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

[Gnoman]

That's one of the mechanisms of energy transfer, but it doesn't do you much good if it happens shallowly. Intermediate rounds like 5.56 can be marginal for reaching vitals on larger deer (if shot frontally), let alone big game. Full-rifle rounds can reach the vitals on big game if you hit it right, but they'll spend so much energy getting there that the kill is probably going to be slow. That's pretty relevant to this question, because the proposed megabeast has regeneration - so even a vitals shot won't kill it if it isn't done fast.

[Martin Greywolf]

Okay, hunting animals with military gear.

Killing humanely

We do not care about this. It's not what the question is about.

Calibers are meaningless

If someone categorically states something like "5.56 is not good for hunting", you know that they don't know what they are talking about. There is a massive range of ammunition with very different properties that are 1) all the same caliber and 2) able to be used in the same rifle. 5.56 specifically is perfectly legal for use in a lot of countries (USA varies by state), and there are specialized deer loads for it.

Even more importantly, penetration is not dictated by caliber in the slightest, saying that "5.56 does not have enough penetration" is categorically wrong. Penetration within reasonable range (not, like, ten meters into solid steel) depends on bullet velocity and bullet not fragmenting. And with modern bullets, most of them are designed specifically to fragment. If you have a bullet that was meant to fragment inside a human chest and you shoot a bear, it doesn't matter if it was a .50 cal (and yes, there are some weird 50 ammo types that do this) or 5.56, it's not gonna do that much damage.

Stopping power

This is the ability to neutralize (not necessarily kill) a thing in as few shots as you can. It matters a great deal in civilian hunting, because of humane killing considerations, and in situations where you need to drop something within a second (e.g. self defense, hostages being involved etc).

Here's the thing, it doesn't matter much if you have fully automatic weapons and nothing to stop you from just hosing the animal. A hunter will not want to take a machinegun or an assault rifle and dump two hundred rounds into a tiger, a squad of soldiers will not care. The animal will look like a bunch of bloody shreds by the time they stop, but it's not like they want to eat it.

So, unless the animal can manage to either not give them enough time to do that (e.g. by being an ambush predator, like tigers are), the animal is dead if the soldiers can aim properly. Which is why you always see animals evading death in places where they are hard to see (jungle, muddy water), and usually with less that stellar armed forces going after them.

Anti-materiel rifles

They aren't really needed on Earth animals. Sure, they will work, but why waste your time on faffing about with them when you can get a fireteam to dump a few magazines into the unfortunate elephant.

Beast of Gevaudan

It's been some time since I've looked into it seriously, but the most reasonable theory I've heard about it is that it was several wolves, not just one beast. Combine that with mass hysteria, and you're sending you soldiers to tramp around in the woods looking for demons every time someone sees a large dog.

Emu war

Look, I like this meme as much as the next guy, but if you use this as an example, at least go read about it.

First round was a bunch of soldiers trying to get cute with herding emus into ambushes, which may well have worked if the machinegun didn't jam. They then tried to mount the MG on a truck, and the ride was so rough the gunner couldn't even start shooting, let alone hit something. Note that they still did kill ~200 emus for 2500 rounds fired.

Once people started to use braincells, there were about a thousand emu kills for 10 000 rounds, with another 2500 emus estimated to die from wounds, one emu killed per three bullets. For comparison, WW2 saw some 50 billion rounds fired, if they were as efficient at killing people as they were emus, they would kill all the people alive today twice over.

So no, the emus didn't win the Emu war.

But hey, don't take my word for it

Because there was one incident from Vietnam war of tiger vs soldiers that is from a reliable source that I dug up.

Spoiler: Northern Marine Magazine article

Show

So, six soldiers on a recon patrol, ambushed by a tiger at night while they were sleeping, one of them was literally in tiger's jaws and couldn't defend himself because he was asleep moments prior. The tiger still died and only managed to hurt a soldier who was asleep.

Military hunting parties

[warning, dead animals are discussed and show in the links, nothing graphic, but still]

Are organized when they have to be, usually to precision-kill a single troublesome animal, and for that job, the soldiers tend to pick DMRs.

[Inevitability]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?


If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

[tyckspoon]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?


If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

If armor is not in play, having bad iron weapons is not an advantage over stone. Flesh is not significantly easier to damage with metal than stone. That will come down to which side is better organized, usually; if the militia actually practices as a militia they should be able to repel a less-organized attacker. If it's just 'somebody rang the alarm bell, show up with whatever you have nearby' and they don't drill or practice combat with whatever their options are, they'll probably get pretty badly mauled in one-on-one fights with enemies that are much better suited to doing that.

Once armor starts showing up the advantage swings heavily to the militia, and once you're looking at metal armor the primitive weaponry is effectively not a threat any more. You will still see injuries and the occasional deaths, of course, because combat is combat and stuff happens, but I do not believe there is any real chance that the side wearing chainmail actually loses to the side without in a direct engagement.

Horses would offer a mobility advantage, but without a number of other technological innovations it's actually quite hard to fight effectively from horseback, so actual combat would still be as dismounted foot; mounts would probably see the humanoids adopting a hit-and-run raiding style where they try use the horses to strike at areas the organized defence cannot easily cover, grab whatever they can easily move/have their horses carry, then remount and vacate once an an organized response shows up.

[Pauly]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?


If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

Ask Hernan Cortez

[Gnoman]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?


If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

Absent armor (note that the Spanish Conquistadors often went without armor against the Aztecs and others, due to the heat of local conditions), the primary disadvantage of stone and bone weapons is availability. Stone and bone that's suitable for weaponmaking is of limited quantity, and stone takes a great deal of time to work into shape. Metal is metal in general, and is faster to work in a comparable piece. Once armor comes into play, things change significantly - any armor at all greatly hinders the functionality of a stone or bone weapon, and it is physically impossible to penetrate metal armor with one - the weapon will break at a much lower level of force than you would need to force the armor out of shape. So, to compare your three scenarios:

1. Unarmored militia

The militia's use of metal won't aid them all that much. The enemy weapons will kill them just fine, and rapidly improvised weapons made of a better material are probably worse than purpose-built weapons made of an inferior one. Depending on what you mean by "monstrous humanoid", they're likely to be at a great disadvantage simply because the guys using stone and bone weapons against them are probably going to be stronger and tougher than they are. This is pretty clear cut that the edge goes to the monsters.

2. Armored militia with real weapons.

Here, the militia has a real edge in equipment. Leather armor is not immune to the crude weapons, but it is highly resistant. Meanwhile, their weapons are straight up better than the primitive ones being used against them, which makes a big difference. Countering this, the monstrous humanoids are probably more experienced in fighting, and are probably strong and tough enough to offset the edge in equipment. I'd call this an even match.

3. Real armored soldiers

This is simple and straightforward. Their armor will be effectively invulnerable to the primitive weapons barring extreme bad luck, they have better weapons, and are probably trained for fighting. In a straight-up fight, the soldiers will win. The only way for the monstrous humanoids to defeat this enemy would be to use harassment and ambush tactics to pick off vulnerable solders that are out of armor, or to use traps that don't care about armor such as pits and deadfalls.

[Martin Greywolf]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?

I don't feel like writing several books...

If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

This is a lot more specific.

Since we have no armor in play, which in itself can be odd (more on that later), only thing that matters is reach of your attacks. Since both sides have access to sharpened sticks, the weaponry is pretty much equal no matter what it is made of. George Silver states outright that in a fight of rapier and staff, staff wins, and he was referring to unsharpened staff to boot.

I have to object to the term "savage humanoids" - not necessarily on PC grounds, but rather on grounds of it doesn't tell us anything about this other group. Are they hunter-gatherers, primitive farmers, do they have martial culture? All of those things matter.

Still, village farmers would be just about the least suitable people to fight short of office workers, so our savages do have the edge here.

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

You will not find it in a village. You are unlikely to find any sort of militia in a village, but one with armor and solid weapons isn't a thing - the Hussites had significant trouble arming their hastily assembled commoners, to a point where they invented several new, easy to manufacture weapons. Maybe if this is a frontier town or some such, but that needs to be specified - we can potentially be talking about something like the Ranger towns of Hungary, where a small tribe got a village in exchange for their military service of scouting and guarding the border.

Spoiler: For an anti-crusader on a budget, Hussite weaponry

Show

These dussacks became incredibly famous by appearing in Lichtenauer tradition treatises, but keep in mind they were a last-ditch sidearm for the hussites, the polearms above were much often used

What's more, boiled leather armor isn't a cheap thing. It was used only rarely, and usually by higher income folks, your armor for people on a budget is gambeson. If you are really on a budget, there are records (from Hussite wars) of smolnice, which I'd translate as tarmor (tar+armor), which are bits of straw soaked in tar strapped over yourself, combined with rope helmets (take a rope and curl it over a ball/head, then sew it together).

Iron-tipped spear doesn't really give you any advantage against unarmored people over a sharp stick other than durability and messers are a terrible idea (unless you have shields, but those were not specified), so the only advantage is the longbow.

Here's the thing, a 60 lbs bow will send an arrow straight through a deer, anything heavier than that is an overkill against armor, so you don't really need longbows. A simple hunting self bow that a teenager can use (~40-50 lbs) will cause wounds that are pretty much as lethal as the ones from a 160 lbs longbow against unarmored humanoid.

So in this case, the villagers have advantage of some armor, and that's pretty much it. I'd still bet on the savages.

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

Well, a dedicated two-handed thrust with a spear you put your weight behind may get through a good mail shirt, but it will definitely knock the wind out of you - with more people on the field, ot means one spearman will knock the wond out of you and the other will use that to stab your face.

Thing is, if the swords are all the soldiers have, they will be javelined to death even before that happens, but an actual combined arms force will have the advantage.

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

Not a single thing, because this is essentially a siege. Only things this will affect is what happens before and after the fight.

What you forgot

There are factors in play that matter a lot more than weapon quality.

The most important one is morale, how willing are the savages to press the attack? How determined are the villagers to hold? What is at stake?

Morale aside, if the savages are attacking a village and the village knows that this might happen, it will fortify itself. Stone walls are not happening and even proper pallisades may be out of reach, but a sturdy wooden fence will go a long way.

Spoiler: Proper pallisade, repro of 9th c. Great Moravian chieftain compound at Ducove

Show

Spoiler: Plank wall and tower at Lozorno, looking at gate from the inside, simpler solution

Show

It took us two days to build the tower, and half of that was putting the roof on

While the plank walls can't stop a battering ram, they can stop you from kicking them down, especially if someone is stabbing you from above - unfortunately, I can't find any photos of that particular event

These sorts of fortifications are a hell of a force multiplier, and will give the villagers the win here - unless the attackers use incendiaries on the very likely straw roofs. They you have a fight that will be as much about putting out fires as it is about fighting.

Villagers may have some skilled slingers among them, as could the savages.

Finally the savages. They have armor. Even if they managed to loot nothing usable by them, even stone age cultures had some sort of armor - several layers of whatever clothing they had on hand, be it linen or hide, sometimes reinforced with wood and bone. They won't wear this for hunting (it's either useless for rabbits or doesn't work for bears), but if they set out on a raid, they will have at least some people being their heavy infantry.

Spoiler: Some pre-columbian sets could get pretty fancy

Show

Spoiler: Seyma-Turbine culture, 18-15th c. BC

Show

Spoiler: Tibetan leather lamellar, it was in use in central Eurasia since forever, possibly stone age

Show

Spoiler: Nakoaktok rope armor

Show

In absence of organized large scale military response on behalf of the villagers, what you have on hand is a siege with more or less equal fighting potential man-to-man. The conventional rule of thumb is that the attackers need a 5 to 1 numerical advantage to successfully storm the fort.

[Vinyadan]

Martin, how did you make sure the structures were stable? How deep down in the terrain do they go? Did you have a method to choose what to place in the hole with the beam?

[Martin Greywolf]

Martin, how did you make sure the structures were stable? How deep down in the terrain do they go? Did you have a method to choose what to place in the hole with the
beam?

Bear in mind it's been almost a decade.

Martin, how did you make sure the structures were stable?

Hustle.

More seriously, you don't need a lot for these structures, use heavy tree logs for the frame, put them into holes and secure them in place with rocks. As long as the structure isn't too airy, its own weight will stabilize it. The important bit is to use some sort of treatment for the wood to prevent it from rotting - historically, you'd use tar, beeswax or oil, we probably used some sort of commercial paint-on thing, but I honestly can't remember - it's the black "paint" at the bottom meter and a half of the pillar.

Spoiler: A different building that has photos of building process

Show

And yeah, we cheated on the roof, because annually replacing straw is not fun

You may well question our methodology, but the thing is still standing a decade later, so...

Spoiler: More recent photo, building on the left

Show

How deep down in the terrain do they go?

As you could see from the photo of building it, about knee deep for 2 stories for the big building, IIRC the tower is 1.5x to twice as deep because it is taller and lighter, but I wasn't there for building of that one.

Did you have a method to choose what to place in the hole with the beam?

The arcane method of "different sizes of rocks that are readily available".

Spoiler: Riveting footage of rocks, 2011, colorized

Show

We only had to cheat with one pillar, because we hit a spring from the side, we poured concrete into that one.

Important note

If you live in an area with hurricanes or earthquakes, building like this will get you or someone else killed.

[Thane of Fife]

Not a single thing, because this is essentially a siege. Only things this will affect is what happens before and after the fight.

What you forgot

There are factors in play that matter a lot more than weapon quality.

The most important one is morale, how willing are the savages to press the attack? How determined are the villagers to hold? What is at stake?

Morale aside, if the savages are attacking a village and the village knows that this might happen, it will fortify itself. Stone walls are not happening and even proper pallisades may be out of reach, but a sturdy wooden fence will go a long way.

Why do you think this is the most likely turn of events? Raiding - for cattle, brides, slaves, etc. - is probably the most ubiquitous form of warfare in history, and I have never heard anything that suggests that raids typically devolved into sieges.

[Mike_G]

Why do you think this is the most likely turn of events? Raiding - for cattle, brides, slaves, etc. - is probably the most ubiquitous form of warfare in history, and I have never heard anything that suggests that raids typically devolved into sieges.

Fortifications for even small villages are really common. In the case of a raid, if people had enough warning to get into the fort/tower/blockhouse/whatever, then the raiders had to decide to just leave, take the place by assault or conduct a siege. So yeah, it did happen a lot.

Successful raids usually caught the defenders by surprise and either took the village or grabbed what they wanted and escaped. Often, a raid destroyed a village or carried off loot or prisoners but many of the people survived if they holed up in a stronghold. They may have a lot of rebuilding to do after, but it's better than being dead.

[gbaji]

I think it's important to remember that unless a village is somewhere really really far from potential raiders, it's almost always going to have at least some sort of wall somewhere around at least some of the buildings, and at least one building somewhat designated as the "fallback/defense" position that specifically has strong walls and is usually taller than the surrounding buildings as well. That will give the defenders an advantage.

Are the people in the village aware of even the potential for being attacked? They should have something available to at least slow down attackers and to hide behind. Even in the absence of a direct serious concern about raiding, villages tended to have walls/fences if for no other reason than to keep domesticated animals *in* and wild animals *out*. Even a somewhat open fence can act as a decent defensive position if both sides are fighting with basically sharp sticks. The guy who's trying to get across it is at a disadvantage to the guy already on the other side who's just standing there defending. Always.

And, as a couple of people pointed out, where do ranged weapons come in? Even in relatively primitive weapon scenarios, the advantage of range has always been significant. Simple bows, slings, or just thrown rocks, can be major factors in a fight like this and are extremely easy to make and should be readily available to both sides. And yeah, once again the advantage goes to the defenders (even moreso IMO).

The obvious counter to the defenders advantages would be the attackers having some element of surprise on their side. The fight will be significantly different if they are detected outside the wall/fenceline/whatever, versus if they get inside before an alarm is sounded and the locals come out to see what's going on. That will also dramatically change how you may want to run the encounter as well. Is it a desperate scramble to man the walls and hold off an overwhelming number? Or is it a smaller number but they're already running around inside the village square, lighting things on fire, killing anyone who gets near, and grabbing and running off with anything of value.

Oh. And I suppose the most important thing: What is the actual objective of the attackers? Is this a raiding party? Are they trying to just kill their enemies? Capture specific people? Rescue someone of theirs who is held captive? Steal something specific? What they're trying to accomplish is going to completely change how they attack and what they do during the attack. Just saying "I want a fight that goes like this" may work, but without a motivation for the attackers it's going to be less "OMG! They're trying to destroy the omicron power source!" and "they're just enemies for us to kill, cause they're there and attacking our side, and we're here to attack them". Latter is less satisfying (and frankly wont make much sense).

[Satinavian]

And, as a couple of people pointed out, where do ranged weapons come in? Even in relatively primitive weapon scenarios, the advantage of range has always been significant. Simple bows, slings, or just thrown rocks, can be major factors in a fight like this and are extremely easy to make and should be readily available to both sides. And yeah, once again the advantage goes to the defenders (even moreso IMO).

Improvised ranged weapons without training are pretty much abysmal, even if you have metal. We should assume that the attackers do have shields as was extremely common even in metal deprived tribal warfare.
And while the attackers might have them, whether they play a big role depends on their strategy.

Also no, useful bows and useful arrows in relevant numbers are not that trivial and fast to make. You should count those only from the "militia has proper weapons" stage onward. Slings are simple but would need practice.


And don't overestimate the effective range of primitive ranged weapons. It is shorter than one might think, especcially with subpar equippment and without training. Certain feats of legendary elite troops of the past were the praiseworthy exception, not the norm.

[VonKaiserstein]

To what extend can pre-metallurgy equipment stack up to medieval-era iron and steel?


If I have a group of savage humanoids, somewhat bigger and stronger than humans, armed with stone bludgeons and simple knives/spearheads/arrowheads made out of flint and bone, would they be able to stand up to a ramshackle village militia (unarmored, weapons are repurposed iron tools like pitchforks and kitchen knives)?

What about a better-equipped militia (boiled leather armor, with messer-like blades, iron-tipped spears, and longbows)?

What about a squad of soldiers in chainmail, armed with 'normal' swords?

If the savage humanoids have horses and the humans do not, does that change anything?

The sources are quite biased, as they're being told by the technologically advanced civilization, but look up Indian massacres as historical examples. A common pattern is that a group of preindustrials seems to win against industrial militia regularly, even when they're equipped with firearms. Against soldiers, much less so.

Though the tales emphasize the treachery and subterfuge of the Native Americans, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre_of_1622 Indian Massacre of 1662 shows militia being able to just fall back to strongpoints, while the preindustrial society destroyed massive amounts of infrastructure, leading to starvation.

Mostly when soldiers get involved it goes exactly the other way- Native American tribal militia did no better than their colonial counterparts when soldiers attacked their villages.

That's a great period of time to research for your question, because you have many incidents of non metallurgical societies fighting both trained soldiers, and untrained pioneer/militia.

The only examples I can think of of effective militia are those who have so much training that they'd more reasonably be considered soldiers than militia. As previously mentioned in this thread, the Hussites were peasants before being rigorously trained by Jan Zizka. The Swiss pikemen during the Canton wars set the precedent for Switzerlands train everyone, so there is no civilian population to conquer approach. Essentially, there milita was ex-military, and had been trained to a soldier level.

[Thane of Fife]

Fortifications for even small villages are really common. In the case of a raid, if people had enough warning to get into the fort/tower/blockhouse/whatever, then the raiders had to decide to just leave, take the place by assault or conduct a siege. So yeah, it did happen a lot.

Successful raids usually caught the defenders by surprise and either took the village or grabbed what they wanted and escaped. Often, a raid destroyed a village or carried off loot or prisoners but many of the people survived if they holed up in a stronghold. They may have a lot of rebuilding to do after, but it's better than being dead.

I have no doubt that it did happen, only that it was the most common result. There have probably been many raids in history, perhaps even the majority, that have occurred because some guys in one village got drunk and decided to go raid the neighbors, steal some stuff, and run before serious resistance is organized. There have no doubt been other raids where the vikings sail in and everyone runs for the fortified house and/or the woods. I could not tell you what the historical ratio is of one to the other, but I would tend to guess that it was not overwhelmingly slanted towards the latter.

[halfeye]

I have no doubt that it did happen, only that it was the most common result. There have probably been many raids in history, perhaps even the majority, that have occurred because some guys in one village got drunk and decided to go raid the neighbors, steal some stuff, and run before serious resistance is organized.

Really? That's a heck of a way to start a vendeta. If there is an ongoing feud that it's a part of, maybe, but a lot of people don't like living like that. Neighbours are neighbours usually.

There have no doubt been other raids where the vikings sail in and everyone runs for the fortified house and/or the woods. I could not tell you what the historical ratio is of one to the other, but I would tend to guess that it was not overwhelmingly slanted towards the latter.

Nobody liked the Vikings, even in Sweden they died out.

[Grim Portent]

Really? That's a heck of a way to start a vendeta. If there is an ongoing feud that it's a part of, maybe, but a lot of people don't like living like that. Neighbours are neighbours usually.

It feels pretty plausible to me, plenty of towns and villages hated their nearest neighbours to the point of long term low level violence that occasionally broke out into actual conflict. Feuds start somewhere after all, and are often attributed to someone drunk or young and stupid stealing something, kidnapping someone or killing someone. Sometimes all three.

Pretty sure a lot of the clan based conflicts up here in Scotland boiled down to someone's great-great-uncle stealing some cows*, eloping with someone else's daughter without permission, or getting drunk and stabbing someone, and 'justice' never being satisfied afterwards.


*Serious business, that. Cows are valuable to a pre-industrial society, and well worth killing over.

[halfeye]

It feels pretty plausible to me, plenty of towns and villages hated their nearest neighbours to the point of long term low level violence that occasionally broke out into actual conflict. Feuds start somewhere after all, and are often attributed to someone drunk or young and stupid stealing something, kidnapping someone or killing someone. Sometimes all three.

Pretty sure a lot of the clan based conflicts up here in Scotland boiled down to someone's great-great-uncle stealing some cows*, eloping with someone else's daughter without permission, or getting drunk and stabbing someone, and 'justice' never being satisfied afterwards.


*Serious business, that. Cows are valuable to a pre-industrial society, and well worth killing over.

If there's already a feud running, it might work that way, but around here there are iron age forts on some of the hilltops, and you probably didn't go messing with them over a drunken revel. There were still feuds in the previous century, but I think in real life most people prefer to steer clear of them. They may be fun in a game, but there's little real risk in that.

[Pauly]

It feels pretty plausible to me, plenty of towns and villages hated their nearest neighbours to the point of long term low level violence that occasionally broke out into actual conflict. Feuds start somewhere after all, and are often attributed to someone drunk or young and stupid stealing something, kidnapping someone or killing someone. Sometimes all three.

Pretty sure a lot of the clan based conflicts up here in Scotland boiled down to someone's great-great-uncle stealing some cows*, eloping with someone else's daughter without permission, or getting drunk and stabbing someone, and 'justice' never being satisfied afterwards.


*Serious business, that. Cows are valuable to a pre-industrial society, and well worth killing over.

Raiding was a serious business, not undertaken by drunken yahoos. The Steel Bonnets by George Macdonald Fraser is a great read about the Anglo-Scottish border reivers, which I highly recommend.
The existence of a non defensible border that prevented a central authority from exerting control was a key feature of why the raiding lasted so long in the area.

[Grim Portent]

Proper viking style raiding was serious business, but opportunistic theft or brawls that are also called raids didn't have to be well thought out or even planned in advance to work. Outlying homesteads, farms and pastures were not hard to ransack before anyone could rally a response, and made up a pretty big chunk of inter-village/town conflicts. It's also not unheard of for a guest to turn into an enemy because of a spur of the moment change in situation.

A raid could be something as simple as beating the snot out of (or stabbing) a shepherd and legging it with some sheep that were out to pasture after all, it's not all razing villages to the ground and running off with sacks of silver. A few drunk idiots were fully capable of that sort of thing.

[HeadlessMermaid]

A raid could be something as simple as beating the snot out of (or stabbing) a shepherd and legging it with some sheep that were out to pasture after all, it's not all razing villages to the ground and running off with sacks of silver. A few drunk idiots were fully capable of that sort of thing.

I wouldn't describe that as raiding, I would describe it as rustling. Very common (within AND without blood feuds), and almost obligatory if we're talking about semi-nomadic shepherds as opposed to settled farmers. Razing villages and running off with the loot also happened, but at that point we got brigandage (or war; when soldiers "forage" in enemy territory, their actions are indistinguishable from banditry).

Bandits are a favourite topic of mine and I've looked it up in many different contexts and places and eras. And I gotta say, village 1 randomly attacking nearby village 2 is NOT a normal thing.

[Thane of Fife]

I wouldn't describe that as raiding, I would describe it as rustling.

If you look up the Wikipedia page on cattle raiding, it describes rustling as being the North American (especially cowboy) term for cattle raiding.

Certainly, when I described some people getting drunk and going on a raid, I was imagining something more along the lines of "Let's go steal/break some stuff" then "Let's go kill everyone and burn their village down."

[HeadlessMermaid]

If you look up the Wikipedia page on cattle raiding, it describes rustling as being the North American (especially cowboy) term for cattle raiding.

Huh. Well thanks for that TIL moment, I didn't know that. English is not my native language and I often lose track of American/British English differences. That said, I used the term "rustling" because I've read it in a bunch of papers and books that talk about animal theft in decidedly not North American contexts (the Mediterranean, the antiquity, the Ottomans etc), and it doesn't have to be cattle specifically, it's often sheep. I mean, I didn't make it up. :)

tl,dr; That was just a terminology mixup, no real disagreements here.

[Martin Greywolf]

Raiding

If this is a raid, then there won't be a siege, your grace. Or a fight.

The raid has a simple objective: hit the soft targets, loot everything you can and then retreat before any resistance is organized. If this is a fortified frontier village and it gets raided, then the raiders will chase off the people outside of it, abscond with the cattle and whatever there is out there, take one look at the fortified village and leave. This is the modus operandi of: vikings, mongols, other nomads, pre-Shaka Zulu Zulu warfare, ...

The point of it is not to get into a pitched battle, so unless the militia manages to ambush them, which is another very different fight, they won't see that much fighting.

Basically, a raid is a specific type of engagement, and since it wasn't specified in the opening question, I just ignored it, like so many other possibilities. Especially since this is a TTRPG forum and fighting back against a raid isn't very interesting in most TTRPGs - it's 99% scouting and prevention.

How common are fortifications

Anything from every village has them to practically non-existent. It depends on how the people perceive safety, if there are enemies nearby, if they have common cultural background... Wihtout knowing more about the context this fight takes place in, it's impossible to tell.

This gets really specific is you don't want to make assumptions, so I'll focus on area where I've read enough on the topic: 1250s Hungary. The details will vary greatly.

There is an... event of sorts that flipped the script in this period, that being the Mongol invasion, so you have pre-Mongol situation and post-Mongol situation. Pre-Mongol, villages have wicker fences and that's about it, it is only towns and larger that have most often earthworks fortifications. On the Panonian plain, those earthworks are a dug ditch material from which was used to raise a small hill, on top of which you have wooden pallisades - sometimes wood-packed dirt - wood, often just one row of wood.

Spoiler: This is a neolithic Panonian plain town, but medieval ones looked very similar

Show

Spoiler: Remains of such a hill

Show

The actual small villages were expected to use those towns/large villages (there was no formal distinction between the two) to hide if there was trouble.

On more hilly terrain, you saw less fortifications. As weird as it sounds, there was a sound logic behind that: if the enemy comes, bury your valuables, grab what you need and run for the hills. You still have some places in hills above those villages that have local names that suggest this was how they were used. The idea was that the enemy force wouldn't have the time or the inclination to chase you around the forests and you can go back down once they leave.

Spoiler: Finding pictures is hard, but it looked something like this

Show

This worked fairly well if there was a brief nomad raid, and if the attack was from the people of the same culture (Germans, Italians, Poles), people sometimes didn't even bother to run if the attacker had a decent reputation, they just buried their stuff to pretend they were poorer than they really were. This was frequent enough that there are references to this in some writings, usually in the form of "a paesant is a deceitful creature, shake them down good because they hid their stuff".

Then the Mongols came. They raided the country for two years non-stop, were organized enough to defeat earthworks and the only things that stopped them were very rough hills and Danube. Once Danube froze, only hills helped, but the villages still got raided and burned down, and since farmers were hiding, no one was making food. The population went from 3 million to 2.

The response to this was significant, but perhaps not in the way you think. Villages remained unfortified, and the fortifications of towns changed. Royal charters were made and the number of cities and towns with stone walls increased tenfold at least. The most significant response, however, was the lift of moratorium on building of stone castles - you had to have an explicit royal permission which was rarely given before, now those stone castles started to crop up everywhere.

And those refuge places in the hills were now used as good locations for castles a lot of the time.

The ordinary villages defended themselves by the means of lookout towers, that gave you enough time to seek that refuge with enough of your stuff. The consistent occupation for a prolonged time Mongol-style would still starve you, but it was much, much harder to do when maybe a hundred stone castles became about a thousand.

Spoiler: Some of those towers were multi-function, and yeah, sometimes a church tower was used

Show

This is a klopacka, a "knocking tower", from which the change of a miner's shift was announced by knocking. You can hear it here, it was done this way to make it clearly distinct from church bells.

Spoiler: Vartovka, a dedicated lookout tower from Habsburg-Ottoman wars

Show

In conclusion, Hungary went as far as village fortifications went, from "we aren't in enough danger to use these" straight to "if we try to hold something we can actually reasonably make we're dead anyway, so we won't bother". There's a lot more nuance here rather than danger==walls, no danger==no walls.

What the USA frontier tactical reasoning looked like as far as fortified villages went... I could take a guess, but I haven't done enough research to say anything with confidence.

[Grim Portent]

Huh. Well thanks for that TIL moment, I didn't know that. English is not my native language and I often lose track of American/British English differences. That said, I used the term "rustling" because I've read it in a bunch of papers and books that talk about animal theft in decidedly not North American contexts (the Mediterranean, the antiquity, the Ottomans etc), and it doesn't have to be cattle specifically, it's often sheep. I mean, I didn't make it up. :)

tl,dr; That was just a terminology mixup, no real disagreements here.

In a medieval context raids/raiding cover a surprisingly broad set of things. Border skirmishes, banditry, murder, kidnapping, nighttime assaults in general (Vlad the Impaler was known to have led several nighttime raids against Ottoman military camps for example.) Basically all clan vs clan violence in the Scottish Highlands was done through the medium of raids, with a few proper battles being the exception.

These being violent affairs meant that one raid was usually responded to with another raid, which could then bounce back and forth for generations and cover all manner of skirmishes, thefts, murders and so on. It's basically informal warfare when you get down to the basics, and common to tribal/clan based societies across a lot of the world.

It could get pretty nasty up here. Or North of here technically, me being a lowlander. A few raids were launched with the specific purpose of genocide, the goal being to murder an entire clan in their beds in a nighttime assault. Actual raze the place to the ground and stab the babies sort of stuff.

[Saint-Just]

The modern 0.5 inch sniper's rifles are easily elephant killers, and would mess up a tiger no problems at full range even on a not particularly ideal hit. They are so powerful they are outside the Geneva convention.

Unless you are joking "so powerful they are outside the Geneva conventions" is a myth. There is no limitation on power/caliber of anti-personnel weapons, and while there has been some controversy about usage of explosive ammunition against humans I think most if not all RoE allowed it even if sometimes writers felt the need to jump through the weird hoops to justify it.

[halfeye]

Unless you are joking "so powerful they are outside the Geneva conventions" is a myth. There is no limitation on power/caliber of anti-personnel weapons, and while there has been some controversy about usage of explosive ammunition against humans I think most if not all RoE allowed it even if sometimes writers felt the need to jump through the weird hoops to justify it.

It's a myth I heard in the context of an alleged sniper auto-biography saying "we weren't allowed to shoot them, so we shot the wall and killed them with the shrapnel". Maybe it is a myth. *shrugs*

[Pauly]

Unless you are joking "so powerful they are outside the Geneva conventions" is a myth. There is no limitation on power/caliber of anti-personnel weapons, and while there has been some controversy about usage of explosive ammunition against humans I think most if not all RoE allowed it even if sometimes writers felt the need to jump through the weird hoops to justify it.

Besides the Geneva Convention(s) are about how to treat combatants, POWs, non-combatants and generally how to wage war humanely.

The Hague Convention(s) are about regulating weapons of war.

If a weapon is so terrible as to be banned, most recently blinding lasers, then it will be banned under the Hague convention.

Biologial and chemical weapons are banned under the Geneca Protocol, not the Geneva Concention.

Any time someone says “[a particular conventional weapon] is banned under the Geneva Convention” it’s usually a pretty good clue they don’t know what they’re talking about, or quoting someone who didn’t know what they were talking about.

[Gnoman]

It's a myth I heard in the context of an alleged sniper auto-biography saying "we weren't allowed to shoot them, so we shot the wall and killed them with the shrapnel". Maybe it is a myth. *shrugs*

It is, but it is one that originated within the military itself - I've heard more than a few veterans relating it as a tale told in basic training.


The most likely origin is the M8C Spotting Rifle that is integrated into the M40 Recoilless Rifle. This is a .50 caliber weapon that is specially loaded with a very bright tracer. Said tracer is carefully rigged to have identical ballistics to the 106mm round, and to be highly visible. This is so you can fire off that, see where it hits, and very quickly fire the main round and run away. When this weapon was in service, soldiers issued it were instructed in very strict terms to never, ever try using the spotting rifle as an antipersonnel weapon - not for any concerns about treaty or convention, but because a very bright slow-moving projectile from a single-shot rifle is not a very good weapon for hitting people, and it gives away the position of the guy with the heavy weapon - not a problem for the intended use, because there's no hiding a recolless rifle firing anyway, but bad if your squad is up against another squad. Over time "the rules say never use this specific .50 caliber weapon against personnel" turned into "the rules say never use any .50 caliber weapon against personnel". Everything you hear about "shoot them in the belt buckle, because that's equipment and not a person" or "shoot the wall" or whatever is bunk.

[Martin Greywolf]

Everything you hear about "shoot them in the belt buckle, because that's equipment and not a person" or "shoot the wall" or whatever is bunk.

Especially because lawyers writing these agreements aren't towering morons. A cursory read of any of these treaties reveals that the weapons that are banned are banned "for use in war" (Geneva Protocol has it in its official name), because all parties are well aware what kind of loophole abuse would result if something was banned for use "against people".

If a country breaks a prohibition, though, then we see all kinds of sophistry to make it better in public perception (as opposed to legally), but we're skirting dangerously close to forum rules as is, so that's where I'll leave it.