u/TacitusKadari

I have serious doubts as to whether this system actually gave you any advantages over a single shot rifle. With rifles like the Vetterli or Kropatschek, I can see why it would be nice. The magazine takes ages to load, but when the situation demands it, you can increase your rate of fire quite substantially.

But with this system, I have my doubts whether the increase would have actually made a difference. But the Norwegians seem to have thought so.

As far as I understand it, the bayonet was primarily a psychological weapon in early modern warfare. Very few men were actually stabbed with bayonets and melee was the exception, rather than the norm. Usually, when lines of musketeers with bayonets approached each other, one side would just break and run away before they got within stabbing range. It takes intense discipline and training for soldiers who carry neither shields nor armor to actually stand up to a horde of brightly colored screaming men charging at them with long, spiky sticks.

But I've heard from reenactors that wearing armor gives you a lot of confidence. One anecdote I've heard was of a reenactor wearing medieval plate armor being surrounded by a bunch of drunk guys, who could potentially have been dangerous and yet he said he did not feel scared around them.

That makes me wonder. Would musketeers wearing even so much as a cuirass have been more confident facing a bayonet charge?

I know armor for infantry went mostly out of fashion in Europe even before the socket bayonet was introduced, so I don't know whether there has ever been a case of musketeers with bayonets and no armor trying to charge infantry with armor or being charged by them. But maybe there are some overseas engagements I'm missing due to not being well versed in colonial conflicts.

I've been playing a lot of Shogun 2 Total War: Fall Of The Samurai recently and got inspired to make my own "hermit empire meets the industrialized world" kind of setting. Fortunately, I already had a fantasy planet ready with more than enough empty spaces to add that kind of thing.

And now my previously established lore about the specific place I've chosen to be the hermit empire has resulted in some interesting developments.

One of these is armor made of lindwyrm shells. I've used these before and never specified how tough exactly they are. Now I am tempted to make them resistant against black powder weapons and I'm not entirely sure how they would affect gunpowder warfare with roughly 1850-1880 technology.

Here are the characteristics of the armor:

1. The armor is affordable enough equip some units with it, but not so cheap as to be ubiquitous.
2. It's also quite light and comfortable to wear. You don't need a thick cuirass. Segmented armor works just fine, as long as the rivets holding it together are up to the task and you got some padding underneath.
3. It can only stop black powder pistol and rifle rounds. Modern smokeless powder would get through and if you shoot at the wearer with a wall gun or a swivel gun, it doesn't matter whether the armor stops the bullet, the guy will be dead from the impact alone.

Here are the consequences I got so far:

1. Strengthening the caste system of the hermit empire. They did have guns before being forced out of isolation, but only matchlocks and wheellocks. Expensive and difficult to use, which is why having a dedicated warrior caste still worked. That bullet resistant armor would add onto that. Even with cheap flintlock muskets and socket bayonets, an army of peasant conscripts would have a harder time against the armored warrior caste.
2. Melee becomes more important. The warrior caste would essentially use the Gå På tactic of the Swedish Caroleans, where you march through enemy fire until you can see the white in their eyes, then unload your volleys at close range and then charge. Dedicated melee infantry like pikemen would also stay viable for much longer.
3. Lancer cavalry would remain important well into the era of breach loaders and metallic cartridges, if this armor is given to horses as well.

I am a bit worried that this would make the old warrior caste too powerful. Part of the storyline I've planned out is about the lower castes using imported weapons to rise up against their rulers. Easy to use flintlock muskets, later Minié rifles and finally breach loaders would have been the great equalizer here that allows peasant conscript armies to defeat noble warriors that have trained their entire lives.

I am not sure how effective this armor can be until it overturns this idea.

We've probably all heard the myth that the American Civil War was so deadly, because modern, accurate Minié rifles were used by armies whose tactics had not changed much since the days of Napoleon. But as far as I know, the vast majority of infantry vs infantry engagements in the ACW occurred within 100 meters. A range where smoothbore muskets firing at densely packed formations were reasonably accurate too.

The only soldiers who were actually trained to estimate ranges correctly and thus exploit the theoretical advantage in accuracy and thus effective range that the Minié rifles offered were elite and comparatively very small sharpshooter units.

So I can understand why you'd want to give those guys modern rifles. But why even bother handing them out to the line infantry? Why not just keep the smoothbore muskets with their "buck and ball" ammo?

Edit: My first guess would be that it was for logistical reasons. But the eye watering number of different cavalry carbines - each with its own proprietary cartridge - in use at the time makes me doubt this.

Perfect for home defense, concealed carry and pest control!!!

Reddit has just asked me to send them a picture of my ID for age verification.

No Reddit! Fuck you, Reddit!

Does anyone here know a European VPN I can use to circumvent this BS? Preferably something cheap, because I don't have much money.

And while I'm at it, I may as well finally get on with de googling my digital services. So is there a European company that provides a VPN, an alternative to GoogleDocs and an e-mail all in one account?

The three needle rifles I know of - Dreyse, Chassepot and the very first Carcano - are all bolt action systems and I'm wondering whether anyone tried that concept with a break action or under lever system.

I suspect that gun would have some issues with blowing gas into the shooters face. But I would still like to see the abomination.

It sounds like a reasonable propositon to me. Horse archers need to be able to controle their horses - at least for a short amount of time - while having both hands on their bow. They need to hold their weapon stable and take aim while on horseback and the Mongols are said to have had a really good aim.

Yet I can't think of any case, were an 18th or 19th century military hired men from a culture that practiced horse archery specifically for the purpose of turning them into mounted carabiniers or pistoliers.

And I have trouble even thinking of countries that could have done so. The Russian empire did not trust its ethnic minorities, so of course they would not have given them guns. The Samurai started out as horse archers, but the only guns they had during the Sengoku period were matchlocks - handling a burning match on horseback is probably not a good idea - and I seriously doubt those skills would have survived in combat ready form until the Meiji restoration.

So what about the Hungarians or Ottomans? Did anyone ever modernize horse archers with guns?

I know only two. The trapdoor system as used by the Trapdoor Springfield and the Austrian Wanzl rifle. And the side hinged thing the Enfield Snider uses.

But I've never seen a military conversion use a break open system.

AFAIK, the major powers pretty much all switched to breach loaders right after the American Civil War in late 1860s.

But what about countries like Peru or Japan? I've been told that muzzle loaders were still widely used in the Satsuma rebellion in 1877.

Please note, we are not talking about complete backwaters like Afghanistan or Sudan. I am aware muzzle loading small arms still show up in modern conflicts when nothing else is available.

The AI does that all the time in my FOTS campaigns. Even when it has 4 full stacks around the castle. They don't attack, they just try to starve me out and I have to fight yet another offensive field battle instead of getting to use the Gatling towers for which I specifically downloaded a mod to make them worthwhile.

Is there a mod that fixes this?

Yes, I know lancers still existed in WW1 and the French cuirassiers still *officially* had their cuirasses until 1915, but that's not what I mean.

As far as I know, the last ever successful cavalry charge in history took place in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war when German cavalry charged a French artillery battery and suffered massive casualties as a result.

Now this makes me wonder: If advances in firearms technology made cavalry charges less and less practical over the course of the 19th century, wouldn't this have forced the different types of cavalry all more or less converged around the same roles?

Specifically, scouting, screening, raiding, skirmishing and dismounted combat. The kind of things that I've heard a lot about in discussions about cavalry during the American Civil War.

And if this happened, does this also mean that cavalry units across the board were given smaller horses with higher endurance instead of the larger and slower horses with lower endurance that heavy cavalry at the time of Napoleon got?

By "small war", I am referring to raids, scouting and screening operations for larger armies and other types of small scale skirmishes that would have been much more common throughout history than the set piece battles we tend to imagine when we think of Napoleon.

But since large blocks of men with muskets shooting volleys at each other would probably not have been viable for these kinds of engagements, I am wondering what kinds of tactics were used here during the 18th century.

Did they primarily use melee weapons, like in previous eras?

Did 18th century armies have a dedicated "small war" doctrin or was it more of an afterthought?

Do we even have good sources on this not so glamorous topic?

I have a post apocalyptic setting, where the world has been thrown in a centuries long winter and the survivors have built a new civilization that relies on greenhouses for most of its food.

They use glass and metal from vast ancient ruins and have gotten really good at creating small ecosystems inside their greenhouses. Wherever possible, plants grow on galleries or floating islands on deep water tanks, full of fish and other marine life.

I've read a lot about how productive these kinds of systems are. So much so that it's one of the ways we might be able to feed a moon base one day. But I've never found mentions of how much greenhouse space you'd actually need to feed one person.

I suppose there is a lot of variety, depending on how exactly you do it. But there has got to be some data on it.

This is something that came up in the units descriptions of Napoleon Total War a couple times. CA claimed that the French mounted Guard Grenadiers were given exceptionally large horses to make these already large men with their enormous bearskins appear even bigger and more intimidating. Meanwhile, lighter cavalry units, supposed to chase fleeing enemies were said to ride smaller, faster horses with higher endurance.

On paper, this idea makes sense. I know of three somewhat comparable examples. The warhorses of the 15th century French Gendarmes were so huge that they couldn't subsist in grass alone, while Mongol horse archers have become famous for conquering the biggest land empire ever with ponies that are perfectly fine eating whatever grass you find along the way. And the Hakkapellitta of the 30 years war just used workhorses from their farms and I've heard they never brought their best horse to battle either.

But was this a thing that militaries at the time of Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon or Bismarck seriously thought about?