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Goddamn I wanna see the elephants on a Roman boat crossing the channel.
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Dec 22, 2023 20:08
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Bovington Tank Museum now trolling me specifically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9-EJKnRjU
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Dec 22, 2023 21:26
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how much stuff did martin caidin invent for his book samurai! about saburo sakai?
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Dec 22, 2023 21:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:On top of all that, Elephants have a horrible breeding cycle where it's two years of gestation, one baby at a time, four years between pregnancies, and 9 years to reach maturity, as opposed to horses being mature at 3 years and gestating in just one year. It's such a sunk cost to just be breeding elephants at all, you can barely even think about selectively breeding them to get real domestication going, much less do all the warping of biology that we do with dogs. Nenonen posted:Horse was domesticated some 3500 BCE which seems to have been ample time to get to where we are now. Elephants are not much later, but they are considered to be just semi domisticated. My dummy understanding is that people would capture elephants from the wild time to time to use as work animals and other purposes and try to make them reproduce if possible, but since it takes a lot more work to manage elephants then any long term breeding program would take steady resources for a long time, which could and would be ruined by any historical mishap such as a war, plague, famine or the governing city burning down. Meanwhile a band of nomads could run a basic breeding program without any infrastructure. It would soon come to the point where people wouldn't try to capture and redomesticate wild horses (equus ferus) because it would be like trying to domesticate wolves when we have dogs. Meanwhile elephants have remained just elephants, if you need another one you can find one in the jungle. elephants weren't bred like horses, they were captured
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Dec 22, 2023 21:56
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Gort posted:The domesticated fox breeding program is interesting. I wonder how they avoided inbreeding when they only had 30 male foxes and 100 vixens to begin with? inbreeding is the whole point if you want to breed some animal for a certain purpose that's why mutts are way more healthy than some habsburgian pugs
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Dec 22, 2023 21:58
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VostokProgram posted:I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from elephants. Whatever people may tell him, the elephant will always get through. The Romans entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to trample everybody else and nobody was going to trample them. They sowed the elephant and now they are going to reap the herd.
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Dec 22, 2023 22:48
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Nessus posted:I remember that bit from "Dumbo" I legit could see the Romans creating their own Luftwaffe if they had realized the power of flying elephants
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Dec 22, 2023 22:52
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In 1861, King Rama IV offered to send elephants to the United States, as they make good labourers, and herds of elephants could replace the dwindling bison population. Lincoln politely declined. There's a myth that the elephants were war elephants, but that was never the original offer; Lincoln privately joked that the only use for elephants in the US would be to stomp out the rebels.
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Dec 23, 2023 04:04
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Well now I’ll forever be heartbroken that the Civil War didn’t involve Confederates getting routed by war elephants.
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Dec 23, 2023 05:17
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Too bad that the elephant/donkey symbols weren't established yet, maybe Republicans would have accepted the deal as an election stunt. US army elephants would have looked good pulling cannons and ammo wagons in parades, at least.
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Dec 23, 2023 10:38
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Nah, don't need to inflict that bullshit on the elephants. They're shockingly intelligent creatures that do poo poo like mourn dead members of their herd. They've been shown to suffer from PTSD like symptoms when bad poo poo goes down, too. Don't get me wrong, ultimately the human suffering is greater. And I'm sure horses get hosed up, maybe there's horse PTSD I dunno. But those are wild animals, not ones bread in captivity. No need to capture them only to transport them to Antietam or whatever other hosed up battlefield is wallowing in blood this week. Let the big fellow be.
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Dec 23, 2023 14:46
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A bridge even Turtledove hasn't crossed.
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Dec 23, 2023 17:01
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The Russian Empire should have sent over some of their cloned mastodons to fight the confederates
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Dec 23, 2023 17:05
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Brawnfire posted:The Russian Empire should have sent over some of their cloned mastodons to fight the confederates Considering how real-life Russian history went, I'd fully expect any cloning program to end day 1 with the mass execution of all geneticists because the Nenonen posted:Given that Cheka was founded by Lenin I assume that you mean they should have used harsher language about the bloodsucking Romanovs You are of course right. For some reason, my brain, being build by the lowest bidder, tends to combine things that sound similarly. In this case, my mind wrongly connected Tsars and Tscheka, but it should have been the Okhrana Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 17:50
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Libluini posted:Considering how real-life Russian history went, I'd fully expect any cloning program to end day 1 with the mass execution of all geneticists because the Cheka overheard them saying something mildly bad about the Tsar. Given that Cheka was founded by Lenin I assume that you mean they should have used harsher language about the bloodsucking Romanovs  (Okhrana was the imperial secret service)
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Dec 23, 2023 18:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:Nah, don't need to inflict that bullshit on the elephants. They're shockingly intelligent creatures that do poo poo like mourn dead members of their herd. They've been shown to suffer from PTSD like symptoms when bad poo poo goes down, too. I assume these scenarios are in the hypothetical world where we actually successfully domesticated elephants. For non-military purposes, elephants are slower than horses and about the same speed as cows, and are less efficient for how much they eat relative to how much they haul. I guess they're probably better with rough terrain, and they have some advantages for some specialized jobs like logging because they can do a lot of complicated refined manipulation with their trunks and tusks.
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Dec 23, 2023 18:22
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Funny tho it be i don’t think you could actually scare elephants with lions. There’s plenty of nature docs you can watch where elephants encounter lions, and what they do is form a 360 phalanx of tusks and lion-proof skin around the calves. They stand their ground and smash lions for their babies 
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Dec 23, 2023 23:29
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Scare elephants with mice instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpTSA_25wGE
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Dec 23, 2023 23:35
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The Camel Corps could’ve been a thing though
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Dec 24, 2023 02:07
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Nessus posted:The Camel Corps could’ve been a thing though This is a lucky strike country
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Dec 24, 2023 02:09
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Ainsley McTree posted:This is a lucky strike country "Hey, Archimedes, how's the Roman fleet?" "It's toasted!"
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Dec 24, 2023 02:33
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Nessus posted:The Camel Corps could’ve been a thing though The Red Army mobilized camels when there was a shortage of draft horses in 1942. One of them even made it to Berlin.
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Dec 24, 2023 03:05
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Red Army mobilized camels when there was a shortage of draft horses in 1942. One of them even made it to Berlin.
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Dec 24, 2023 03:15
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Nessus posted:The Camel Corps could’ve been a thing though What is the carrying capacity of camels vs horses or mules?
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Dec 24, 2023 03:49
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MikeC posted:What is the carrying capacity of camels vs horses or mules? Similar, but you have to be extremely careful when loading straw
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Dec 24, 2023 05:33
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Cyrano4747 posted:Similar, but you have to be extremely careful when loading straw 
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Dec 24, 2023 05:41
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Buuuuu
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Dec 24, 2023 06:11
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Red Army mobilized camels when there was a shortage of draft horses in 1942. One of them even made it to Berlin. Here's one trying to get a look at Vasily Grossman's newspaper:
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Dec 24, 2023 12:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:I assume these scenarios are in the hypothetical world where we actually successfully domesticated elephants. To be fair, they also terrify the gently caress out of non-trained horses (a smell thing and i assume also just the size), which seems to have been about 50% of their military utility as far as I can tell.
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Dec 24, 2023 14:18
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ChubbyChecker posted:inbreeding is the whole point if you want to breed some animal for a certain purpose Yeah, inbreeding is a way to amplify traits effectively, for good or ill, though I recall hearing once canines seem to have more "flexible" chromosomes than many animals, so it's easier to get mutations (and therefore different breeds) out of them. The big thing from the fox experiment I remember was that merely selecting for animals which were calmer interacting with humans (i.e. the ones less likely to bite/threaten primitive humans back when domestication started and thus more likely to be tolerated around humans) was enough to get foxes with traits similar to dogs (like more "puppy" features in adults and I think reading human gestures/words better?). Suggests why they were domesticated so early; even basic human desire to tame whatever cute fluffy animal they might see would be a good first step towards doing that. Nessus posted:The Camel Corps could’ve been a thing though Hmm, dumb question, but can camels be trained to charge like horses can? Trying to recall if I've ever heard of them specifically being used as cavalry fighting mounts, most of the mentions I can think of were about them as decent pack animals in the appropriate environments. Maybe skirmishing/ranged platforms?
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Dec 26, 2023 05:41
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_the_Suez_Canal It seems the Bikaner Camel Corps engaged in a successful camel-cavalry (camelry? dromidarii?) charge in 1915 around the Suez Canal. As it was successful, the camel cavalry charge seems to be the most successful of all tactics, with a 100% success rate. Taste the flavor.
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Dec 26, 2023 06:02
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Camelry.
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Dec 26, 2023 06:04
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Nessus posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_the_Suez_Canal camels are still used in the desert bit of the india-pakistan border
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Dec 26, 2023 06:06
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bob dobbs is dead posted:camels are still used in the desert bit of the india-pakistan border
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Dec 26, 2023 06:14
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The Parthians had camel-mounted cataphracts which I'm pretty sure means you can train camels to charge given that's cataphracts' whole thing.
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Dec 26, 2023 06:37
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Seems like the best method would be to get the camels to do a spit attack just before impact so the enemy is blinded/grossed out.
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Dec 26, 2023 13:47
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FishFood posted:The Parthians had camel-mounted cataphracts which I'm pretty sure means you can train camels to charge given that's cataphracts' whole thing. That’s badass.
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Dec 26, 2023 16:11
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According to Herodotus the smell of camels scared horses, and this seems to be supported by modern evidence. Horses get easily startled if they encounter something strange and new, but can also be taught to tolerate them. So if your enemy has horses that haven't met camels and you have camels that have encountered horses, then your cam-cav has a potential shock effect.
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Dec 26, 2023 18:55
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Nenonen posted:According to Herodotus the smell of camels scared horses, and this seems to be supported by modern evidence. Horses get easily startled if they encounter something strange and new, but can also be taught to tolerate them. So if your enemy has horses that haven't met camels and you have camels that have encountered horses, then your cam-cav has a potential shock effect.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:23
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Being charged by camelphracts sounds like the kind of thing that would cause a pretty speedy rout if the folks on the receiving end aren't aware of what camelphracts sound like given the lack of hooves.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:37
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