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Deptfordx posted:Is there an age limit? From glancing at the wiki, it appears that under current guidelines that would be considered draft evasion and you'd be subject to imprisonment for two to three years due to evading for 17+ years. You also cannot renounce your citizenship prior to service. Basically if you're a male citizen of Singapore (or a second generation permanent resident) you're expected to serve for 24 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_service_in_Singapore
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Jul 20, 2021 20:38
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e: actually having trouble finding where I got this from, it doesn't seem to be on ACOUP, so maybe I'm spouting bullshit. I'd be curious to know some non-osprey sources on ancient siegecraft though, there seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around.
Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jul 20, 2021 |
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Jul 20, 2021 21:39
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Tulip posted:You can also use a catapult. Since your catapult will be on walls, it will be at a general advantage vs a catapult on the ground. Plus you're more likely to have it ranged out and so on. Or you can put it BEHIND the walls where it isn't subject to direct fire...
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Jul 20, 2021 21:44
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this is kind of a weird question - i was catsitting today and enjoying that childlike glee that playing with a laser pointer so the cat can chase the dot. i remember doing similar as a child with a reflective object on a sunny day. i wonder how old that is, like, what is the first recorded instance of someone doing that, or it turning up on a painting or something? does it only start happening when we have mass production of glass and such or do we have ancient sources going on about what a fun time it is when glitter something shiny in front of a cat, like we do with some dog guides? like we've been playing the same game with string and cats for millennia, similar to what we have with sticks and dogs . i'm curious how old it is?
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Jul 20, 2021 22:08
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CoolCab posted:this is kind of a weird question - i was catsitting today and enjoying that childlike glee that playing with a laser pointer so the cat can chase the dot. i remember doing similar as a child with a reflective object on a sunny day. i wonder how old that is, like, what is the first recorded instance of someone doing that, or it turning up on a painting or something? does it only start happening when we have mass production of glass and such or do we have ancient sources going on about what a fun time it is when glitter something shiny in front of a cat, like we do with some dog guides? Probably as old or older than cat domestication, you could probably do similar poo poo with anything reflective or shiny enough, beetle wing casings can get really reflective and gently caress me up on survey sometimes. But it's one of those things I don't think you will get a solid answer on.
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Jul 20, 2021 22:15
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Not sure if there were attracted by reflections, but there are some interesting paw prints: Roman roof tile, AD 100. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-33687439  Medieval equivalent of snuggling up on your laptop. 15th century which counts as medieval since it's before the 1922 collapse of the Roman empire
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Jul 20, 2021 23:01
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Koramei posted:e: actually having trouble finding where I got this from, it doesn't seem to be on ACOUP, so maybe I'm spouting bullshit. I'd be curious to know some non-osprey sources on ancient siegecraft though, there seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around. One of the things that makes it difficult to research, is that ancient sources generally don't talk about siege engines very much. Modern readers are frequently most interested in that topic, but ancient authors did not usually share that fascination. For example, Thucydides provides a very long and detailed account of the siege of Syracuse, but spends almost no time talking about siege engines. The vast majority of the account is about battles fought over Athenian siege walls they built to try to surround the city, and over Syracusean counter-walls built to block the Athenian siege walls. We know siege engines were present at the siege of Syracuse, since they are referenced a few times, but they are very much in the background of the story. They were probably used to carry troops to the walls being attacked, but we don't really know, since what exactly they were used for was not described in any detail. In Xenophon's history Hellenika,, which picks up where Thucydides ended, siege engines are mentioned exactly twice. Thucydides and Xenophon are writing before or roughly around the same time as the invention of catapults in the Mediterranean though, so siege engines were much less important to them. Accounts of Alexander's campaigns feature siege engines a bit more prominently, since he had new and cool catapults, but they still receive relatively little attention.
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Jul 21, 2021 00:03
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Xenophon mentions military engineering (beyond like, the layout of walls) exactly one time that I can remember in Hellenika. The Spartans were laying siege to Mantineia, which had a river flowing throught he center of town and the walls went over the river. The Spartans dammed the river and caued the area inside the walls to flood. Notably, he didn't mention this because he thought it was particularly notable from a military or historical perspective, but because he wanted to deliver a snarky punchline:quote:This is how matters turned out at Mantineia, and men became wiser from this incident in one way at least: that one should not have a river flow between one's walls.
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Jul 21, 2021 00:08
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cheetah7071 posted:Xenophon mentions military engineering (beyond like, the layout of walls) exactly one time that I can remember in Hellenika. There is another time he mentions it, but he provides so little information that we can learn almost nothing from it. quote:When he learned that the enemy were intending to bring up their siege-engines by the race-course which leads from the Lyceum, he ordered all his teams to haul stones each large enough to load a wagon and drop them at whatever spot in the course each driver pleased. When this had been done, each single one of the stones caused the enemy a great deal of trouble. These siege engines being brought are never mentioned again. All we can learn about siege engines from this passage is that they cannot be moved across a road when large stones are blocking the path, which we could have assumed without Xenophon telling us.
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Jul 21, 2021 00:36
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OK the talk about rivers reminded me of one of my favorite ancient battles, Jinyang. The Eastern Zhou Dynasty is probably the most 'feudal' era of Chinese history, where the ruling Zhou frequently had to appease their own vassals and even appointed some as being the "hegemon" amongst the vassals with the Zhou basically admitting they were mostly doing religious rather than temporal. The really really big vassal was the Jin, who were in a lot of ways the most feudal, and thus had their own set of dominant clans, and after several deades this turned into a civil war. It eventually came down to four, and three of them, the Zhi Wei and Han, ganged up on the Zhao. The Zhi were kind of the imperious ringleaders, effectively bullying the Wei and Han into the alliance. The Zhao were in a bad position and retreated into their capital, Jinyang. The allied forces started a miserable siege. After 3 months of failures, they settled in for a long haul and then a year later diverted the Fen river into the city, flooding everything under three stories. This ground on for two more years. The Zhao sent out some agents into the camp, on the basis that the Han and Wei commanders were more scared of Zhi than of Zhao. Which turned out to be well founded, and they coordinated a night time attack where some agents would seize the dam, and then re-diverted the river into the Zhi camp in the middle of the night. The leader of the Zhi clan's skull was turned into a wine cup, and the state of Jin was divided equally, which is considered as good a point as any for the start of the Warring States Period.
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Jul 21, 2021 04:01
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2 years of siege? drat I knew some could last but you'd think they'd run out of food supplies at that point. Did they have decent farmland inside the castle or were they able to smuggle in supplies? Or did they just have like a massive granary?
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Jul 21, 2021 05:53
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Some places could grow food inside the walls, some had good stores, some had access to food that couldn't be cut off (fishing in a river, for example, or supply by sea). Also most sieges were not perfect. Particularly if the target was a big city, or the geography wasn't cooperative, you couldn't always physically surround the entire city with your army. You'd do the best you could and then rely on patrols to maintain the siege around the rest, which opens opportunities to get in supplies/go foraging/raid the besieging army's supplies/whatever.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:04
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The ability for fortified positions to resist siege and the ability for armies to besiege were both constantly in flux and you get wild swings in the duration and success rate of sieges based on region and period. Like a Roman army had basically no trouble storming pretty much any walled city of the period, and the walls only really served to delay progress long enough to hope a relief force showed up. A few hundred years earlier, the Spartan army would walk up to the Athenian walls every summer, go "well I guess there's nothing we can do here" and then go home for the season. And I read a book once which asserted that a 14th century French army was basically incapable of either storming a fortified position (defensive technology having far outstripped siege technology), or of starving them out (because the cities/castles could store food for longer than the army's supplies would last). So the only way they accomplished anything was by going up and saying "sure would be a shame if we kept you penned in all season. That would be awful. Say, if you swear fealty to us, we'll just move on." And that worked >50% of the time, because enduring a siege was miserable even if you won.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Some places could grow food inside the walls, some had good stores, some had access to food that couldn't be cut off (fishing in a river, for example, or supply by sea). Also most sieges were not perfect. Particularly if the target was a big city, or the geography wasn't cooperative, you couldn't always physically surround the entire city with your army. You'd do the best you could and then rely on patrols to maintain the siege around the rest, which opens opportunities to get in supplies/go foraging/raid the besieging army's supplies/whatever. Yeah I mean, that's why I asked 'did they smuggle in supplies?' I figured. Just wasn't sure in this particular case, seems pretty long to hold out even then!
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Jul 21, 2021 06:20
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Candia lasted 21 years
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Jul 21, 2021 06:25
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Candia lasted 21 years drat. And that was apparently the Ottomans sieging a star fort? I know what I'll be reading about tonight. Wikipedia says its the second longest, with Ceuta being even longer as a 30 year siege. The sheer logistics of that make me sweat.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:27
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I think there's a plausible read where the peloponnesian war is an attempt by Sparta, after some initial bumbling, to complete the siege of Athens (after which Athens surrendered basically immediately). Even if you accept a partial siege as counting though, the period of initial bumbling was long enough I'm not sure it'd be 21 years long.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:29
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FreudianSlippers posted:The Norse would frequently ride horses into battle but dismount before the actual combat started. Norse or nordic? Asking 'cause the new consensus is norse ought to pertain only to people from old norway (so also parts of sweden and finland).
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Jul 21, 2021 06:48
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That's really not a good example of a long siege, most of all because there were periodic cessations of hostilities and at one point an eight year peace treaty (for certain definitions of peace).
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Jul 21, 2021 06:51
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cheetah7071 posted:I think there's a plausible read where the peloponnesian war is an attempt by Sparta, after some initial bumbling, to complete the siege of Athens (after which Athens surrendered basically immediately). Even if you accept a partial siege as counting though, the period of initial bumbling was long enough I'm not sure it'd be 21 years long. 99% of the so-called "Siege of Athens" here was not an actual siege though. Sparta only pursued conventional siege tactics for a very brief time in 404, after the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont cut off access to food shipments from the Black Sea. Before Athens lost access to the Black Sea, there was no point in Sparta trying to besiege the city, since they knew they could never starve Athens out. After the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont was destroyed, the siege was just a formality to keep up pressure during surrender negotiations, since both sides knew Athens no longer had any access to food.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:52
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There's a reason armchair generals study tactics, actual generals study logistics. Can only wonder what it's like growing up in a multi-decade siege.
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Jul 21, 2021 07:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a reason armchair generals study tactics, actual generals study logistics. Well, the good news is that a lot of the time they wouldn't have to endure it for a long time! Wrt to Candia, neither side had complete control of the sea so the Venetians & allies were able to resupply Candia and the Ottomans were able to keep their siege forces resupplied. It was pretty grim on both sides, with each one having periods of not being able to re-supply their forces properly.
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Jul 21, 2021 15:33
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 2nd century Roman sardonyx.
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Jul 21, 2021 17:32
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Banana Canada posted:Were those ballista things with ropes attached in Kingdom of Heaven just invented whole cloth for the movie? I honestly have not heard of siege towers being taken down this way in any actual battles. I've never encountered this in a source. Guibert of Nogent mentions two traction trebuchets (operated by body weight rather than a permanently attached counterweight) used by the women of Amiens to destroy a siege tower, and Jean de Joinville mentions a catapult flinging Greek fire for the same purpose. Joinville also mentions a "frame-mounted crossbow" at one point but it's being used to kill rather than fling grapples. Tulip posted:This is one of my favorite pieces of medieval art: This cannot be mounted on the walls because it is a traction trebuchet, and you'd need room to put people in addition to loading it. *Maybe* on the top of a wide keep, but from everything I understand the sort of motion that trebuchets produce would basically shake apart any masonry beneath them. feedmegin posted:Or you can put it BEHIND the walls where it isn't subject to direct fire... This is a smarter idea. The 80 women operating the above-mentioned trebuchets at Amiens were nearly all killed by arrow fire after they took out the two siege towers. Also keep in mind siege towers are not always these wheeled things for deploying soldiers. In fact in the majority of sources I've seen they're really just temporary fortifications that offer a high position for launching missiles.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:24
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The mention of Greek Fire got me to wondering: just how long was it used for? And when would the how-to for making it be considered lost?
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Jul 21, 2021 19:37
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Rosemont posted:The mention of Greek Fire got me to wondering: just how long was it used for? And when would the how-to for making it be considered lost? It was invented in 672 and the last unambiguous source mention of Greek fire in use I can find was during the reign of Alexios I Komnenos. Couple of mentions if it from the Crusades but it's unclear if it's actually Greek fire or just something similar. So it was in use for roughly four and a half centuries for a conservative estimate and maybe an extra couple hundred years.
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Jul 21, 2021 21:25
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Tias posted:Norse or nordic? Asking 'cause the new consensus is norse ought to pertain only to people from old norway (so also parts of sweden and finland). I fail to see how this is a a meaningful distinction.
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Jul 21, 2021 22:23
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FreudianSlippers posted:I fail to see how this is a a meaningful distinction. it excludes the danes, which to the norwegians is the most meaningful distinction
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Jul 21, 2021 22:30
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I mean some contemporary sources (at least the medieval Icelandic lawbook Grágás and also some other poo poo I've read that I can't remember the specifics off right now) call Old Norse ,,Dönsk tunga" or The Danish Tongue. So if anything the Danes are the most Norse of the Norse until they underwent Germanisation at least. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 23:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:This cannot be mounted on the walls because it is a traction trebuchet, and you'd need room to put people in addition to loading it. *Maybe* on the top of a wide keep, but from everything I understand the sort of motion that trebuchets produce would basically shake apart any masonry beneath them. Do you have any source for this claim? I've used a traction trebuchet and while i wouldn't be keen on putting it on my own back, I struggle to believe that even poor masonry has much to fear.
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Jul 22, 2021 13:28
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Grand Fromage posted:It was invented in 672 and the last unambiguous source mention of Greek fire in use I can find was during the reign of Alexios I Komnenos. Couple of mentions if it from the Crusades but it's unclear if it's actually Greek fire or just something similar. So it was in use for roughly four and a half centuries for a conservative estimate and maybe an extra couple hundred years. So it lasted for quite a long time, then. In the past whenever I came across mentions of the stuff it was just to say that it was used. Granted, I don't often dive deep into ancient history and I've more or less only have a casual knowledge of the times discussed in this thread, so there's a lot of things I don't know. That's why I lurk this thread rather than post much in it. The discussions in here have been pretty fascinating.
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Jul 22, 2021 16:16
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Rosemont posted:So it lasted for quite a long time, then. In the past whenever I came across mentions of the stuff it was just to say that it was used. Yep. It gets somewhat overstated as a superweapon, but in a world of wooden ships the Roman fleet having flamethrowers was certainly quite the advantage. It was also used in grenades and handheld flamethrowers.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:05
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FreudianSlippers posted:I fail to see how this is a a meaningful distinction. Norse means 'from these specific parts', and since these specific parts include Norway and Iceland (which was settled by Norwegians), the sagas are often known as 'norse mythology', which doesn't make a lick of sense when referring to non-Norwegian scandinavians?
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Jul 22, 2021 18:46
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Tias posted:Norse means 'from these specific parts', and since these specific parts include Norway and Iceland (which was settled by Norwegians), the sagas are often known as 'norse mythology', which doesn't make a lick of sense when referring to non-Norwegian scandinavians? I always understood "Norse" to refer to, at least in English, all medieval Northern Germanic speaking groups in general, so inclusive of Danes, Getes, and a whole host of Snorris and Ragnars. It was a replacement term for "Viking" once that was understood to refer specifically to raiders/warriors.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:35
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Agree. I'm Norwegian, interested (but not learned) in history and I've never heard of any scholar or popular definition of Norse (norrøn) that excludes Swedes or Danes. It could well be that the Norsemen's use of "Norse" was more specific than how we use it today, but that's not what it means today. It's perhaps a totum pro parte thing, where a part describes the whole. Today it is mostly used to define the language. The culture and age is most often described as viking, but not everyone who lived in the viking age did viking raids. Not everyone in the bronze age had bronze, etc.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:53
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Ola posted:Agree. I'm Norwegian, interested (but not learned) in history and I've never heard of any scholar or popular definition of Norse (norrøn) that excludes Swedes or Danes. It could well be that the Norsemen's use of "Norse" was more specific than how we use it today, but that's not what it means today. It's perhaps a totum pro parte thing, where a part describes the whole. everyone in the stone age had stone tho, that one is okay
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Jul 23, 2021 00:54
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Tunicate posted:everyone in the stone age had stone tho, that one is okay Not neccesarily. Australia for example is very short on suitable stone and stone tools were mostly traded over large distances.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:56
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The Lone Badger posted:Not neccesarily. Australia for example is very short on suitable stone and stone tools were mostly traded over large distances. Interesting, you have a source for this? Good quality poo poo (Im looking at you obsidian) can get traded large distances regardless of the availability of local sources because its really nice to flake with and would make a solid trade good. Then you get material selection based on things other than physical properties which probably happened but I am unaware of a really solid work about it. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 01:05
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bad stone is still stone 
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Jul 23, 2021 01:06
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Tunicate posted:bad stone is still stone It's not rock science.
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Jul 23, 2021 01:11
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