Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

I mean, 8 shots rapidfire traded for an hour or two spent cleaning and reloading afterwards? Fuck that, just go full pirate brace of pistols! If your party survives the fight, you just make the swabby reload.

Alternatively: "Man survives duel after being impaled" hey brother, have I got a job for you!

 

Yea, historically most everyone went with just having a couple of pistols on the saddle instead of one super clumsy flimsy ahead of it's time apparatus. Besides it was most always possible to just quickly fire off your pistol or pistols and ride to rear line to reload them in safety. Then the problem was that your opponents would be so heavily armored and the pistols so inaccurate that for both of these reasons the best bet was point blank range.


Some contemporary masters indeed treated it as if a sword that cannot be parried or just "place the barrel on the opponent and fire". That said they could also be used as part of caracole skirmishing - harassment.

Also - it is often neglected that primary method of warfare involved small unit tactics in the manner of raids and defending against raids. Typically the forces would be around one company (100 - 200 men) or even less. The problem for raiders was that they'd want to hit the enemy's resources without actually running into the garrison, preferably able to take some loot with them. While it wasn't the hardest part to find one of many targets that is at the moment furthest from the local patrols - the soft target - the bigger problem was that you'd want to take loot and the loot would slow you down.

For the defending garrison the problem was in trying to control such strategic locations by which you could deny the enemy access to your soft villages and towns as the raiders could often just evade your patrols and strongpoints. The advantage of defenders was that after hearing of a raid you might be able to plot the raiders' route back to their territory and moving faster than they do you could them prepare an ambush for their withdrawal.

So in a sense Mount & Blade, really, except with more nuance and complexity. And indeed people always ask why there was so much cavalry and mounted infantry given that cavalry was so rarely effective in routing infantry from fortified positions in mass battles - it's good to remember that overwhelming bulk of fighting and battles occurred on small scale where the cavalry had many more advantages and indeed while a 5,000 men pike formation cannot be dislodged by cavalry charge a 100 man raiding party will get absolutely shredded to pieces if encountering 100 lancers. On small scale they just don't have the depth and mass and the shock will tear through them.

It's a shame that Total War games pretty much entirely neglect 95% of period warfare. Similarly Mount & Blade is actually a lot more truthful in skipping the few exceptionally rare pitched mass battles. Mostly it was just company masters riding about with letter of recruitment in pocket telling them to raise troops for the season and then raise havoc with them, trying to preserve the force they've paid out of their own pocket to raise and trying to earn a profit from their campaigning - a whole lot like medieval MW2 Mercenaries really!

 

There are far better ways now to destroy armored vehicles then with just land mines. I got to see lots of unique and interesting designs that had been used to try and kill fellow marines while out on a convoy or escort.

 

Oh certainly, one of my friends is a Finnish combat pioneer. Mines are very useful but what those guys really love is when they are allowed to get creative. I mean literally taking down helicopters with explosives and whatnot.

They've got a good battle song too, the 'pioneers' battle song'. They sing of how during war they aren't entertained by home stove and how there's no river, no cliff and no fort that can stand in their way, they fell the strongest trees and used satchels against the strongest forts. "The black flag unites".



Which reminds me, in our current doctrine the jägers like me are not faced with ourselves causing casualties to the enemy but our purpose is merely to repeatedly ambush the enemy just so that being fired upon pins them down enough for punishing artillery, it's only a few rounds fired from each position before disengaging and if you hit something - all the better but the artillery is the real killer. Mines really help in channeling and funneling the enemy to where the artillery is most effective.

So yea, which faction are we from Warhammer / 40k ? Hint: Lots of artillery and the infantry are primarily deployed in skirmishing role to pin down the enemy with ambushes, rinse and repeat.

 

Moar SWOOSH!

 

so a butt-load is an actual measurement.

 

this is also where the weight for a ton comes from because a Tun of liquid is approximately 2100 lbs which would have been rounded to 2000 lbs which is a ton.

Dont forget the chart for wine bottles.

 

Its true.

 

But that's the short ton. A ton is ~2204.6226 lb and the multiplier is ~0.00045359237

Thus the tun is actually closer to a ton than a short ton, 957 of roughly 1.0 (water, wine is actually ~0.99), meaning the contents weigh ~950kg and if the tun barrel is anywhere close to 50kg empty then it would be very close to one ton.

And if it's closer to one ton and not the short ton I am suspicious that all the other excuses about the SI-units being bullshit and in reality the whole system is based around the weight of one ton wine barrel and it's easy divisions and multiplications. You know, just shifting the comma because that's still roughly doable when you can't see straight whereas some obscure "ishh itzzz zhirty shoo oer zwewentty shoo timesh... oh fuck it"

 

There was a scifi concept of animals or so that wanted to be eaten.
Now I imagine a cow running down a vegan.

 

Wildstar had a great rib at the vegan movement with the Aurin being the treehugging race that supposedly only ate vegetables. The kicker being that the vegetables they ate were sentient, and were frequently able to both speak and would flee and cry out against being eaten. They do not go into whether or not the vegetables are actually intelligent, or are simply parroting but it amuses me all the same.

 

My absolute favorite documentary channel.