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Speaking of which, what happens if you're a Spartan and your shield breaks? Not sure you're even allowed to drop it 
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Mar 2, 2013 23:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkhpqAGdZPc This is a pretty interesting video linked from the milhist thread. 2 things I haven't appreciated: 1) Viking roundshields weren't strapped to the forearm, but were instead held in the hand so it could rotate side to side. And shield-bashes seemed to be a crucial component, except that instead of the traditional frontal bash with the flat, it seemed that the shield-edge was used as the main offensive tool for to create openings the sword would exploit. Meanwhile, the flat edge was used to ward off your opponent's sword. 2) You really had to draw the sword towards you or push away from you to get a good cut into someone. We usually assume a good strong hit was instantly incapacitating, when it may actually be the case that you need a good cut AND a good pull in order to slice through the skin and fat into the muscles and tendons to reduce someone else's fighting capacity. What they don't seem to explore is the effect of armour, I'd imagine if you're fighting mail you want to emphasise your cut and spend less time on the draw in order to bruise and batter your opponent. My latter thoughts are shakier, I don't actually know how a sharp piece of metal interacts with a fleshy human.
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Mar 12, 2013 08:23
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Thanks for the criticisms. So yeah, draws if you can afford to against soft tissue, but it's worthless against armour. Better off slamming as hard as possible against joints or bones. Still, their interpretation of the fighting style seems to fit more with Viking single-combat, instead of a good-old-fashioned spear-and-shieldwall.
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Mar 13, 2013 12:28
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Yeah, it doesn't sound complex enough that you need a Professional Sword Sharpener. Just teach your conscripts as part of the drill.
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Mar 14, 2013 06:29
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Yeah you're probably going to want to aim for the joints and disable them that way.
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Mar 17, 2013 22:43
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He's a monk he ain't ever see titties before.
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Apr 21, 2013 10:19
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Even the cross predates Christianity. It's a geometric shape.
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Apr 24, 2013 03:28
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Argh, I've been searching but couldn't find it. I remember talking with Alphadog about it a long time ago, where the real reason plate became popular (as big pieces of plate, not just small plates strapped to one another) was because of more advanced metallurgical techniques such as blast furnaces and water drop hammers) making these big pieces of plate more economically viable. Not to mention that making mail, which is very labour-intensive, became more difficult after half the population died of the plague.
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Jun 18, 2013 06:03
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[quote[Other factors that need to be considered include technological innovations in mass production, namely the water-powered trip hammer and the blast furnace. These technologies enabled iron plate to be manufactured in much larger quantities and much more cheaply than previously. In addition, labour costs dramatically increased after the Black Death (14th century), and the technologies previously mentioned meant that mail actually cost more to produce than all but the finest of plate armour. Williams compares the cost of 12 oxen for a 9th century helmet, mail and leggings with the cost of only 2 oxen for horseman's plate armour at the end of the 16th century.111 At Iserlohn in the 15th century, a mail haubergeon cost 4.6 gulden while plate armour only cost 4.3 gulden.112 Kassa's archives (Hungary 1633) record a mail shirt costing six times that of a "double breastplate." These records also indicate the huge difference in labour involved. The mail required 2 months to be completed while the breastplate, only 2 days. If plate armour was cheaper, quicker to produce, and offered better protection than mail, one could argue that it would have become popular even if weapons such as longbows, crossbows, and lances never existed.[/quote] Ohhh yeeah I was partly right!
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Jun 19, 2013 00:34
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Obdicut posted:The only valid thing to take away from strategy is that you can go broke as gently caress waging war. And from tactics that you often kill fall more in the rout than in the battle. Uh, didn't they massacre civilian populations using axes.
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Jun 29, 2013 02:56
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You only get to slaughter peasants and steal their stuff if they had a tenuous link to someone your lord doesn't like.
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Jul 1, 2013 07:59
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Well I guess it depends on what kind of fight you're in. If you're in massed ranks, you probably won't want to barrel around like it's a bar fight, though using your fists and feet and shield-bashes probably can't hurt. If you raiding a village or sacking a town and get intercepted by some other armed men, then sure, if the fight devolves into a melee then this might happen. I can't help but imagine that any real veteran knight could kick any number of these guy's asses
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Aug 1, 2013 07:34
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Well, more risks, but how many risks you'll take also depends on how outnumbered you are and how dedicated your opponents are to killing you versus keeping themselves alive. I mean, the classic way to kill someone in heavy armour is to grab their arms and legs and jam sharp objects into their armpits and groin and eyeslits and beneath their gorget. So ideally you don't want to get mobbed and instead want to rout them and make them vulnerable.
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Aug 1, 2013 08:47
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WoodrowSkillson posted:While its hardly a perfect simulation, stuff like that probably happened plenty, given the right circumstances. If there is an isolated knight causing trouble, you bowl him over from behind and mob him. Being the guy who gets isolated is a really dumb idea, but in a fight, it probably happens whether you want it to or not. Well ideally you never want to walk alone into a village even if you're packing some flashy equipment. Always want someone watching your back, even if those others aren't kitted out as good as you are. Because I can't imagine you'd have very good situational awareness if you're in full plate. As for this kind of thing in the battlefield? How long would a melee typically last if discipline is still maintained and people are still capable of falling back into ordered ranks?
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Aug 1, 2013 15:02
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Cholera just makes you piss out your rear end, dysentery happens to make you piss out bits of your intestinal linings as well.
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Aug 21, 2013 12:03
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You've been watching Attack on Titan, haven't you? Put it this way, no answer will be satisfactory thanks to the magic of the cube square law: a giant (human or robot) won't support its own weight, nor will whatever they swing at each other.
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Sep 8, 2013 02:19
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Considering that wars broke out at the drop of a hat back then, there's no doubt that the city they think corresponds to Troy had some major bloodshed around it. Still, have any of the other names in the Iliad been corroborated by other sources? (I can't want to see what  thinks of this discussion of the historicity of the Iliad.)
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Sep 16, 2013 11:08
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Trust me I'd steal less from you that from the guys down the river over there, now we wouldn't want them to come over and start chevauchee us would we???
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Nov 5, 2013 14:09
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That... sounds like a terrible idea.
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Mar 18, 2014 00:27
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Regard the Chu-ko-nu poison, I'm working off this as a source, which says that the poison is based on this kind of Aconitum species of plant. I have no idea how toxic and fast acting it is on intramuscular injection, and the sources are imprecise. Not to mention that stuff is a part of TCM, and it clutters up the pubmed literature making it nigh incomprehensible.
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Apr 28, 2014 07:30
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I really want to see how 100 dudes could pull off the ol' Surprise! Pike Square! tactic.
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May 21, 2014 05:28
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They were both bad kings. One of them just had better PR.
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Jul 27, 2014 02:25
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Everything I've read and watched about feudal Japan makes them out as some of the least honorable motherfuckers ever.
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Sep 2, 2014 05:26
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Owlkill posted:
Holy poo poo this is going into my animes.
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Sep 10, 2014 01:59
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Rabhadh posted:The javelins were universally acknowledged to be pretty useless at actually killing anybody. "More noisesome than deadly" as the source puts it. The whistling javelins are mentioned in the context of night attacks on camps, where they were spooking the conscripts. Is it a case of a javelin simply lacking the kinetic energy of an arrow, which you can build up using elastic energy?
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Oct 30, 2014 01:20
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Well, something can be projectile resistant without being blade resistant. See: Kevlar. Whether or not buff coats would have this effect is unclear to me.
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Feb 3, 2015 23:23
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Peasant levies are terrifyingly effective upon meeting certain conditions. You need a well organised state that can cast its central authority deep through society, down into individual villages. You need some way of motivating your peasant army to fight. You need a state with a large tax base that can command large quantities of arms to be built. You need a well organised transport network that can muster your peasants to a central point. And you need a cheap, mass produced weapon, with a simple drill, that is enough of a force multiplier to turn an untrained peasant into a knight killer. It's essentially how Napoleon rampaged throughout Europe.
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Feb 26, 2015 13:53
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The gun had been introduced to Japan long before the Tokugawa shogunate. Portuguese matchlocks were introduced to Japan in 1543, and they were very rapidly adopted. Japan, being part of China's sphere, already had a familiarity with gunpowder, but the European weapons took that to the next level. Nobunaga was already arming masses of his peasants with matchlocks and using them to conquer his rivals. And after unity, Hideyoshi had a massive veteran army of musketmen that he used to devastating effect in the invasion of Korea. The emphasis on the sword over other weapons such as the bow, spear, and musket, were Tokugawa era cultural baggage. Swords were the only weapons allowed, and quite frankly, an army of nothing but swordsmen is worthless, which of course was good if you didn't want a bunch of aristocrats stirring everything up into a civil war.
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Apr 28, 2015 00:14
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On this note, I've never had a satisfactory answer as to how Japan developed a horse archer culture. Japan is extremely mountainous. China, I can understand, it was to counteract steppe nomads who had a horse archer culture. Korea, I can understand, they were originally steppe nomads as well, even if a large fraction of the Korean peninsula is mountain. Cultural exchange between Japan and the mainland? Or perhaps was horse culture purely restricted to the upper classes (like Europe)?
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Apr 28, 2015 01:12
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Basically instead of investing in an industrial economy that can churn out anti-melee armour, invest in an industrial economy that can churn out lots of rapid-firing guns.
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May 21, 2015 04:07
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| # ¿ May 29, 2024 08:04 |
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FreudianSlippers posted:A breaking wheel pole is a pretty striking image: It seems they want public displays of torture and suffering to deter criminals and political enemies, but can't use good ol' fashioned crucifixion for religious reasons.
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May 31, 2015 14:13
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