoke tracers" (although the phosphorous burned too quickly to make an effective tracer). This may have been an attempt to hide the purpose of them. Nevertheless, I would still like to see some more detailed descriptions of the ammo.

[Pauly]

Reliable sourcing for this claim (note that it was a "Buckingham bullet") is hard to find - every source for any claim points back to a single memoir. It is important to remember that memoirs are usually written well after the fact, and even if the author is young enough to remain in sound mind (the infamous Death Traps, for example, was written when the "author" was extremely old, possibly in the early stages of senility, and much of the content was added by the "co-author"), memory is a pretty fickle thing. It is very easy for you to remember something wrongly after twenty years, especially if it relates to a Good Story that's been passed around and around.

What I can find is that there was an issue with them, but it was not their filler. They were flat-pointed - thus potentially falling under the definition of "expanding round".


Which memoir are you referencing?

I have about 30 written in the 20s and 30s, packed away in storage in another continent and it is referenced. From memory Harry Cobby mentions in when he talks about balloon busting.
W E Johns when writing in 1932 in the story “the Balloonists” refers to the Buckingham bullets being outlawed by rules of war and needing authorization to use them against balloons to avoid trouble if captured.
W E Johns was a DH4 pilot so he didn’t do any actual balloon busting in WW1, but after being captured he was interned with other pilots and continued to serve after the war in the RAF. As a side note I’ve taught ESL to a Japanese JSDAF F-16 pilot who has attended the “Top Gun” school and set him Biiggles as reading assignment and his professional opinion as a fighter pilot was that the air combat descriptions in Biggles are very accurate. He took issue with one story where Johns was trying to describe a hammerhead turn which Johns described as a flat turn, not a climbing turn.

[Kriegspiel]

As a side note I’ve taught ESL to a Japanese JSDAF F-16 pilot who has attended the “Top Gun” school and set him Biiggles as reading assignment and his professional opinion as a fighter pilot was that the air combat descriptions in Biggles are very accurate. He took issue with one story where Johns was trying to describe a hammerhead turn which Johns described as a flat turn, not a climbing turn.

FWIW the JASDF doesn't fly the F-16, they have the F-2 which built off the same platform but it's definitely a unique airframe. Similar to the Hornet vs Super Hornet, although to a lesser degree.

[Pauly]

FWIW the JASDF doesn't fly the F-16, they have the F-2 which built off the same platform but it's definitely a unique airframe. Similar to the Hornet vs Super Hornet, although to a lesser degree.

Yui san called it an F-16, so maybe he was simplifying it for a gaijin.

[fusilier]

Which memoir are you referencing?

I have about 30 written in the 20s and 30s, packed away in storage in another continent and it is referenced. From memory Harry Cobby mentions in when he talks about balloon busting.
W E Johns when writing in 1932 in the story “the Balloonists” refers to the Buckingham bullets being outlawed by rules of war and needing authorization to use them against balloons to avoid trouble if captured.
W E Johns was a DH4 pilot so he didn’t do any actual balloon busting in WW1, but after being captured he was interned with other pilots and continued to serve after the war in the RAF. . . . .

In the digging around I've been doing to try to find info on German incendiary rounds, I've seen a good number of varied references to both Buckingham bullets, and the paranoia that they might be executed if captured with them. Written orders and "blue cards"(?) were handed out to show that the aviators were operating under orders to try to allay their fears.

I'm not sure if the term "Buckingham bullet" was used in official documentation (i.e. officially it was the Mark VII round, or something like that). Also there were some others variants used too (Pomeroy?), but Buckingham may be the name that stuck in everyone's mind.

Finally, while there seems to have been some paranoia among British pilots, others seem to have used incendiary bullets without much compunction. Silvio Scaroni (Italy's second highest scoring ace), reported in his diary that his ammo belts were loaded with: 3 ordinary bullets, 1 incendiary, 1 explosive. (Although I wonder if this is an error in translation, and the incendiary was a tracer). Using exploding bullets gets into a whole other issue with violating international norms . . .

[gbaji]

Note that that was a 1949 convention.

Yup. Possible (probable? Haven't done a ton of research) that occurances like his were part of the reason that convention was written to include that sort of situation. So progress, I suppose.

I do agree with the general trend on munitions that a lot of it boils down to "what we say or how we define what we're doing", and a heck of a lot of it gets twisted to meet conveniences of the day. And yeah, some older definitions that get sorta handwaved away because they maybe aren't as applicable today as they were when written. Not an area I'm extremely well versed in, beyond a general observation that (as often is the case) there is a tendency to create new rules based on the previous conflicts and not necessarily on the next one(s).

The same pattern can be seen historically both in people who try to make warfare more humane, and people who are trying to be "better at war". How this equates to historical accuracy of weapons used in any given time period or setting can kinda be up to who is creating the setting and whether they want to follow "real world" patterns, or actively explore a "what would happen if..." type of situation. I actually find the latter can be an interesting exercise.

[Vinyadan]

Not an area I'm extremely well versed in, beyond a general observation that (as often is the case) there is a tendency to create new rules based on the previous conflicts and not necessarily on the next one(s).

An example I heard from a conference with an American scholar (a household name that currently escapes me) was the way drone use was left unregulated for the longest time, and that the few early drone users didn't try to impose a standard of rules; a particularly fateful choice, he thought, and a missed chance, given that he expected that the low cost and relative simplicity of drones would quickly lead to their proliferation worldwide.


Silvio Scaroni (Italy's second highest scoring ace), reported in his diary that his ammo belts were loaded with: 3 ordinary bullets, 1 incendiary, 1 explosive. (Although I wonder if this is an error in translation, and the incendiary was a tracer). Using exploding bullets gets into a whole other issue with violating international norms . . .

If you can find the original, I should be able to translate it without much trouble.

[wilphe]

As a side note I’ve taught ESL to a Japanese JSDAF F-16 pilot who has attended the “Top Gun” school and set him Biiggles as reading assignment and his professional opinion as a fighter pilot was that the air combat descriptions in Biggles are very accurate. He took issue with one story where Johns was trying to describe a hammerhead turn which Johns described as a flat turn, not a climbing turn.

Biggles was originally written to help preserve the lessons of WW1 air combat for another generation

It did not however take long for it to get a younger fanbase that didn't want to hear about icky girls and got bowdlerised to the point that pilots would engage in balloon busting competitions for crates of lemonade rather than champagne or whisky. I forget which it is in the original.

[wilphe]

Fryatt was a civilian who allegedly dared to fight back. Experiences with partisan activity in the Franco-Prussian War made the Germans extremely paranoid about such things.


The Germans have historically taken wearing the uniform very seriously and accordingly taken a very dim view of those who fight against them whilst not wearing them.

[Pauly]

Biggles was originally written to help preserve the lessons of WW1 air combat for another generation

It did not however take long for it to get a younger fanbase that didn't want to hear about icky girls and got bowdlerised to the point that pilots would engage in balloon busting competitions for crates of lemonade rather than champagne or whisky. I forget which it is in the original.

You can get the original un-bowdlerized editions on iBooks. A lot more references to whisky, women, and the effects of combat stress than the books I read as a young chap.

But once you get to the first novels, Biggles flies East and Biggles and the Rescue Flight, the bowdlerization starts to kick in.

[Vinyadan]

So, how common is it for a general to wear a military-grade shower cap (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/MacArthur_Inchon_planning.JPG) on his hat to avoid getting wet?

In a less facetious manner, I've seen stuff like that in everyday life, but mostly on the legs and shoes. Putting a hat on your hat isn't something I've ever considered.

[tyckspoon]

So, how common is it for a general to wear a military-grade shower cap (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/MacArthur_Inchon_planning.JPG) on his hat to avoid getting wet?

In a less facetious manner, I've seen stuff like that in everyday life, but mostly on the legs and shoes. Putting a hat on your hat isn't something I've ever considered.

It's pretty common for military that is being required to be in inclement weather while still wearing full fancy dress or more formal versions of the uniform - you aren't allowed to NOT be in fancy dress when the ceremony/task you're doing says you have to be, but your hat also isn't designed to get wet and you'll get in trouble/have to pay for replacing it if you let it get wrecked by being rained on. So the compromise is to put a raincoat on your cap.

[snowblizz]

It's pretty common for military that is being required to be in inclement weather while still wearing full fancy dress or more formal versions of the uniform - you aren't allowed to NOT be in fancy dress when the ceremony/task you're doing says you have to be, but your hat also isn't designed to get wet and you'll get in trouble/have to pay for replacing it if you let it get wrecked by being rained on. So the compromise is to put a raincoat on your cap.

I swear I seen it on pics for things like police officers too.

[Pauly]

So, how common is it for a general to wear a military-grade shower cap (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/MacArthur_Inchon_planning.JPG) on his hat to avoid getting wet?

In a less facetious manner, I've seen stuff like that in everyday life, but mostly on the legs and shoes. Putting a hat on your hat isn't something I've ever considered.

For a ceremonial dress uniform it’s fairly common.

In field the solution is something like a proper duffel coat, with an oversized hood to go over the field cap/beret.
Some examples here: http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-return-of-duffle-duffel-coat.html
Not sure it is was meant to be worn over a helmet though, but a quick google search doesn’t show me any photos of it being done.

[Vinyadan]

Thanks for the information about the hat cover. It sounds a bit counter-intuitive: one would assume that the cover negates the looks of the fancy uniform. Then again, so does using a non-fancy one... I guess the solution would be to make military-grade fancy uniforms, but then one would be all stuffy while dancing with the colonel's daughter at the officiers gala.


The Germans have historically taken wearing the uniform very seriously and accordingly taken a very dim view of those who fight against them whilst not wearing them.

I have been wondering about this. Apparently, violent acts by French civilians under German occupation were part of the formative experience of the German Reich (1871-1945) during the Franco-prussian War. There is some French literature (I mean "art prose" , not scientific works) about them, like Maupassant's La Mère Sauvage, where a woman suddenly burns down her own home (and the German soldiers bunked within it) after news of the death of her child reaches her. Other works of his are about a civilian who got hold of a German cavalry uniform and spent his nights on the roadside, pretending to be a wounded cavalryman to lure lone German patrols and kill them, or a man who finally kills a German soldiers with which he had had an apparently jovial (albeit not really friendly) relationship. Most of these stories end with the civilians being executed, although there isn't always a partisan action behind the verdict, as in the case of two men from Paris who somehow decide to go fishing while the city is under siege, are captured by the Germans and are sentenced to death.

Then again, it could be the result of Prussian militarism giving immense prestige to the uniform and trying to preserve it with a black/white distinction and severe penalties for violators, or old standards being kept while the rest of Europe had (if it had) moved on.

What I couldn't find is information about true German irregulars, as even the Volkssturm had its insignia, and I assume very few were left outside of it. There were some Arbeitskommando in the French-occupied Ruhr after ww1, but it's very hard to find info about them, as the name now mostly refers to forced labour in ww2.

I also wonder about German and Austrian behaviour in occupied Italian regions during ww1. It's very easy to find info about Austrian misbehaviour before Italian unification (otherwise it was hard to justify it), but I've never read anything about mistreatment of civilians in ww1 Italy, and certainly nothing comparable to what happened in Belgium.

[fusilier]

I also wonder about German and Austrian behaviour in occupied Italian regions during ww1. It's very easy to find info about Austrian misbehaviour before Italian unification (otherwise it was hard to justify it), but I've never read anything about mistreatment of civilians in ww1 Italy, and certainly nothing comparable to what happened in Belgium.

Mark Thompson's The White War, has a chapter about this. Unfortunately, my books are still packed up, but what I remember is that the occupation of Italian lands by the Austro-Hungarian Army was not too bad. The civilians suffered from the deteriorating logistical situation of the K.u.K., but I don't hear much about mistreatment. For most of the war it was the Italians occupying Austrian lands, and not until the last year was the situation reversed (although the Central Powers occupied considerable more territory than the Italians had).

I'll have to see if I can dig out that book . . . I'm sure there were some incidents, there always is, but I don't recall any serious troubles.

There was an infamous event where the Austrians executed Italian P.O.W.s, who had renounced their Austro-Hungarian citizenship and gone to fight for Italy (and were later captured). It was really badly handled.

http://worldwar1.com/itafront/battisti.htm

[fusilier]

I also wonder about German and Austrian behaviour in occupied Italian regions during ww1. It's very easy to find info about Austrian misbehaviour before Italian unification (otherwise it was hard to justify it), but I've never read anything about mistreatment of civilians in ww1 Italy, and certainly nothing comparable to what happened in Belgium.

I was able to put my hands on my copy of The White War.

The Austrians took control over most of the infrastructure (railways, post, telegraph). They applied the military penal code. "There are no statistics for sentences passed by the courts martial; an Italian commission, set up after the war to investigate abuses under the occupation, concluded that death sentences were seldom passed. Exceptions in cluded two civilians hanged for lighting lanterns at night. Their corpses were left on the gibbet for several days, to drive home the message that spies could expect no leniency." (pg. 348)

Nevertheless, the situation deteriorated. The Austro-Hungarian forces started stripping the populace of everything edible, and then started to requisition fabric, leather and other material. Boroevic realized that the situation was bad, and even opened up public kitchens, "but his administration lacked the resources and, at lower levels, the will to ensure that people did not starve." 10,000 civilians starved to death, 12,500 perished for lack of medical care.

A woman from Pordenone was caught by the censorship office with a letter that described the AH army as "a mass of famished barbarians who have come to Italy to steal everything." (pg. 349).

"The real scale of sexual crime during the occupation will never be known. The postwar royal commission found that rape was widespread in the first few weeks and continued to the end. . . . Occasional acts of sabotage led the administration to fear an uprising. Secret lists were prepared of people to seize as hostages. They were not needed . . . partly because people believed that time was on their side."

When the Italian troops arrived in November of 1918, they found land "completely cleaned out of food." (pgs 350-51).

Apparently, the Austrian occupation was mostly ignored by historians until the 1980s. I will end with this concluding comment by the author: "Brutal, arrogant and predatory, the occupation did Rome the favour of destroying any trace of nostalgia in north-eastern Italy for Habsburg law and order. In the empire's last year of existence, imperial rule finally became as bad as Italian nationalists said it had always been." (pg. 351)

[Frozenstep]

How "free" is the hand of a strapped shield arm?

I'm writing a story and trying to visualize if a warrior with a shield strapped to their arm could still do things like draw potions from a pouch. Based on pictures I've looked at, it seems like they should still be able to open their hand around the grip and pinch small objects, but I can't test it and just want to be sure I'm not missing anything. I know shield and strap design varies, but I'd like to be able to describe a design that does work (or multiple).

[gbaji]

How "free" is the hand of a strapped shield arm?

I'm writing a story and trying to visualize if a warrior with a shield strapped to their arm could still do things like draw potions from a pouch. Based on pictures I've looked at, it seems like they should still be able to open their hand around the grip and pinch small objects, but I can't test it and just want to be sure I'm not missing anything. I know shield and strap design varies, but I'd like to be able to describe a design that does work (or multiple).

It depends on the size and design of the shield. Obviously, it's possible to rig up some sort of method to do this with just about any shield. But assuming we're using standard "out of the box" shield types:

The smallest shields (bucklers) have to be gripped by the center handle, and typically were not strapped (you hooked it on your belt, hence the name). You'd have to set it down (or hook back on the belt). But equipping and unequipping bucklers is a quick thing to do (by design). I suppose for very simple tasks, you could maybe grip stuff with the same hand the buckler is held with. And it's light enough that you have full range of motion with that arm, so... maybe? I don't know if you could do something as complex as unstoppering a potion vial with that hand though.

Medium sized shields would probably work ok for this (rounds and heaters basically). You could basically let the shield handle go, and it's still attached to the arm. It'll dangle a bit, but you can do things like grab something on your belt, adjust your collar, etc. Total arm motion while doing this is limited though. These shields are generally "attached" at two points. A strap around the arm, and a handle for your hand. So you wouldn't need to totally unequip them to make some use of your shield hand, but it would still be a bit clumsy (you're basically holding the shield from the strap in the crook of your arm). So full range with the hand, but not so much with the arm. And you can't extend your arm straight down, or the shield will slip off.

Larger shields (tower, kite, hoplite) are a different beast. They're too heavy/large to allow to "dangle" really, but in most cases, you can just set them against the ground instead (they're designed to be tall enough for this exact purpose). You could certainly rest it against the ground, free up your hand and maybe grab something on your belt or front of your body. In this case though, you're somewhat limited based on the actual height of the shield relative to the crook of your arm in terms of how much mobility you'll have and how much you'd have to crouch maybe. Also, your still attached to the shield, which is now somewhat immobile, so you can't move while doing this. Remember that part of the whole point of these shields is to crouch behind them to maximize protection from missile weapons, so this is within the range of motion expected. Again though, could be a bit awkward depending on what you're trying to do. Additionally, with many of these larger shields, you can actually just plant them in/on the ground and let them go entirely. Er. But you're basically unequipping it at that point, which I'm assuming you were trying to avoid.

I'll also note that usually, one would just pass their weapon held in their main hand to their shield hand (gripping the hilt/shaft/whatever around the strap/handle being held by the shield hand), and just use their main hand to do stuff. In just about any case I can think of, that would be quicker than fiddling with the shield hand and you'll have a completely free hand to do whatever it is you're doing rather than one partialy hindered by a shield hanging off of the same arm/hand. But you asked about doing this with the shield hand, so there you go.

I'm probably missing a number of points as well. And since this is for a story, if you really want your hero to do something like this, there's certainly the possiblity of having some sort of custom rig for this purpose. There's a number of potential strap configurations for both mounted and foot shield stowing that could also double as a "keep the shield from slipping off my arm and/or falling to the ground, if I use my hand for something else" use. Unless you are setting your story in a very specific historical time period, with specific period gear and gear use, I think you can have a lot of latitude here. As long as something "could work", you should be able to justify it IMO.

[Frozenstep]

As long as something "could work", you should be able to justify it IMO.

Thanks for the insight! It's for a fantasy setting, so I do have the leeway, but it's a background detail for supporting characters, so I think a short and simple solution would be best (and take less page space to describe). It's really just about the ergonomics of warriors drinking potions/using simply magical items like glowsticks. I think passing the weapon to the shield hand makes plenty of sense, although I might find a use for the larger shields being able to stand on their own, so thanks for including that.

[Martin Greywolf]

How "free" is the hand of a strapped shield arm?

I'm writing a story and trying to visualize if a warrior with a shield strapped to their arm could still do things like draw potions from a pouch. Based on pictures I've looked at, it seems like they should still be able to open their hand around the grip and pinch small objects, but I can't test it and just want to be sure I'm not missing anything. I know shield and strap design varies, but I'd like to be able to describe a design that does work (or multiple).

I have extensive experience when it comes to marching with shields through all sorts of terrain, from forests through snow to faux-deserts (there was the sand, but the heat was only at 35 Celsius). And trying to operate things with them on, ranging from pouches on the belt, modern locks, car trunks, smartphones and the like.

And unfortunately, it's not really possible most of the time.

Let's take the usual "taking potion out of a pouch" scenario - if there is any sort of lacing or buckle that closes the darn thing, forget about it. Even a buckler will be really badly in the way, and something like a strapped heater shield or a round shield will often make it impossible to angle your hand properly. If there is no lacing (e.g. it's in a bandolier) it is much more viable, but the problem now is the handle of shield in your hand. Unless the shield has just straps as handle, you can't grab anything that has much girth on it.

Furthemore, assuming you managed to get the potion out, how are you gonna get it close enough to your face for uncorking and/or drinking it? There are some few shields that will let you do it, but not without risk of clonking yourself on the head. And all this time, you need to move slower and with more care because there is a lot of weight on your arm.

Another consideration that I run a lot into when slinging with a shield is this: are there enemy archers, because if so, doing weird moves with my shield means my shield isn't protecting me from the arrows in that time.

So, the answer to question as stated is: you can't do much with your shield arm that isn't fighting with a shield.

There's a major, huge but to it.

One thing you can absolutely do with 99% of shields is grab your weapon in your shield arm.

http://www.oregonknifeclub.org/dirk01.jpg
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L9WWAgvGWHw/Wl5ZSjnoCgI/AAAAAAAAKdo/v-b4h5tpqFgBjFFzdodT90z2y8h0NnsrACLcBGAs/s1600/sword%2Bgrab_2.jpg
https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/3/35/Marozzo_53.png/305px-Marozzo_53.png
This one doesn't have the shield hand grip illustrated, but it is mentioned in the text, see this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yy1RM30N-s) for an example around the 3:00 mark

http://galahad.sk/img_loader.php?img=cGcp5SMWAOfnFxbqlSfnjXYslSLpFmb 1REIqjHcgsxf2lGf9jHdOl9NWAJMvMXfnFxbjlSYqjXfsF2fvU mbyVGdu92a


This has some applications in a fight (I keep a long dagger in my shield hand from the get go in battles), but it also means that outside of it, or during a lull, you can grab whatever weapon you have in your dominant hand and put it into the shield hand. This frees up your dominant hand in the amount of time that is a minute fraction of what you need to take out something out of a pouch.

[Frozenstep]

-snip-

That's all good to know, and thanks for the picture examples! I'm glad I asked, it was pretty hard for me to picture how difficult it would be to pinch a potion from a pouch with a shield arm, but holding onto your weapon with it instead just makes a thousand times more sense.

[gbaji]

Furthemore, assuming you managed to get the potion out, how are you gonna get it close enough to your face for uncorking and/or drinking it? There are some few shields that will let you do it, but not without risk of clonking yourself on the head. And all this time, you need to move slower and with more care because there is a lot of weight on your arm.

Hah. I was so focused on the "what can you actually reach with your shield hand without completely unequipping it", that I didn't even think about something like trying to drink a potion. Yeah. Good point!


One thing you can absolutely do with 99% of shields is grab your weapon in your shield arm.

Yup. It's just so much easier.

It's also a practical matter. In pretty much any situation where you feel you have sufficient time to grab something with a "free hand", if you have a choice between "not able to use my shield" and "not able to use my weapon", you should always prefer not being able to use the weapon. This is usually only going to occur in a situation where you are not actively engaged with someone, so the weapon isn't needed. But you may still be under threat of ranged attack, so having that shield ready to use is still handy. And if someone suddenly charges you and you have to pick either your shield or your weapon to be at hand, you'll likely also always pick "shield". The shield allows you to survive long enough to draw/equip your weapon. Less so the other way around.

Exception, perhaps, for a more renaissance style rapier and buckler/main gaunche style of fighting. Then I'd keep my main weapon in hand and ready, stow my short weapon, and do whatever I need to do. I can fight far better with just the main weapon, both offensively and defensively, than any other configuration. Of course, we've also taken "defending against ranged atttack" pretty much off the table there. And the question did assume shield use (and "fantasy shield use" at that), so...

[Vinyadan]

On the other hand, I would assume a world with D&D-like potions would have knights with "beer helmets", hiding a wineskin inside their helmet's crests or have much taller metal helmets with a potion tank over their head. Or wear a wineskin on their back and keep a straw inside their mouth. Being able to heal wounds immediately or becoming far stronger seems too useful an ability not to have some dedicated technology for people who can afford it and go to battle prepared.



Apparently, the Austrian occupation was mostly ignored by historians until the 1980s. I will end with this concluding comment by the author: "Brutal, arrogant and predatory, the occupation did Rome the favour of destroying any trace of nostalgia in north-eastern Italy for Habsburg law and order. In the empire's last year of existence, imperial rule finally became as bad as Italian nationalists said it had always been." (pg. 351)

Thanks, I can think of many reasons for this long forgetfulness. Austria had no reason to revisit these events, especially since they were a brief season that also ended in defeat (my impression has been that the focus is far more on the internal breakup of the Empire and the difficult, ambiguous years that followed). The suffering of the population in a war that was by no means necessary* was also embarassing for Italy.

*I think the only explanation I've read to show Italy being forced to enter the war was that, in their war effort, France, Germany, Britain, Austria and Turkey were gobbling up all of the available coal on the market, strangling Italian industry, and the only way Italy could access that market again was to be on someone's side in the war, so that that side would let some coal flow to Italy to make it a useful ally. I don't remember such arguments being reported from the actual debate back then, however.

[Pauly]

*I think the only explanation I've read to show Italy being forced to enter the war was that, in their war effort, France, Germany, Britain, Austria and Turkey were gobbling up all of the available coal on the market, strangling Italian industry, and the only way Italy could access that market again was to be on someone's side in the war, so that that side would let some coal flow to Italy to make it a useful ally. I don't remember such arguments being reported from the actual debate back then, however.

People, including eminent historians, have a tendency to force the facts to fit their pet theories.

It’s always better to read what people said at the time as to why they were doing things than to rely on someone else’s later interpretation. There are many examples of widely held views of “why a war happened” that fall apart when you look at the original underlying documents and pre-war commentary.

[fusilier]

Thanks, I can think of many reasons for this long forgetfulness. Austria had no reason to revisit these events, especially since they were a brief season that also ended in defeat (my impression has been that the focus is far more on the internal breakup of the Empire and the difficult, ambiguous years that followed). The suffering of the population in a war that was by no means necessary* was also embarassing for Italy.


*I think the only explanation I've read to show Italy being forced to enter the war was that, in their war effort, France, Germany, Britain, Austria and Turkey were gobbling up all of the available coal on the market, strangling Italian industry, and the only way Italy could access that market again was to be on someone's side in the war, so that that side would let some coal flow to Italy to make it a useful ally. I don't remember such arguments being reported from the actual debate back then, however.

I certainly have not seen that in my readings about Italy's entry into the war. I did read a monograph about the development of Italian labor relations during the war which argued that the expansion of industry led to a kind of "fast-forward" through the various stages of labor strikes (from small, individual workshops going on strike in 1915, to city and sector wide strikes in 1918). In it, they did argue that Italy received a lot of coal from the Allies to fuel/expand its industry.

I supposed coal may have been a factor?* But it seems pretty clear that the Allies were more likely to support Italy's territorial ambitions (certainly more than Austria). San Giuliano argued for not joining the Central Powers for a series of reasons (from Thompson):
"the [Triple] Alliance was a defensive treaty and Austria was the aggressor against Serbia . . . Austria and Germany had violated the Alliance by excluding Italy from their discussions. . . . The government and industry feared the effects of a British naval blockade if Italy joined the Central Powers. Italy depended on Britain and France for raw materials and foodstuffs, and almost all of Italy's coal arrived with other imports through routes controlled by the British Navy."

(Thompson notes that the objections to Austria being the aggressor, and Austria/Germany ignoring Italy in their treaty discussion could have been finessed, if public opinion hadn't been decided anti-Austrian). However these are reasons for not joining the Central Powers -- but not reasons for joining the Allies. San Giuliano was one of the politicians who supported neutrality. Many Italian politicians at the time accurately predicted the problems with joining either side, and argued that Italy could get everything she wants if she sat out the war. Unfortunately for Italy, those politicians were out of power at the time.

*Politicians will say anything -- and everything -- to drum up support for their position, or mitigate the opposition. So it may have been said that Italy needs to join the war to keep its industry alive, but I don't recall this particular argument. If the argument was made I doubt it was persuasive on its own.

[Vinyadan]

I certainly have not seen that in my readings about Italy's entry into the war. I did read a monograph about the development of Italian labor relations during the war which argued that the expansion of industry led to a kind of "fast-forward" through the various stages of labor strikes (from small, individual workshops going on strike in 1915, to city and sector wide strikes in 1918). In it, they did argue that Italy received a lot of coal from the Allies to fuel/expand its industry.

Something interesting I read about this was an analysis of the workforce. The industrial working class changed a lot during the war, as men were sent to the front, and the more industrialised North sent by far the most soldiers (as its population almost equalled the aggregate Center, South, and Islands). The result was that women, old and very young men, and migrant workers from the agrarian regions substituted them in the factories during wartime and kept filling the workforce as it expanded to accomodate the massive increase in production. As a result, the "classical" industrial working class, mostly made by men in their prime and connected through decades of work and socialisation in the factory, union, and workers clubs, simply did not exist any more. Nevertheless, the new workforce quickly joined together and developed enough of a common culture to pull off some remarkable strikes and even revolt (Turin 1917), in spite of the lack of support from party representatives, who preferred to abstain from sabotage of the war effort. The fact that watchmen frequently threatened workers with sending them to the front had a role in creating this culture. But the October revolution also sent shockwaves and seemed to open the possibility of a new world, while workers and the general population were angry at the great industry owners, lovingly nicknamed "the Sharks", who were considered the only beneficiaries of the war.

After the war, this massive overproduction had to be stopped. This meant a flood of returning soldiers and dismissed workers, while an explosive confrontation between workers and owners continued for a few years, with factories being occupied by workers or preventively locked-out by the owners. As Italy hadn't really transitioned to industrialised and remained a mostly agrarian society, the role of women was happily rolled back, and they were once again expected to tend to the hearth in the traditional fashion.

In the end, almost no one was happy. Nationalists thought that Italy had been duped and offended at Versailles. Many others anxiously expected a Moscow-style revolution. Many had no job any more. Many had seen their relatives return home dead, crippled, or insane, if at all, and saw no advantage from the war. Most people simply did not trust the elites and ruling class any more: while this and universal suffrage led to partial successes for moderate working-class parties, it still was a dangerous situation, with thousands of Arditi (shock troops) looking for new fights, and less decorated thugs eyeing opportunities in instability, as members of the extreme sides of the political spectrum were already killing each other. There also was a strong anti-government and anti-owner sentiment in rural areas, which were frequently isolated from the rest of the world by lack of infrastructure and ailing from extreme levels of economic misery (this is particularly true for mountainous regions, which represent much of Italy, and Sicily and the South), or which, even before the war, had seen major contrasts between the three strata of owners, sharecroppers, and landless day labourers.

To make an example, in a fairly advanced area like Romagna threshing machines had been introduced around 1910. But threshing was, historically, the part of agricultural work that required the most energy and people. When sharecroppers and landowners got threshing machines, the day labourers that had historically worked at threshing found themselves without an important source of income, and started sabotaging them. The whole business became unusually violent and was resolved only when, IIRC, the various unions accepted that the threshing machines had to be owned by the cooperatives of the day labourers.

I've also been taking a look at the strengthening of the pro-war positions in Italy during 1914-1915. What impressed me the most is how unruly political discourse had become. The press had turned pro-war. Salvemini slapped De Bellis (!?). Other MPs were assaulted. A neutralist, Adriano Gadda, was killed in Milan. A contemporary, Paolo Valera, assumed that Giolitti, then out of power, wrote a famous public letter where he declared that Italy stood to gain much from neutrality on invitation of the king, so that the king could see the public reactions, understand where the wind was blowing, and choose the more convenient side. By then the secret Treaty of London with the Entente powers had actually already been signed, but the king could still have chosen a neutralist prime minister, who would have had the power to recuse the treaty. Apparently, after the letter Giolitti was burnt in effigy and turned into something of a punching bag during public discussions, and need a life guard to move safely. Even the pro-war government explained to the Central Powers that it would refuse Austria's territorial concessions as insufficient because the people were too riled up, and would have started a revolution if war wasn't declared or if Italy did not get more territories in exchange for neutrality. Von Buelow, a German ex-chancellor that was leading these dealings with Rome, got turned into a villain in public opinion (with Valera implying that part of the antipaty that he received from the aristocracy was from occupying a much coveted Roman villa). The Parliament, facing the pro-war king, government, and demonstration outside the palace, voted for war, but was mostly composed of Giolitti-aligned neutralists.
So I'm wondering if the pro-war faction finally won not because it had larger numbers (of people who partecipated to such debates; there were huge masses that didn't), but because it was louder and perceived as more dangerous.

*By the way, I have seen an article on an Austrian newspaper saying more or less the same thing about Skoda, although, not remembering its publication date, I suspect it was written before the war started, looking at it as a possibility that was becoming reality: I doubt it would have passed censorship during the war proper.

[Eladrinblade]

In 3.5, a lance is a two-handed weapon with reach. You don't have to use it mounted, but that's what it's for. It can be used one-handed while mounted. It deals double damage if your mount is charging, and up to triple damage if you have the spirited charge feat. If you are using it two-handed and are power-attacking, it can do ridiculous damage.

In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

[Pauly]

In 3.5, a lance is a two-handed weapon with reach. You don't have to use it mounted, but that's what it's for. It can be used one-handed while mounted. It deals double damage if your mount is charging, and up to triple damage if you have the spirited charge feat. If you are using it two-handed and are power-attacking, it can do ridiculous damage.

In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

It depends on what you mean by “lance”.
Lance can be a 2 handed spear, as often seen in Roman through dark ages Europe.
Lance can be a heavy couched spear more or less bolted to the wielder as in the classic medieval tournament jousting.
Lance can be a light one handed spear as used in 18th and 19th century Europe.

There were also a lot of transitory types and different types existed at the same time and place. Plus we aren’t even scratching the surface of what happened outside of Europe.
Generally speaking a lance designed to be used with two hands was longer than a lance designed to be used with one.
Traditionally the explanation has been that the invention of different types of horse furniture [Stirrups, bit, bridle, saddles, pommel, cantle] are given as reasons for changing how lances could be used. People who actually ride horses have taken issue with the archeology/history bookworms on those points, but I haven’t kept up with the debate.

[Berenger]

In 3.5, a lance is a two-handed weapon with reach. You don't have to use it mounted, but that's what it's for. It can be used one-handed while mounted. It deals double damage if your mount is charging, and up to triple damage if you have the spirited charge feat. If you are using it two-handed and are power-attacking, it can do ridiculous damage.

In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

Using a lance or spear two-handed from a mount at least isn't a D&Dism. I see no compelling reason why this should impossible with a high medieval knight's lance, except that it forces the warrior to forgo a shield, which is kind of bad if the other guy also has a lance you need to deflect.

Obviously, you can't couch the lance and use it two-handed at the same time, so you should have to choose between double / triple damage for couching and extra strength-based damage for two-handed attacks. The latter would be generally only worthwile for warriors with superhuman strength or when charging is not possible (for example, because the enemy stands behind a cheval de frise and out of sword range).

Whether you should be able to use Power Attack with a couched lance depends on how you interpret the feat. If it means "hit extra hard with recklass abandon and your full body weight", it makes little sense. If you interpret it as "aim at a hard-to-hit weak point", it should work.

https://abload.de/img/975325396zihn.jpg

[Martin Greywolf]

Traditionally the explanation has been that the invention of different types of horse furniture [Stirrups, bit, bridle, saddles, pommel, cantle] are given as reasons for changing how lances could be used. People who actually ride horses have taken issue with the archeology/history bookworms on those points, but I haven’t kept up with the debate.

The really short gist of it is this: the good old "equipment X was vitally necessary for couched lance" argument has been empirically disproven by people using couched lance bareback.

What is true is that certain bits make using the lance easier (deep saddle and long stirrups that let you brace yourself), and some bits make it much easier to handle fighting after the lance is broken and you get into melee (stirrups). Other equipment still makes it easier to steer a horse (anything that goes on the horse's head), but this is while undoubtedly useful not really necessary - again, people today have trained horses to where they can be steered without any equipment.

There are then some combinations that aren't possible without more bits of equipment, e.g. if you have a high charging saddle with those stirrups that require you to keep your legs straight, your ability to steer a horse with legs is sharply limited, to say nothing of what a horse armor will do.

In the end it is a complex topic that can't be reduced to a simple truism, you have some combos that drastically improve couched lance charge that aren't possible without necessary gear, but couched lance itself is usable bareback, just less effective.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2cac128e2bc48db8d91898aa23af2c42-lq


In 3.5, a lance is a two-handed weapon with reach. You don't have to use it mounted, but that's what it's for. It can be used one-handed while mounted. It deals double damage if your mount is charging, and up to triple damage if you have the spirited charge feat. If you are using it two-handed and are power-attacking, it can do ridiculous damage.

In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

I'd rule any combination here plausible enough for a game/story/movie if somewhat impractical in real life.

DnD rules translate incredibly poorly into any kind of fighting, melee or ranged, so demanding too much realism will get us nowhere. Before we start to dig in, it bears mentioning that the mythical couched lance isn't so mythical, or limited to only needing lance for it or limited to horseback.

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/13997/1000
I use this style of holding a spear on foot myself, but let's not get into that for reasons of brevity

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/10544/1000

That said, there is a whole world of how you use a given stabby stick on a horse.

People will tell you it isn't used in two hands.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-97355c13ba475cd5a1c205d8a92d505a-lq

Or that if you use them in two hands you can't have a shield...

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-26ac726316954b21ae3ccb0bb69351c5-lq

Or that using a lance underhand and overhand wasn't done at the same time...

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/22443/1000

Or that the European knights never used lances in overhand...

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/12070/1000

Or that lances designed for couched lance use were never used in any other way...

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/16144/1000

Basically, there is such a wide variety of using lances from horseback that you may as well ask "How was sword used?", and answer you get to that question will be either a vague "it depends" sort, a lengthy rant (see above) or not true in most cases.


In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

Yes but actually no. The idea that more strength translates into more damage to a person on hit in a way DnD says it does is patently ridiculous. If you get ran through with a spear, you will be damaged by the same way as if you got run through with a spear that moved at twice the speed - at least at the speeds we're talking about here, once you get into bullet velocities, it changes drastically. Even blunt damage isn't really proportional and split into "can break a bone" and "can't break a bone", because organ bruising will take a good long while to incapacitate you, and while that is relevant in the long term, it doesn't really apply in the short term.

Then we get to how HP isn't really a measure of physical tankiness but some abstraction of luck, and it falls apart even more.

So, how do you use strength with a lance on horseback? It's actually pretty simple, the damn thing is long and heavy and the horse bounces, and keeping it on-target isn't an easy feat by any means. Aim that lance tip to the side and you will transfer your force into the opponent inefficiently or slide off of his armor outright. Strength here doesn't really make you stab harder, but makes those stabbings better aimed to places where they will actually hurt.

This was very much a problem historically because we see an introduction of lance rests once the lances get too long to use in one hand properly, and you very much could improvise and use lance in two hands to make up for lacking it, or even in addition to it. Jousting shields were made in a way that left your off hand free to use the reins, so using them for better lance aiming is possible, just not something you'd bother to do because you may as well let your gear do the work for you and have better defense with the mostly free shield arm.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Armor_MET_154046.jpg

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/8944/1000

tl;dr A lance rest should let you use longer and more powerful lances, but DnD doesn't do feats granted by gear (mundane gear at that), so letting a player take a feat and say that's what's happening, or flavoring it as using both hands is realistic enough. What Spirited charge does is anybody's guess, maybe it is about better technique, maybe it should be granted by late medieval horse gear.

[Eladrinblade]

Obviously, you can't couch the lance and use it two-handed at the same time, so you should have to choose between double / triple damage for couching and extra strength-based damage for two-handed attacks.

This is what I suspected.



I'd rule any combination here plausible enough for a game/story/movie if somewhat impractical in real life.


I'm thinking I probably should leave it alone, realistic or not, because I do like the idea of mounted lancing for characters and nobody would do it if two-handing a greataxe is always a superior option.



Yes but actually no. The idea that more strength translates into more damage to a person on hit in a way DnD says it does is patently ridiculous. If you get ran through with a spear, you will be damaged by the same way as if you got run through with a spear that moved at twice the speed - at least at the speeds we're talking about here, once you get into bullet velocities, it changes drastically. Even blunt damage isn't really proportional and split into "can break a bone" and "can't break a bone", because organ bruising will take a good long while to incapacitate you, and while that is relevant in the long term, it doesn't really apply in the short term.


Well, I was asking because if you are couching then its the horses strength/mass/speed that matters, not so much yours, or so I would think.

Anyways, thank you, all of that was very informative and I had no idea about most of it.

[Pauly]

In 3.5, a lance is a two-handed weapon with reach. You don't have to use it mounted, but that's what it's for. It can be used one-handed while mounted. It deals double damage if your mount is charging, and up to triple damage if you have the spirited charge feat. If you are using it two-handed and are power-attacking, it can do ridiculous damage.

In real life, do you really use your own strength in the attack if you're using it while mounted? Could you even "power attack" with it? Did knights use them one-handed or two-handed in battle?

Addressing the extra damage/damage multipliers.

1) My comments are based on 18th/19th Century European warfare which is where most of my research into the use of the lance has been done.

2) Part of this is a D&D issue of higher level characters and monsters being HP sponges. IRL if you stabbed someone with 8” of lance head, then shoving 3 more feet of wooden pole into them doesn’t make them extra dead. They’re already dead or you didn’t hit anything vital.

3) Over penetration is a bad thing and your lance will get stuck in the target if you hit it too hard. This is how the sport of tent pegging was invented, it was a drill to teach troopers on how to avoid over penetration.

4) In this era the advantage of the lance was seen as reach, the ability to stab the other guy without getting slashed by a sword. The concept of lances doing more damage than swords doesn’t appear in the period texts as an issue as far as I can recall.
In fact saber slashes delivered from horseback were seen as the more terrifying to infantry. Since all the extra mass/speed/momentum that applies to a lance apply to any weapon wielded from horseback.

5) There were a host of minor difficulties such as reduced mobility in rough terrain [when light cavalry was being used as scouts], increased visibility of units, the need to tran the troopers in lance and sword not just sword, the need to drop your lance and pull your sword out anyway if the enemy got into sword distance.

6) On balance lances seem to have been held as being if roughly equal utility as equipping troopers with swords only. The lance had almost died out by the time of the 7 years war, was revived in the Napoleonic era and then continued through the 19th century. Roughly 20-25% of European light cavalry units in the 19th century were lance equipped, although that figure varied from country to country.

In D&D terms thus type of lance use would be better represented by reducing the targets AC (i.e. making it easier to get a damaging hit) than by increasing damage.

[gbaji]

I think the issue with lances in most RPGs is that usually it involves several additional skills/feats in order to use, so the thinking is that "well, when you do have a horse, and a lance, and have spent the skill points/whatever on being able to use them, there should be some benefit versus just putting those points into being better with your normal melee weapon".

The game system I use abstracts this by having the horses stats used to generate strength bonus damage instead of the wielder. Which in most cases is a bonus. Ironically, using magic (cause the system has magic), you can often increase your strength to the point where you'll do the same (or even more) damage bonus just whacking with your normal weapon anyway, so... (I suppose you could cast the strength spell on your mount maybe?). Er, and it also has impaling damage (can do double damage with penetrating weapons on a good hit), but, as correctly pointed out above, the freaking last thing you actually want to do is "run your enemy through" with a lance. At best, it sticks in the body of the person you hit and breaks, next level of worse is that it doesn't break and the lance flies out of your hand, with the next level of worse being that it sticks, doesn't break, doesn't (or cant', cause you got one of those handy holders attaching the thing to your breastplate, right?) fly free, and you go flying out of your saddle and/or get major compression fractures to your chest, broken arm, etc... And hey. Couldn't I just not bother with the horse, and use a long spear instead? Same benefits of damage (especially if I'm using the aformentioned magic boost), same impaling damage opportunities, and hey, I didn't have to learn a new weapon skill *and* learn how to ride a horse (or buy specialized equipment).

If you're actually trying to realistically present lance use from horseback, of course. Or you can just do what pretty much every game system does and handwave a lot of the relisim away in the pursuit of making the game system practical (and fun!) to use. Hence, giving characters who spend time/effort learning to do lance charges some tangible in-game benefit for actually doing so in the (frankly super rare) case that they find themselves in a position to do so. Heck. I have a character I play in one game who is a centaur, so she's already kinda got the "mounted" bit there all the time. And yeah, she's got an uber "sword of Doom(tm)" she uses most of the time that is more than capable of clefting folks in twain. But hey, I get a chance to use a lance for some reason? Why not? Sure. I could just run up to the opponents and whack at them, but it's fun to lance charge. So even though she's less skilled, and likely actually does less damage, I do it anyway. Like in the one out of a hundred combat situations in which there's a group of bad guys "over there", with flat terrain between us, and some space around them to run by them, and room behind them to slow down and turn around, I'm totally on it.

I think that actually brings up another point about lance charging (in games at least). A lot of the time (I think also mentioned above), it's not about doing tons of damage, but about avoiding taking damage yourself. We tend to have a view of lance charages involving a huge line of knights in armor, filed abreast, charging directly at/through a mass of enemy combatants (shades of Braveheart basically, setting aside the whole "that's not remotely how that battle went" bit). And while that was a tactic used by heavy horse in some time periods, most often (and absolutely if you're just a lone person doing this), you don't actually charge "at/through" the enemy. You charge by them. You basically run along one side near the enemy, outside of their weapon range, but inside your spear/lance range and strike at them as you go by. Which side you pass on depends on how you are rigging your weapon (which, as also mentioned above, has a lot of variation). But from a game mechanic perspective, another way to handle this is not to make it do tons of damage, but to allow you to basically do an attack concurrent to a movement past the opponent(s). Doing damage to them while not allowing them to do any damage to you, or get an attack of opportunity, etc. Basically, unless the opponent is set for such a thing, and has a long enough weapon (long spear at the least, or better yet a pike), you get to do free damage. An easy way to do this is to have specific weapons with specific AoO range. So if my lance has a range of 3, and your weapon has a range of 2, and there's room for me to run past you at range 3, I get to do so, move by you, and attack you at the same time, while you can't AoO me in return (cause I didn't move through your zone of control or whtever). But if you have, say a pike, with the same range, you get to attack back as long as you are prepared (set for charge basically).

Lots of ways to handle this.

[Pauly]

I
I think that actually brings up another point about lance charging (in games at least). A lot of the time (I think also mentioned above), it's not about doing tons of damage, but about avoiding taking damage yourself. We tend to have a view of lance charages involving a huge line of knights in armor, filed abreast, charging directly at/through a mass of enemy combatants (shades of Braveheart basically, setting aside the whole "that's not remotely how that battle went" bit). And while that was a tactic used by heavy horse in some time periods, most often (and absolutely if you're just a lone person doing this), you don't actually charge "at/through" the enemy. You charge by them. You basically run along one side near the enemy, outside of their weapon range, but inside your spear/lance range and strike at them as you go by. Which side you pass on depends on how you are rigging your weapon (which, as also mentioned above, has a lot of variation). But from a game mechanic perspective, another way to handle this is not to make it do tons of damage, but to allow you to basically do an attack concurrent to a movement past the opponent(s). Doing damage to them while not allowing them to do any damage to you, or get an attack of opportunity, etc. Basically, unless the opponent is set for such a thing, and has a long enough weapon (long spear at the least, or better yet a pike), you get to do free damage. An easy way to do this is to have specific weapons with specific AoO range. So if my lance has a range of 3, and your weapon has a range of 2, and there's room for me to run past you at range 3, I get to do so, move by you, and attack you at the same time, while you can't AoO me in return (cause I didn't move through your zone of control or whtever). But if you have, say a pike, with the same range, you get to attack back as long as you are prepared (set for charge basically).

Lots of ways to handle this.

Attacks of opportunity are a pure game mechanic to prevent players running past enemies to get to a high value target. If you’ve watched a boxing match or HEMA/SCA skirmishing it’s easy to see that AoOs don’t happen IRL in anything similar to the way D&D handles it. That’s a whole can of worms that I’ll stop opening at this point.

Close formations of spears were very effective at stopping cavalry because the horse, being a sensible animal, does not wish to impale itself. The horses would veer off at a distance that kept them safe from the pointy stabby things thank you very much. You don’t get close enough to exchange blows.
Loose formations and broken formations of spears were easily ridden down, even by cavalry equipped with swords only.

The cavalryman’s advantage against foot is that he has full control of when and where he will engage the target. It is a very simple task for the rider to alter the angle and pace of their attack as well as extend their range by leaning out or to reverse which side they are attacking from. And they can do so in a very short time, so that their on foot opponent has a very difficult time reacting. This advantage gets multiplied when there are several riders against several footmen.

[Martin Greywolf]

4) In this era the advantage of the lance was seen as reach, the ability to stab the other guy without getting slashed by a sword. The concept of lances doing more damage than swords doesn’t appear in the period texts as an issue as far as I can recall.

Plate armor era definitely has more punch as a feature of the lance mentioned. Mallory's L'Morte D'Arthur frequently praises the ability of knights to hit opponent hard enough to go through armor or knock them off of the saddle. Or hard enough to break the horse's back.


And while that was a tactic used by heavy horse in some time periods, most often (and absolutely if you're just a lone person doing this), you don't actually charge "at/through" the enemy. You charge by them.

There are several treatises that deal with fighting on horseback that tell you to do the exact opposite and run the horse directly through the enemy if dealing with infantry.

What we should take from this is that there are too many different ways to do a lance charge to make general statements and we really need to specify what era and what technique we're using. Even saying something like "most of the time" is dead wrong unless it is supported by some sort of proper statistical research.



Close formations of spears were very effective at stopping cavalry because the horse, being a sensible animal, does not wish to impale itself.

This myth needs to go die a fiery death already. There are frequent references of horses charging into massed infantry. There are mentions of horses charging into a braced musket square. We have horses today that can and will charge into a brick wall if told to by their rider. (sure, the brick wall is a movie prop, but it's not like the horse can infer that from context)

Untrained horses will maybe avoid doing this unless they're spooked and stampeding, but what are untrained horses doing on the battlefield?

The reason this happened only rarely is that the humans on top of horses don't want to make that charge for reasons of not wanting to die, because while they would probably take out first five people in their way, numbers six to ten would take an exception to that. However, if the infantry is not disciplined and sees a charge coming, there is a very real risk of them routing because no one wants to be the first five that get killed, and the whole thing turns into a giant game of chicken.

There is also the question of is exchanging one man-and-horse combo for five infantrymen a good value proposition for the commander. The answer is usually no unless there are some external factors involved (e.g. enemy is sitting on top of the water source we need to not die in this desert).

[gbaji]

Attacks of opportunity are a pure game mechanic to prevent players running past enemies to get to a high value target. If you’ve watched a boxing match or HEMA/SCA skirmishing it’s easy to see that AoOs don’t happen IRL in anything similar to the way D&D handles it. That’s a whole can of worms that I’ll stop opening at this point.

Absolutely. I was specifically speaking to how to manage this in game rules to make such things both "balanced" in game terms and "usable" for the players (ie: worth spending time/effort/skill points for), so using game mechanics, even somewhat arbitrary ones, seems reasonable.

And yes, AoO is a prickly point, but usually because game systems simplify the concept (and rightly so IMO). At the most basic, it's to represent the (very real) fact that you can't just run right past soeone who is trying to hit you without taking some sort of defensive action (probably a series of them) along the way. What you see in boxing matches, or HEMA/SCA situations is actually a very complex set of actions and reactions that no game system can really accurately represent (and with a granularity that no game system would attempt to use either). That boxer isn't just walking past his opponent. He's facing him, hands up, taking a dozen offensive and defensive actions, while moving around him. If we were to represent this as discrete combat actions/reactions, we'd have to have game "round" granularity in the fraction of a second range, and could say (at that granularity) that it took 18 rounds or so for one combatant to move in a half circle around his opponent. Similarly, if he suddenly moves back and around, that's really him taking a series of "retreat from zoc" actions and his opponent choosing not to continue to maintain close range. Only then is he free to dance around as he wishes.

But. Uh... No one wants to play that game, right? So while AoO's don't "happen IRL in anything similar to the way D&D handles it", they do, in fact, happen. It's just impossible to realistically simulate given the inherent limitations of rules, especially the "melee round" and "actions per round" rules that a game like D&D has.


Close formations of spears were very effective at stopping cavalry because the horse, being a sensible animal, does not wish to impale itself. The horses would veer off at a distance that kept them safe from the pointy stabby things thank you very much. You don’t get close enough to exchange blows.
Loose formations and broken formations of spears were easily ridden down, even by cavalry equipped with swords only.

This has been responded to well enough. Yeah. It's not quite that simple. It depends very much on what equipment is being used at the time by both sides, how large/deep the formation is, what the terrain is like, what the objectives of the battle leaders are, doctrines in play, and a host of other factors as well. It's why I tried to restrict my observations to small groups or even individuals (say in a RPG party) attempting to lance charge an opponent or small number of opponents and/or how to abstract this in game rules.


The cavalryman’s advantage against foot is that he has full control of when and where he will engage the target. It is a very simple task for the rider to alter the angle and pace of their attack as well as extend their range by leaning out or to reverse which side they are attacking from. And they can do so in a very short time, so that their on foot opponent has a very difficult time reacting. This advantage gets multiplied when there are several riders against several footmen.

Yes and no. I'd argue that it's no more difficult to time an attack on someone speeding at/by you at X speed than it is to time the attack when you are the person speeding at/by. You are correct, in that the guy who's trained to do this has practiced this exact move/attack many times, and thus has some advantage. But it's not like the footman can't see the horse barreling at him though, and can arguably see better than the guy on horseback (have you ever actually ridden a horse that is galloping? Then tried to hold something in your hands while doing so? Then tried to guide the horse to come within a specific distance from something on the ground you are aiming at? Then tried to swing/stab at that something while rushing by? Not so easy, but again, something the horse rider practices to learn how to do). Point being that the footman has *also* practiced "poking my sharp pointy stick at someone who gets close enough to poke", and is pretty darn good at it too. And is standing flat on the ground instead of bouncing around on the back of a horse. If we assume equally trained soldiers (which is not a fair statistical claim of course), and removed all other factors other than "who can hit the other", the footman would actually have the advantage here (on paper anyway).

The bigger factor is not actual difficulty to time an attack, but that the guy on the ground *knows* that he's toast if he stands his ground. It's the "game of chicken" bit that Martin mentioned earlier. And that gets into some interesting psychology bits in which the horseman will tend to have an advantage. The irony is that it's the lack of discrete mobility on the part of the horseman that plays a decent sized part in this. He can't dodge, or duck, or roll away from the potential coming hit. He's "stuck" on the back of the horse, and he goes where it goes. So at the moment of actual impact, he's already previously commited to it and can't affect much at all *except* whether he strikes with his weapon at the right time. So he's going to tend to focus entirely on doing just that. The footman, because he is on the ground, on his own two feet, has choices, right up to that moment. He's much more likely to flinch at that last instant out of a desire to save himself. He has the option to scrunch down, squeeze to the side, duck, etc... instead of focusing entirely on keeping his weapon pointed at his opponent. And that's what gets him (and what usually saves the horseman).

But yeah. Try to simulate that in an RPG.

[Lacco]

But. Uh... No one wants to play that game, right?

The Riddle of Steel community would like a word with you... :smallbiggrin:

[Martin Greywolf]

AoO is trying to solve a problem DnD created for itself by catering to a certain fantasy you want to have when playing.

If we want to realistically simulate combat of some sort, we pick a short amount of time and give everyone an action and determine initiative in some way. When you are attacked, you can either use your action to defend and potentially counter-attack or... get hit and die. That's the feature of real combat I abuse the most as a spearman in re-enactor battles, I stalk the flanks and look for people who are engaged in a fight with someone else, then stab them while their attention is otherwise occupied.

There are some TTRPG systems that do have something like this, e.g. Draci Doupe 2nd edition is a Czech system that gives you one action you can use to either attack or defend plus counterattack and you can get a limited number of actions that can be used for defense (but not counterattacking) from sources like shields and feats (usually about 1-3).

Here's the problem with such a system. If the penalty for not defending yourself is small, it is safe to ignore it and rush past the defenders and it may as well not be there. If it is big enough and you get outnumbered even slightly by even weak enemies, you can bend over, grab your ankles and kiss your ass goodbye. This works for the Draci Doupe which explicitly tries to be a Witcher-like low fantasy system (Geralt was just about the best melee fighter in the setting capable of curbstomping trained knights and also, spoilers for a book decades old, killed by a pitchfork-wielding farmer), but for something like DnD? When you want your players to defeat fairly large groups of goblins at level 10?

Of course, not having this penalty means everyone and their mother runs past the fighter to maul the wizard, so they solved that with an AoO - even that was sometimes not quite enough, hence feats that let you stop movement with said AoOs.

My point is, complaining about how AoOs are or are not similar to anything based in reality is somewhat pointless as their very existence comes from a desire to make the game cater to certain fantasy that is impossible to achieve here in the real world, where shield wall flanks are full of bastard spearmen that want to stab your kidneys.

[fusilier]

This myth needs to go die a fiery death already. There are frequent references of horses charging into massed infantry. There are mentions of horses charging into a braced musket square.

Right. Ok, there's a lot to unpack here. But before I open up that can of worms . . . again . . . please, please do some research into this. It's not a *modern* misconception (if it is a misconception) that horses won't charge into massed infantry, it's an *historical* one. All I'm asking is you look at that evidence. Go and look for the historical evidence of people saying "horses won't charge into infantry if it keeps its formation." If you want to argue that it's a misconception, at least understand the historical evidence for these claims. Then you have to address why, for example, Napoleonic era manuals didn't expect cavalry to plow into the infantry (they absolutely had instructions for how to charge infantry). Also, understand clearly what the argument is. Accounts of horses jumping over skirmishers that are prone . . . don't strike me as relevant to the issue, but I remember reading a lot of accounts of that last time.

First there's a the myth that a horse won't run over a person. This is a myth, but it's based on a realistic observation that horses are generally reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, horses can be trained to run over individuals (at least some horses can). But a formation is more than just a collection of individuals.

Waterloo: The French Perspective, by Andrew W. Field has some excellent quotes by cavalrymen who tried to get their horses to charge into infantry squares but couldn't. They lamented that it was a well known fact that horses just won't do it. That's from the Napoleonic Wars -- large, well documented wars where cavalry attacked infantry frequently. Yet, I know of no example of horse charging into formed infantry during those wars.*

The only instance that comes close, was during the Anglo-Persian wars, where a cavalryman's horse attempted to "jump" over the line of infantry. It failed, landing on the bayonets of the rear ranks, but it made a large enough hole that the other cavalry could enter. All observers were absolutely astounded! They had never even heard of anything like that happening before. I would argue that charging into and attempting jump over are two different things, but regardless it remains an isolated case.

*Why charge if the horses won't simply plow through the infantry? Simple, many soldiers break before the point of contact. Many squares were broken by a cavalry charge, by the infantry breaking before contact. And you only need to get enough to break to form a gap -- you don't need the whole formation to break, just a handful of men together. These formations will collapse quickly in those situations. We can sit in our armchairs and talk all we want about how all the infantry has to do is keep together and it will be fine . . . but when you hear the enemy's hooves come pounding towards you, and they're not being slowed down by your volleys, and you now have an unloaded musket . . . it can be hard to stand up to that! Period manuals sometimes break it down to a contest of nerves.

Also accidents did happen: horses killed at close range, sometimes had enough momentum to crash into the square, and form a gap. I think that happened at least once in Spain to a French square. But it's still a dead horse, and it was a very rare event.

Manuals which described how to attack infantry squares assumed that the horses wouldn't simply run into the ranks. They didn't even need to comment on that fact, it was so well known. Example: Mahan's OUT-POST - standard reading at West Point up to the civil war - concerning cavalry attacking infantry - basically says: don't. "So long as infantry maintains its position firmly . . . the chances are against a successful attack by the [cavalry]."

Jomini is less equivocal: "A charge against squares of good infantry in good order cannot succeed. . . . It is only when infantry is much disordered, or their fire poorly maintained, that there is any advantage in the impetuous gallop over the steady trot. To break good squares, cannon and lancers are required . . ."

Medieval accounts, unfortunately, are often aggrandized/romanticized. It was common for chroniclers to rework accounts of battles to fit classical examples. [Compare the chroniclers' accounts of the Battle of San Romano to the report by the Florentine provedditor]. Although often they're the only sources we have. Interestingly, what counts as "close order" also changed over time. Napoleonic close order was literally shoulder to shoulder: shoulders (or elbows) touching! In the 1500s it was a little looser, about a foot or so separating the infantry. It may have been easier to find or create a gap in such formations. Although, if armed with pikes, I don't think it would matter much.

[gbaji]

Yup. And that in turn is a function of games like D&D that have some sort of "armor class" that exists all by itself, and if the game has any defensive actions at all, they are tacked on as "bonuses" to the "normal" method of "attacker tries to overcome your AC to score a hit". Parry and dodge should not be special actions you only take in some cases to give you extra defensive bonuses in battle. They should be absolutely required. If you don't use them you basically have no ability to avoid being hit at all, and barring a very unskilled opponent, you will be hit (so basically, you have no armor class at all if you don't take a defensive action, and you gain it if you do).

It's also a function of games that abstract "being hit" and "taking damage" into a single function (armor class and to-hit rolls). These are simplifications of what's really going on which is whether you are hit or not, and then whether that hit caused injury (worn armor doesn't prevent you from getting hit, it reduces the damage you take when you are hit). To be fair, D&D eventually kinda sorta addressed this with "touch attack" mechanics, but then only uses it for some specific types of attacks. What should be happening is some sort of "avoidance value", which compares to the "to-hit" value to see if you got hit, and then a "mitigation value" which compares to some form of "damage value" to determine how much actual damage was taken.

Adding to this is the problem of game round granularity which is "one person takes a turn, takes a movement action and a combat action, then the next person takes a turn, does a movement and a combat action, etc....". This, in conjunction with the previous two issues, makes it extremely easy to just "use my movement to run past the opposing fighters, and attack the robe wearer in the back". Cause on my turn I get to "move then attack", right?

So yeah. D&D is the mother of all worse case scenarios of how to simulate anything closely resembling actual combat. It hits every branch of the "bad combat simulator" tree. But it's actually pretty darn "fun" at simulating "big bad heroic folks wading through hordes of wimpy goblin things". And yeah, the AoO rules are a somewhat pathetic attempt to try to make things somewhat more "realistic" and try to prevent the most absurd combat rules mechanic abuses. Kinda. Sorta. It still tends to fail in D&D because of yet another factor designed to up the "heroic" aspect of the game: levels and hps.

If you really want to (still only somewhat accurately) simulate combat, you have to use segmented movement (each person moves one hex on the battle mat at a time, all movement is simultaneous). Then have actual "engagement" rules such that once you are within reach of an enemy (which is usually an adjacent hex, but could be longer with longer weapons), you have "engaged" and may attack that enemy. Once engaged you *must* apply a defensive skill against the opponent, or they will get a free (and nearly automatically successful) hit. You must have a facing at any given time, and can only attack/defend into/against hexes within that facing range. If engaged by multiple opponents, you must divide your defensive skills against them (or reduce them against each additional enemy just to make things more workable). And probably some other rules regarding movement rates, attack rates, counter attacks, etc that make things incresingly complicated.

Very few groups of players are going to want to deal with that, but if you did (and have the "avoidance vs mitigation" aspect to defenses), you'd find that "attack of opportunity" becomes an automatic thing. The moment you try to move past someone without defending against them, they hit you, and you get only your mitigation to protect you, so unless you are walking around in uber armor and being hit by a wimpy person with a small club or something, you're going to take damage. Try to run past/through a large group of opponents and you'll just be cut down. And yeah, this also simulates the whole "I walk around the flank of the already engaged line of enemies, and start hitting them with my polearm and they can't really do anything to defend against it". It also makes ranked fighting a somewhat powerful tactic (guys with swords and shields in the front, with guys with long spears lined up behind them means that every engaged opponent has to defend against two of your guys).

There are some games that come somewhat close to that level of simulation, but in any game there's always a need to balance "realism" with "workable". And one of the biggest problems (that every game I've ever played has) is the concept of single "attacks" per round. The reality is that when you have a melee weapon, and have an opponent within that melee range, you are not just taking a single swing every once in a while. You are constantly moving your weapon and trying to hit the opponent, while the opponent is constantly moving his weapon/shield to try to block you. There's no single one discrete "attack". Not in the sense that game systems have. It's a constant sequence of move and countermove until someone gets an opening on the other, and is able to score a hit. Any failure to actively defend yourself, even just for a moment, results in you getting hit. Period.

I think D&D long ago tried to hand wave this away by saying that the "attacks per round" merely represented how many such openings were available in a given amount of time (a combat round) and assumed that all combatants were constantly ducking, weaving, blocking, etc. But that's problematic when there's no actual game action being taken by the opponent to defend against said attacks. If I get 3 attacks a round against someone assumed to be defending against me, how many do I get if he's just walking on past and ignoring me? D&D just has no method actually embedded in the combat mechanics to simulate that, which is precisely why D&D players will attempt to abuse that fact. And why we get the not terribly well constructed AoO rules that D&D has had to come up with over the years. And to be fair, most games fail on this (how we represent attacks over time) as well. Some have some reasonably workable rules for engagement/reach/AoO that work "ok" at simulating the concept that "if you are not defending yourself you get hit immediately". Most do not. And yeah, even if they do, if "taking a single undefended hit" doesn't represent a significant risk to the character, then "run by" tactics become extremely viable anyway (which is absolutely the case when you have AC and HP mechanics like D&D does).

Eh. To be fair though, fictional heroes are always doing stuff like this anyway. They run through a hail of bullets, or charge past a group of enemies ducking and rolling around their weapons, and manage to get to the far side of the room/battle/whatever to do <something heroic>". So yeah. Such systems simulate *that* quite well, right? Which is all well and good until you're running an encounter and you quite reasonably expect that "the heroes" will need to fight their way through the mooks to get to the spell casters engaged in the "ritual of doom(tm)", only to have one guy just charge past and kill the lead caster on round one. Stuff that works when it operates on "rule of author" doesn't work well at all when the players get to do it whenever they want.

EDIT: Er. This was in response to the AoO post previously. Um... I don't have a particular position on whether or not cavalry charges directly into formations were really done or not, or whether horses could be trained to do so. My personal experience is that it takes a fair bit of training and rider skill to get a horse to take a step into a 3" deep stream, let alone jump over a log, or a trench, so I can imagine the extreme difficulty of getting them to actually charge at full speed directly into a large mass of people. But I'm not 100% precluding the possibility either. However, my understanding of most uses of horses in battle through most of history tended towards the harrassing of the edges of enemy formations (using mounted speed to engage, hit quickly, and then disengage), and the disrupting of partially broken formations (basically running down lose pockets of soldiers and breaking them down into smaller and smaller bits), but not so much directly charging at the "center", so I tend to lean that direction on this one.

Again. I'm not someone who's done a huge amount of historical research on this, but just knowing horses and physics, I would assume that most cavalry assaults (using melee weapons against foot formations, although I could see the same sort of thing being done with ranged weapons as well) would involve something more like an echelon formation than a line abreast formation. Basically you run past the opposing formation, with each member of your own formation edging a little farther "in" towards the center of the enemy formation. This allows you to basically chew away at the side. Anyone not hit by the first rider, gets run down by the second, and the guy next to him gets hit by the third and/or run down the the fourth, etc (times the number of horse mounted troops you have). That's got to be incredibly frightening if you're the guys standing on the edge of a foot formation, to see coming at you. You freaking know you are going to die. The beauty of this sort of attack formation is that each rider can adjust their angle to wherever the "edge" of the foot formation is when he gets there. You're basically using your mounted troops like a buzzsaw to the side of the enemy foot formation, with each horse in the formation being a "tooth" in the saw. And just like a buzzsaw, if you hit too squarely you get stuck, but if you just run along the edge and slowly move farther in, you will maximize the effect. And just like a buzzsaw, you can continue running around in circles hitting them over and over if desired.

Dunno. That just seems like a much more effective way to attack an intact foot formation than trying to just charge right into its center. While I'm sure such attacks did occur, I suspect that they would mostly be used after said formation was already weakened enough to make the attack effective (ie: hole opens up, you charge your cavalry into it to take advantage of it, again though likely using a double echelon formation to widen the gap and break the entire formation in half). I'm having a hard time seeing the value of doing this to an intact formation. You're minimizing your own point of attack power, while maximizing the enemy's, absolutely relying on the enemy formation breaking, and absolutely committed to your own cavalry formation falling apart as well (there's no way you maintain any sort of intact formation after doing this). It's a pretty despearate "all or nothing" attack. Not something I'd want to do with my most expensive and well trained soldiers.

[fusilier]

EDIT: Er. This was in response to the AoO post previously. Um... I don't have a particular position on whether or not cavalry charges directly into formations were really done or not, or whether horses could be trained to do so. My personal experience is that it takes a fair bit of training and rider skill to get a horse to take a step into a 3" deep stream, let alone jump over a log, or a trench, so I can imagine the extreme difficulty of getting them to actually charge at full speed directly into a large mass of people. But I'm not 100% precluding the possibility either. However, my understanding of most uses of horses in battle through most of history tended towards the harrassing of the edges of enemy formations (using mounted speed to engage, hit quickly, and then disengage), and the disrupting of partially broken formations (basically running down lose pockets of soldiers and breaking them down into smaller and smaller bits), but not so much directly charging at the "center", so I tend to lean that direction on this one.

Again. I'm not someone who's done a huge amount of historical research on this, but just knowing horses and physics, I would assume that most cavalry assaults (using melee weapons against foot formations, although I could see the same sort of thing being done with ranged weapons as well) would involve something more like an echelon formation than a line abreast formation. Basically you run past the opposing formation, with each member of your own formation edging a little farther "in" towards the center of the enemy formation. This allows you to basically chew away at the side. Anyone not hit by the first rider, gets run down by the second, and the guy next to him gets hit by the third and/or run down the the fourth, etc (times the number of horse mounted troops you have). That's got to be incredibly frightening if you're the guys standing on the edge of a foot formation, to see coming at you. You freaking know you are going to die. The beauty of this sort of attack formation is that each rider can adjust their angle to wherever the "edge" of the foot formation is when he gets there. You're basically using your mounted troops like a buzzsaw to the side of the enemy foot formation, with each horse in the formation being a "tooth" in the saw. And just like a buzzsaw, if you hit too squarely you get stuck, but if you just run along the edge and slowly move farther in, you will maximize the effect. And just like a buzzsaw, you can continue running around in circles hitting them over and over if desired.

Dunno. That just seems like a much more effective way to attack an intact foot formation than trying to just charge right into its center. While I'm sure such attacks did occur, I suspect that they would mostly be used after said formation was already weakened enough to make the attack effective (ie: hole opens up, you charge your cavalry into it to take advantage of it, again though likely using a double echelon formation to widen the gap and break the entire formation in half). I'm having a hard time seeing the value of doing this to an intact formation. You're minimizing your own point of attack power, while maximizing the enemy's, absolutely relying on the enemy formation breaking, and absolutely committed to your own cavalry formation falling apart as well (there's no way you maintain any sort of intact formation after doing this). It's a pretty despearate "all or nothing" attack. Not something I'd want to do with my most expensive and well trained soldiers.

It happens when in the middle of a long post, that someone posts about another subject. It definitely happens to me! No worries.

Thank you for your informed opinion about horses. Mahan (in Outpost), says to attack the infantry at their weakest points -- flanks if they are in line, or the point (corner) of a square. The battalion should be divided into three squadrons who attack in column or echelon, with enough room for the front squadrons to wheel to the side when repulsed, so that those following can immediately charge. Successive charges are made like this to try to wear down the infantry. A fourth squadron should be left in line, to surround the infantry and pick them off if they break. I've seen it speculated that lancers may have been able to "pick off" the corner man in such an attack, but it would be pretty risky. They do seem to have gained a reputation during the Napoleonic Wars as better cavalry.

Ideally, the infantry should "disordered" by artillery first. Artillery was considered to be the most damaging to morale, and could disrupt formations. Squares were particularly vulnerable to artillery fire. Following up an artillery bombardment with a timely cavalry attack, seems to have been the preferred method of attacking infantry with cavalry. (Basically, by the Napoleonic period, a combined arms approach was considered the best, but they had to consider situations where the conditions weren't right)

Not sure about the preferred way of attacking in earlier periods. Someone once posted about the Byzantines using special blinders (that prevented the horses from seeing directly forward), so they would charge into the infantry. It worked, but only the one time -- the horses would refuse to wear the blinders again! However, I haven't been able to find the source.

[Pauly]

This myth needs to go die a fiery death already. There are frequent references of horses charging into massed infantry. There are mentions of horses charging into a braced musket square. We have horses today that can and will charge into a brick wall if told to by their rider. (sure, the brick wall is a movie prop, but it's not like the horse can infer that from context)

Untrained horses will maybe avoid doing this unless they're spooked and stampeding, but what are untrained horses doing on the battlefield?

The reason this happened only rarely is that the humans on top of horses don't want to make that charge for reasons of not wanting to die, because while they would probably take out first five people in their way, numbers six to ten would take an exception to that. However, if the infantry is not disciplined and sees a charge coming, there is a very real risk of them routing because no one wants to be the first five that get killed, and the whole thing turns into a giant game of chicken.

There is also the question of is exchanging one man-and-horse combo for five infantrymen a good value proposition for the commander. The answer is usually no unless there are some external factors involved (e.g. enemy is sitting on top of the water source we need to not die in this desert).

You can train a horse to jump off a bridge into a river 6 or 7 meters below the bridge. I wouldn’t take what the best horse trainers in the world using the most trainable horses they can find performing a task they have weeks or months to prepare for as a base line for what cavalry can do.

The only historical cavalry unit I am aware of that was reliably deemed ‘capable’ to attack formed steady infantry were the cataphracts. Even then Roman and Byzantine accounts emphasize the need of supporting archery to disrupt the infantry formation to deliver the charge. The Romans held that well disciplined troops who kept formation were proof against cataphract charges.

Every period historical account and training manual from the 18th and 19th century that I’ve read say that horses will not charge home against steady formed infantry. If there are any accounts of cavalry charging home against unambiguously steady formed infantry in the 18th or 19th century I would be grateful if you could post a link to even one.

You assert horses can be trained to charge home against steady formed infantry. What drill would you propose to instill this training?

As far as I’ve read there aren’t any in the period cavalry manuals.



Not sure about the preferred way of attacking in earlier periods. Someone once posted about the Byzantines using special blinders (that prevented the horses from seeing directly forward), so they would charge into the infantry. It worked, but only the one time -- the horses would refuse to wear the blinders again! However, I haven't been able to find the source.

I’ve heard that from someone who has researched the period, but I haven’t seen a source to confirm it. Extant Byzantine cataphract horse armor has some eye protection, but not to the extent of completely blocking forward vision. Maybe it was tried as an experiment?

[fusilier]

Every period historical account and training manual from the 18th and 19th century that IÂ’ve read say that horses will not charge home against steady formed infantry. If there are any accounts of cavalry charging home against unambiguously steady formed infantry in the 18th or 19th century I would be grateful if you could post a link to even one.

At the Battle of Khusab, 1857, during the Anglo-Persian wars, and British cavalry charge broke a square, when a cavalryman managed to force his horse towards the ranks. The horse didn't run into the infantry, instead it attempted to jump the ranks of infantry ("like a picket fence" if memory serves right). It landed on the rear ranks, and created a large enough gap to allow the rest of the cavalry in. But everybody was shocked by the event, it was accepted wisdom that it couldn't be done. Of course, the horsed landed on the bayonets of the rear ranks and was dead. Cavalrymen reported that they tried to charge their horses into squares, they just couldn't.

I can't find the quote now, but if you can find the eyewitness accounts of the event you can see just how amazed everybody was by it. That's the closest description I've seen, and the only one I know of. I would really think there would have been more from the Napoleonic Wars (given the scale of such wars), but I haven't seen any.


IÂ’ve heard that from someone who has researched the period, but I havenÂ’t seen a source to confirm it. Extant Byzantine cataphract horse armor has some eye protection, but not to the extent of completely blocking forward vision. Maybe it was tried as an experiment?

Thanks. I'll keep an eye out.

[Pauly]

At the Battle of Khusab, 1857, during the Anglo-Persian wars, and British cavalry charge broke a square, when a cavalryman managed to force his horse towards the ranks. The horse didn't run into the infantry, instead it attempted to jump the ranks of infantry ("like a picket fence" if memory serves right). It landed on the rear ranks, and created a large enough gap to allow the rest of the cavalry in. But everybody was shocked by the event, it was accepted wisdom that it couldn't be done. Of course, the horsed landed on the bayonets of the rear ranks and was dead. Cavalrymen reported that they tried to charge their horses into squares, they just couldn't.

I can't find the quote now, but if you can find the eyewitness accounts of the event you can see just how amazed everybody was by it. That's the closest description I've seen, and the only one I know of. I would really think there would have been more from the Napoleonic Wars (given the scale of such wars), but I haven't seen any.



Thanks. I'll keep an eye out.

The only clear example of a formed infantry square that stood it’s ground breaking in the Napoleonic wars is the battle of Garcia Hernandez. That involved a mortally wounded horse careening into a square. That was very closely studied as if it could be replicated infantry would be swept from the battlefield.

[Vinyadan]

I think Dominique Jean Larrey, one of the chief doctors in Napoleon's armies, left statistics about the sort of wounds found on the battlefield and their letality. For what I remember, slashing wounds that could be attributed to cavalry didn't have much representation, but that didn't stop Napoleon to make great use of it, presumably because it worked for his purposes.

Wellington by contrast was rather unhappy with the horsemen he had been served, for a variety of reasons: from individual quality and skill of their officiers, which led to inflexibility and ineffectiveness in battle, to the costs of a unit (money, training time, and logistics).

[wilphe]

Let's also bear in mind that this can become unfalsifiable:

Cavalry cannot break good infantry that are formed and disciplined

These infantry were broken by cavalry

Therefore these infantry were not good, drilled or disciplined

[Martin Greywolf]

Right. Ok, there's a lot to unpack here. But before I open up that can of worms . . . again . . . please, please do some research into this.

Oooh, not the "no YOU do the research" argument. How about yo do some research instead?


It's not a *modern* misconception (if it is a misconception) that horses won't charge into massed infantry, it's an *historical* one. All I'm asking is you look at that evidence. Go and look for the historical evidence of people saying "horses won't charge into infantry if it keeps its formation." If you want to argue that it's a misconception, at least understand the historical evidence for these claims.

Here's a clip (https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwarhammer/comments/h793d9/charging_into_a_staunch_line_of_spears/) of several horses charging a line of people in plate armor. They aren't standing on loose skirmisher formation, they are as matter of fact standing closer than Roman infantry did, and about as close as "elbows touch" distance that we see in pike and shot era.

If your statement is "horses won't charge a close formation of infantry" that right there is what we call an empirical proof that they will do just that.

But if you want period descriptions...


We attacked the only body of their
cavalry that showed fight, and sent them flying; but we found we were
surrounded by thousands of their infantry, who formed a square to prevent
our getting back; and it would have done your eyes good to see how we
dashed through them.

In proper square formation, they [the 1st Persian
Regular Infantry] awaited the onset of the charge, the front rank kneeling
with fixed bayonets, and those behind firing in volleys. Lieutenant Moore
led his troop when the order was given to charge. As he neared the front
rank of gleaming steel, Moore pulled his charger’s head straight, drove in
his spurs, and leapt sheer onto the raised bayonets. The splendid animal
fell dead within the square, pinning its rider beneath its body, but the
lieutenant was up and on his feet in an instant; while through the gap he
had made, the sowars [troopers] charged after him. In his fall, Moore had
the misfortune to break his sword; and he was now called on to defend
himself with but a few inches of steel and a revolver.

“Arrived at the square, the adjutant’s horse swerved; but, letting his
sword dangle from the wrist, he seized the reins in both hands, pulled his
head straight, and ramming in the spurs, took the first line of bayonets like
a fence, leaping into the midst of the astonished serbaz [infantrymen].
Down went his charger, dead; snap! the sabre broke close to the hilt; and
as the troopers rode through and out on the other side to re-form for a
second charge, Moore was battling for life, with pistol in one hand and
sword hilt in the other.

At the battle of the Pyramids, the Mamelukes,
armed with light curved sabres, swept down with resistless fury on the
French infantry, and actually rode into and over their squares.

A lance is useless in a mêlée. The
moment the lancer pulls up and the impulsive power is stopped, that
instant the power of the weapon is gone. The 16th Lancers broke into the
Sikh squares at Aliwal; and in the mêlée that ensued, these brave men
attacked the lancers sword in hand and brought many of them low; for they
could effect nothing with the lance.

Funnily enough, two of these accounts then continue on to say something like "and this is almost the only case that a square was broken by cavalry". Note that they say "broken", as in the charge into the square worked, the existence of charges that failed is unspecified.

Another example, battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, where Parthians charged into Roman testudos. While testudos are absolutely awful for fighting things that are not archers, they are also a close formation, and yet here we see cavalry charging it.

Here's another primary source being all hyperbolic about how Crusaders can make a hole in the walls when talking about how unstoppable their charge is.

For this reason, as he was cognizant both of Frankish armour and our archery, the Emperor advised our men to attack the horses chiefly and ‘wing’ them with their arrows so that when the Franks had dismounted, they could easily be captured. For a Frank on horseback is invincible, and would even make a hole in the walls of Babylon, but directly he gets off his horse, anyone who likes can make sport of him.

For high medieval period, we have battles of Crecy and Agincourt (there were some cavalry charges at Agincourt, although the famous ones were done dismounted) where the cavalry charges into braced (and dug in!) infantry were attempted with people expecting them to succeed.

We have battle of Mohacs where a cavalry charge directly into infantry almost routed an army and had to be counter-charged by infantry.

Battle of Polonka in 1660 saw a heavy cavalry charge into prepared positions succeed - it involved the Winged Hussars who liked to do this sort of thing at times.


Then you have to address why, for example, Napoleonic era manuals didn't expect cavalry to plow into the infantry (they absolutely had instructions for how to charge infantry). Also, understand clearly what the argument is. Accounts of horses jumping over skirmishers that are prone . . . don't strike me as relevant to the issue, but I remember reading a lot of accounts of that last time.

First of all, I don't have to address anything. My thesis here is that the fact that charges against infantry weren't done is not a direct result of horses being unwilling to charge infantry. The horses, modern and historical ones, are perfectly capable of charging infantry as can be seen above. I don't know why you bring up skirmishers, there are several primary sources above that talk about charging infantry squares.

But you know what? I'm going to explain it. Again.

You can charge infantry with horses, they are capable of doing it if trained. There can be nor argument against this, because again, we have both horses able to do it today and we have primary sources talking about horses doing just that.

But just because you can do it doesn't mean it is a good idea. Charge a well-disciplined and braced infantry and you will inflict terrible losses on them, but as that article from Cavalry above says - once you stop and the infantry is still there, you will suffer terrible losses in turn. And a cavalryman is usually a lot more expensive than an infantryman.

Even if that wasn't the case and you had cavalrymen to spare - why would you do a frontal charge when you can do a charge from the flanks and inflict more damage with less risk? The cases above were as follows:


Vienna, Crecy - you want to intimidate the enemy and rout them
Carrhae - you do it as a part of cavalry action that also includes flanking charges, cavalry has to do it because infantry can't get here in time
Agincourt, Polonka (early phase) - you want to destroy smaller detachments of the enemy force before they form up
Mohacs, Polonka (final charge) - you want to outright destroy the enemy force


I'd guess that early modern cavalry manuals don't have these charges because the thinking is that you will never need them, as there will always be something better to do - but at the same time we have primary sources of early modern cavalry charging musket squares, so it clearly was done when circumstances aligned. Which granted, probably wasn't very often and was likely a desperation move. The attitude of "I think something is bad so I won't show it in this instructional manual" isn't exceptional for the period, you have several manuals that tell you to never cut because it is always a bad idea.

As for earlier manuals, well, there aren't any, at least not any that would concern themselves with mass combat. There are several manuals that talk about one on one combat of a horseman against an infantryman, but that's about it. It probably bears mentioning that relative rarity of unhorsed vs mounted in specifically these manuals is most likely due to them only infrequently depicting dissimilar weapon techniques in the first place.

https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/c/cc/Pisani-Dossi_MS_34a-c.png/712px-Pisani-Dossi_MS_34a-c.png

https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/7/7f/Mair%27s_mounted_fencing_02.png/800px-Mair%27s_mounted_fencing_02.png
https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/a/a1/Mair%27s_mounted_fencing_04.png/800px-Mair%27s_mounted_fencing_04.png

https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/8/8b/Cgm_1507_18v.jpg/400px-Cgm_1507_18v.jpg

As a final remark, you have depictions in art of cavalry charging infantry, even pikes, and Morte DArthur mentions this happening a lot as well, but I only mention it now because people would cry artistic license.

https://i0.wp.com/the-past.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/post-1_image2-171-scaled.jpg?ssl=1

[PhoenixPhyre]

Ok, a question for the tactical types, especially those who know Roman styles.

I have a villain who is currently marching forces against the "good guys" (scare quotes intentional). I know the force compositions on both sides and the terrain--those are fairly locked in. But what I'm not sure of is what kind of tactics a "tactical genus" would employ in this scenario, given what he knows.

Terrain:
The battle in question will take place at a chokepoint of sorts--the only natural pass up onto a short plateau for days' march in either direction. The plateau is only about 5m tall, but it's effectively a 5m wall for a hundred miles in each direction, getting higher as it goes. This one pass is about 300m wide and a small river (3-5 m wide at this place, 1-2 m deep but fast and very cold) runs down the middle of the slope. Below and above the slope are rolling grasslands with short-ish grass (not a barrier to movement, not high enough to hide any significant forces in).

The defenders have thrown up very rudimentary earthworks across the pass--a 2-3 m earth embankment with a water-filled trench downhill of it and a couple of "bunkers" (fortified points with slots for crossbows). Given more time they can build much higher--they have a combat engineer force capable of fast construction.

Strategic Goal: The villain needs to break through the defenses at the chokepoint as fast as possible without taking unnecessary losses so he can hit a nearby village (basically unprotected other than a rudimentary palisade) in search of a mystic artifact of doom that's located there. If he's delayed more than a few days, the local government's army will be able to mobilize and wipe him out. So this is a hit and run, with the defenders mostly stalling for time. The villain will not be reinforced, the defenders will.

Defender's Forces: 10 experienced longbow-wielding "snipers" (trained to hit and fade and harass, not mass volleys), 100-ish militia. The militia are fairly well disciplined, but motley and not very experienced. Mostly spears and missile weapons (crossbows, mostly).

They have planted (but the villain does not know about) crude "mines" (mostly incendiary but some explosive) as traps in the slopes approaching the wall.

They also have (but are not in direct control of) about 70 skirmishers, half light cavalry (javelins and spears) and half foot (similar armament). They are ranging on the lower side of the wall and have been conducting hit and run attacks against the supply train. But they won't hold up to a pitched battle due to discipline issues.

No major tactical-scale magics available.

Villain's Forces

Morale is not a problem--these forces are under effective brainwashing, which also provides discipline. They are all experienced both with their equipment and fighting in general.

75 heavy infantry: roman legionaires (lorica segmentica, tower shield, javelins, sword) except they're 2+ m tall and 150+ kg.
150 light infantry: light armor, javelins, slings, light shields. These are goblins, only about 1m tall.
50 dedicated archers: more goliaths wielding oversized greatbows.
15 spell-casters: basically combat medics. No major attack spells.
10 elites scattered about as leaders: these range from the commander himself (a frost giant) to ogres to other physically large, imposing fellows.

They have a secret weapon, a "tank" of sorts (ancient lost tech) that will destroy any fortification. But it takes a while to get set up and is very slow once set up, meaning it's basically a one-shot use. But more or less invulnerable to direct fire once set up. Vulnerable if swarmed by infantry who can get on top and jam the joints or disable the core.

The villain is operating with a "tactical computer" (magical equivalent thereof) in his ear guiding him. But the computer is generations out of date on strategies and tactics and does not have up to date information on the exact situation (due to some disinformation from the good guys earlier). Aesthetically, I want it to think kinda like a roman general (similar patterns of tactics).

[Telwar]

50 light infantry scale the plateau and raid the village for the mystical artifact while the remainder of the force demonstrates convincingly at the pass.

[PhoenixPhyre]

50 light infantry scale the plateau and raid the village for the mystical artifact while the remainder of the force demonstrates convincingly at the pass.

That would be the optimal solution except for a few constraints that were in my head but I forgot to actually state.

The village has some defenses (a local militia and a palisade wall, enough to repel a small light infantry force) and the artifact is in a vault that will require the main villain himself to be present to open it. So the villain needs to cross the pass in force--if he goes alone, he'll get ganked by the party.

For various plot reasons, the party can track the rough location of the main villain (plus he's a 3m tall giant who kinda stands out) so subterfuge isn't really an option. Nor is it in his character (for him personally, he's fine with it via agents). He had double agents in place, but they were taken out already.

[Grim Portent]

What leaps to my mind is fielding the light infantry as a forward screen. Spread out, using slings and shields, falling back from any attempts to counter attack them in melee. Close with the outer fortifications quickly, try to keep the defenders heads down with slingstones or javelins. Depending on the height of the bunker slits trying to stab the crossbowmen inside with javelins or just block the firing arcs with shields.

Behind them is the archers, keeping a bit of distance for the light infantry to skirmish, but still in range to cover them with volleys, maybe pick off the snipers if they can. Keeping the river on their side to protect that flank from cavalry.

Close behind them, if not part of the same formation, the heavy infantry. Guarding the archers from the enemy skirmishers until the goblin infantry are at the base of the fortifications, then advancing more quickly to press the assault. Once they reach the earthworks, use the siege weapon to knock a big whole in them and try to force through with superior strength.

Mages are spread out among the heavy infantry, with one or two among the archers. Chief task is keeping the elites alive, but also generally keeping the archers and heavy infantry functional.


Could the goblins climb the 5m cliff and get behind the earthworks? If they timed things right and managed to stealthily approach the defenders from the back it would be a pretty devastating blow. 150 light infantry attacking the militia from behind at the same time as the heavy infantry are approaching could be very effective. Especially if the goblins split into two groups and hit the earthworks from either end while the goliaths march up with the river to one side in roughly the middle. 300m is a pretty wide wall, so the defenders should be spread out and vulnerable to being swamped if caught unawares.

[Pauly]

4 basic options.
1) immediate bull rush. Historically this was often done because a surprise attack could overwhelm the defenders before they got fully ready. Generally speaking if given the opportunity the attackers would approach unseen and attack at dawn, but sometimes a late afternoon rush worked because the defenders though the attackers would wait until tomorrow.

2) Pin and flank. Launch an attack with the heavy portion of your forces and send your light forces to where they can cross the obstacle and come down on the flank of the defenders.

3) Screen and bypass. Put sufficient forces in front of the defenders to make them think you are preparing an assault, then under cover of night/magic send your main force around the defenders and force march to the town. Subterfuge such as lighting extra camp fires, dressing light infantry to look like heavy infantry, preparing the ‘tank’ in plain sight etc. help keep the defenders in place until it is too late.

4) bluff the defenders into surrender.
Create the illusion of being the vanguard of a much larger force that is coming in a day or 2, and demand immediate surrender or face the unspeakable consequences. Some form of theatre such as marching troops between woods, then doubling back out of sight and marching between the woods with a different set of flags, extra camp fires, illusion magic, is necessary.
Works best on low morale defenders and/or attackers with a reputation for being utterly ruthless if they are forced to fight. Get the villain to give Henry V’s Harfluer surrender or else speech (Act 3, scene 3, not the more famous ‘once more unto the breech’ of Act 3, scene 1)

[Telwar]

I like having the goblin light infantry doing a flanking movement. There's no reason they couldn't scale the plateau wall when not under fire, and come in and hit from the rear. As long as our Literally BBEG has competent lieutenants who can command and coordinate, that'll be huge.

[tyckspoon]

Since the situation for the attackers can only get worse, I suspect the tactical advice would probably fall toward 'just blitz the walls and damn the consequences, letting them dig in more will only cause more casualties and more lost time than whatever we lose in forcing this barricade.' The heavy infantry advancing in a proper shield formation should be largely invulnerable to anything the defenders can throw at them aside from stepping on a mine - hence while things like getting the light infantry into a flank position will certainly help, if the most pressing consideration is time then the solution is probably just forming up all the heavy infantry and pushing hard on the defenders to overwhelm them with a minimum of time spent on positioning or trying to be clever about things.

.. but if they can afford a little bit of time, to add to the other suggestions - take advantage of superior numbers to harass the defenders across the width of the defenses and if possible throughout the night (especially if the attacking force has superior night vision and doesn't have to bear light sources that will give away their approach.) Don't give them time to rest or rotate the stationed troops at the fortification- All or almost all of the defenders can be kept constantly watching for attacks on the fortifications while the attackers can afford to rest a portion of their forces to bring fresh troops when it's time to make the actual assault against exhausted and demoralized defenders... and if the medic-mages among the attackers have the capability to reinvigorate or relieve fatigue even the attackers that were participating in the night operations can be counted among the 'fresh' troops.

[gbaji]

50 light infantry scale the plateau and raid the village for the mystical artifact while the remainder of the force demonstrates convincingly at the pass.

I was going that direction too. Except maybe the entire force. I don't see any mounted troops. He stated that the plateau is only 5m high, but stretches "hundreds of miles", with this one 300M wide depression/gap where one could get through. That's not remotely a sufficient reason for any force to walk right through the heavily defended "chockpoint".

5m is not very high. Easily scalable with basic ladders. If these are based on Roman foot soldiers, they all carrried with them parts of components for a variety of encampment pallisade structures, and could certainly assemble 15' ladders (lots of them) anywhere along that "several hundred mile" length, get on top, march across, then hop down the other side, reform their ranks, and then attack the village from any direction they want, since they are now on the other side of this terrain obstacle. The terrain as you describe it is not nearly steep or high enough, and way too long to defend againt this. Basically if the defenders are all hanging out in this chockpoint, the enemy will simply bypass it, while still a few days march away, cross to the other side, and approach the village. The first you'll know of it is when runners from the village tell your forces at the chockpoint that the village is under attack, and by then it'll be too late.

Maybe your riders will be able to spot the army doing this, but again, you're forced to face them on open fields and they have a significant numerical advantage.

Make the terrain much much higher. Like at least 15m to be a realistic obstacle to a group of footmen. I'd also make it less "wide". It need not be hundreds of miles long. Could be a series of steep hills surrounding the village itself, maybe only 8 or 10 miles around, sufficient to make approach difficult/slow, forcing movement through a "valley" pass through the hills, but not so huge that the enemy can pick any spot in a very very large area (I don't think you know just how hard it is to track someone across a hundred mile long stretch of hilltop). Whole armies (much much larger than this) get lost in that size area. Easilly.

But yeah. Assuming some adjustments to the terrain to actually force the bad guys to attack the good guys at this chockpoint, then any of the previously mentioned suggestions may work. Would need more time to do a more concise analysis. This bit just jumped at me as "something that would not realistically stop a force like that". Well. Except for their "tank", but then they wouldn't need it.

[Vinyadan]

For what I remember, a standard of early Renaissance forts was that a shorter wall was easier to defend than a longer one (guns later cause the employment of those star-shaped walls). What you describe sounds like a fortress with walls a hundred miles long. It's practically undefensible, unless there are good reasons why the bad guy has to go through the pass.

So, the best thing to do would be to just avoid the pass altogether. There's an immense length; just have the army get over the wall 10, 30, or 50 km away from the defenders. Then you can attack them from behind, or bypass them and go straight for the village. If you are very worried, you can build an earthen ramp to get over the "wall": 5 or 10 metres isn't that much, and you can start building it a day's journey away from the defenders. Even if scouts detect what's going on, the main defending force won't reach the place before your men are up the wall (even if you aren't done with the ramp, you can just use ladders to make sure you quickly have a force up there to avoid surprises) and then let's see how the defenders fare, in smaller numbers and without defenses!

This is actually a fairly Roman thing to do, Masada is the big example, but that was a massive ramp that took a far longer time. The advantage of a ramp is also that you don't have to leave the baggage train in an unreachable position, and it can follow you. Then you can even set up camp on the plateau. And that's an even better situation, as it means that the defenders will have to attack your defenses, if you are doing things the Roman way. Even if you are in a hurry because of the big army that is bound to arrive, you can still build a fortified encampment to protect your train and leave some men there; it will also protect your back from the defenders at the pass, or at least send a messenger if they are sighted, so you can come back and defend the camp.

Thinking of the pass: if the fight has to be fought there, it sounds like the villain will win simply because of mind-control. Keep sending in people in spite of volleys, and the defenders morale is bound to break before your men are unable to fight. Still, this is bad. It sounds like a situation where the Romans would have taken a beating. It's the crossbows in particular that worry me. While there was something similar in the ancient world, the typical crossbow is much more recent and could penetrate plate armour, which was far more protective than what the Romans had at their disposal. Add to this that crossbows were far easier to use than bows, so even a militiaman could be a good shot.

I think this could be a plan: First, fight at night. Both Goblins and Goliaths have darkvision. Send some light infantry explorers into the pass. If possible, have half the goblins stealthily climb the walls and attack the defenders from them. Keep some of them at the rear and flanks of the heavy infantry to avoid surprises, and make sure you have sentinels further away. Use the legionnaires as front line, and have the archers follow them (or mix them in initially, so they are protected by the shields to make up for the range difference due to height while they close in). Have the large shields aborb the bolts, and, once in range, the archers answer under cover of darkness. Even better, the archers have a higher rate of fire, so they could try to deny crossbows the field (although I don't know if suppressive fire existed in the middle ages...) It's also night, and Goblins might be already attacking the defenders, so the crossbowmen should be in disarray. Darkness could also make the mines less effective, as it's harder to blow them up at the right moment. Then again, they could light up fires and take away some of the advantage of darkvision... Once the heavy infantry is in range, have the light infantry at its flanks shoot at the defenders. At this point, the heavies can walk over to the defenses under the protection of over 100 shooters, and finally charge in (maybe throw their pila first, if they have them). Once they are fighting there, light infantry should enter, too. I expect defenders to have already run away, however.

About the water trench: one way pits were walked over was by throwing bundled branches in them. Water makes this iffy, but it's still better than nothing. In theory, one could also try using sappers to drain the trench, but this could cause problems to your army downhill. I think that a weaponised dam would have been a devastating weapon in the hands of the defenders. The trench is bad business, but darkvision helps immensely, as it makes it easy to cover the heavies as they cross it. But this could be a good use for the elites, have them move large stuff to fill the trench. Otherwise, I'd keep them in the back of the heavy troops formation to protect the commander, who would ultimately remain with the archers (this would keep him out of the melee, but also protect the archers from suprises).

A Roman army would also have had some small siege machine to snipe at individual soldiers and hit them with stones from far away. That could have been done with the defending snipers.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I was going that direction too. Except maybe the entire force. I don't see any mounted troops. He stated that the plateau is only 5m high, but stretches "hundreds of miles", with this one 300M wide depression/gap where one could get through. That's not remotely a sufficient reason for any force to walk right through the heavily defended "chockpoint".

5m is not very high. Easily scalable with basic ladders. If these are based on Roman foot soldiers, they all carrried with them parts of components for a variety of encampment pallisade structures, and could certainly assemble 15' ladders (lots of them) anywhere along that "several hundred mile" length, get on top, march across, then hop down the other side, reform their ranks, and then attack the village from any direction they want, since they are now on the other side of this terrain obstacle. The terrain as you describe it is not nearly steep or high enough, and way too long to defend againt this. Basically if the defenders are all hanging out in this chockpoint, the enemy will simply bypass it, while still a few days march away, cross to the other side, and approach the village. The first you'll know of it is when runners from the village tell your forces at the chockpoint that the village is under attack, and by then it'll be too late.

Maybe your riders will be able to spot the army doing this, but again, you're forced to face them on open fields and they have a significant numerical advantage.

Make the terrain much much higher. Like at least 15m to be a realistic obstacle to a group of footmen. I'd also make it less "wide". It need not be hundreds of miles long. Could be a series of steep hills surrounding the village itself, maybe only 8 or 10 miles around, sufficient to make approach difficult/slow, forcing movement through a "valley" pass through the hills, but not so huge that the enemy can pick any spot in a very very large area (I don't think you know just how hard it is to track someone across a hundred mile long stretch of hilltop). Whole armies (much much larger than this) get lost in that size area. Easilly.

But yeah. Assuming some adjustments to the terrain to actually force the bad guys to attack the good guys at this chockpoint, then any of the previously mentioned suggestions may work. Would need more time to do a more concise analysis. This bit just jumped at me as "something that would not realistically stop a force like that". Well. Except for their "tank", but then they wouldn't need it.

The issue is that if they detour one way, they'll have to walk back past the defended area unless they detour way out of the way. If they detour the other way, they'll run right into the big military force coming from that direction. Either way, they'll have to walk through the riders and will be slowed enough to let the big military get on scene. The pass is the only quick way to get there.

It's also not a pass through a ridge, the village is on the (very large) plateau area, about a days' march back from the plateau edge. The further away from the pass you go, the sides get higher. It's 5m here, but a few km in either direction it grows up by quite a bit (10s of m at least). Effectively this is the only place where the plateau is possibly climbable (the area within a mile or so of the pass). And the defenders know that, and have posted guards at intervals (including several watch towers).

And (although the villain doesn't know this), the defenders actually have a way of tracking his (rough, +- a mile or so) location. So sneaking by isn't really an option.

I'll also note that the villain doesn't know the pass is defended until he gets within sighting distance. His information was that the pass was completely undefended and that the only opposition would be at the village (due to collaborators now defeated who would have bottled up the militia and other forces and not alerted the military to his coming). He was planning on reaching the pass unobstructed. So this is "ok, I'm here and...there's defenses. Crap. Now what" planning, not his plan A.

[Talakeal]

Is this guy (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ted3s0uojk7za8q/334956141_571574441585849_5087632919117881077_n.jp g?dl=0) holding his weapon and shield correctly?

Something just looks weird about the point of the shield and the blade of the weapon both facing up, but I can't tell.

Thanks!

[tyckspoon]

Is this guy (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ted3s0uojk7za8q/334956141_571574441585849_5087632919117881077_n.jp g?dl=0) holding his weapon and shield correctly?

Something just looks weird about the point of the shield and the blade of the weapon both facing up, but I can't tell.

Thanks!

Weapon isn't too weird, assuming he's not intended to be actively taking a combat stance - if he was you would expect one of the business ends of it to be pointed toward his opponent rather than having the end of the haft pointed out. Hammer and axe blade portions are wayyyy too thick, but that's pretty standard for fantasy art.

Shield is kinda bizarre. If it's a gripped handle you would generally have the tear/tail end of the shield covering the body, because presumably you want your shield in a place where it.. well, can shield you. If it's strapped with multiple points of contact then it's basically got to be worn in whichever direction the straps are oriented - whichever way you can put your arm into those straps is definitionally 'correct' for that shield because there isn't any other way to hold it, but it's still a really weird choice of orientation.

[Pauly]

Is this guy (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ted3s0uojk7za8q/334956141_571574441585849_5087632919117881077_n.jp g?dl=0) holding his weapon and shield correctly?

Something just looks weird about the point of the shield and the blade of the weapon both facing up, but I can't tell.

Thanks!

It’s meant to be a kite shield that is either center boss gripped (but no boss is visible) or strapped to his forearm (in which case the shield is not quite in the right place). The normal orientation is with the forearm horizontal or slightly raised and with the shield to be point down. By dropping his forearm the shield has rotated and the point has come up.
It isn’t in a normal traditional fighting position, but it is a position someone might take in a lull in fighting.

However the armor is evocative of late 15th century full plate and the shield is more 11th century. The full plate was often used without shields because [short version] it wasn’t necessary outside of jousting. So you normally wouldn’t use a shield with that type of armor, but if you did it certainly wouldn’t be a kite shield.

[gbaji]

It's also not a pass through a ridge, the village is on the (very large) plateau area, about a days' march back from the plateau edge. The further away from the pass you go, the sides get higher. It's 5m here, but a few km in either direction it grows up by quite a bit (10s of m at least). Effectively this is the only place where the plateau is possibly climbable (the area within a mile or so of the pass). And the defenders know that, and have posted guards at intervals (including several watch towers).

Ok. The way you actually describe it above was a "5m wall that extends 100 miles in each direction". Which seemed... absurd. I mean, you'd have to defend 200 miles of hillside to stop an advancing army. I got thrown off by you saying the "plateau" was just 5m high, and repletedly referring to the chokepoint as a "pass" (usually defined as a low point between two high points). It made me assume you were talking about a short hill that extended several hundred miles across, but was only 5m high, with a single point that is flat but only 300m wide, which allows one to get through to the other side.

What you're talking about is a narrow point where a hill slopes gently up to a high plateau, with every other point to either side being too steep to traverse (without climbing gear maybe), and with a village at the far end on top of the plateau itself (presumably surrounded by sheer high cliffs on three sides, except for the one side that slopes gently to the choke point). That makes a lot more sense. :smallsmile:



I'll also note that the villain doesn't know the pass is defended until he gets within sighting distance. His information was that the pass was completely undefended and that the only opposition would be at the village (due to collaborators now defeated who would have bottled up the militia and other forces and not alerted the military to his coming). He was planning on reaching the pass unobstructed. So this is "ok, I'm here and...there's defenses. Crap. Now what" planning, not his plan A.

Well. One of the advantages the attacking forces will have is that this river effectively splits the defenders into two different "sides" of the approach. Is the river reasonably crossable downstream a bit? I would assume it's actually harder to cross on the "slope" that the defenders are on, then the "flat" on which the attackers are approaching.

If they can pull back a distance (not sure how long sight lines are here), the attacking force could pick one side of the river and then quickly advance to engage the defenses. Depending on how distant they will be visible, the defenders might not have a lot of time to adjust where they are. My understanding is that the river flows down the middle of the 300m wide approach, more or less perpendicular to their defensive lines, and they have dug trenches parallel to that in front of their lines to form an extra line of defense. So while the attackers will have to cross this trench no matter how they approach, the defenders also will have to cross the river itself to go from one "side" of their defensive line to the other. Is that correct?

If visibility is suffiently long, the attackers could split their forces at a distance, but have one of them significantly smaller than the other (about 1/3rd of the forces maybe). Basically a diversionary force designed just to be large enough (and kicking up enough dust) so that the defenders can't actually tell which "side" to put the bulk of their forces on until they are being engaged. The smaller group could still use ranged weapons to harrass defenders and otherwise keep them honest and have to at least keep some forces there to keep them from just walking across the trench and through the defenses. The main assault group should simply advance using siege shields (tower shields or even somewhat larger). Basically, very simple siege device which is a large flat shield, held in front of the advancing troops. When you get to the trench/embankment, you just lay it down across it, and advance with "normal" shields before you. Not sure if the attacking troops have some ability to take some time and assemble such things before the attack, but if they can, it makes it easy. Even without though, the trench can be traversed pretty quickly, just not as easily (and they'll suffer more losses along the way).

Honestly, given the relative strengths of the two sides, I would expect the attackers to make relatively quick work of the defenses. A small trench and a short embankment is not a great defense. It's better than nothing, of course, but given the disparity in numbers, and the relative width of the densive area (300m is quite wide really), the ability of the attackers to simply assault the line at more points than there are defenders (100 militia and 10 "snipers", right? versus 225 total infantry and 50 archers) makes it almost a cake walk. At least from a straight up infantry to infantry pov. The only variable here is the skirmishers. The problem with that is they are still quite outnumbered by the attacking forces, so they can't engage on their own. If they do prior to the assault beginning, they will just be repelled and disrupted. Their best bet is to stay at a distance and attack the main assault groups flanks while they are attacking the line (and can certainly harrass them while they are positioning themselves on various sides of the river on approach.

The other problem with the skirmishers is that they also have to pick a "side" of the river to be on, and since half are mounted, crossing the river may be a more time consuming task for them. And in any case, they are going to be "off to the side" relative to the actual attack direction anyway. So the attackers actually have the advantage of seeing the skirmishers approaching from the side, then either just dispatching part of their force to face them while continuing on, or potentially leaving just enough force on that "side" to hold off the skirmishers, while transfering the rest to the other side and pushing a single strong attack there. The skirmishers are then "stuck", effectively unable to actually contribute to the defense of the approach at all. If the skirmishers engage/harrass earlier, they could potentially retreat across the defenses and then help from that side instead, which presents another wrinkle (and changes the odds quite a bit). But then you are losing their ability to engage in any sort of "flanking" attack.

And, of course, the attackers have a pretty large number of archers, which can keep the defenders heads down, and minimize effective defensive fire. And yeah, if the defenders really focus on those two "bunkers" to allow for their own ranged attacks from relative safety, then they are further depleting the actual line defenses. I keep coming back to "300m is a really really wide area to defend with just 110 people, let alone if you stick say 20-30 of them in your bunkers". I mean, that's really thin. And if you don't put a significant number of crossbows (and snipers) "off the line" and either in the bunkers or arranged farther up the hillside, you're going to have a really hard time holding that line with 50 archers plinking at you. To put this in perspective, at Agincourt, the English defended a ~700m wide "gap" with 1500 foot (which was, frankly, woefully not really enough by itself). These defenders in this scenario are trying to block a 300m wide "gap" with just 100 mixed foot and crossbowmen. And they don't have 7000 longbows helping them either. They have 10 snipers. Yeah. The attacking force is much smaller too, but it's really a matter of "area to defend, and how many physical bodies you have to defend it". The attacking forces can basically engage, extend their lines, and just walk right around the denders, given those numbers.

I'm also not sure what these spell casters can do (oh. just healers. Ok). But just crunching some basic numbers, I don't realistically see any way the defenders actually hold that line for very long. They will ultimately have to retreat to the village, at which point there will be yet another battle (and perhaps that tank thing will come into play). But yeah, almost any way I slice up the attacking formation and tactics (you could just divide them evenly against the line if desired, still have enough to hold off the skirmishers from the side while effectively "threatening" the line (forcing them to remain and defend it), and leave the other "side" basically overwhelmed and broken within minutes of the start of the engagement). So yeah, it's going to come down to "how many of the attackers can you kill/wound/whatever and is that enough whittling down to allow for a defense of the village?". And of course "how many of your own defenders survive that attack and are able to fall back to the village to defend it?". And yeah, how many skirmishers survive and where they end up after the line is breached can be significant too.

EDIT: Oh. And I forgot about the explosives. That could actually be pretty critical, delaying and injuring the initial push to the line to allow the defenders some time to adjust their numbers. So potentially, whichever side the skirmishers are on, that sides defenders could reduce their numbers a bit on the line, and shift them to the other side to help out. That moves this from "almost immediate rout" to "well, they'll hold for a little while", and probably affect the casualty balance a fair amount.

[Telok]

Honestly just numberd-wise unless the defenders are doing a really good job of bluffing up their apparent numbers there's no reason for the attacker to consider this little earthworks a real barrier. I'd just do a quick head count, camp for the night, about an hour or two before dawn send the gobbos sneaking in say... 50 left and 100 right supported by the archers (shoot at lights) while you form up everyone else. If the gobbos don't overrun then it's a first light assault of the heavy troops, keeping your horse back for security and possible break throughs.

This is assuming the defenders are mostly looking human/daytimer and less than shoulder to shoulder on the wall. If they manage to look like serious opposition then I'd still do a next dawn attack. Goliaths climbing to heights above the defenders in the night on... say the right half. Then throw all the gobbos at the left just right before daybreak and march the heavy foot up the right fifteen or twenty minutes later under covering fire from the archers. Still keeping the horse back to protect baggage or exploit any sudden major holes in the earthworks.

Your landmines will bugger it up a bit but the exact response will depend on their density and if the goblin morale breaks before they reach the earthworks. Possibly press the attack home if possible, but otherwise reform and reconsider. A lot of it really depends on how that first encounter with the landmines goes and what the casualties are like.

[gbaji]

Your landmines will bugger it up a bit but the exact response will depend on their density and if the goblin morale breaks before they reach the earthworks. Possibly press the attack home if possible, but otherwise reform and reconsider. A lot of it really depends on how that first encounter with the landmines goes and what the casualties are like.

And if you do the whole "probe the defenses with the light infantry" bit, it's also a matter of what level of healing the spell casters have. You could potentially run those goblins up, "discover" the mines, fall back, heal up, then reform and attack again, having gained some intelligence about how the defenses are laid out, and how they respond, and also having more or less "disarmed" the mines.

And yeah, I'm still coming back to "that's a really wide gap". There's absolutely nothing stopping the attackers from just engaging the "center" with enough forces to absolutely require that every single defender must be there to even slow them down, while advancing a couple small units (20 or so) of experienced/heavy troops up the sides, and then just pinchering them to death. Even a smallish number of troops, once they get behind and uphill of the defenders, will absolutely crush their defenses. And worse, if the defenders don't retreat pretty much immediately, they will lose the ability to retreat and likely be wiped out to a man.

And I'm only considering options that still require attacking through the defined 300m gap. There are absolutely also options (several have been mentioned) involving sneaking a small number of experienced troops farther up the sides of the hill to allow them to attack from behind later. But even just playing this scenario absolutely "straight", the attackers should almost roll right through it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Update: I'm adjusting the size of the gap (both based on feedback and based on realizing I'd mis measured) down to only about 300 ft (about 90m) wide, not 300m (about 1000ft).

I want this to be, in the absence of PC actions, a contested loss for the defense, but one the PCs can turn around by making good decisions and intervening at the right places.

Although one thing that probably wasn't clear is that the defending skirmishers are already down below the gap behind the attacking force and effectively can act on both sides of the river. They're tons more mobile and are in their home terrain. Up till now they've restricted themselves to raids on the baggage train/supply lines but can be counted on to engage from the rear once the attackers are committed to the assault.

I'd imagine that if the attackers just ignored them they'd not be very happy getting attacked from the rear.

[Telok]

Although one thing that probably wasn't clear is that the defending skirmishers are already down below the gap behind the attacking force and effectively can act on both sides of the river. They're tons more mobile and are in their home terrain. Up till now they've restricted themselves to raids on the baggage train/supply lines but can be counted on to engage from the rear once the attackers are committed to the assault.

I'd imagine that if the attackers just ignored them they'd not be very happy getting attacked from the rear.

The issue with that is two fold. First, with the makeshift earthworks there's very little for the attacker's dedicated calvary to do as calvary during a frontal assault. So the typical and normal thing would be to hold them back as a fast reserve force.

Second, by attacking supply lines that force let the attacking commander know about them. Unless they've been very clever about concealing their numbers & gear they're a known factor by now. The commander, if not 150% incompetent, will absolutely be watching and waiting for them. And as light irregular calvary they can't effectively operate at night. If they camped anywhere within ten miles of the invaders and didn't effectively hide themselves I'd expect a contingent of gobbos to make a night attack on them.

The absolute last thing those skirmishers want to do is come into direct conflict with another calvary force, especially one that's better trained/experienced and probably has better gear. All the attacker needs to do is keep enough calvary out of the fight threaten the skirmishers and they'll likely not attack.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The issue with that is two fold. First, with the makeshift earthworks there's very little for the attacker's dedicated calvary to do as calvary during a frontal assault. So the typical and normal thing would be to hold them back as a fast reserve force.

Second, by attacking supply lines that force let the attacking commander know about them. Unless they've been very clever about concealing their numbers & gear they're a known factor by now. The commander, if not 150% incompetent, will absolutely be watching and waiting for them. And as light irregular calvary they can't effectively operate at night. If they camped anywhere within ten miles of the invaders and didn't effectively hide themselves I'd expect a contingent of gobbos to make a night attack on them.

The absolute last thing those skirmishers want to do is come into direct conflict with another calvary force, especially one that's better trained/experienced and probably has better gear. All the attacker needs to do is keep enough calvary out of the fight threaten the skirmishers and they'll likely not attack.

The attacker doesn't have any cavalry at all. That's their big weakness. They have foot skirmishers, but any they dedicate to handling the defending skirmishers aren't going to be in any position to attack the defended position.

The defenders have goblins on wargs as skirmishers, plus some shamans who can do a lot to hide their location (less direct combat, more misdirection and illusion), plus a fair amount of foot skirmishers who are very familiar with their terrain.

[Satinavian]

Well, the skirmishers are fast and know the terrain, so they can't be easily engaged. And the villain doesn't have time to hunt them. So he will let them be.

But that does not mean ignoring them. He will obviously have to assign troops to deal with them. They will just not take part in the assult and instead protect the rear. As he has enough troops, that is easy enough. The skirmishers won't be able to attack an unprotected rearside when the main assault happens. Except if the villain tries to bait them, which is possible but risky.

[Telok]

The attacker doesn't have any cavalry at all....

...The defenders have goblins on wargs as skirmishers, plus some shamans who can do a lot to hide their location (less direct combat, more misdirection and illusion)...

Those details massively change things. The skirmisher's tactics and action will be extremely different from anything historical. I presume you're generally handwaving supplies then too. Those are archer calvary with night vision goggles riding giant wolves and being given effective stealth magics. There shouldn't be anything resembling normal supply trains for the attackers. They're basically going to have to run off what food they can scavenge. After a week of marching they're likely done as a fighting force unless they get to regularly raid villages for food every couple days.

[gbaji]

The issue with that is two fold. First, with the makeshift earthworks there's very little for the attacker's dedicated calvary to do as calvary during a frontal assault. So the typical and normal thing would be to hold them back as a fast reserve force.

I didn't see any cavalry listed in the attacking forces. Have I been missing something this whole time? I see 75 heavy infantry, 150 light infantry, 50 archers, some spell casters/healers, and 10 elite leader types.


Second, by attacking supply lines that force let the attacking commander know about them. Unless they've been very clever about concealing their numbers & gear they're a known factor by now. The commander, if not 150% incompetent, will absolutely be watching and waiting for them. And as light irregular calvary they can't effectively operate at night. If they camped anywhere within ten miles of the invaders and didn't effectively hide themselves I'd expect a contingent of gobbos to make a night attack on them.

Yeah. I'm assuming that the attacking forces are aware of the skirmishers, and are taking them into account during the assault.


The absolute last thing those skirmishers want to do is come into direct conflict with another calvary force, especially one that's better trained/experienced and probably has better gear. All the attacker needs to do is keep enough calvary out of the fight threaten the skirmishers and they'll likely not attack.

If the attackers do actually have cavalry, then yes. Um... Even without, the skirmishers are light troops, as described, and not well regulated. So presumably, one can leave a smallish rear guard force to manage them. The real impact this has is that the "reserve" forces you'd usually use in an attack like this to push forward when/if a break in the defenses occurs are likely going to be tied up serving as rear guard. So it turns the line assault into a straight up "line vs line" situation. Given the adjusted gap size, the defenders are in a much better position, which makes this a real slog for the attackers.

As a general rule, when holding a position to stop an advance (pre-firearms anyway), you must "block" every possible route the opposition could use. This generally requires either impassable terrain (walls, cliffs, etc) *or* (approximately) one defender per meter of defended line. Earthen defences (trenches, embankments) do not actually "block" advancement. They merely slow it down a bit. So they don't actually count in the "prevent advance" calculation at all. If you have enough defensive folks to block every approach, however, *then* those things count because the attackers have to fight "uphill", so to speak. Advancing "uphill" when there's no one in front of them is just a delay in movement. We don't have walls here, so that's not a consideration either.

With the narrower gap, the defenders now have enough (barely) to actually cover all the approaches with a line of defenders. This means that the attackers must fight their way through defenders across those embankments. So... good thing for the defenders. They'll still probably eventually get pushed back, given the relative distribution of forces, but it's going to be very very costly for the attackers now.

As for the defenders, if possible, I might put maybe a third/quarter of the skirmishers back behind the lines. Someone needs to look out for sneaky stuff like a small squad climbing the hillsides and coming around from behind, and those guys would work well for that. There still really aren't enough foot/crossbow folks on the defender's side to both secure the gap *and* look out for sneak-arounds. Some of the mounted skirmishers might work well for this IMO. Don't need many, but they need to be able to move quickly and patrol for likely approaches, and be able to engage them while (hopefully) still climbing. And a smaller amount of skirmishers is still sufficient to keep a portion of the attacking force "honest" and have to defend their rear. You don't really need to full on engage with them, just keep them in position as a threat from the rear. If the attackers keep forces back to defend against it, then great, you've occupied them at no real cost. If the attackers decide to move those forces forward to push through an attack (which they will likely have to do at some point) *then* you hit them from behind with the skirmishers and make that breach as costy as possible.

I still predict the attackers will be able to breach the embankment and take the gap (the defenders are still spread pretty thin, so just random chance is going to result in some holes opening up that can't be closed since they literally have zero reserves behind them), but it'll be costly. Probably lose somewhere around 2/3rds of their force in this push, with the defenders losing maybe half of theirs, assuming they retreat at the correct time. If they delay too long, they could maybe kill some more of the attackers, but will suffer much much greater casualties themselves. Most of the attaking losses will be their light infantry, leaving most of the heavy infantry (let's say 50 or so) intact to attack the village itself, and maybe another 20-30 light infantry as well (hey. They're just goblins, right?). The defenders should be able to fall back with all of their snipers, and maybe 50 or so of the foot/crossbowmen, and maybe 50 or so skirmishers will be able to hoof it to help defend the village as well (kinda assuming the attackers stop to regroup after they take the gap, bring up their supply stuff, get their "tank" across the trench/embankment, etc).

Which makes the final attack on the village having the attacker at a slight numerical disadvantage, but with somewhat better quality troops, and with a "tank" to help breach the light walls of the village (I'm asssuming something like a low wooden palisade at best?). Should work well as a scenario backdrop IMO. The attacking forces archers should also survive the initial battle somewhat unscathed as well. Kinda depends on where the snipers focus their attacks really. Some number of archers and/or leaders may have been picked off along the way maybe. Sholud make things "interesting". And yeah, barring player intervention, I'd still expect the attackers to ultimately be able to win in a straight fight here. It's a village. You don't have enough people to defend all the points of attack (but have at least some sort of wall to help). And in this fight, the attackers have something that can force a breach.

[fusilier]

Oooh, not the "no YOU do the research" argument. How about yo do some research instead?

I apologize for the delay in returning to this subject, but have not had the time. My books are still packed up, and I was merely trying to encourage you to dig a little deeper into your sources. I come here to both share knowledge and to learn, because through disagreement I've often found improved understanding, but maybe others approach it differently than I do. So if I came off as condescending I apologize.


But if you want period descriptions...


We attacked the only body of their
cavalry that showed fight, and sent them flying; but we found we were
surrounded by thousands of their infantry, who formed a square to prevent
our getting back; and it would have done your eyes good to see how we
dashed through them.

"Dashed through them" -- doesn't describe that the infantry formation held until the cavalry made physical contact with them. I feel I have to keep reiterating this point: most charges resulted in one side breaking (or, if the attacker, halting) before making contact. Therefore, squares, could be, and were (even if rarely), broken by cavalry charges. Even if the horses didn't physically contact the soldiers to do so. What I'm looking for is an explicit description of the horses doing so. Something like these . . .

In proper square formation, they [the 1st Persian
Regular Infantry] awaited the onset of the charge, the front rank kneeling
with fixed bayonets, and those behind firing in volleys. Lieutenant Moore
led his troop when the order was given to charge. As he neared the front
rank of gleaming steel, Moore pulled his chargerÂ’s head straight, drove in
his spurs, and leapt sheer onto the raised bayonets. The splendid animal
fell dead within the square, pinning its rider beneath its body, but the
lieutenant was up and on his feet in an instant; while through the gap he
had made, the sowars [troopers] charged after him. In his fall, Moore had
the misfortune to break his sword; and he was now called on to defend
himself with but a few inches of steel and a revolver.

“Arrived at the square, the adjutant’s horse swerved; but, letting his
sword dangle from the wrist, he seized the reins in both hands, pulled his
head straight, and ramming in the spurs, took the first line of bayonets like
a fence, leaping into the midst of the astonished serbaz [infantrymen].
Down went his charger, dead; snap! the sabre broke close to the hilt; and
as the troopers rode through and out on the other side to re-form for a
second charge, Moore was battling for life, with pistol in one hand and
sword hilt in the other.

Those two describe the same event, during the Indo-Persian Wars I referred to before. (They are excellent, thank you for providing them). They describe a horse which attempted to jump a square, and landed on the rear rank creating a large enough gap that the other troopers could poor into the square.

At the battle of the Pyramids, the Mamelukes,
armed with light curved sabres, swept down with resistless fury on the
French infantry, and actually rode into and over their squares.

Again, not specific enough to know if they broke into it by physically crashing through the soldiers, or if some part of the square was broken.

A lance is useless in a mêlée. The
moment the lancer pulls up and the impulsive power is stopped, that
instant the power of the weapon is gone. The 16th Lancers broke into the
Sikh squares at Aliwal; and in the mêlée that ensued, these brave men
attacked the lancers sword in hand and brought many of them low; for they
could effect nothing with the lance.

Same here. They "broke into the squares." I haven't claimed that squares couldn't be broken by cavalry charges, but instead, that horses weren't expected to charge bodily into formed infantry. And that that "expectation" was a result of observation, not a lack of willingness on the part of the cavalrymen.

So, once again, we are left with *one* instance that clearly describes the situation of a horse breaking into a square . . . bodily(?). I won't even say charging into a square, because it attempted to jump.

So what did the people who fought in these battles actually say about attempting to charge into a square that didn't break? I.e. where the infantry held fast:


When he is urged to charge against the terrible face of the infantry square . . . the animal becomes bewildered with terror, and wheeling around, in spite of rein and spur, rushes from the unequal conflict, where he seems to know almost by instinct that his destruction is instant and inevitable. Let anyone, officer or soldier, who has ever charged a square, deny, if he can, the truth of this picture.

Ensign Gronow --

the horses of the front rank of the cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders, came to a standstill, shaking and covered in foam, at about twenty yards distance . . . and generally resisted all attempts to force them to charge the line of serried steel.

Both quotes can be found on page 142 of Andrew W. Field's Waterloo: the French Perspective.

These are quotes from people who actually witnessed the battle. And they are explicit, it couldn't be done, the first one even says "anyone" who has ever attempted it would agree. This was the common logic of the time.

I'm not going to address medieval accounts, as you noted they tended toward the hyperbolic. Also, I know that even basic descriptions of battles could often be reworked to fit certain motifs.


Here's a clip of several horses charging a line of people in plate armor.

I'm familiar with this particular scene because I too am friends with reenactors who work on this kind of stuff. I myself have also worked on movies (although not as a horseman, but around horses). This came to my attention when a reenactor buddy shared some "behind the scenes" videos of this exact scene. When seen from other angles, the horse, while definitely hitting the one guy standing alone in front, actually charges into a gap in the ranks. You can't see the gap because of the careful positioning of the camera, but from other angles it is more apparent.

The infantry that appear to be thrown around by the horses are doing this: as the horse *passes* them, they are leaning into the horse to briefly make contact with its side, then throwing themselves away from the horse as if they've been knocked down. Filmed from the correct angle, it gives the impression that the horse is bowling through these infantry! But, from the other angles, as my reenactor friend pointed out, you can see the careful use of cleared "lanes" for the horses to charge into are more visible. Even from this angle, if you look carefully, you can kind of see the lanes. It's an impressive scene, but ultimately it's a movie, carefully rehearsed and practiced, and "cheated" to give the impression they want to give. My friend, an experienced horseman, who had worked on movies, was very impressed with how carefully the shot was set up, and pointed out all these details.

Note: Pike and shot soldiers, circa 1600, did not stand "elbow-to-elbow" they had a gap of about a foot or so in "closed order." It was later Napoleonic era soldiers that stood elbow to elbow. (To be fair, I know the practice started well before then, I'm just not sure exactly when between those two dates. My knowledge of circa 1700 manuals is lacking).

[Pauly]

I
Note: Pike and shot soldiers, circa 1600, did not stand "elbow-to-elbow" they had a gap of about a foot or so in "closed order." It was later Napoleonic era soldiers that stood elbow to elbow. (To be fair, I know the practice started well before then, I'm just not sure exactly when between those two dates. My knowledge of circa 1700 manuals is lacking).

In the 7 years war the practice was for infantry to stand elbow to elbow. A buttressed line of infantry was considered proof against cavalry, but doctrine and training changed between the 7 years war and the Napoleonic era, which made it more difficult for infantry in lines to resist cavalry.

Famously Colin Campbell’s 93rd Highlanders in a 2 deep line held firm and forced Russian cavalry to retreat at the Battle of Balaclava. NB 4 deep lines were the doctrine at the time for resisting cavalry charges.

[Maat Mons]

I've been directed here for my question.


Honestly, I have no idea which subforum corresponds to discussion of real historical weapons. If someone can tell me, I'll see about having this moved.

I've decided halberds are awesome. I came to this conclusion after a painstaking research process of watching one YouTube video. What sold me was that the "beard" of the axe can be constructed to allow for some hooking potential, and the space between the top part of the axe and the spike or spear tip can do, whatever it is those things on a ranseur or partisan do. Nestle the shaft of a pike in there and push it up or to the side while approaching? Maybe?

I have some questions though.

I see some halberds have concave cutting surfaces on the axe head. Does this make a major difference in effectiveness?

Does the distance of the cutting edge from the center line of the shaft matter greatly? In particular, can it exacerbate the consequences of poor edge alignment?

How big does a hook need to be to be effective?

[Eladrinblade]

Regarding sally ports in castles: how were these not a structural weakness? Why wouldn't attackers try to force their way in at these points? Surely they were less defensible than the main gate or some stretch of wall?

[Gnoman]

Regarding sally ports in castles: how were these not a structural weakness? Why wouldn't attackers try to force their way in at these points? Surely they were less defensible than the main gate or some stretch of wall?

Do you know why the main gates of fortifications tended to be so big? It wasn't to create some sort of spectacle, but because you need a big opening to move lots and lots of men. Meanwhile, the role of a sally wasn't to drive off the enemy entirely, it was sending a small force out to raid and harass a besieger. Thus, sally ports were small, just big enough for one or two soldiers to go out at a time, which inherently made them defensible - a gate that only lets one or two defenders out at a time will also allow only one or two attackers in. There were often other defenses that varied by the specific fort - sometimes there was another set of doors, sometimes the approach was very difficult, sometimes it was placed in a way that let archers enfilade any attacker, etc. The size, however, was the biggest factor.

They did provide a potential liability in case of treason, but that's hard to guard against.


More importantly, you can't run a place like that with only a front door. When you're not being besieged, not having extra entrances causes Problems.

[Rynjin]

I've been directed here for my question...
I see some halberds have concave cutting surfaces on the axe head. Does this make a major difference in effectiveness?

Does the distance of the cutting edge from the center line of the shaft matter greatly? In particular, can it exacerbate the consequences of poor edge alignment?

How big does a hook need to be to be effective?





Not as much of an expert as some but I'll take a crack and others can correct me.

1/2.) Should be more of an edge case difference for the most part. You get less directed force in the center than something that comes to a "point" (which the center arc of a traditional axehead counts as for our purposes), resulting in less destructive power at the point of impact...technically. In a purely academic sense. At the end of the day you're still swinging a weapon with ridiculous momentum and the difference between 110% dead and 105% dead aren't really worth mentioning. That same force is increased at the points created by the concave arc but again...academic.

3.) Big enough? This is a bit of an odd question because the answer entirely depends on what the hook is fore. It's big enough to get the job done and no bigger, because then you're just adding extra weight.

[gbaji]

Do you know why the main gates of fortifications tended to be so big? It wasn't to create some sort of spectacle, but because you need a big opening to move lots and lots of men. Meanwhile, the role of a sally wasn't to drive off the enemy entirely, it was sending a small force out to raid and harass a besieger. Thus, sally ports were small, just big enough for one or two soldiers to go out at a time, which inherently made them defensible - a gate that only lets one or two defenders out at a time will also allow only one or two attackers in. There were often other defenses that varied by the specific fort - sometimes there was another set of doors, sometimes the approach was very difficult, sometimes it was placed in a way that let archers enfilade any attacker, etc. The size, however, was the biggest factor.

Yup. Typically, very narrow openings, with additional narrow passages leading to them (thus very easy to defend), and thick/heavy doors, tended to make sally ports not great targets. Ironically, the size is what makes all the difference here. Take a 2" thick wooden door. Make it just 2' wide, and set in a stone wall, perhaps with some steps leading down from this door (it's set 5' or so up the wall), and steep curved steps on the inside of the wall leading to it. Now try battering that down. You simply can't get anything heavy (big) enough up against the door to break it down. The door is too small to have enough flex to break it down, you can't get larger seige type weapons up against it, the entire time you're standing around getting stuff shot/dropped into you, and if you do manage to batter your way through, you're fighting single file though a narrow tunnel. Not exactly a way to blast through the defenses and get inside.

Larger gates, as you say, are larger because there is a need to allow for large things in and out. Wagons. Crates of supplies. People on horseback, etc. But large gates have much much wider surfaces relative to their thicknesses. This makes them both prime targets for battering (more flex along the width of the facing surface of the gate) *and* allow for a large rush of attackers to enter once it's breached. Take that same 2" thick wooded door, but make it 10' wide, in double panels, attached to stoneworks on either side (so say 20' wide entrance being covered here). Even with very heavy and thick bars holding it closed, pretty much anything pushing against the center of that gate will cause the entire thing to bend, putting pressure and creating cracks in the woodwork and on the bars. Worse, since this is used for moving wagons, carriages, horses, etc through the gate, the approach by necessity will be flat, allowing for large seige weapons to be brought to bear (large battering rams, or just 20-30 men pushing really hard.

And honestly? Most gates have to be light enough to be something that can be reasonably opened and closed. They're often quite a bit less "sturdy" than the doors you might use for a sally port. So for simple forts, the front gate is often by far the most vulnerable point of attack. Of course, as you build up your defenses, you start building up more complex gate works to make this weak point stronger. Instead of just a large door in a stronger wall, you build an actual gatehouse. You have an outer and inner door. You put defenders above this entryway who can drop stuff on anyone caught within if they breach the outer door to make attacking the inner one more difficult. More expense, but a heavy portcullis that can be dropped down as an additional line of defense. There's a reason why when you look at the layouts of castles you can see some really elaborate gateworks setups on some of the larger ones. They had to be because these were the best route for large numbers of people to enter, so they required more defenses to actually be secure.

On the other hand, as you somewhat alluded to, sally ports make great tools for dealing with intrigue or small numbers of folks sneaking in/out of a fort or castle. So from a gameplay point of view, they do serve a pretty useful purpose. PCs may often be able to fight their way through such things, where a large force of "regular soldiers" probably would not be worth trying. If you do manage to sneak or guile someone inside the castle, having them open a sally port and let in the rest of the group is a very valid tactic.

[Maat Mons]

I guess the problem is, I'm not certain what hooks on polearms were used for exactly. They feature on a few different types, so they must have been useful for something. My best guesses are to catch into a gap in a horseman's armor and then pull him off the horse, or to get behind a foot soldier's leg and trip him. That first one seems like it would be doable with a pretty small hook. But the second one seems like it would require a bigger hook.

[Eladrinblade]

Yup. Typically, very narrow openings, ...

Okay, that makes sense.

Another question: how could sallying troops get to and from their targets effectively? You'd think besieging armies would have sally ports watched constantly, with troops hanging around just in case anybody came out. How do they achieve surprise?

[gbaji]

Okay, that makes sense.

Another question: how could sallying troops get to and from their targets effectively? You'd think besieging armies would have sally ports watched constantly, with troops hanging around just in case anybody came out. How do they achieve surprise?

That's largly dependent on circumstances. But typically, when not actively attacking a defensive position (let's say a castle), you don't have your troops just standing around in archery range. So any section of wall is going to be clear of opponents for some distance. You can easily get group of soliders out through the sally port and then send them <somewhere> to do <something>. And yeah, the enemy may have folks keeping an eye on such things. Although some sally ports may be well hidden. A similarly narrow doorway, hidden along a stretch of wall behind some bushes, or abutting a ditch or other terrain may similarly be very difficult to attack, but allow for secretly slipping some folks out through as needed.

The assumption is that the enemy can't observe and defend against every possible angle and side of the castle at all times ("outside perimeter" is always bigger than "inside perimeter"). You can slip small numbers of people in/out if you want. Certainly, under cover of darkness, to try to get a messenger to a nearby ally to ask for aid or whatnot. Or to send out a raiding party against the enemy camp, maybe to light the seige weapons they are constructing on fire or something.

During an actual attack, the attackers are going to be concentrated on whatever area(s) they are actively attacking. For the same reason as above, you wouldn't just have your trooops standing in a big circle around the entire castle letting the defenders kill them with ranged weapons. You mass in one area, and focus your attack on a single point (or maybe a couple points, depending on the actual defenses). This leaves large portions of the castle wall basically empty (and often also unwatched). So easy to open up a sally port, have a dozen or two soldiers slip out, form up, and then go circle around the attackers and try to hit them from surprise or something. Even if the attackers left a few scouts watching the walls, they may not be able to see this happening, then run off and report it, then have someone react to it (all in the middle of pitched battle), before the folks who just slipped out through a sally port can do whatever it is they are trying to do.

This largely depends on the relative numbers of attackers and defenders, the terrain around the defensive position, distribution of troops, etc. And yeah. When not under attack, these things are just extra doors that folks might use for mundane purposes. For the exact same reason you might enter or exit through a side door into a building instead of the main entrance and through the lobby.

[Rynjin]

I guess the problem is, I'm not certain what hooks on polearms were used for exactly. They feature on a few different types, so they must have been useful for something. My best guesses are to catch into a gap in a horseman's armor and then pull him off the horse, or to get behind a foot soldier's leg and trip him. That first one seems like it would be doable with a pretty small hook. But the second one seems like it would require a bigger hook.

It is indeed for unhorsing people, though I think the hook was also used to unbalance people with shields.

[Pauly]

Regarding sally ports in castles: how were these not a structural weakness? Why wouldn't attackers try to force their way in at these points? Surely they were less defensible than the main gate or some stretch of wall?

The main gate was often the most defensible spot in the castle. More castles were taken by breaching the walls at another spot than those taken by assaulting the main gates.

It was very common for sally ports to be built at a spot where it was difficult to observe (eg on the cliff side of the hill) the sally part and even more difficult to maneuver forces into position to assault a sally port.

[Gnoman]

Okay, that makes sense.

Another question: how could sallying troops get to and from their targets effectively? You'd think besieging armies would have sally ports watched constantly, with troops hanging around just in case anybody came out. How do they achieve surprise?


That's largly dependent on circumstances. But typically, when not actively attacking a defensive position (let's say a castle), you don't have your troops just standing around in archery range. So any section of wall is going to be clear of opponents for some distance. You can easily get group of soliders out through the sally port and then send them <somewhere> to do <something>. And yeah, the enemy may have folks keeping an eye on such things. Although some sally ports may be well hidden. A similarly narrow doorway, hidden along a stretch of wall behind some bushes, or abutting a ditch or other terrain may similarly be very difficult to attack, but allow for secretly slipping some folks out through as needed.

The assumption is that the enemy can't observe and defend against every possible angle and side of the castle at all times ("outside perimeter" is always bigger than "inside perimeter"). You can slip small numbers of people in/out if you want. Certainly, under cover of darkness, to try to get a messenger to a nearby ally to ask for aid or whatnot. Or to send out a raiding party against the enemy camp, maybe to light the seige weapons they are constructing on fire or something.

During an actual attack, the attackers are going to be concentrated on whatever area(s) they are actively attacking. For the same reason as above, you wouldn't just have your trooops standing in a big circle around the entire castle letting the defenders kill them with ranged weapons. You mass in one area, and focus your attack on a single point (or maybe a couple points, depending on the actual defenses). This leaves large portions of the castle wall basically empty (and often also unwatched). So easy to open up a sally port, have a dozen or two soldiers slip out, form up, and then go circle around the attackers and try to hit them from surprise or something. Even if the attackers left a few scouts watching the walls, they may not be able to see this happening, then run off and report it, then have someone react to it (all in the middle of pitched battle), before the folks who just slipped out through a sally port can do whatever it is they are trying to do.

This largely depends on the relative numbers of attackers and defenders, the terrain around the defensive position, distribution of troops, etc. And yeah. When not under attack, these things are just extra doors that folks might use for mundane purposes. For the exact same reason you might enter or exit through a side door into a building instead of the main entrance and through the lobby.

The one thing I'd like to add to this (otherwise quite complete) explanation is something that a lot of moderns really struggle with. Most of us have grown up in a world of nighttime streetlights, occasional headlights, and powerful portable lights. The ancient world didn't have any of those. At night, you saw only by the moon or by firelight - a torch, a candle, maybe an oil lamp in the right time and place if you're feeling fancy. None of those fires illuminate very far away, so the only way you're seeing a sally port open in the dark is if the moon catches it just right (pretty easy to avoid) or if the defenders are stupid enough to light it up themselves. Once the sun sets, it is trivial to slip a small, quiet force out.

[Grim Portent]

The amount of damage a nighttime raid could do is also not to be underestimated. A force of twenty or so men able to sneak into position while most of the enemy is asleep and unprepared can easily kill or wound dozens of men before slipping away with minimal casualties, start fires that destroy munitions or food and water and scatter or kill pack animals. A small organised force can defeat a much larger disorganised force even when the numbers seem ludicrously one sided.

Also of course a lot of forts on rivers or coasts had sally ports that lead to actual ports. Or landings really, places small boats can dock and launch from, usually nestled in hard to climb rock formations. Impossible to approach by sea, because defensive cannons and all that, but perfect for the defenders sneaking supplies and people in and out, and occasionally sending out small boats at night to board or set fire to warships supporting a land based siege. Such landings make river/coastal castles almost impossible to take without naval support, because the defenders can resupply via the water.

[gbaji]

The one thing I'd like to add to this (otherwise quite complete) explanation is something that a lot of moderns really struggle with. Most of us have grown up in a world of nighttime streetlights, occasional headlights, and powerful portable lights. The ancient world didn't have any of those. At night, you saw only by the moon or by firelight - a torch, a candle, maybe an oil lamp in the right time and place if you're feeling fancy. None of those fires illuminate very far away, so the only way you're seeing a sally port open in the dark is if the moon catches it just right (pretty easy to avoid) or if the defenders are stupid enough to light it up themselves. Once the sun sets, it is trivial to slip a small, quiet force out.

Yup. It's actually one of the things I see in films and TV shows all the time and it drives me nuts. People "sneaking around" in the dark carrying flashlights. It's like we have gotten so accustomed in modern times to having illumination everywhere we go, that it's just accepted and normal for folks to always need light when walking around outside at night. It's annoying enough in a show set in modern times. It's shockingly silly when set in a historical setting. And yeah, I get why they do it. They need light so the audience can see the faces of the actors and what they are doing. But it also seems like they justify it as though people just need light to see themselves or something. As someone who's actually spent time "out in the wilderness", the last thing you do is carry light with you. Once your eyes adjust to darkness, you'd be surprised at how well you can see (at least nearby objects and outlines of terrain around you). And if you're worried about someone "getting you" out in the dark? The best defense is to stay dark yourself. A light allows you to see better maybe 10-20 feet around you. It allows everyone else to see you (or at least where you are) from pretty much anywhere that has line of sight (You can see a flashlight from miles away in the dark).

I recall watching the TV show Manifest. I liked it more or less. Had some issues later on. Whatever. But sometime I think near the end of season two, two of the characters are approaching a cabin in the woods where three bad guys are holding someone hostage. What do they do? They carry flashlights. And the whole time I'm thinking "why are you doing that? They'll be able to see you coming from far away". And sure enough, the bad guys see their flashlights, and start scambling to deal with them (then other stuff happens, so whatever). Ok. That was "dumb". But then, wait for it, a season later, the same bad guys have returned, and two people (one of whom was one of the two people from the last "sneaking around in the dark with a flashlight" debacle) are trying to sneak up on one of them for <reasons> in the same freaking woods. Again, I'm thinking "surely they learned their lesson the fist time, right? Right? It's the two of you, both armed with guns, against one guy with no weapon, should be easy". Nope. Flashlights come out. Then they split up (I'm eyeball rolling at this point because it's obvious what's going to happen), and then sure enough, the bad guy jumps the flashlight and night vison gone good guy, beats him up, takes his gun, and now hunts for the second person (and ends up shooting her and her falling off a cliff or something IIRC).

It's like the people who write this stuff know how light in the darkness works, but then pretend the characters they are writing don't. Or are just monumentally stupid. Sorry. Bit of a tangent, but stuff like that just drives me absolutely up the wall.

But yeah. In the dark, as long as you aren't monumentally stupid and carrying your own light source, you can sneak around quite well. On the flip side, noise is much more of an issue. When you get away from roads, and houses, and even the hum of electricity that is everywhere around us (but we don't notice), the sheer silence of night can cause the slightest noises to carry quite a distance. Listening is often far more effective at night than seeing. But again, in such a setting, the folks living in it tend to know what sorts of sounds are "normal", and which will be noticed and can act appropriately.

[Pauly]

On the light at night time, with a bit of practice most people can see well enough by starlight to move around in openish terrain. Clouds or closed in tree canopies make things dark enough that people effectively can’t see.

Another big issue is how much light snow reflects. It doesn’t have to ge snow on the ground in your vicinity. A few snow covered mountains in the distance is almost lime like turning on a light switch.

[Vinyadan]

People "sneaking around" in the dark carrying flashlights.

Mine is people hiding in the dark... while smoking a cigarette. Now I can see them from 100 m away and smell them in whichever direction the wind blows. In Persepolis, there's actually a scene where civilians discuss this, as Teheran was being bombed. One told another not to smoke a cigarette, she answered that the airplanes were too high up to see it, and someone else commented that someone had told him that those were the sort of light people saw best from up there. It's obviously not meant to be a technically accurate discussion (it wants to portray how civilians live through such experiences), but the problem of how visible a lit cig is would immediately be noticed by anyone around it.


But again, in such a setting, the folks living in it tend to know what sorts of sounds are "normal", and which will be noticed and can act appropriately.

Insert Skyrim dude, an arrow through his leg, standing by the corpse of his companion, going "It must have been the wind". :smallcool:

[gbaji]

Mine is people hiding in the dark... while smoking a cigarette. Now I can see them from 100 m away and smell them in whichever direction the wind blows. In Persepolis, there's actually a scene where civilians discuss this, as Teheran was being bombed. One told another not to smoke a cigarette, she answered that the airplanes were too high up to see it, and someone else commented that someone had told him that those were the sort of light people saw best from up there. It's obviously not meant to be a technically accurate discussion (it wants to portray how civilians live through such experiences), but the problem of how visible a lit cig is would immediately be noticed by anyone around it.

It's something that is (in theory at least) taught to all Navy personel as well. The distance a lit cigarette can be seen, at night, on the ocean, is more or less limited only to the limits of the horizon (farther if you are a flat earth believer!).

[HeadlessMermaid]

Mine is people hiding in the dark... while smoking a cigarette. Now I can see them from 100 m away and smell them in whichever direction the wind blows.
Hah. Well the smell can't be helped, but I think you can cup your hand and hold the cigarette with the burning end towards your palm, so that the light can't be seen. From most angles, at least. You can cover what's left with your body. I don't remember a specific film scene right now, but when I think of "scoundrel or gangster lurks somewhere dark and smokes to pass the time", that's how I picture it. And remember it, for that matter (I've been around some scoundrels). Same gesture as protecting a lit cigarette from the wind and rain.

[halfeye]

Hah. Well the smell can't be helped, but I think you can cup your hand and hold the cigarette with the burning end towards your palm, so that the light can't be seen. From most angles, at least. You can cover what's left with your body. I don't remember a specific film scene right now, but when I think of "scoundrel or gangster lurks somewhere dark and smokes to pass the time", that's how I picture it. And remember it, for that matter (I've been around some scoundrels). Same gesture as protecting a lit cigarette from the wind and rain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_on_a_match

I would call smoking unlucky anyway, it can give you cancer.

[jayem]

Okay, that makes sense.

Another question: how could sallying troops get to and from their targets effectively? You'd think besieging armies would have sally ports watched constantly, with troops hanging around just in case anybody came out. How do they achieve surprise?

That then leaves a shift of attackers on constant alertness while the defenders get to prepare, in a mirror image of the overall situation.

And if you've only got a few watchers, that means the defenders can probably sally out, get seen, hit those watchers and run back inside before the reinforcements arrive.

A decent number of designed sally ports will also have a transition area (e.g. the gate opens into the ditch, and is hence obscured), this means that from the attackers point of view there are effectively loads of sally ports to watch, while from the defenders point of view there is only one. Or if there is a shielding wall the defenders can go unobserved through the actual door in single file then assemble before they are revealed as they run round the corner.

[Maat Mons]

The Wikipedia article for the qinglong ji says it shouldn't be referred to as a "Chinese halberd" because it's "fundamentally different" from a halberd. Is it really?

[Rynjin]

They're correct, it's really more of a combination between a ranseur and a volge.

Yeah, no, a polearm is a polearm pretty much. There's a lot of sub categories but really all it boils down to "is it an axe on a pole, a hammer on a pole, or a spear"?

The various ji types are all halberds.

[Pauly]

The Wikipedia article for the qinglong ji says it shouldn't be referred to as a "Chinese halberd" because it's "fundamentally different" from a halberd. Is it really?

Pride makes people see big differences when the reality is there are minor superficial differences.

[InvisibleBison]

The Wikipedia article for the qinglong ji says it shouldn't be referred to as a "Chinese halberd" because it's "fundamentally different" from a halberd. Is it really?

Looking at the wikipedia page, I think it's saying that spears and halberds are fundamentally different weapons and therefore it's inaccurate to use both terms as a translation of ji, not that halberds and jis are fundamentally different.

[Pauly]

They're correct, it's really more of a combination between a ranseur and a volge.

Yeah, no, a polearm is a polearm pretty much. There's a lot of sub categories but really all it boils down to "is it an axe on a pole, a hammer on a pole, or a spear"?

The various ji types are all halberds.

I would argue “sword on a pole” is a fundamental type of polearm, although less common than the other 3.

[Mechalich]

It's like the people who write this stuff know how light in the darkness works, but then pretend the characters they are writing don't. Or are just monumentally stupid. Sorry. Bit of a tangent, but stuff like that just drives me absolutely up the wall.

This is, mostly, a constraint of things that have to be physically filmed. There's two factors. One, the actual scene has to be sufficiently well-lit for the audience to see it on their screens - GoT/House of the Dragon has a number of scenes that aren't mindful of this and are essentially just black blurs unless viewed using the best possible setup. Two, during filming there are safety requirements that the actors (and crew like sound techs and so forth) not hurt themselves stumbling around a set with no lights. This is why it may, in some circumstances, make more sense to film a 'night' scene during the day and then use filters to make it seem dark rather than filming in real darkness.

[Rynjin]

I would argue “sword on a pole” is a fundamental type of polearm, although less common than the other 3.

All of the "swords on a pole" are basically just middle grounds between axe and spear TBH. One of the only true swords on a pole is the naginata, which is literally just a katana with a comically long handle.

Other "swords on a pole" (eg. the guandao) typically thicken the "sword" portion so much that they're basically axes anyway.

[Pauly]

All of the "swords on a pole" are basically just middle grounds between axe and spear TBH. One of the only true swords on a pole is the naginata, which is literally just a katana with a comically long handle.

Other "swords on a pole" (eg. the guandao) typically thicken the "sword" portion so much that they're basically axes anyway.

I’ve been living in Japan for 10 years which brought it to mind. Also the Japanese I’ve spoken to about it consider the yari to be a sword on a stick too. Not that my Japanese is good enough to have a conversation about precise weapons handling.
I’ve had a good chance to see many examples of surviving yari and they’re not any thicker or more heavily built than katanas or naginata. Well at least not the ones they thought were good enough to preserve.
In art in temples they’re depicted as being used more or less in the same manner as naginata. Technically you could stab someone with a yari, but the only art I can think of where yari are used that way are when they’re being used to finish off a fallen foe.

[gbaji]

Which really makes maybe the best scope point for differentiation a bit lower in the tree, maybe at "spear" vs "polearm". The broad distinction being that if the weapon is only really capable of thrusting, then it's a spear (sharp point on a stick), but if it is primarily designed for lateral movements (slashing, crushing, whatever), then it's a polearm. I mean, yeah, if we wan't to be really literal then anything stuck on the "end of a pole" is a polearm, but I do find value in distinquishing the simpliest forms of spears, versus an array of other weapons designed for slashing, piercing, crushing, hooking, whatever mounted on the end of a pole so as to give the attacker greater reach and ability to attack over/around sheilds.

The term "halberd" is vague enough to encapsulte *most* polearms, but not every single one depending on how detailed we get. Mostly because the halberd is generally assumed to have cross mounted weapon surfaces. Some polearms which have a slashing surface (so can attack via lateral motion) but are not cross mounted (sword on a stick rather than blade pointed sideways mounted on the end of a stick) don't really fit that definition.

I think that in most game terms, this is going to be a distinction without much of a difference though. And if the game system is associating similar skills for some reason (grouping weapons based on some sort of skill treee maybe), I would suggest that a naginata has a lot more in common with a halberd in terms of skill used to weild than it does with a spear. Any time you are holding a polearm and then moving the far end in some lateral way to strike people at some distance (and hopefully with some force), you are using a completely different set of skills and hand positions than you'd use for thrusting with a spear. And while the specifics of those lateral motions will vary a bit based on the specific shape and composition of the weapon surfaces on the end of your polearm, it's not nearly as great IMO.

Someone trained with any of these polearms would probably be able to use any of the others with some level of skill, while someone trained only in spear use, and who has never used any polearm, will likely struggle with any of them. Again. Hand position and just general concept of "how to attack with this thing" is completely different from a spear.

[Cygnia]

Picked up a new knife (https://www.instagram.com/p/CqlfZEmJhYe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) at a flea market last month and I'm now trying to figure out country and age. The seller thought it might be Australian since the collection he got it from had boomerangs.

That 3rd photo...there's 19 notches on the spine there. Like it might have seen action in war maybe?

[HeadlessMermaid]

Picked up a new knife (https://www.instagram.com/p/CqlfZEmJhYe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) at a flea market last month and I'm now trying to figure out country and age. The seller thought it might be Australian since the collection he got it from had boomerangs.

That 3rd photo...there's 19 notches on the spine there. Like it might have seen action in war maybe?
I have no idea where that's from, but I'm sure the notches are decorative, they come from the knife-maker and not from use. Sadly it doesn't help us to identify it. For practical reasons, lines and Xs are the most convenient shapes to carve on a blade's spine, so you can find them in knives from all over, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a connection.

[Pauly]

Picked up a new knife (https://www.instagram.com/p/CqlfZEmJhYe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) at a flea market last month and I'm now trying to figure out country and age. The seller thought it might be Australian since the collection he got it from had boomerangs.

That 3rd photo...there's 19 notches on the spine there. Like it might have seen action in war maybe?

It isn’t any of the standard shapes of a knife for cooking or butchery.
The quality of the workmanship isn’t refined.
The handle doesn’t fit any of the major European knife making centers such as Thiers, Solingen, Eskilstuna or Sheffield. Nor does it fit Japanese designs.

The blade is carbon steel.
There are no maker’s mark apparent, nor is there a ‘made in [country]’ stamp.

The knife appears well used.

What I would guess is that it is a blacksmith made knife, not a knife for commercial sale. Unfortunately that makes dating and putting an origin on it very difficult. A commercially made knife normally would have a much thinner spine than the very chunky spine the knife has.

Based on the condition and materials I would guess late 1800s for age.

As for purpose, it looks like it was designed for meat cutting.

[Rynjin]

Personally, I would have clocked it as a homemade machete, especially with the angled handle.

[Cygnia]

There's a good bit of weight to it, so I could see this have being a machete or chopper of some kind.

[Vinyadan]

This might be an odd question, but here it is. In civilian life, it's become normal to get a label warning you of dangers that might come from tools or devices. Workplaces also are required to follow stringent regulations concerning moving parts, motors, and so on.

How do you handle this sort of thing in the armed forces? I assume that there is a huge difference based on how much time and resources are available for training. But is it possible to keep people away from things they don't know how to handle safely, especially on deployment? I also think of various devices that can be used to lower danger in the industry, but that would be very problematic during a battle, like sound signals or a part locking when performing certain operations.

Also, what do you do if you shoot an explosive round, and the round doesn't go further than a few metres? Is there a big bin of unexploded ordnance?

[halfeye]

Also, what do you do if you shoot an explosive round, and the round doesn't go further than a few metres? Is there a big bin of unexploded ordnance?
That tends to be a problem. Milligan had a case in his memoirs, a shell exploded as it left the gun and killed the crew of another gun. Unexploded bombs don't exactly have a nationality.

[Telok]

That tends to be a problem. Milligan had a case in his memoirs, a shell exploded as it left the gun and killed the crew of another gun. Unexploded bombs don't exactly have a nationality.

One of our players was in Desert Storm. Has a story about firing a TOW (wire guided anti-tank missile) from a LAV... I want to say LAV-25 but don't rely on that number... Anyways the secondary motor failed to ignite and it hit the ground not far away. Stunned everyone in the vehicle for a bit apparently.

My general knowledge of it is unexploded ordinance is treated as an enemy mine/bomb of appropriate size. Mark it and everyone says away until your expert can come deal with it.

[gbaji]

How do you handle this sort of thing in the armed forces? I assume that there is a huge difference based on how much time and resources are available for training. But is it possible to keep people away from things they don't know how to handle safely, especially on deployment? I also think of various devices that can be used to lower danger in the industry, but that would be very problematic during a battle, like sound signals or a part locking when performing certain operations.

Most famous warning label:

Front

Wasn't enough though, so they added:

Towards Enemy

[Beleriphon]

How do you handle this sort of thing in the armed forces? I assume that there is a huge difference based on how much time and resources are available for training. But is it possible to keep people away from things they don't know how to handle safely, especially on deployment? I also think of various devices that can be used to lower danger in the industry, but that would be very problematic during a battle, like sound signals or a part locking when performing certain operations.

Many piece of military equipment have really big arrows and warning saying things like: This end away from face, or Point This End at Target.


Also, what do you do if you shoot an explosive round, and the round doesn't go further than a few metres? Is there a big bin of unexploded ordnance?

It's basically considered a live explosive that the enemy just shot at you.

[Maat Mons]

Were halberds notably shorter than other polearms? I just noticed that neither D&D 3e nor PF 1e statted them as having reach.

Obviously, they'd be shorter than pikes, no need to point that out to me.

Everything I can find online says halberds were 5-6 ft. long, which I thought was a very typical polearm length. Then again, PF 1e says that a spear is 5 ft. long and doesn't have reach, and a longspear is 8 ft. long and does have reach. So maybe I've just been picturing all the reach weapons as shorter than they are.

Everything I can find online says "black" bills were 5-6 ft. long, which is what I always imagined, but "forest" bills were 8-9 ft. long, which is much bigger than I thought. I've also found some things saying glaives were 8-9 ft. long, which, again, is more than I had been imagining.

So was 8-9 feet pretty common for all the weapons D&D gives reach to? Were there any halberds in that length range? How common were the two different lengths of bills?

[Lapak]

Were halberds notably shorter than other polearms? I just noticed that neither D&D 3e nor PF 1e statted them as having reach.

Obviously, they'd be shorter than pikes, no need to point that out to me.

Everything I can find online says halberds were 5-6 ft. long, which I thought was a very typical polearm length. Then again, PF 1e says that a spear is 5 ft. long and doesn't have reach, and a longspear is 8 ft. long and does have reach. So maybe I've just been picturing all the reach weapons as shorter than they are.

Everything I can find online says "black" bills were 5-6 ft. long, which is what I always imagined, but "forest" bills were 8-9 ft. long, which is much bigger than I thought. I've also found some things saying glaives were 8-9 ft. long, which, again, is more than I had been imagining.

So was 8-9 feet pretty common for all the weapons D&D gives reach to? Were there any halberds in that length range? How common were the two different lengths of bills?I mean, reach in the real world is a relative term; a warrior with a halberd could definitely strike from outside the range of an opponent with almost any sidearm, but a guy with a rapier should have a similar advantage against an opponent with a dagger. D&D picked one semi-arbitrary size and said "everything longer than this has reach, everything shorter than this doesn't." And there's no consistency even within that: many historical polearms weren't super-standardized in their length even within the same basic design to begin with (a 'glaive' covers so much ground), just about anything shorter than a pike-type weapon is ideally sized to its user to at least some degree, and so on. Then we could get into functional reach vs. actual length, where we have to start looking at bigger two-handed swords vs. pole weapons that require a grip partway up the haft for proper use and a million other things.

Long story short, I believe you're more or less right in where 3e-and-later *tried* to set the 'reach zone', but it's such an inherently gamified concept that trying to translate it back to the real world gives all kinds of headaches. Halberds were shorter than a lot of polearm types, but longer than many weapons that aren't classed as reach weapons.

[Spiryt]

Early halberds could probably be 5-6 feet or so, but the later ones, in 16th or 17th century tended to have more slender build and increasingly long top spikes, and could easily be around 8 feet long. Which means that you could stab from quite some distance, at least.

It would surely handle quite a bit different from more "classic" stout Swiss style halberd, but it's still a halberd.

So it is kinda like asking what reach should "sword' have, too.

[halfeye]

Early halberds could probably be 5-6 feet or so, but the later ones, in 16th or 17th century tended to have more slender build and increasingly long top spikes, and could easily be around 8 feet long. Which means that you could stab from quite some distance, at least.

It would surely handle quite a bit different from more "classic" stout Swiss style halberd, but it's still a halberd.

So it is kinda like asking what reach should "sword' have, too.

I remember seeing somethings a long time ago that were certainly pole arms and I thought were called halberds (in a castle? maybe The tower of London? maybe elsewhere?) that were on wooden poles that appeared to be significantly over an inch thick, and were certainly over ten feet (3 metres) and maybe 15 feet (4.5 metres?) long (including the head in the latter length, but not so much the former).

I also remember a friend/aquaintance going a bit mad about a young oman, turning up at hers with a sledge hammer and getting badly beaten by her new boyfriend with a pickaxe handle (no pickaxe attached).

[wilphe]

Isn't grip and stance going to affect this a lot?

A Rapier you hold at one end and keep pointing at the foe; you generally don't do that with, say, a quarterstaff even if that is nominally longer

[stoutstien]

Anyone have resources on bellow rifles? For a setting I'm working on it's going to be a emergent technology in the absence of chemical propellants.

I built a couple prototypes myself with good results with .117/.22/.35 darts and pellets that reach decent energy levels( and I have dug up some information on the more famous models but majority of them were tank/pump systems.

[Maat Mons]

Not what you're looking for, since you said no chemical propellent, but the only musing I've done regarding bullets propelled by compressed gasses not generated by gunpowder involved catalyzing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide with silver to create superheated steam. Basically, I cribbed the idea from a combination of Last Exile and a documentary I watched about a rocket pack used in an old Bond movie.

Anyway, bellow rifles, as I said, are not my area, I'd never even heard of them before, but if you're not generating the pressure by chemical mean, nor by pumping air into a tank, wouldn't that mostly just leave winding up a spring and using the stored energy to power a bellows? Storing energy in a spring and using it to propel a projectile is what crossbows do. Wouldn't it be more efficient to directly use the spring to drive the projectile, rather than going through the extra step of converting the energy to air pressure before converting it to kinetic energy?

[stoutstien]

Not what you're looking for, since you said no chemical propellent, but the only musing I've done regarding bullets propelled by compressed gasses not generated by gunpowder involved catalyzing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide with silver to create superheated steam. Basically, I cribbed the idea from a combination of Last Exile and a documentary I watched about a rocket pack used in an old Bond movie.

Anyway, bellow rifles, as I said, are not my area, I'd never even heard of them before, but if you're not generating the pressure by chemical mean, nor by pumping air into a tank, wouldn't that mostly just leave winding up a spring and using the stored energy to power a bellows? Storing energy in a spring and using it to propel a projectile is what crossbows do. Wouldn't it be more efficient to directly use the spring to drive the projectile, rather than going through the extra step of converting the energy to air pressure before converting it to kinetic energy?

Modern spring air guns are basically the same principle using a coil spring and a piston/shaft rather than a bellow.

For the most part bellows allow for a narrow profile and where around before coil springs where made with anywhere near the same energy a V or leaf spring had. Even now a V spring is something you can picked up pennies on the dollar for a similar coil spring. *I am working a model using a coil and a cylinder bellow but need to do more math and cut it down to size.*

Without a coil you need longer lever arms. Crossbows are still around for a reason but string stretch/fatigue has never been solved. V springs can have energy stored indefinitely.

*I've made my fair share of shot crossbow/slingshots. those are also a forgotten tool of the past. Short range but fairly easy to use and accurate.*


Historically bellow guns were novelty for the rich but they could have wider applications thanks to being accurate, silent, easy to use, and trading off the *rapid* fire that similar period tanked air rifles/pistols had for consistently, cost and reliability. Being silent was actually one of the biggest reasons why air guns never took a major hold in Europe until recently as they were more regulated than powdered guns because they didn't like the idea of silent guns in the hands of the rabble. Even up to WW2 getting a small caliber rook or varmint rifle wasn't hard but if you wanted an air gun you better be a lord or very rich. France and a few other countries still hates them on principle regardless of power/size.

[Ixtellor]

Recently a friend made an off the cuff remark and I want to know whose right.

Based on the greeks, Romans and lots of other examples I assumed the most common armament in pre gunpowder warfare was sword and shield. But my friend insists spear and shield is the most prevalent. Is either of us right?

[stoutstien]

Recently a friend made an off the cuff remark and I want to know whose right.

Based on the greeks, Romans and lots of other examples I assumed the most common armament in pre gunpowder warfare was sword and shield. But my friend insists spear and shield is the most prevalent. Is either of us right?

No is the short answer. You're looking at an extremely wide range of History to draw on so unless you narrow it down a little both are about equal if you factor a sword as any bladed weapon.
Tactics and gear changed/cycled so many times you can go in loops forever here.
Manye pick a region and general period to work with?

[Maat Mons]

My understanding in the Greeks used spear and shield, while the Romans used sword and shield. Well, the Romans carried two spears, but they were for throwing.

Also, my understanding is that in later periods, shields fell out of favor, at which point I gather pikes (12-20-ft. spears), halberds (lovechild of an axe and a spear), and bill hooks (branch-pruning tool weaponized) were the most common battlefield weapons.

I could be wrong about some of that though.

[Ixtellor]

No is the short answer. You're looking at an extremely wide range of History to draw on so unless you narrow it down a little both are about equal if you factor a sword as any bladed weapon.
Tactics and gear changed/cycled so many times you can go in loops forever here.
Manye pick a region and general period to work with?

2000BC to 1200 AD -- in generally which was more common.
I assume spears were more prevently early on because swords are more complex to make, but if you just average it out --- not in terms of personal use, but in terms of armies which would be more prevenlant --- Asian, Middle East, Europe, all combined for a general winner.

[stoutstien]

2000BC to 1200 AD -- in generally which was more common.
I assume spears were more prevently early on because swords are more complex to make, but if you just average it out --- not in terms of personal use, but in terms of armies which would be more prevenlant --- Asian, Middle East, Europe, all combined for a general winner.

That would be a lifetime research project lol. Even 1000-1200 has an insane range thanks to some pissed off guys arguing over who's pizza delivery guy is better.

[Ixtellor]

That would be a lifetime research project lol. Even 1000-1200 has an insane range thanks to some pissed off guys arguing over who's pizza delivery guy is better.

I get that, but..

As an expert in the field if you had to make an educated guess, which would you guess?

Personally the idea of most armies using shield and spear seems propostrous based on my knowledge of historical battles --- just spears, sure I'm sure there were tons of units using spears but the idea that the majority of soldiers were wielding a spear 1 handed with a shield --- I can't even think of historical armies doing this (not counting Romans who threw a short spear then switched to sword/shield)

[Gnoman]

A spear gives you much more reach, which is important in battle, and often is better at penetrating armor with a strong thrust. The Romans were one of the relatively few peoples to focus heavily on the sword instead, and even then they had spearmen ready to come forward if things turned sour. That doesn't mean swords were not common - they have the superb quality of being fairly easily carried at the belt, making them excellent sidearms.

Spear and shield are attested as a common infantry setup not just for centuries but millennia - phalangial formations can be conclusively dated to the mid 600s BC, and there's mention of Scots pikemen carrying shields as late as the 1500s AD. Use of the spear and shield together diminished as pikes and pole weapons (which gave still greater reach, at the cost of being unwieldy with one hand) grew more and more prominent, as well as personal armor getting more and more capable of resisting most weapons. With a few exceptions, sword and shield appears to have been a specialist formation, not something most infantry would have carried.

[Vinyadan]

I get that, but..

As an expert in the field if you had to make an educated guess, which would you guess?

Personally the idea of most armies using shield and spear seems propostrous based on my knowledge of historical battles --- just spears, sure I'm sure there were tons of units using spears but the idea that the majority of soldiers were wielding a spear 1 handed with a shield --- I can't even think of historical armies doing this (not counting Romans who threw a short spear then switched to sword/shield)

This is something that came up some time ago: for both the Greeks and the Romans, the spear was the symbolic weapon of war. The Greeks called the land conquered during war "conquered by the spear" , and, talking about themselves as opposed to the Persians, they identified themselves with the spear, and the Persians with the bow. The Romans, in spite of the wide use they made of the sword, used a wooden spear as a symbol of military valor, and a spear was a symbol of military authority.

The age you refer to comprises eras of Greece both before and after Homer, which are culturally and politically pretty different. However, we do notice that Homer's heroes use a spear and a shield. The spear is the main weapon and, while it is occasionally used in melee, its most famous uses are in throwing; the sword is used after the hero has thrown his spear.
After Homer, the most famous Greek soldier is the hoplite, who fights in formation wearing a large shield and wielding a spear that is mostly employed in melee, still carrying a sword. We have a description in particular where the Spartans who are forced to switch to swords at the Thermopylae, because the battle has been long and their spears are mostly broken. For what I have read, much about the hoplites depended on how they held their shield, and we aren't fully clear on how that worked: part of its weight rested on the shoulder and the handle itself was quite complex. The shield partially covered the man at your side, so there were good reasons to stick together.
When the Macedons take over much of the known world, the soldiers in their phalanx hold very long pikes with both hands, but they still use a shield with the help of a sling.
https://www.realmofhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Amazing_Facts_Macedonian_phalanx.jpg


Now, about the Romans: the name of some of their early troops (hastati) suggests that they also made extensive use of the spear (hasta), fundamentally starting out as hoplites with an unusual emphasis on manouver. In the Imperial period, I've had somewhat contradictory impressions. On one hand, the typical description of the legionary is the one mentioned above: shield and sword and a big, strange javelin for throwing. On the other hand, some of the depictions on the monumental columns of Rome seem to show soldiers fighting with spears... Except there are no spears, possibly because they were made of metal and were scavenged in later years. Maybe they were painted over, and they faded with time? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/069_Conrad_Cichorius%2C_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianss%C 3%A4ule%2C_Tafel_LXIX.jpg/1579px-069_Conrad_Cichorius%2C_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianss%C 3%A4ule%2C_Tafel_LXIX.jpg

[Satinavian]

Recently a friend made an off the cuff remark and I want to know whose right.

Based on the greeks, Romans and lots of other examples I assumed the most common armament in pre gunpowder warfare was sword and shield. But my friend insists spear and shield is the most prevalent. Is either of us right?For many cultures we might know what weapons were used in principle but have no way whatsoever to get proper numbers. So we can't really answer that at all. That is even made worse by weapons of the upper classes being depicted more often or preserved better, which always skews the impression. Most cultures by far had some kind of mix.

That said, you should have a third contender with axes. There are some cultures using axe and shield nearly exclusively as melee weapons (e.g. Egyp middle kingdom and possibly even late depending on how you treat hybrids like the increasingly common khopesh) and many others where they were at least somewhat common.

Really, with a starting point of 2000BC and such a large region you have a lot of cultures and centuries that didn't even enter bronze age proper. And i am not aware of any copper age culture using swords. And even in bronze age societies swords remained often too expensive for mass deployment.



But if i really had to put my money somewhere, it would be "spears". Usually with shields which were used basically everywhere until late medieval/early modern armor.

[Khedrac]

I am not a historian, but I expect it will also depend on how you define "armament" and "spear".

A spear is a hunting tool (weapon) thus huge numbers of low-technology people will have them (or access to them) and be reasonably familiar in their user. This makes them good choice for equipping forces comprised of whoever is available without extra training. It can also make them a good starting point for trained soldiers such as hoplites etc.

An axe is a farming and logging tool (weapon), and probably easier to make with Stone Age technology. Whilst possibly harder to use as a weapon and shorter ranged than a spear it's still a good choice when drawing from people used to using them.

A sword is rarely a tool - cultures in jungle areas usually develop a machete-type tool that is basically a sword with a non-combat purpose, but otherwise sword use usually needs to be trained for the troops to be effective.

Now specifying "and shield" does move you out from hastily organised bands using their available tools (spears and axes) to more formal troop deployments, but then what counts as a spear?
As said, the Roman legions started with the pilum (a throwing spear) and gladius (short-sword) to go with their shields - so which category do they count as? Later on their spears got smaller and lighter (and less able to be used as a melee weapon) and became the plumbata dart for ranged use. Now I called the pilum a "throwing spear", but I believe they were also used in melee, but ask an actual historian on that one...
Then when the lance comes in for mounted troops - does lance and shield count as spear and shield or not? (And I believe most lancers carried a sword as backup.)

A fascinating question. My initial thought would be with you - sword + shield, but when I think about it I strongly suspect spear + shield was more common - but that is just my guess.

[snowblizz]

Personally the idea of most armies using shield and spear seems propostrous based on my knowledge of historical battles ---
I'm sorry, what???

You can't have looked at many historical battles to come to that conclusion.

The simple truth is, range beats everything. This was known from the first day an ape picked up a rock and threw it at an ape holding a stick.

Range doesn't have to be ranged though. This is why ancient peoples hunted with spears, not swords. You want the angry wild board a spear's reach away from you. The same principle holds for man-on-man combats. In the case of a sword vs spear the spear wins most times all other things being equal.

With organised armies the formation becomes paramount. Keeping a tight formation is much easier when people are stabbing with spears behind their shields rather than trying to lunge forwards with a sword. Real-world fights are not Hollywood-scrums.

The Romans didn't beat everyone (which naturally they also didn't) because they had swords. They beat people because there were more of them, they had better logistics, they were organised, they adapted continually to circumstances around them. As others have said the Romans started out with spears, and in many cases kept them, even if transformed into the pilum. Without this spear the Roman legions would have been much less successful.

There are very few ancient militaries that weren't spear users in one way or another. All the famous ones were. Notwithstanding that ancient military forces were not monoliths. Even the Romans used plenty of auxiliaries that brought skills they didn't have as their core strengths, like cavalry and archers/slingers.

It's rather ironic that swords actually become more militarily relevant after gunpowder changes warfare (it remains the secondary weapon, and become the sometimes primary cavalry weapon). Arguably. As soldiers broadly speaking de-armour, put away most other melee weapons as you don't need the can openers anymore. Though still, what is the musket+bayonet if not a attempt to give you a spear of sorts.

[Maat Mons]

We're drawing ever closer to the 30th incarnation of this thread. Perhaps we should commemorate it to Vin Diesel, a longtime Dungeons & Dragons fan?

[Vinyadan]

Range doesn't have to be ranged though. This is why ancient peoples hunted with spears, not swords. You want the angry wild board a spear's reach away from you.

I remember an old hunting manual that explicitly said that bears should only be hunted with spears among melee weapons, because no man can challenge a bear. Of course, I then ended up finding a big miniature or fresco with a guy in the background half-swording a bear...

I really liked that image. It's a pity I can't find it any more, I had posted it in one of these threads. Of course, it probably represented some exceptional feat, not a thing people normally did. A bit like the Duke of Valentinois beheading boars, which I believe was mentioned in some occasions in these threads.


Though still, what is the musket+bayonet if not a attempt to give you a spear of sorts.

Interestingly, there was an arms race about getting the longest possible range with bayonets too (sometimes to make up for the shorter barrell of a carbine), which gave us sword-bayonets.

[gbaji]

With organised armies the formation becomes paramount. Keeping a tight formation is much easier when people are stabbing with spears behind their shields rather than trying to lunge forwards with a sword. Real-world fights are not Hollywood-scrums.

Yeah. One of my many peeves about how films depict battles by having them engage and then immediately break out into a big crowd of individuals hacking at eachother. Very dramtic and "showy", but historically, the folks who fought like that got slaughtered by the folks who maintained proper formation discipline. And not just a little bit slaughtered either.

And yes. Using spears in formation is much easier than swords (or any edged weapon really). And they tend to be easier to make in mass quantities. And less expensive. And more people would be familiar with their use. So a lot of reason why spears are pretty ubiquitous weapons through most of the history of warfare. Whether with shields or without really depended on specific formation type being used, and often said more about who they fought with regularly than anything else. If your enemies used a lot of ranged weapons, shields were very useful. But shields could be a hindrance to using longer spears (there's a whole "how many hands do I need here" thing going on). So it was a tradeoff thing.


The Romans didn't beat everyone (which naturally they also didn't) because they had swords. They beat people because there were more of them, they had better logistics, they were organised, they adapted continually to circumstances around them. As others have said the Romans started out with spears, and in many cases kept them, even if transformed into the pilum. Without this spear the Roman legions would have been much less successful.

Yup. The Romans were the masters of practicality. We tend to show images of the standared Roman legions based on later periods (the large square curved sheild, short sword, and javelin/pilum). But early on they were much more about structured order of battle with a variety of different types of forces and weapon combinations. Even in later periods, they had a bit of variation, based on the specific need. But yeah, they did also do the "standardization" bit quite well to. And the stereotypical legion kit derived more or less from "Big shield protects from lots of stuff and allows us to keep our formation intact" and "small sword is about the biggest thing we can actually wield while using this big shield". The rest was more or less "wear them out over time, cause we're fighting to win the battle and not just the fight with the person right in front of us". This strategy was amazingly successful.

And, as you pointed out, in addition to their more standard set of "regular units", the Romans also regularly deployed more "local military" forces based on where they were, which also tended to be configured based on the specifics of warfare needs in that area.

[stoutstien]

Armor dictated which was used. Reach was useless if you couldn't actually cause harm so metallurgy methods changing caused a lot of back n forth. If you could readily punch through you want reach (spear and quarrel) but if you can't you need leverage and precision....or overwhelming blunt force.

That why in the shoulder era of technology you see lots of very long spears in tight formations and as protection got better they shorten. When breakthroughs occurred like mass production chainmail the change in tactics was very quick to compensate.

Sort of why daggers and rondels racked up casualties as fast as anything else but are largely overlooked(based on wound examination in Mass Graves). Same with something like bar maces that tend to just work because trauma and no skill needed.

**Arm chair opinion of a smith**

[Ixtellor]

Thanks to everyone that responded to the sword/shield v spear/shield question.

No need to follow up, but the reason I thought it was sword/shield is my limited understanding is that spears did get longer and more unwieldy and thus less likely to equip a shield. If the question had been sword/shield v spear I would have wagered spear.
I did a search for ancient art depicting battles and it is spear and shield that pops up most often.

[stoutstien]

Thanks to everyone that responded to the sword/shield v spear/shield question.

No need to follow up, but the reason I thought it was sword/shield is my limited understanding is that spears did get longer and more unwieldy and thus less likely to equip a shield. If the question had been sword/shield v spear I would have wagered spear.
I did a search for ancient art depicting battles and it is spear and shield that pops up most often.

Historical art is funny. Spears are easily to included and is better to depict scale of conflict better when you lack forced perspective.
Nothing changes much even with artistic depictions of modern conflicts on film and such.

[awa]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.

[Pauly]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.

Tests involving a pilum, on the heavier end of historical javelins

https://youtu.be/33AL7xs91pU

[Willie the Duck]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.

I suspect this might have been true for the bows typical of the time when javelins were at their peak. Or the author was simply thinking about the javelin's increased mass. Or the pila, as Pauly points to.

[awa]

I suspect this might have been true for the bows typical of the time when javelins were at their peak.

This was not that type of fantasy, this was a rule of cool fantasy with knights in full plate, cavalry charging barbarian hordes like a battering ram. It just made me question my assumptions by forcing me to acknowledge I had no actual information one way or the other.

[gbaji]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.

It really depends on the time frame and the armor being worn at the time (and the bows being used too). At least in terms of penetration. The main difference is light weight object moving faster and farther, versus heavier object moving slower and at closer range. So tactically, bows and javelins are used completely differently.

Bows tended to be long distance stand off weapons. You would, for example, have an entire group of dedicated archers in formation hanging back behind your foot troops for the purpose of hitting targets at a long distance. Javelins would commonly be caried by the foot troops, and hurled at the enemy formation while closing with them. The idea being that you could injure or disrupt their front line just a bit, right before you engage with them, and give your own force an advantage in the melee scrum.

Javelins have the disadvantage that they move relatively slowly, so are (in theory at least) much easier to block (individually, of course). But with higher mass, they're going to cause some impact even if blocked. The Romans specifically crafted the pilum to stick into the shield and then hang down. Obviously, doing that at a distance wasn't much use. But if you did that seconds before engaging, the enemy would find his shield has an ungainly thing sticking out of it and find it difficult to use in melee. Again, with the primary purpose being to put the enemy at a disadvantage once you engaged in melee with them.

Arrows are faster, and harder to block. And also tend to be fired in large volleys, so unless you have somewhat large shields, someone will get hit (probably a lot of someones if we're talking larger scale combat). Which puts us back to armor quality.

If we're talking about more small scale combats like we might be simulating in RPGs, it's still a bit tricky. The tendency from a game balance perspective would be to balance the fact that javelins are heavy and unweildy compared to arrows (you can maybe carry a handful, and probablly not something you'd carry around while tromping around the wilderness or in an underground dungeon environment), by having them do more damage when they hit. But honestly, that's not terribly accurate. They do a lot of damage if they hit. But so do arrows when direct fired at similar distances. So I might be tempted to put them in the same damage category, but with bows having higher rates of fire (and greater range), but with the disadvantage that to fire an arrow, you have to equip a bow, which takes some time and both hands. A javelin can be used quickly using one free hand, and is more flexible to use in fast moving battle situations.

With a bow, you're pretty much dedicated to ranged combat, and have to shift from one mode to the other. Perfectly fine on a large flat battlefield, but probably quite dangerous in a quickly shifting small scale combat (like tend to happen in RPGs). There's a huge advantage to being able to cut down the person you are fighting, then grab a javelin and toss it at someone else, then grip your sword again and move to the next melee target, all while keeping your shield equipped and able to defend yourself. You just can't do that with a bow.

Now, how well the game system you are using simulates this may afftect how well this can actually be used as a balancing point for the weapons. And very few game simulate things like "missiles stuck in your shield making it more difficult to use". You can effectively use a shield with quite a few arrows stuck in it. One javeling stuck in a shield will make it *very* difficult to use. But again, very very few games simulate this, so one of the main differences between the two is completely lost here.

[tyckspoon]

This was not that type of fantasy, this was a rule of cool fantasy with knights in full plate, cavalry charging barbarian hordes like a battering ram. It just made me question my assumptions by forcing me to acknowledge I had no actual information one way or the other.

That kind of fantasy often has only the loosest relationship to real-world history and usage of arms and armor anyways >.>

But as a kind of incredibly, incredibly oversimplified level.. they're probably about the same as far as 'penetrating armor' goes. Neither a javelin nor an arrow stands much chance of actually 'punching through' proper plate armor, not at the intended usage ranges of those weapons (with human-available mechanics. If you have a giant-sized bow that can apply arrow velocities to javelin-sized objects things are much different, or you have some fantasy creature whose physiology allows them to throw a javelin much faster than human arms can or whatever.) Both can pretty effectively damage the chain/gambeson/shield setup that is one of the common 'heavy armor' arrangements prior to plate. What javelins have going for them is, for lack of a better term, stopping power - as a far more physically massive object throwing a javelin at your opponents can interfere with them in ways arrows cannot. Pitch a bunch of javelins at the enemy troops you wish to engage (or at the ones you want to not engage you if you're looking at the wrong end of a charge that you don't think you'll win) and even if you don't directly harm all that many of them they must now navigate a bunch of fairly large sticks in and around their equipment and bodies. Hard to keep your shieldwall nice and tight together when you've got an extra kilo of wood hanging on your shield, the soldier to your left is trying to step over a three-foot stick poking up between their legs, and the one on your right is waiting for the world to stop ringing after having a log bounce off his helmet.

[awa]

Interesting idea I have a feat to allow a thrown weapon on a charge to interfere with a foe on a shield hit or near miss, it might be worth making that a general javelin trait and make it better with the feat.

[stoutstien]

Assuming the bows have a relatively high draw weight i think they win out by nature of volume and rate of release. Disadvantage is probably the skill needed to do so.
Comparing it projectile versus projectile is going to be difficult unless you're going to do it in distance increments vs different targets.

[halfeye]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.
The energy of a projectile is 1/2 mv^2. The square factor means that rises in speed do more to increase damage than increases in weight if the speed stays the same.

[stoutstien]

The energy of a projectile is 1/2 mv^2. The square factor means that rises in speed do more to increase damage than increases in weight if the speed stays the same.

Depends on the target and projectile material/medium. There's a reason why flying into a bug at 200 mph doesn't shatter your windshield but a tiny piece of ceramic moving a fraction that speed will go right through it. A more apt example would be firing arrows at period plate versus just dropping a rock on their head.
Arrows from longbows are very efficient at getting through all but plates and good mail. even armor piercing arrows struggled to get through decently crafted chainmail outside of volley and luck because the arrows just don't have enough mass behind them or point blank range.
Throughout history most javelins were actually just giant hand-propelled arrows/dart with fletching and all. You're trading speed and distance for mass and impact potential. makes for an interesting comparison because unlike a lot of weapons their general designs were similar and was just a question of scale and energy production. I think arrows are superior in this comparison because the javelins are too light not because they're too heavy.

Iklwa and such are the exceptions because they were designed to be thrown or not in roughly equal measures and are frequently categorized as short Spears rather than javelins. If you start including these into the comparison it gets murky because they have a lot of weight behind them and in short distances can get energy to transfer through some tough material even if it fails to punch through.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The energy of a projectile is 1/2 mv^2. The square factor means that rises in speed do more to increase damage than increases in weight if the speed stays the same.

Yeah, it's more complex than that as Stoutsien says. It's something that gun folks have been debating for a long time.

There's effects from
* momentum
* kinetic energy
* material properties (hardness, elasticity, density, etc)
* penetrator shape
* and probably several others I haven't remembered

And they're all competing and possibly at cross-purposes. Or maybe sometimes in the same direction.

Categorizing it by one effect or the other is almost guaranteed to be wrong.

[GeoffWatson]

How good are javelins relative to bows in terms of penetration/damage?

I was reading a fantasy novel and it suggested that Javelins were excellent at penetrating armor while arrows largely weren't.

Now my gut instinct was to disagree with that, but when it came time to justify that instinct I got to thinking yeah it feels wrong, but does it feel wrong because I grew up on D&d and internalized that?

It feels like the Bow should have the edge because of its mechanical advantage on the other hand a Javelin is a lot heavier than an arrow so now I'm simply uncertain. So I decided just to ask and see what other people think.

Bows improved a LOT over time. Early bows were much weaker than the British propaganda longbows you might be thinking of.

[stoutstien]

Yeah, it's more complex than that as Stoutsien says. It's something that gun folks have been debating for a long time.

There's effects from
* momentum
* kinetic energy
* material properties (hardness, elasticity, density, etc)
* penetrator shape
* and probably several others I haven't remembered

And they're all competing and possibly at cross-purposes. Or maybe sometimes in the same direction.

Categorizing it by one effect or the other is almost guaranteed to be wrong.

Heck we are still debating sling stone/shot parameters and design.

[awa]

Bows improved a LOT over time. Early bows were much weaker than the British propaganda longbows you might be thinking of.
The javelins in question were punching right through shields to kill the plate armored men holding them, so I'm pretty confident the Javelins were being exaggerated. The only question was how much and that was what made me question the relative penetration between bow and javelin. Of course now I finally have time to watch that linked video so I'm gonna do that.

[halfeye]

Yeah, it's more complex than that as Stoutsien says. It's something that gun folks have been debating for a long time.

There's effects from
* momentum

Absolutely, the conservation of momentum is also critically important, it's why most of the energy goes with the projectile. I've seen (here?) people saying that the impact of a bullet is equivelent to the kick of the gun, and it's nothing like the same, the energy mostly goes with the projectile because of the conservation of momentum, because that causes the energy to go in inverse proportion to the masses of the particles and the gun plus shooter is much heavier than the bullet.


* kinetic energy

Sure, as I noted.


* material properties (hardness, elasticity, density, etc)

Agreed, something hard, heavy and flexible will do a lot more damage than something soft, light and brittle (something soft, heavy and flexible might do a lot of damage, but would be unlikely to get through armour).


* penetrator shape

Sure, a lot of mass over a small area is what makes stiletto heels so dangerous.


* and probably several others I haven't remembered

And they're all competing and possibly at cross-purposes. Or maybe sometimes in the same direction.

Categorizing it by one effect or the other is almost guaranteed to be wrong.

Yeah, I was simplifying, but it's better to have a correct simplification than garbage.


Depends on the target and projectile material/medium. There's a reason why flying into a bug at 200 mph doesn't shatter your windshield but a tiny piece of ceramic moving a fraction that speed will go right through it.

Shatter it maybe, chip it nastily more likely, go all the way through? nope.


Arrows from longbows are very efficient at getting through all but plates and good mail. even armor piercing arrows struggled to get through decently crafted chainmail outside of volley and luck because the arrows just don't have enough mass behind them or point blank range.
Throughout history most javelins were actually just giant hand-propelled arrows/dart with fletching and all. You're trading speed and distance for mass and impact potential. makes for an interesting comparison because unlike a lot of weapons their general designs were similar and was just a question of scale and energy production. I think arrows are superior in this comparison because the javelins are too light not because they're too heavy.

When the motive force is one manpower, heavier means slower, which would imply that all manpowered projectiles are equal, but that's not true, mostly because of the square factor.


Iklwa and such are the exceptions because they were designed to be thrown or not in roughly equal measures and are frequently categorized as short Spears rather than javelins. If you start including these into the comparison it gets murky because they have a lot of weight behind them and in short distances can get energy to transfer through some tough material even if it fails to punch through.
I understand some projectiles, and a little theory, but I don't know those.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yeah, I was simplifying, but it's better to have a correct simplification than garbage.


In this field, "correct simplification" is...well...not really an option. Although some of the considerations attendant on bullets (such as over-penetration) are less salient for muscle-powered technologies.

-----------------------

Question:

Assume you have a civilization of horse nomads (prototypical scythian-style archers "born to the horse") backed up by groups of zulu-esque foot (leather shields, at most leather/cloth armor, spears). The horse nomads are most familiar with raiding tactics rather than pitched battles; the foot folks are zealots but without substantial heavy combat (but a generally martial culture). So they've practiced lots...but don't have tons of experience in pitched battles. Critically, they have no access to or understanding/patience for siege weapons.

What kind of force/tactics would they be weakest against? Just hole up in fortified locations and wait them out? How would disciplined heavy infantry + medieval artillery (light catapults, ballista, etc) fare against them? Is it just a numbers game? Or do they have particular weaknesses/strengths.

Terrain is mostly open rolling grassy hills, with the nomads on the assault against villages. The target villages have a central palisade/stockade they can retreat to, a mix of high wood and stone walls. They're not expecting any significant trouble, although there have been light raids in the past (mostly livestock raids).

[Spiryt]

Sports javelins thrown by decent level men can reach about 25 m/s.

Given that their weight is about 800g, as ordered by rules of competition, the initial kinetic energy is about 250J.

It's generally way above anything achievable with hand held bow or crossbow, at least traditional ones. Some heavy compound ones could probably manage, but noone really makes them AFAIK. Generally one would probably need 180 pound+ well made reflexive hornbow to dream about reaching 200 J.

Obviously, it's a bit extreme example, since javelin throwers are running up uninterrupted for 20-some meters, and put everything into that throw, but still.

Humans are good at throwing stuff, and the kinetic link, motion of entire body is very powerful here, you can have all muscle groups involved.

Highest level thrower can reach 29 or 30 m/s and highest recorded velocity was apparently 32.3 m/s which would yield way over 410 J of KE.

Reaching such a level is obviously way bigger feat than being able to shoot even 200 pound bow though, absolute human peak so far.

So yeah, with good thrower, and heavy javelin/spear energies will be above those of most bows or crossbows.

There are in fact at least two 15th century accounts of knights/men at arms starting formal challenge/duel by throwing spears at each other and they are said to stick in plate armor, though apparently without injuring the wearer to severely. I can posts them when I dig them up.

Piercing mail is also mentioned in late 14th century.

https://books.google.pl/books/content?id=5ws1AAAAMAAJ&hl=pl&pg=PA51&img=1&pgis=1&dq=mail&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U19kmnEaEIMnoKN4nMeEQ3FEWnABg&edge=0

So yeah, due to high energies, heavy spear or javelin, particularly heavier than those thrown in sports competition, definitely have armor piercing potential.

Especially that due to size they're going to be more robust than arrows and able to punch trough stuff, trough actual "results" obviously depend on many factors.

[Vinyadan]

I don't remember much about arrows in Homer, but thrown spears are generally described as immensely dangerous. Of course, those things would have been heavier than a javelin, and they were meant to fight armoured warriors anyway. I remember some spears getting more or less stuck, or hitting excessively thick protection and perforating much of it without killing the target; in one case, a belt stops the spear; in another one, a shield made of many layers of hide is almost pierced through, but the last layer stops the spear.

Some thrown weapon vs armour:

Menelaus vs Paris: Paris hits the shield, which deflects the spear; Meleaus hits the shield, pierces it, goes through the armour, also pierces the shirt, but Paris dodges. (Menelaus then shatters his own sword on Paris's helmet, grabs him in spite of being unarmed, and starts dragging him off, and Venus has to spirit Paris away).

Pandarus manages to shoot an arrow that goes through the metal cuirass and wounds Diomedes's shoulder. He then throws a spear, which goes through the shield, and hits the breastplate without wounding Diomedes; Pandarus at first however thinks he's deadly wounded. Diomedes then throws the spear though his head, with devastating results. Then he breaks Aeneas's hip joint by throwing a large rock at him.

Agamemnon throws a spear though Deicoon's shield and belt, and kills him by hitting the lower belly.

Ajax kill Amphius by throwing a spear agains his belt (I should check whether the word for belt also means a body part). Then the shield of Ajax stops many spears.

Ajax throws a spear at Acamas, penetrating his helmet, forehead, and brain.

Ajax throws a spear at Hector, piercing his shield and armour. Hector's spear is stopped by the seventh layer of Ajax's shield. Then Ajax pierces Hector's shield again, then throws a massive rock at Hector, breaking his shield inward. Hector instead cannot pierce Ajax's shield, even at the second attempt.

[Maat Mons]

Would kettle helms have generally been worn with a mail coif or without?

[stoutstien]

Would kettle helms have generally been worn with a mail coif or without?

Weather and position would dictate. The layer worn under the mail would be heavy, hot, and depending on material, could soak up water. If you were planning to be moving a lot under conditions that would risk overheating you'd probably use one or the other where if you were stationary it would be less of a concern.

[Spiryt]

Would kettle helms have generally been worn with a mail coif or without?


Such combination seems very common in art, even on effigies, even though it probably wasn't most prestigious and representative helmet to put on effigy. So yeah, I imagine it was very common for anyone who could afford one.

Later on, in Europe at least it got displaced by aventails, camails and then various bevors and gorgets, both plate and mail ones.

[Gnoman]

In this field, "correct simplification" is...well...not really an option. Although some of the considerations attendant on bullets (such as over-penetration) are less salient for muscle-powered technologies.

-----------------------

Question:

Assume you have a civilization of horse nomads (prototypical scythian-style archers "born to the horse") backed up by groups of zulu-esque foot (leather shields, at most leather/cloth armor, spears). The horse nomads are most familiar with raiding tactics rather than pitched battles; the foot folks are zealots but without substantial heavy combat (but a generally martial culture). So they've practiced lots...but don't have tons of experience in pitched battles. Critically, they have no access to or understanding/patience for siege weapons.

What kind of force/tactics would they be weakest against? Just hole up in fortified locations and wait them out? How would disciplined heavy infantry + medieval artillery (light catapults, ballista, etc) fare against them? Is it just a numbers game? Or do they have particular weaknesses/strengths.

Terrain is mostly open rolling grassy hills, with the nomads on the assault against villages. The target villages have a central palisade/stockade they can retreat to, a mix of high wood and stone walls. They're not expecting any significant trouble, although there have been light raids in the past (mostly livestock raids).

Historically, such raiders have been very difficult to deal with. They've got minimal siege capability, but holing up in fortifications only delays the inevitable - they ravage the land long enough, that's effectively a siege. Meeting them in open battle is hard because of their mobility - they can harass your slower units very effectively as long as you can't bring your full force to deal with them. Light infantry like that can even outmove heavier cavalry if they're able to fight to their strengths.

Their great weakness is that if you can bring direct force, they can't take much damage - they rely on mobility rather than armor. The tactics they would be weakest against is traps - let them get pinned down looting or engaging weaker forces and hit them in the rear, trap them between multiple forces so they can't disengage without fighting at least one (which will likely slow them enough to let the other forces catch them as well), pursue them in a way that they get pinned against a terrain feature, etc. The big problem with this is that it is extremely difficult to do - their mobility tends to provide superb recon. But if you can force them to engage with heavy foot and strong cavalry, it will likely be a slaughter. Which leads into the other great weakness of the kind of force you describe - they usually don't grow that big without settling down, because the acreage to sustain the semi-nomadic lifestyles that most such raiders come from is immense. One or two good slaughters, and they're wrecked.

[wilphe]

Also that they probably don't have much in the way of logistic support - they have to keep moving

Fixed barriers (Great Wall of China, Roman Limes) won't stop an army or determined raiders getting in but they do make it much harder to get loot out

If you also make sure that any supplies are taken inside your local forts and refuges any attack is not going to penetrate far

[gbaji]

Which leads into the other great weakness of the kind of force you describe - they usually don't grow that big without settling down, because the acreage to sustain the semi-nomadic lifestyles that most such raiders come from is immense. One or two good slaughters, and they're wrecked.

This really bears focus. I think that we, coming from our modern peception of armies and militaries, tend to just sort of handwave away the logistics involved with warfare in older historical time periods. It takes a *lot* of resources to weild a large force. Well developed civilizations could maintain decent sized forces near/around their cities/borders, and have some to send off to more distant locations. But the supply lines become problematic.

It's easy to just say "they're nomads, so they live off the land, or whatever", but.... That only works up to a certain size/scale. To have a really large number of such fighters walking around in enemy territory for any length of time, "living off the land" lasts until they've raided the food and supplies from the villages and towns they have hit, and then they have to actually go back to herding animals, and gathering food, and whatnot, and that requires that they spread back out into a large area.

There were several examples of this happening during the Roman Republic era, where large armies of enemies were more or less rampaging around in various provinces (and in Italy itself in some cases), and basically continued to do so until they just ran out of steam, dispersed on their own, and the remnants were wiped out. At the end of the day, they either have to actually take large cities, settle there and effectively "become city dwellers" just like the folks they were attacking, or they would eventually just not be able to sustain themselves.

The very thing that makes them hard to nail down and engage in a single decisive battle also effectively ensures their eventual loss. Now, if you are really clever you employ the Ghengis Khan method of pushing a wall of these sort of fighters ever outward while taking and holding the areas within the border. Kind of an early combined strategic forces deployment, if you will. But even that really only lasted as long as the "border" was continuing to push outward. Once it stopped, the whole thing collapsed (ok, there was the whole "he died and his empire fractured bit too"). You can also employ a form of enclosed nomadism, where you have one culture that has both settled and nomadic people. Which can work both offensively and defensively (and was also somewhat what Khan was doing).

It's unclear how sustainable that is either though. But yeah, from an "immediate threat" point of view? The "large force of fast raiders" is very very effective. You can basically bottle up the enemy in their strong points and raid their smaller towns and villages to your hearts content. The negative is that you can't really hold territory using this method. Not unless you combine it with something else.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In this particular case, the force isn't actually supposed to hold territory. In fact, they're supposed to die while taking as many of the enemy with them as possible. They don't know that fact, but are somewhat brainwashed into believing that they can cause the enemy to just flee "their" territory.

Their current orders are to wipe out as many towns as they can, slaughtering everyone they can, but avoiding sieges. And then when the enemy army shows up, to try to engage them in open battle (even if hit and run). And die gloriously.

The only question in my mind is how effective they're going to be once they start raiding.

[Mechalich]

This really bears focus. I think that we, coming from our modern peception of armies and militaries, tend to just sort of handwave away the logistics involved with warfare in older historical time periods. It takes a *lot* of resources to weild a large force. Well developed civilizations could maintain decent sized forces near/around their cities/borders, and have some to send off to more distant locations. But the supply lines become problematic.

It's easy to just say "they're nomads, so they live off the land, or whatever", but.... That only works up to a certain size/scale. To have a really large number of such fighters walking around in enemy territory for any length of time, "living off the land" lasts until they've raided the food and supplies from the villages and towns they have hit, and then they have to actually go back to herding animals, and gathering food, and whatnot, and that requires that they spread back out into a large area.

Steppe nomads, specifically, are capable of essentially bringing their supply network - read, their livestock - with them on campaign so long as the campaign region supports grassland. The Mongol conquests (not counting the Southeast Asian campaigns of Kublai Khan using what were functionally Chinese armies) extended more or less right up to the boundaries of the territory that could conceivably support their animals and no further.

The societies most vulnerable to this are sedentary populations living in areas surrounded by grassland, which most commonly refers to city states along large river systems that rely on irrigation to support their crops, a circumstance that describes roughly everything between the Hungary and the eastern edge of Gansu Province in China. City states in such regions are also usually sufficiently small, due to water-based limits on the amount of cultivated territory, that steppe nomads can gather in sufficient numbers to temporarily overwhelm the defenders. Steppe conquerors from across the vast expanse of history from the Xiongnu to Timur tended to conquer one city at a time, and those cities struggled to support each other because of the limitations of moving large non-steppe nomad armies across the terrain.

The key to denial of steppe nomad raiders is to create an inhospitable buffer zone on the edge of one's own state, which can then be devastated (such as by regularly burning the grassland to eliminate fodder) to prevent them from crossing into the heartland of the sedentary society. The trick to doing this is securing supply routes to strongpoints well-beyond the 'border' to facilitate this. For example, the reason Ganszu Province has the funky shape it does it that is follows the Hexi Corridor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexi_Corridor) which is the best route to get from the steppe into China proper and Qin general Meng Tian pushed a road down it and fortified the whole position to keep the Xiongnu out (which worked, for the brief time that the Qin Dynasty survived). The problem is that this sort of aggressive policy tends to be very expensive and many states have traditionally preferred to simply buy off steppe nomads instead.


In this particular case, the force isn't actually supposed to hold territory. In fact, they're supposed to die while taking as many of the enemy with them as possible. They don't know that fact, but are somewhat brainwashed into believing that they can cause the enemy to just flee "their" territory.

Their current orders are to wipe out as many towns as they can, slaughtering everyone they can, but avoiding sieges. And then when the enemy army shows up, to try to engage them in open battle (even if hit and run). And die gloriously.

The only question in my mind is how effective they're going to be once they start raiding.

As mentioned, it depends on the nature of the societies they are raiding. Irrigation dependent states are vulnerable to the destruction of their irrigation systems, something the Mongols notably did a lot of, which can result in the destruction of city states over time. It also depends upon how possible it is to either to overwhelm their targets through assault or use of fire.

[Pauly]

Question:

Assume you have a civilization of horse nomads (prototypical scythian-style archers "born to the horse") backed up by groups of zulu-esque foot (leather shields, at most leather/cloth armor, spears). The horse nomads are most familiar with raiding tactics rather than pitched battles; the foot folks are zealots but without substantial heavy combat (but a generally martial culture). So they've practiced lots...but don't have tons of experience in pitched battles. Critically, they have no access to or understanding/patience for siege weapons.

What kind of force/tactics would they be weakest against? Just hole up in fortified locations and wait them out? How would disciplined heavy infantry + medieval artillery (light catapults, ballista, etc) fare against them? Is it just a numbers game? Or do they have particular weaknesses/strengths.

Terrain is mostly open rolling grassy hills, with the nomads on the assault against villages. The target villages have a central palisade/stockade they can retreat to, a mix of high wood and stone walls. They're not expecting any significant trouble, although there have been light raids in the past (mostly livestock raids).

Historically horse archers were best in open areas. They avoided sieges wherever possible. They were able to surround and swarm heavier slower foes whenever they had suitable terrain.
Light infantry generally did well in mountainous terrain, as well as boggy or rocky terrain. They relied on the terrain to disrupt formations of heavy troops and the singled out stragglers.

Both used hit and run tactics where possible.

Most often historical opponents tried to lute light infantry into open fields where superior arms and armor could steamroll them
In the case of horse raiders opponents would try to find choke points such as mountains, rivers, forests that restricted movement to try to force engagements where the horse raiders couldn’t use their mobility.
The only success I am aware of where a heavy force defeated a light cavalry army in open rolling terrain is Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Scythians. If things look bad for the light horse they can always disengage and trade space for time.

Given the nature of the 2 main components of the army the opponents will be most worried about the horse archers. Most forces include their own light infantry so they are relatively easier to counter.

[gbaji]

Steppe nomads, specifically, are capable of essentially bringing their supply network - read, their livestock - with them on campaign so long as the campaign region supports grassland. The Mongol conquests (not counting the Southeast Asian campaigns of Kublai Khan using what were functionally Chinese armies) extended more or less right up to the boundaries of the territory that could conceivably support their animals and no further.

The societies most vulnerable to this are sedentary populations living in areas surrounded by grassland, which most commonly refers to city states along large river systems that rely on irrigation to support their crops, a circumstance that describes roughly everything between the Hungary and the eastern edge of Gansu Province in China. City states in such regions are also usually sufficiently small, due to water-based limits on the amount of cultivated territory, that steppe nomads can gather in sufficient numbers to temporarily overwhelm the defenders. Steppe conquerors from across the vast expanse of history from the Xiongnu to Timur tended to conquer one city at a time, and those cities struggled to support each other because of the limitations of moving large non-steppe nomad armies across the terrain.

The key to denial of steppe nomad raiders is to create an inhospitable buffer zone on the edge of one's own state, which can then be devastated (such as by regularly burning the grassland to eliminate fodder) to prevent them from crossing into the heartland of the sedentary society. The trick to doing this is securing supply routes to strongpoints well-beyond the 'border' to facilitate this. For example, the reason Ganszu Province has the funky shape it does it that is follows the Hexi Corridor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexi_Corridor) which is the best route to get from the steppe into China proper and Qin general Meng Tian pushed a road down it and fortified the whole position to keep the Xiongnu out (which worked, for the brief time that the Qin Dynasty survived). The problem is that this sort of aggressive policy tends to be very expensive and many states have traditionally preferred to simply buy off steppe nomads instead.

Yeah. Better description than I was making. There are limitations in that they can't really linger in any one area for too long in too large a number, but that was generally more than sufficient to overwhelm the city states in the area, and then subject them to regular tribute demands. Didn't hurt at all that the kingdoms along the rim of the grasslands were notoriously in constant conflict (or at least not terribly friendly) with each other. There's a number of really great historical sources that describe the somewhat perfect conditions for that kind of warfare going on then. Also some interesting bits on how various dynasties dealt with this, and the somewhat odd aliances that formed and then shifted over time because of it. And there's that whole wall thing they built at some point (and kept extending, like over and over...).

Less effective overall strategy to use in someplace like Western Europe though. But can be used pretty much anywhere for short periods of time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Follow up question(s):

1. I'd assume that the "prime time" for such nomad invasions would be mid summer when there's plenty of grass?
2. How much fodder can you carry, assuming the light infantry are providing logistics support (wagons bearing hay and grain)?
3. Does doing so basically neuter your advantages?

The invasion in question is kicking off right at the end of the winter/very early spring for various reasons other than sheer military effectiveness (basically "divine" command). The ground is still partially frozen but spring grass is beginning to come up. The particular area is fairly dry, so mud isn't as big an issue.

[Spiryt]

Most often historical opponents tried to lute light infantry into open fields where superior arms and armor could steamroll them
In the case of horse raiders opponents would try to find choke points such as mountains, rivers, forests that restricted movement to try to force engagements where the horse raiders couldn’t use their mobility.
The only success I am aware of where a heavy force defeated a light cavalry army in open rolling terrain is Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Scythians. If things look bad for the light horse they can always disengage and trade space for time.
.

It depends on what we mean by "heavy".

Steppe nomads like Mongols or Avars had plenty of heavy troops, especially relatively to their opponents and other combatants of the period. Someone clad with long lamellar armor, with helmet with aventail, and sometimes even face mask, with heavy bow, arrows, lance and sidearms would be heavily armed.

"Heavy forces" were beating horse nomads quite a lot, Polish-Lithuanian forces alone had many victories against them, but in many cases the trick would be not actually beating them, but engaging them, if they didn't want to engage.

But on actual battlefield entire army cannot generally retreat to kite etc. whole time, eventually it will turn into actual rout, and the field will be lost.

But during actual bigger scale invasion, even most mobile steppe nomads generally will need to have some wagons and camp in general, they have to defend.


Follow up question(s):

1. I'd assume that the "prime time" for such nomad invasions would be mid summer when there's plenty of grass?
2. How much fodder can you carry, assuming the light infantry are providing logistics support (wagons bearing hay and grain)?
3. Does doing so basically neuter your advantages?

The invasion in question is kicking off right at the end of the winter/very early spring for various reasons other than sheer military effectiveness (basically "divine" command). The ground is still partially frozen but spring grass is beginning to come up. The particular area is fairly dry, so mud isn't as big an issue.

Having any kind of light infantry providing support mostly nullifies advantage of being able to evade engagement.

Crimean Tatars were sometimes raiding Ukraine and Poland during winter, but they likely had to carry more baggage, thus being less mobile.

Though hardy and tough breeds of horses can probably in fact go on winter grass. Obviously it's only possible if there's no heavy snow cover.

[gbaji]

Follow up question(s):

1. I'd assume that the "prime time" for such nomad invasions would be mid summer when there's plenty of grass?
2. How much fodder can you carry, assuming the light infantry are providing logistics support (wagons bearing hay and grain)?
3. Does doing so basically neuter your advantages?

Yeah. Depending on latitude and terrain, anywhere from mid-spring to mid/late-fall could work.

Is this a combined arms situation (faster light nomad style cavalry followed up by more traditional infantry)? In that case, then yeah, the infantry would march slowly towards the target area, maintaining their wagons of supplies and setting up "camp". The horse troops would range around that camp and harrass everything in a fairly large area. This is not much different than traditional armies that existed in a lot of time periods in history though.

It does somewhat neuter your advantage in that there is a more tradtional "center" of your force. And the opposition will likely be aware of this, by the movements of the horse troops themselves, if nothing else (you can tell that they are "leashed" to some sort of support structure). You lose the ability of the true nomadic style horse troops to just carry everything they need with them, stay light, move fast, and cover very large distances at speeds that a traditional military force just cannot match. You gain some degree of "fallback" though, and (I'm guessing important here) the ability to actually storm larger cities in your path.

You can also play them off as two disconnected forces. One a nomadic force just running around rampaging and pillaging in the area. That'll break things up, and force folks to flee to the safety of larger walled cities. If a second force then marches in, they can probably pick off some bigger targets with little difficulty because everyone is more or less frozen where they are. Very much depends on what forces the defenders have available to them though. This approach can epically fail if the defenders figure it out. Remember that the nomadic force is strong in that it can't be forced to engage (can pick weak targets and hit them as they wish). But that's a weakness if there's a target out there that they are supposed to be defending (like the slower infantry force marching along).


The invasion in question is kicking off right at the end of the winter/very early spring for various reasons other than sheer military effectiveness (basically "divine" command). The ground is still partially frozen but spring grass is beginning to come up. The particular area is fairly dry, so mud isn't as big an issue.


That will present some problems for the light nomadic forces. Their entire methodology is about carrying very little on each horse. Just enough to make simple camps where they stop for the day, weapons, and simple tools. They can't carry much food with them, and definitely not enough to operate the horses for any length of time without grass for grazing. There might be "just enough" maybe. Less dense grass means that the nomads will have to spread out in a large number of smaller camps to manage this. That may not present too much difficulty, but is a limitation and potential vulnerability.

It will certainly slow them down a bit since they'll have to spend more time each day communicating and coordinating their days activities. This can be alleviated if there are decent commanders in charge of each "group", with good instructions on what to do, and a good head on their shoulders in terms of the "overall plan". But the ability to coordinate larger attacks is going to be hampered by this. How much of an issue that actually is, depends on a ton of factors though. It may very well be that "split our force into 8-10 smaller ones and go out pillaging" is exactly what you want to do anyway. But if you later find that you really want to combine forces and hit a specific target/location, just finding the other forces to combine together becomes problematic. The very thing that is your strength (we move fast and could be anywhere) can work against you. Coordinated actions become matters of happenstance. Commanders A, B, and C, just happen to have their riders run into eachother, meet up and decide to hit a specific small town together, for example.

On the flip side though, these sorts of actions become impossibly unpredictable to defenders, so that can work too.

[Vinyadan]

Though hardy and tough breeds of horses can probably in fact go on winter grass. Obviously it's only possible if there's no heavy snow cover.

I think even winter action depends on how hardy they are. Wild horses did survive in the steppe for thousands of years. The following is about Przewalski's horses in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which comprises forests and old farmland from drained swamps:


In winter, Przewalski’s horses browsed
Salix spp., Pyrus communis, Malus sylvatica,
Pinus sylvestis, Rosa spp., Alnus spp. they also
dig for Festuca spp., Bromopsis inermis and El-
ytrigia repens, which were still growing under
the snow cover. In general, in winter Przewal-
ski’s horses graze the same grass species as do
domestic horses (D av idova and step anov
1936, Bi kbu l atov et al. 1997, siets es et al.
2009).

I took a quick look, and both Bromopsis and Festuca grow by steppe rivers, while Eltrygia grows almost everywhere (forest, steppe, steppe-forest, and is considered a serious weed in the fields) except mountains and deserts.

Snow cover in the exclusion zone lasts around 50 days and is 12 to 15 cm thick.

It would be interesting to see whether Cossack cavalry went to war during winter, and how they handled it. But I guess people aren't horses, and getting something done in the snow would be much harder anyway.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yeah. Depending on latitude and terrain, anywhere from mid-spring to mid/late-fall could work.

Is this a combined arms situation (faster light nomad style cavalry followed up by more traditional infantry)? In that case, then yeah, the infantry would march slowly towards the target area, maintaining their wagons of supplies and setting up "camp". The horse troops would range around that camp and harrass everything in a fairly large area. This is not much different than traditional armies that existed in a lot of time periods in history though.

It does somewhat neuter your advantage in that there is a more tradtional "center" of your force. And the opposition will likely be aware of this, by the movements of the horse troops themselves, if nothing else (you can tell that they are "leashed" to some sort of support structure). You lose the ability of the true nomadic style horse troops to just carry everything they need with them, stay light, move fast, and cover very large distances at speeds that a traditional military force just cannot match. You gain some degree of "fallback" though, and (I'm guessing important here) the ability to actually storm larger cities in your path.

You can also play them off as two disconnected forces. One a nomadic force just running around rampaging and pillaging in the area. That'll break things up, and force folks to flee to the safety of larger walled cities. If a second force then marches in, they can probably pick off some bigger targets with little difficulty because everyone is more or less frozen where they are. Very much depends on what forces the defenders have available to them though. This approach can epically fail if the defenders figure it out. Remember that the nomadic force is strong in that it can't be forced to engage (can pick weak targets and hit them as they wish). But that's a weakness if there's a target out there that they are supposed to be defending (like the slower infantry force marching along).

That will present some problems for the light nomadic forces. Their entire methodology is about carrying very little on each horse. Just enough to make simple camps where they stop for the day, weapons, and simple tools. They can't carry much food with them, and definitely not enough to operate the horses for any length of time without grass for grazing. There might be "just enough" maybe. Less dense grass means that the nomads will have to spread out in a large number of smaller camps to manage this. That may not present too much difficulty, but is a limitation and potential vulnerability.

It will certainly slow them down a bit since they'll have to spend more time each day communicating and coordinating their days activities. This can be alleviated if there are decent commanders in charge of each "group", with good instructions on what to do, and a good head on their shoulders in terms of the "overall plan". But the ability to coordinate larger attacks is going to be hampered by this. How much of an issue that actually is, depends on a ton of factors though. It may very well be that "split our force into 8-10 smaller ones and go out pillaging" is exactly what you want to do anyway. But if you later find that you really want to combine forces and hit a specific target/location, just finding the other forces to combine together becomes problematic. The very thing that is your strength (we move fast and could be anywhere) can work against you. Coordinated actions become matters of happenstance. Commanders A, B, and C, just happen to have their riders run into eachother, meet up and decide to hit a specific small town together, for example.

On the flip side though, these sorts of actions become impossibly unpredictable to defenders, so that can work too.

Thanks.

The split up is actually their natural state, and coordination issues are baked into the cake. Think tribes that mostly interact by raiding each other for prime breeding stock and supplies. Low casualties, but also low density. Mostly bands of 20-ish during the summer. Now being shoved together by (what they believe is) a divine decree.

Their mission is ostensibly to raid and pillage all of the border settlements in an area. Only one "must kill" target, and that's the least defended/defensible and is intended to be the first one hit. But they're intentionally (on the part of their leadership) being set up for massive casualties themselves--they're supposed to basically provoke the enemy, get them good and mad so they send the regular army, kill as many civilians and destroy as much property as possible, and then get slaughtered en masse to fuel a demonic ritual. So having a "weak center" and having the enemy figure out where the camps are and force a fight there is actually intended. As long as it doesn't happen too soon. Because if the camps just get raided and burned early, the forces are likely to just disperse out of sheer survival (not knowing they're supposed to die "heroically"). So it provides an appropriate short cut mechanism for those wanting to stop the slaughter on both sides--figure out that this is the plan and hit the camps hard while they're only half-defended. Focus on burning the supplies and routing the infantry support while not engaging in pitched battles if possible. Classic "special forces" operations (which is appropriate since this is in support of a D&D campaign and the PCs are part of/allied with the non-nomad forces).

[Pauly]

Thanks.

The split up is actually their natural state, and coordination issues are baked into the cake. Think tribes that mostly interact by raiding each other for prime breeding stock and supplies. Low casualties, but also low density. Mostly bands of 20-ish during the summer. Now being shoved together by (what they believe is) a divine decree.

Their mission is ostensibly to raid and pillage all of the border settlements in an area. Only one "must kill" target, and that's the least defended/defensible and is intended to be the first one hit. But they're intentionally (on the part of their leadership) being set up for massive casualties themselves--they're supposed to basically provoke the enemy, get them good and mad so they send the regular army, kill as many civilians and destroy as much property as possible, and then get slaughtered en masse to fuel a demonic ritual. So having a "weak center" and having the enemy figure out where the camps are and force a fight there is actually intended. As long as it doesn't happen too soon. Because if the camps just get raided and burned early, the forces are likely to just disperse out of sheer survival (not knowing they're supposed to die "heroically"). So it provides an appropriate short cut mechanism for those wanting to stop the slaughter on both sides--figure out that this is the plan and hit the camps hard while they're only half-defended. Focus on burning the supplies and routing the infantry support while not engaging in pitched battles if possible. Classic "special forces" operations (which is appropriate since this is in support of a D&D campaign and the PCs are part of/allied with the non-nomad forces).


Well if that is the leader’s plan

The leader’s plan once they have accomplished the ‘must kill’ part of the plan will be:
- Have the tribes commit atrocities. This will ensure that the defenders will be motivated to exterminate, not just defeat/expel;
- Send the cavalry into chokepoints, places where they can be trapped against terrain and can’t escape. Not into the bad terrain per se, but for example besiege a city on a river and when the defenders show up they’ll be trapped against the river and won’t be able to kite;
- Send the light infantry on forced marches across open ground from one ‘safe’ area to another. Eventually they will be caught in the open and slaughtered;
It shouldn’t look like they are trying to achieve the plan, it should look to the players that they are being smarter and better than the invaders.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Actual chakrams never had a "crossbar" to grip like you see on Xena, right? They've always just been the hollow, sharpened circle?

[stoutstien]

Actual chakrams never had a "crossbar" to grip like you see on Xena, right? They've always just been the hollow, sharpened circle?

I've never seen an historical representation with a midbar and seeing how they were carried/worn it wouldn't make sense to have one. Even the hula hoop sized ones lacked any crossbars.

[awa]

from what I understand one of the techniques for using them at close range in a formation was to twirl them around your finger which would be impossible with a bar in the center.

So not only have I never seen a version with that (means little i'm no expert) it doesn't make any sense and just adds unnecessary weight for no conceivable benefit.

[Trafalgar]

Let's pretend a hypothetical person allegedly wanted to kill their father-in-law in the most painful way possible. What would be the best weapon to use?

Of course, I am not speaking about a real world person or real world situation. This is all imaginary.

[Khedrac]

Let's pretend a hypothetical person allegedly wanted to kill their father-in-law in the most painful way possible. What would be the best weapon to use?

Of course, I am not speaking about a real world person or real world situation. This is all imaginary.

For this I would go with Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham - "a spoon" - (Because it's DULL ... It'll hurt more.)

If you want to cause pain use the species of box jellyfish where the sting is so painful it can cause a feeling of impending doom and even a light brush can put the victim in hospital for a month or more.

(There are a number of odd venoms reportied to cause really long lasting pain in most people, oddly the duck-billed platypus has another of these!)

[Vinyadan]

Let's pretend a hypothetical person allegedly wanted to kill their father-in-law in the most painful way possible. What would be the best weapon to use?


Maybe a spoon? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y)

[stoutstien]

For this I would go with Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham - "a spoon" - (Because it's DULL ... It'll hurt more.)

If you want to cause pain use the species of box jellyfish where the sting is so painful it can cause a feeling of impending doom and even a light brush can put the victim in hospital for a month or more.

(There are a number of odd venoms reportied to cause really long lasting pain in most people, oddly the duck-billed platypus has another of these!)

Go a step more and use the Gympie-gympie plant.

[Khedrac]

Go a step more and use the Gympie-gympie plant.

I didn't know i had that long term effect! Thank-you.

Interesting I vaguely remember watching a tv documentary many years ago (probably early 80s) where a TV naturalist (I think David Bellamy) was talking about one then reached over to handle it with what looked like a very thing layer of something to protect him (my memory says 1/4 to 1/2 inch of paper, but I suspect it is wrong) and was promptly stung through the padding...

[D&D_Fan]

Let's pretend a hypothetical person allegedly wanted to kill their father-in-law in the most painful way possible. What would be the best weapon to use?

Of course, I am not speaking about a real world person or real world situation. This is all imaginary.

I hear starvation in isolation is a really bad way to go. If you lock someone in a basement with no light, no sound, no insects, no rats, just bottled water, and no food, they will not die of thirst, but they will spend up to a month in pain and fear before finally succumbing to starvation.

The door must be solid steel, hinges on the outside, multiple deadbolt locks, or otherwise weld it shut. Do not provide anything that could be used as an easy escape. No glass, sharp metal, shoelaces, rope, or string.

[Trafalgar]

I hear starvation in isolation is a really bad way to go. If you lock someone in a basement with no light, no sound, no insects, no rats, just bottled water, and no food, they will not die of thirst, but they will spend up to a month in pain and fear before finally succumbing to starvation.

The door must be solid steel, hinges on the outside, multiple deadbolt locks, or otherwise weld it shut. Do not provide anything that could be used as an easy escape. No glass, sharp metal, shoelaces, rope, or string.

But what happens when my wife.... I mean when my hypothetical wife rescues her hypothetical father from the basement I allegedly locked him in?

[Vinyadan]

But what happens when my wife.... I mean when my hypothetical wife rescues her hypothetical father from the basement I allegedly locked him in?

I seem to remember Beauty and the Beast having a happy ending?...

[Berenger]

@PhoenixPhyre: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has an article on the tactics of horse archers and how to defeat them.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/

[Spiryt]

So I haven't found those 15th century mentions of spear throwing in duel, but I found fascinating experiment with throwing replica or all wooden spears from deep Pleistocene -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347593/

Replicas weighted 760 and 800 g, so about as much as sports javelin, and throwers were moderately good sport throwers.

One participant apparently achieved rather frightening 444 J of KE, very interesting, and at odds about what I said about maximal achievable whooomp. :smallconfused:

I wonder if it wasn't some malfunction of equipment or what.

Perhaps just that biggest and at the same time, most experienced thrower (189 cm tall, 94kg, 24 years of throwing) having good running start and giving it all.

[stoutstien]

So I haven't found those 15th century mentions of spear throwing in duel, but I found fascinating experiment with throwing replica or all wooden spears from deep Pleistocene -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347593/

Replicas weighted 760 and 800 g, so about as much as sports javelin, and throwers were moderately good sport throwers.

One participant apparently achieved rather frightening 444 J of KE, very interesting, and at odds about what I said about maximal achievable whooomp. :smallconfused:

I wonder if it wasn't some malfunction of equipment or what.

Perhaps just that biggest and at the same time, most experienced thrower (189 cm tall, 94kg, 24 years of throwing) having good running start and giving it all.

I'd love someone to get some athletes like this and train them with an atlatal. I can get them going at ~50 MPH and I'm not exactly good at it.

[wilphe]

Crimean Tatars were sometimes raiding Ukraine and Poland during winter, but they likely had to carry more baggage, thus being less mobile.

Though hardy and tough breeds of horses can probably in fact go on winter grass. Obviously it's only possible if there's no heavy snow cover.

During the Northern Crusades there were two active seasons:

Summer was for campaigning because you need water transport to move your supplies and your siege equipment

Winter is for raiding and often when you get your VIP visitors to stop by. The rivers and marshes are frozen so you have mobility. But you have to well plan it, you have to move fast and take almost all of your supplies with you so raids are measured in days when summer campaigns are in months.
And you are in a lot of trouble if anything goes wrong and if there is a sudden thaw you are in even bigger trouble.

[Maat Mons]

There was a post on the previous page that, at the time, I interpreted as implying that the poster believed lighter-weight arrows would have greater kinetic energy than heavier-weight arrow, assuming both were fired from the same bow. Rereading the post, I think there’s a decent chance I only imagined that viewpoint being present. Anyway, I’ve already gone to all the trouble of running the math, so I’ll post what I concluded anyway.

The complex-ish math really just confirmed my initial intuition. Any given bow, when pulled back, has some particular amount of energy stored in it. On firing, some percent of that energy is transferred into the arrow, where it takes the form of kinetic energy. The only question is how efficiently that energy is transferred.

The math confirms that energy transfer efficiency is influenced by arrow weight. But in retrospect, I could have skipped the math and arrived at the same conclusion by looking at a simplified view of the before and after. When the bow is pulled back, the bow and arrow each have a center of mass. At the point in time when they separate, both of them have centers of mass that are further forward.

Really, it boils down to the relative weights of the bow and the arrow, and the relative amount of motion of the centers of mass. All other things being equal, a heavier arrow gets a bigger share of the energy at the end because it has a bigger share of the mass. If the arrow had 100% of the mass, it would gain 100% of the energy.

So the heavier arrow will have more kinetic energy, at least at point-blank range.

Other things that help are reducing the weight of the bow, having the arrow move farther, or having the bow flex less. I finally understand why compound bows are so much better than regular ones. The mechanical advantage offered by the cams means the bow can flex less while allowing for the same draw length.

[halfeye]

Really, it boils down to the relative weights of the bow and the arrow, and the relative amount of motion of the centers of mass. All other things being equal, a heavier arrow gets a bigger share of the energy at the end because it has a bigger share of the mass. If the arrow had 100% of the mass, it would gain 100% of the energy.

So the heavier arrow will have more kinetic energy, at least at point-blank range.
This is mistaken.

It is legitimate to treat the firing of a projectile (other than a rocket) as an elastic collision. In an elastic collision, both energy and momentum are conserved. There are moderately simple equations for these, and you have to match them up. The end result is that the lighter arrow leaves the bow with more of the kinetic energy than the heavier arrow, which means it is much faster, because with less mass it has to carry the extra kinetic energy as speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_collision

A lighter arrow will lose energy more quickly due to air resistance, so a heavier arrow may well arrive at long range with more energy than a lighter one would.

[Maat Mons]

You just said momentum is conserved in an elastic collision. In the firing of an arrow from a bow, the bow and arrow both start with zero momentum, since they are stationary with respect to the reference frame (the Earth). After the arrow is fired, it has positive momentum in the forward direction, because it is moving forward. The bow also has positive forward momentum, since the unbending it undergoes represents a shift in its center of mass in the same direction that the arrow travels. With the Earth itself as our reference frame, nothing moves backwards to cancel out the two masses moving forward, so momentum is not conserved.

In order to model the firing of an arrow as an elastic collision, you’d have to model the Earth as one of the colliding bodies. You can do that, sure, but bear in mind that that gives you three bodies to consider, not two. You need to model the earth, the arrow, and the bow, since each of those things experiences a different change in momentum when you fire. Also, bear in mind that, if your target is itself standing on the Earth, and thus moving with it, the movement the target experiences in the direction opposite the arrow will add to the effective force with which the arrow strikes.

Really, modeling the firing of an arrow as an elastic collision seems like an awful way to go about it. You can do it, and if you do it right, you’ll get the right answer, but doing it right requires dealing with the bow’s weight and motion. The weight of a bow and the amount by which it moves (flexes) has been consistently shown to be a huge factor in the speed of arrows. So if you’ve done math that suggests those things are unimportant, you know you’ve made a mistake. It’s a basic sanity check.

Another thing that should give you pause is to note that, if you did assume momentum of the arrow was fixed, regardless of weight, you’d get math suggesting the speed at which the bowstring drives the arrow forward goes to infinity as the weight of the arrow goes to zero. It is clear from dry-firing a bow that the string does not move with infinite speed without the weight of an arrow.

[Spiryt]

Yes, in reality heavier arrows will always have higher energy, bows are way more efficient with them. At least to a some point.


It's visible even with modern recurve and compound bows, which can be very very fast compared to most traditional bows. Still quite a few more Joules with heavier arrows.

With something like selfbow with more round crosssection, or some kind of reflexive bows, it's can be very drastic and firing light arrow can be dangerously close to dry fire.

Adam Karpowicz's 105 pound 27 inches Turkish style flight bow (so built for speed/distance) achieved about 114J with 1548 grain arrow, but only 73J with 203 grain arrow. Which is still very impressive, many wooden longbows would probably snap, or at very least kick archers' hand like a mule, without launching such a tiny arrow very fast.

[halfeye]

You just said momentum is conserved in an elastic collision. In the firing of an arrow from a bow, the bow and arrow both start with zero momentum, since they are stationary with respect to the reference frame (the Earth). After the arrow is fired, it has positive momentum in the forward direction, because it is moving forward. The bow also has positive forward momentum, since the unbending it undergoes represents a shift in its center of mass in the same direction that the arrow travels. With the Earth itself as our reference frame, nothing moves backwards to cancel out the two masses moving forward, so momentum is not conserved.

In order to model the firing of an arrow as an elastic collision, you’d have to model the Earth as one of the colliding bodies. You can do that, sure, but bear in mind that that gives you three bodies to consider, not two. You need to model the earth, the arrow, and the bow, since each of those things experiences a different change in momentum when you fire. Also, bear in mind that, if your target is itself standing on the Earth, and thus moving with it, the movement the target experiences in the direction opposite the arrow will add to the effective force with which the arrow strikes.

Really, modeling the firing of an arrow as an elastic collision seems like an awful way to go about it. You can do it, and if you do it right, you’ll get the right answer, but doing it right requires dealing with the bow’s weight and motion. The weight of a bow and the amount by which it moves (flexes) has been consistently shown to be a huge factor in the speed of arrows. So if you’ve done math that suggests those things are unimportant, you know you’ve made a mistake. It’s a basic sanity check.

Another thing that should give you pause is to note that, if you did assume momentum of the arrow was fixed, regardless of weight, you’d get math suggesting the speed at which the bowstring drives the arrow forward goes to infinity as the weight of the arrow goes to zero. It is clear from dry-firing a bow that the string does not move with infinite speed without the weight of an arrow.


Yes, in reality heavier arrows will always have higher energy, bows are way more efficient with them. At least to a some point.


It's visible even with modern recurve and compound bows, which can be very very fast compared to most traditional bows. Still quite a few more Joules with heavier arrows.

With something like selfbow with more round crosssection, or some kind of reflexive bows, it's can be very drastic and firing light arrow can be dangerously close to dry fire.

Adam Karpowicz's 105 pound 27 inches Turkish style flight bow (so built for speed/distance) achieved about 114J with 1548 grain arrow, but only 73J with 203 grain arrow. Which is still very impressive, many wooden longbows would probably snap, or at very least kick archers' hand like a mule, without launching such a tiny arrow very fast.

This is standard physics. You can probably (I don't know your physiology, maybe you can't throw?) throw a tennis ball a long way. Throwing a bowling ball your range will be less. You probably can't throw something with the mass of a person far at all, and if you can't lift something you can't throw it. Since KE is 1/2 mv^2 kinetic energy increases faster with increasing speed than speed increases with decling mass. As I said above, light things decelerate faster than heavy things, so at long range it's entirely expected that more massive arrows have more energy, it wouldn't be true point blank.

It is a legitimate approximatioin fo treat the firing of a gun or bow as an elastic collision, you have the weight of both the projectile and the launcher (with a bow, and to a lesser extent with a gun, you have to include the mass of the archer), you have the overall KE, you have (or can get, though that may not be simple) the muzzle velocity.

It wouldn't be done, and I don't suggest it would be sensible for anything other than physical research, but if we made cartridges with the same amount of propellant in them for bullets of different calibres (with the same shape of bullet for the different calibres), then the smaller calibres would be faster, and have more kinetic energy at the muzzle, while the heavier buttets would become progressively more useless as the calibre and weight of the bullets went up.

[Maat Mons]

The firing of a bow cannot be modeled in the same way as the firing of a gun. There are factors that are important to a bow’s ability to impart energy to an arrow that are not present with a gun. If your approximation does not account for that, it will give the wrong answer.

Additionally, I feel your claim that the firing of a gun can be modeled as an elastic collision needs support. By definition, an elastic collision preserves kinetic energy. When firing a gun, everything is stationary in the initial state, hence no kinetic energy. At the time the bullet exits the muzzle, it has nonzero velocity. Since the bullet also has nonzero mass, this means the system has nonzero kinetic energy. Going from zero kinetic energy to nonzero kinetic energy clearly is does not represent kinetic energy being conserved.

Bear in mind, kinetic energy is necessarily a non-negative value. It’s equal to mass times the square of velocity. Mass can’t be negative, and while velocity can be negative, squaring a negative number still results in a positive number. There’s just no way to get a negative kinetic energy, so there’s no cancelling out the kinetic energy of the bullet-in-motion.

You can use conservation of momentum if you want. That still applies. But momentum being conserved isn’t enough to call an interaction an elastic collision.

Additionally, the litmus test of the validity of any approximation is to compare the predicted results to actual experimental data. I can refer you to tests showing heavier arrows possessing greater kinetic energy even at point-blank range. (https://youtu.be/ghoVmc12vEs?t=543)

[stoutstien]

The reasons heavy arrows tend to have better energy retention is due to how
constant the rigidity the shafts/dynamic spine have when combined with heavy draw weights.

There is even a famous paradox covering it. It's very easy to "over power" light quarrels with powerful bows and sap energy, accuracy, and even structural integrity.

[Spiryt]

This is standard physics. You can probably (I don't know your physiology, maybe you can't throw?) throw a tennis ball a long way. Throwing a bowling ball your range will be less. You probably can't throw something with the mass of a person far at all, and if you can't lift something you can't throw it. Since KE is 1/2 mv^2 kinetic energy increases faster with increasing speed than speed increases with decling mass. As I said above, light things decelerate faster than heavy things, so at long range it's entirely expected that more massive arrows have more energy, it wouldn't be true point blank.

Well, no, almost nobody measures arrows velocity at long range, it's pretty challenging, to say at least. 99% measurements are from few meters at least, and mentioned Karpowicz test where made with window of chronograph about 1 yard away from the bow.... We're talking about very initial velocity.

KE energy being square of velocity obvisouly works both way, if you want to speed something up two times, you need to put in 4 times more energy. Increasing speed isn't easy.

Many very good composite bows are close to 95% efficient in ideal conditions (heavy arrows, perfect, instant release), so even if there were somehow more efficient with light arrows as with heavy ones, there wouldn't be any energy more to gain.

The fact that bows of all kind are visibly more efficient with heavier arrows really isn't disuptable.

Here are menioned Karpowicz tests:

https://www.atarn.org/islamic/akarpowicz/turkish_bow_tests.htm

Here's a ballistic for some modern crossbows by deer and deer hunting.

https://s22301.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Crossbow-Speed-by-Arrow-Weight.jpg

Heavier arrows yield more KE.



It wouldn't be done, and I don't suggest it would be sensible for anything other than physical research, but if we made cartridges with the same amount of propellant in them for bullets of different calibres (with the same shape of bullet for the different calibres), then the smaller calibres would be faster, and have more kinetic energy at the muzzle, while the heavier buttets would become progressively more useless as the calibre and weight of the bullets went up.


Generally, the opposite seems to be true, if anything.

For given caliber, amount of propeller, and barrel length, and shape, heavier bullet will tend to have bit more energy.

[Gnoman]

For given caliber, amount of propeller, and barrel length, and shape, heavier bullet will tend to have bit more energy.

Note that having everything but bullet weight being identical is nigh-impossible for a large majority of firearms even if it were desirable, because anything except a single-loader has pretty major constraints on overall length (it will fit in the chamber just fine, but any kind of feeding system tends to have trouble if the bullet is much longer than expected). This means that usually to get a heavier bullet, you usually have to change the shape - a standard 115 grain FMG 9mm round comes to a smooth roundness, a 147 grain FMJ round has a massive flat tip, for example.

That said, the two rounds generally have pretty close to the same energy if the propellant and the barrel length is the same. The heavier bullet retains more velocity at range, though being slower it has just a bit worse ballistics and flight time. The heavier round having the same energy is often the reason to make it, in scenarios where a slower speed is valuable in and of itself (the most common such scenario being suppressors, where you want to drop the bullet below the speed of sound to eliminate the supersonic crack).

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Ogre: Hey, we reached page 50! Time to start a new thread!