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s did actually use war elephants a little bit, though the consensus of (later) sources is that they weren't nearly useful enough to justify the trouble
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Jun 19, 2022 03:55
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Elephants were an awesome status symbol, particularly for showing you're able to control something that big. It's the chrome-wheels humvee of the ancient world.
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Jun 19, 2022 04:11
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FishFood posted:It should be noted that War Elephants didn't disappear from the Mediterranean because they were ineffective or unreliable, but because Mediterranean powers lost access to them. The Seleucids lost their source once the Parthians took over their Eastern satrapies and they could never get a reliable breeding program started in Syria. The African elephants that Carthage, Rome, and the Ptolemies used went extinct largely because of human exploitation, and African bush elephants are entirely unsuited to being tamed, not to mention far away from the Med. war elephants continued to be used in india and southeast asia because they were a symbol of kingship, mostly. you were a more respected and powerful king if you had lots of war elephants, and if you decided to spend all that money somewhere else people made fun of you. also, as i said, the real problem with war elephants (logistics) doesn't apply in the elephants' natural range, so of course you want to have some. they are more valuable individually than cavalry, no question; it's just that once you have to stable and feed the elephants all the time, each individual elephant is going to cost the same as 20 or 30 horses. the 20 or 30 horses are generally better than 1 elephant unless the circumstances are correct or the elephants have extra value to you beyond their battle capabilities. the romans actually shut down the seleucid breeding program after they conquered syria because they didn't culturally value elephants and determined that they'd rather just feed more horses instead.
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Jun 19, 2022 04:30
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Jazerus posted:war elephants continued to be used in india and southeast asia because they were a symbol of kingship, mostly. you were a more respected and powerful king if you had lots of war elephants, and if you decided to spend all that money somewhere else people made fun of you. also, as i said, the real problem with war elephants (logistics) doesn't apply in the elephants' natural range, so of course you want to have some. they are more valuable individually than cavalry, no question; it's just that once you have to stable and feed the elephants all the time, each individual elephant is going to cost the same as 20 or 30 horses. the 20 or 30 horses are generally better than 1 elephant unless the circumstances are correct or the elephants have extra value to you beyond their battle capabilities. the romans actually shut down the seleucid breeding program after they conquered syria because they didn't culturally value elephants and determined that they'd rather just feed more horses instead. Also related is the term "White Elephant." White elephants were venerated and incredibly valuable. They were also incredibly expensive to keep up. Kings would gift them to nobles as a great honor and to bankrupt them. The nobles couldn't afford to keep them, couldn't use them to do any work and couldn't get rid of them as they were a gift from the king and a great honor to have. Thus a White Elephant is a thing that is technically valuable but is worthless to you, and you're unable to get rid of it so it just sits around gathering dust and taking up space you could use for something else.
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Jun 19, 2022 04:46
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Elephants eat a whole lot of food, but also take forever to breed, and nearly 2 years gestation, so they're just not easy at all to further domesticate. Probably hard and dangerous to train as well. I'm also not really convinced at how much utility elephants have relative to the other beasts of burden and mounts that were available in the Old World. They've got more carrying capacity, but how easy is that to even utilize? They're impressive creatures, but so are Peacocks, and they're also more of a novelty so far as domestication goes.
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Jun 19, 2022 05:45
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I have no evidence for it but I've also always wondered if elephants are smart enough to see a battle line of pikemen and just say gently caress that, I'm out no matter how well trained they are.
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Jun 19, 2022 06:02
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Tulip posted:I'd be inclined to suspect its put into practice. South Korean riots are hardcore in a way that American riots just aren't, I'd be surprised if they're doing dance routines instead of putting their experience to work. I had cross lines one of those once in Pusan from a strike to get back to a ship before it sailed. I’ve never been able to communicate how goddamn crazy that was.
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Jun 19, 2022 07:31
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Elephants are still used in some places nowadays for labour purposes, with varying levels of humaneness. Properly trained they can basically serve the purpose of construction vehicles. Of course, still having downsides in that they are living beings with needs and minds of their own.Grand Fromage posted:I have no evidence for it but I've also always wondered if elephants are smart enough to see a battle line of pikemen and just say gently caress that, I'm out no matter how well trained they are. Quite possibly, or at least to just decide to gently caress off and it's very hard to stop them. They also go absolutely nuts when they're wounded, which can be to your benefit if they're surrounded by the enemy, but if they're not... CommonShore posted:are there any records of anyone using war elephants essentially as beasts of burden most of the time? They've always struck me as, as the thread puts it, kinda gimmicky on the battlefield, but that might be offset by having elephants to carry your poo poo around and pull down trees and stuff. Rudyard Kipling wrote about animals being used as pack beasts in the Afghan War, including elephants towing artillery. Of course this is back in the day before you reliably have mass-produced diesel trucks.
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Jun 19, 2022 07:47
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Steely Glint posted:I'm not nearly as informed as Tulip but I've got Local Government in China under the Ch'ing by T'ung-Tsu Ch'u (瞿同祖) somewhere which I think is a good English-language overview... of Qing law, which is not remotely ancient. However, there are at least claims of an administrative/judicial tradition stretching through the various periods of Imperial China, so it might be worth a read regardless. Nah, there's a lot preserved from the Qin legal code and related criminal proceedings. If you want to read about it and review a collection of cases, see "Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire" by Ulrich Lau and Thies Staack. For those who would like to couple it with an ancient Hellenic collection, please see the works of the Attic Orators; I recommend Lysias, but honestly they're all good (if you can take interest in family/inheritance law cases, otherwise skip some of the drier ones).
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Jun 19, 2022 07:49
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Parmenides posted:Nah, there's a lot preserved from the Qin legal code and related criminal proceedings. If you want to read about it and review a collection of cases, see "Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire" by Ulrich Lau and Thies Staack. For those who would like to couple it with an ancient Hellenic collection, please see the works of the Attic Orators; I recommend Lysias, but honestly they're all good (if you can take interest in family/inheritance law cases, otherwise skip some of the drier ones). Thanks for the recommendations! Sounds like a trip to the library is in order
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Jun 19, 2022 08:07
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Tulip posted:Engineering/construction has absolutely been done, elephants are fantastic at pulling down trees. Logistics they are terrible for, because as happens with increasing animal size, the larger the less efficient they are at calorie management, which is to say holy poo poo they eat so much. Being logistical nightmares is a substantial mark against them and frankly understandable as a contributing factor for why the Romans had like 4 chance to adopt war elephants via conquest that they bailed on.
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Jun 19, 2022 09:35
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Imagined posted:Did war elephants ever work reliably? Seems like they were usually like these guys in old school Warhammer: that's a decent comparison Tulip posted:War elephants were fairly frequently dramatic but they're never really going to be reliable, on account of being tamed rather than domesticated. Like they have some victories: if the enemy comes near, they'll charge forwards a random distance, and after that they change direction randomly. if they hit, they'll hit hard, but after their first charge they are quite easily countered with archers
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Jun 19, 2022 12:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:that's a decent comparison What is the lightest weight armour one could fit to an elephant to make it reasonably protected against missiles?
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Jun 19, 2022 16:20
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Beefeater1980 posted:What is the lightest weight armour one could fit to an elephant to make it reasonably protected against missiles? linothorax, gambeson or the like but their eyes and lower parts of the legs would still be vulnerable
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Jun 19, 2022 16:39
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If you want to get REALLY lightweight I'm thinking attaching birds to the elephant somehow.
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Jun 19, 2022 17:26
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Just gonna recommend the ACOUP article on war elephants to people that don't know it: Part 1, part 2, part 3. I feel like most of its core points have already been brought up but it'll go into all of them in more depth than was discussed here. IIRC part 1 is about elephants in war in general, 2 is about why e.g. Rome and China stopped using them, 3 is about why some other states carried on.
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Jun 19, 2022 17:36
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pics of elephant armor: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17835/this-ancient-suit-of-elephant-armor-holds-the-record-for-the-largest-of-its-kind didn't know that they had tusk blades
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Jun 19, 2022 17:40
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ChubbyChecker posted:didn't know that they had tusk blades well, it makes sense, those fuckers love to hit things with their tusks similar to wild boars (now that's an idea: tame wild pigs and equip them with armor and blades, with their intelligence-level, they'd make almost decent soldiers on their own, even  )
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Jun 19, 2022 18:07
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I just saw a claim that Chinese development of cannon was hindered by the thickness of East Asian city walls; is that true?
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Jun 19, 2022 18:11
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Lawman 0 posted:I just saw a claim that Chinese development of cannon was hindered by the thickness of East Asian city walls; is that true? i think the argument runs that chinese walls were often big fat earthwork walls instead of the stone-faced castle and city walls of europe. earthworks are how you fortify against cannons in a star fort and similar early-modern fortifications, so if the chinese were already using them then cannons wouldn't exactly be useful for punching through those walls. no idea how much direct evidence there is for this but it does make sense
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Jun 19, 2022 18:22
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Jazerus posted:i think the argument runs that chinese walls were often big fat earthwork walls instead of the stone-faced castle and city walls of europe. earthworks are how you fortify against cannons in a star fort and similar early-modern fortifications, so if the chinese were already using them then cannons wouldn't exactly be useful for punching through those walls. no idea how much direct evidence there is for this but it does make sense But wouldn't they just have developed better mortars instead? Mortars don't care about walls, and they certainly work faster than catapults.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:25
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The argument is that technology is path dependent. The cannons of 1450 weren't very good against Chinese walls and the guns of 1450 weren't very good against steppe nomads, who were some of china's most routine foes. So why spend a bunch of resources on a dead end technology? Meanwhile in Europe you had castles that were extremely vulnerable to early cannons and they were fighting opponents that muskets are useful against, so you have a lot of people thinking about how to make better guns. Even then, exploding shells that were good enough to tear through a good star fort didn't develop for several hundred years.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:38
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cheetah7071 posted:The argument is that technology is path dependent. The cannons of 1450 weren't very good against Chinese walls and the guns of 1450 weren't very good against steppe nomads, who were some of china's most routine foes. So why spend a bunch of resources on a dead end technology? Wikipedia tells me the siege of Qizhou in 1221 saw heavy use of firebombs thrown into the city with catapults, which eventually weakened the defenders so much the attackers forced the walls. With examples of explosive projectiles in massed use this early, I'm fairly sure the Chinese would have made good use of mortars, which makes me believe they may even have developed some later, but I don't know. My cursory Wikipedia-search didn't turn up any 15th-century mortars, just the really funny observation that the Chinese put explosives in loving everything. Ancient Chinese battles must have been like WW1, just with people wearing even fancier uniforms. 
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Jun 19, 2022 20:17
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Isn't the issue that nobody could figure out how to fire an exploding shell out of a gunpowder weapon (without it blowing up in the operator's face often as not)? Coehorn does in 1701, but it's something that might not have been possible with earlier metallurgy.
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Jun 19, 2022 20:35
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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What was that seige defense weapon that was basically a firework on the end of a pole? Something you could reliably give to conscripts and increase their effectiveness without getting too complicated
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Jun 19, 2022 20:43
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Benagain posted:What was that seige defense weapon that was basically a firework on the end of a pole? Something you could reliably give to conscripts and increase their effectiveness without getting too complicated I could see that martial arts would get pretty exciting with explosive-tipped spears.
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Jun 19, 2022 20:54
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PittTheElder posted:Isn't the issue that nobody could figure out how to fire an exploding shell out of a gunpowder weapon (without it blowing up in the operator's face often as not)? Could be, I tried finding more about mortars, but apparently early versions of mortars indeed fired fullmetal or stone projectiles, not bombs. So that's something not even we Europeans got right until the 1700-hundreds, I suppose. According to this source, Karl V. had a big mortar in his arsenal capable of firing 100-pound balls back in 1540, but again nothing about explosive projectiles.
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Jun 19, 2022 21:01
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Here's a cross section of Xi'an's walls:  Rammed earth covered with stone. Really the VERY vertical stone walls seem to be a peculiarly European phenomena: good for preventing escalade, but bad other forms of defense. Here's one of my favorite photos, Bukhara:  This enables you to make things much taller (good for stopping ramps) and tougher (good for stopping mines) but much easier to climb in a hasty escalade. OK enough about that. China did figure out bombards at a fairly early point (and hand cannons by the end of the 13th century). Notably one of the most important engagements in all of Chinese history, Lake Poyang in 1363, was a naval gunpowder engagement with cannons and whatnot. If the question is about Chinese cannon not being as good as European ones by like, the first Opium War, I'm not really sure because I don't know enough about the European side of those developments to say why European cannons got so radically better between 1500 and 1800. My two guesses are that the Qing military in general was kind of a shambles by 1800, not just falling behind on military science but in some ways actively regressing (the Qing were suffering by that point, though the really bad years were still in front of them); and that Chinese metallurgy had started falling behind. Pommeranz talks fairly extensively about the problems China faced with steel manufacture in the early modern period but I don't really have the quotes on hand right this second.
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Jun 19, 2022 21:15
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you need to not only have a shell that will explode, you need it to explode at the right time I believe the earliest useful ones worked by exploding in midair above the walls to shower the defenders in shrapnel--these are the bombs bursting in air from the american national anthem. Bombs with enough force to burst through an earthwork fort didn't exist until people had already stopped building earthwork forts, I think
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Jun 19, 2022 21:33
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it always weirded me out that marcus antonius stabbed himself in the gut. why not the heart or anywhere else? i know the romans had basic surgical technology so didn't they know where to stab for a quick death?
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Jun 19, 2022 21:57
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Cato reference?
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Jun 19, 2022 22:01
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Shibawanko posted:it always weirded me out that marcus antonius stabbed himself in the gut. why not the heart or anywhere else? i know the romans had basic surgical technology so didn't they know where to stab for a quick death? Seems to have been a common place to stab yourself for suicide in the Roman world. Both Marcus Antonius and Cato the Younger did it that way, and according to legend, so did Lucretia. My guess as to why not atab yourself in the heart is because your ribs are in the way, and it can be tough to stab yourself there. I don't know for sure, though.
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Jun 19, 2022 22:02
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Severing the arteries in the gut isn't going to be all that slow if you move the blade out of the way afterward.
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Jun 19, 2022 22:05
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“Why is it China that invented firearms, but Europe that perfected them” is straight the central question of Kenneth Chase’s “Firearms: A Global History to 1700” which I actually happen to be reading atm. I have not yet gotten far enough to properly understand his conclusion, but from what I’ve read so far he ties it fundamentally to steppe nomads. In basically everywhere in Eurasia except for its far west (w. Europe) and east (Japan), nomads — against whom early firearms were of limited utility at best — were the preeminent foe from ~1200 onwards, so the motivation to develop firearms out of their cumbersome early incarnations was lacking. When China was divided they were useful for fighting within itself, like at Lake Poyang, but once it was united, the vast majority of its military resources got out to work defending the north. Likewise, while they can be immensely useful at sea, Ming withdrew from that early in the dynasty and Chinese naval power never really recovered.
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Jun 19, 2022 22:12
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Koramei posted:“Why is it China that invented firearms, but Europe that perfected them” is straight the central question of Kenneth Chase’s “Firearms: A Global History to 1700” which I actually happen to be reading atm. I have not yet gotten far enough to properly understand his conclusion, but from what I’ve read so far he ties it fundamentally to steppe nomads. This is not entirely correct, the Mughals in India became well-known for their artillery, often mentioned in the same breath with the Ottomans. And it's not like India is magically protected from nomads, the north at least was wide open to them. (Tamerlan) In fact, Tamerlan turned out to be the ancestor to the founder of the Mughal Empire, which turns the question on its head: If early firearms worked so bad against nomads, why did the nomads want them so badly?
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Jun 19, 2022 22:44
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Libluini posted:This is not entirely correct, the Mughals in India became well-known for their artillery, often mentioned in the same breath with the Ottomans. And it's not like India is magically protected from nomads, the north at least was wide open to them. (Tamerlan) I think you've missed the central point. Guns are bad at fighting nomads, therefore nomads would be more likely to adopt them when fighting settled cultures as opposed to settled people who need to fight nomads. Also the Mughals came about centuries after firearms had started to dominate warfare in Europe and India in general was less unified than China so they wouldn't get as complacent with their warfare while all these innovations in Europe are happening.
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Jun 19, 2022 22:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think you've missed the central point. Guns are bad at fighting nomads, therefore nomads would be more likely to adopt them when fighting settled cultures as opposed to settled people who need to fight nomads. Fair enough, but are there actual examples of firearms whiffing badly in battles against nomads, or is this all just post-facto explanation for firearms development crapping out in China?
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Jun 19, 2022 23:16
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I don't know the answer, but I'm wondering if the Ottomans had their developed gunpowder army by the time they went up against Tamerlane (and lost, badly)
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Jun 19, 2022 23:19
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Libluini posted:Fair enough, but are there actual examples of firearms whiffing badly in battles against nomads, or is this all just post-facto explanation for firearms development crapping out in China? Early firearms just aren't that useful against cavalry, especially against highly mobile targets like steppe nomads. They're heavy and inaccurate, and slow to reload. They're an anti-infantry weapon used for firing into dense formations and or at closer ranges.
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Jun 20, 2022 02:00
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Libluini posted:This is not entirely correct, the Mughals in India became well-known for their artillery, often mentioned in the same breath with the Ottomans. And it's not like India is magically protected from nomads, the north at least was wide open to them. (Tamerlan) I might be getting it mixed up with a different time, but wasn't Northern India blanketed with fortifications at this point in time? That would explain the desire to advance gunpowder artillery.
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Jun 20, 2022 02:46
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