Avernum Art Project - Redux

[Randomizer]

The main differences between pistols and rifles are rate of fire and range. If you ever seen the Maverick episode "Gunshy" you see the sheriff shooting at Bret Maverick and missing because of range.

[Edgwyn]

I of course do not know how often the SAS relies on pistol ammunition. However, they were filmed on camera during the hostage rescue at the Iranian embassy in London using MP-5s which fire 9x19 rounds which are the same round as in the Berreta 92F that the US military uses. The longer barrel of the MP-5 does provide a slight increase in muzzle velocity and in combination with the stock a large increase in accuracy. The RCMP's emergency services team also uses the MP-5 as their close quarters weapon as do many other similar organizations. 5.56x45 and 7.62x39 are the most common military rifle calibers with 7.62x51in specialist application. Someday I would love to see a comparison of 5.56x45 versus 7.62x63 on things like body armor and vehicle doors. Right now, it would probably just depress me.

 

On the other hand, I am very glad to hear that the calvary guys were smart enough not to charge infantry squares. Seeing/participating in a re-enactment of Waterloo at Waterloo would certainly be a fantastic experience, I am jealous.

[Alorael at Large]

There's no way of knowing if cavalry guys were smart enough to not charge. The horses were the ones who reliably balked.

 

I'm also not convinced by the slashing vs. stabbing arguments. A slashing wound is large, but unless you really hack through a lot of person it's much more likely to be shallow and not incapacitating. A good thrust is much more likely to be lethal, or at least greatly impairing, because we're full of essential bits that are vulnerable to puncturing. It's also much easier to get through the ribcage by piercing between ribs than by trying to cut through the ribs. Ribs are tough and very well evolved to protect those aforementioned squishy bits. And while slashes are larger motions that can hit more flesh, that also has its disadvantages. Distributed force means it takes less armor to stop the blow. And there's more motion and time to parry or block or just get out of the way.

 

—Alorael, who agrees that using the inertia of the weapon is an advantage in slashing. Really there's a reason that many swords were straight(ish) and sharpened both at the point and on the edges. Having a variety of lethal maneuvers available is also an advantage in battle.

[Student of Trinity]

I don't know about other weird flavors of 7.62 round, but the NATO 7.62x51 and 5.56x45 rounds are high-powered rifle ammunition. Both go through body armor and car doors like paper.

[Necris Omega]

One more thing is that in the age where swords were more than glorified jewelry, even a minor cut was grossly at risk for infection. Even if a glancing slash doesn't immediately incapacitate an opponent, you've still opened their veins to the hell of an ongoing battle in an age where leaches were seen as valid medicine.

 

That and a lunging thrust requires a lot more commitment than a slashing swing, which is a defensive liability.

[Lilith]

One more thing is that in the age where swords were more than glorified jewelry, even a minor cut was grossly at risk for infection. Even if a glancing slash doesn't immediately incapacitate an opponent, you've still opened their veins to the hell of an ongoing battle in an age where leaches were seen as valid medicine.

 

A deep puncture wound from a thrusting weapon is actually a lot more likely to get infected than a cut from a slashing weapon -- all that bleeding helps clean the wound, and it's more exposed to air, which tends to keep a lot of the worst bacteria from growing.

 

So I don't think the difference between a spear and a sword can be that a wound from a sword is more likely to get infected and kill you in a couple of weeks' time. In fact, I wonder if it might be the opposite: if part of the difference might not be a matter of immediate stopping power. Getting impaled by a spear is certainly quite capable of killing you in the long run, but if the weapon doesn't hit the brain, heart, lungs or a really major blood vessel, then you've got some time when you can maybe still fight and inflict equally bad wounds on some other poor sap. On the other hand, if your muscles and tendons have been sliced clean through by a sword, then you're not going to do much fighting with them.

[Student of Trinity]

From the fact that stabbing seems almost always to have been part of what swords did, I figure that slashing wasn't such a terrific thing in itself. It may have been a killer app for swords, but it wasn't the only app. What I think is that being able to slash as well as thrust gave a fighter a much bigger repertoire of moves — a qualitatively bigger range, something like having a two-dimensional space of options, rather than one. Spear guys had one set of moves, and club or axe guys had another set, but the sword guy had both.

[Edgwyn]

I wonder if there is any reliable literature on the proper employment of swords versus chain and plate armors. As was pointed out earlier, most of us have a pretty strong heroic fantasy lens to our perceptions of how to use a sword. I do not consider the various fencing disciplines a good start because they are all so stylized. The better sword fight scenes in Hollywood movies tend to be fencing based. Good Japanese movies tend to be Kendo based and to me, that is not any closer to what I am curious about. I know that it is too much to expect a written field manual for a society where the majority of the combatants were close to illiterate, but I can dream can't I?

 

7.62x39 is the traditional AK-47 round (as opposed to the newer 5.45x39 of the AK-74).

[Alorael at Large]

I could see it working the other way, though. Causing infections that kill days later won't save you from getting killed yourself on the battlefield, but even "lucky" stabbings into entirely non-vital places are often incapacitating because humans are generally not great at operating when impaled. Basically, I think there are reasons to opt for all kinds of variety in wrecking human bodies.

 

There is, as I understand it, a fair amount of understanding of the co-evolution of arms and armor, and a number of so-called fencing books, which often depict fighting with little resemblance to modern fencing, have survived. In general, armor tends to hold up better against slashes than against stabbing, and heavy plate armors resulted in some major changes to armaments. For one thing, it made blunt force very useful, hence the abundance of maces and hammer It also led to narrow, tapered swords for thrusting through weak points in armor. But with the rise in firearms and their increasing power it eventually became impractical to be imperviously armored. Guns and heavy armor coexisted for a time, though, and being shot in the breastplate certainly beat getting shot in the breast.

 

—Alorael, who will note incidentally that individual combat in general can have little resemblance to massed combat. A single pike is not an ideal weapon, but a squad bristling with pikes is formidable. One master fencer with a rapier is a deadly threat, but a formation of them don't actually have enough mobility to fence. A shield wall only works if you have more shields than your own. And so on. Many projectile weapons, from bows to early firearms, were really only effective when launched in volleys against target-rich opposing forces. You didn't aim at a person, you aimed at hundreds of people and collectively hit quite a few of them. But the calculus could change dramatically if a single enemy charged a single archer. And so on.

[Student of Trinity]

That's an interesting point in relation to swords versus other weapons. The Roman legions fought with short swords in dense formations, after throwing their spears. Somehow legions died out later; I'm not sure why. Roman infantry tactics seemed to be unbeatable for quite some time, but then they disappeared, even though no great technology change that I know of had occurred.

 

My only theory is that Roman infantry tactics actually required an enormous amount of training. Was poking at people with a gladius from behind a big shield a surprisingly complex skill? I'm not sure about that, but one book I read once included a description of how a Roman legion actually fought. I don't know what evidence was behind this book's description, but it was very interesting.

 

According to this book, the legion formed up in three major lines, but each line was itself composed of then ranks of legionaries. The first rank of the first line would fight for a couple of minutes or so, pushing and poking and hacking like mad; then they'd get tired. So then there was some kind of drill by which that tired front rank would stop fighting and step back through the ranks behind them, and the second rank would step up quickly and neatly enough to just take over the pushing and hacking, without everything coming unglued into a massive schmozzle. Then this would repeat through ten ranks. If the enemy still hadn't had enough at this point, the entire first line could somehow retire and be replaced by the second line, with another ten ranks; and finally there could be the third line. Apparently there was a Latin expression about a battle 'coming to the third line', to describe any long and bitter struggle.

 

I can only imagine that it would take a great deal of training indeed for a large group of men to execute such handovers every few minutes, in literal contact with the enemy. But an army that could do that would be appallingly effective, because it would face you with fresh guys for hours of intense hand-to-hand combat, and each of those guys would fight in the security of knowing he only had to hold out for a few minutes, and then somebody else would take his place. It's not nearly as hard to be brave for just a few minutes, when you know that you'll be safe after that, as it is to be brave for an indefinite period.

 

So maybe legions disappeared just because the capability of executing all those maneuvers reliably died out, as training budgets got cut and then experienced legions got lost or retired; and then the techniques couldn't be relearned and re-taught quickly enough to pay off. I think there may also have been economic problems: at one point the Roman state attracted lots of long-service soldiers with promises of free land after twenty years, but it became hard to find good land for veterans.

 

I guess the point of all that, for swords, may have been that a short sword, as an individual weapon, fit well into a larger scale tactic of disciplined movement in fairly close formations. A legionary could lower his sword, pull in his shield, and suck in his gut, and slip back between his buddies in the rank behind. It would be much harder to do something like that, for guys armed with spears. A few spears getting crossed, in the heat of battle, would make it all come undone.

[Sudanna]

The Republican legions did indeed fight in a three-line checkerboard formation (called the manipular legion), arranged from least to most veteran soldiers and given different, specific armaments, for a while. But this changed eighty years before the fall of the Republic, with the reforms of Gaius Marius in 107 BC, which (among many other very important things) dissolved the distinctions between three different types of troops, standardized equipment and training, and ended the practice of three rotating lines to instead rely more on the commanding of individual manipoles reinforcing or relieving each other. This system would remain more or less the same until the reign of Diocletian around 300 CE, who had his own sweeping reforms. But no Imperial legion ever fought in the way you describe.

 

Of note to this discussion is that legionaries were spaced six feet away from each other, to allow plenty of room for swinging a weapon - these formations were not usually extremely close unless things had gone very wrong and soldiers were being physically forced into one another, or they were directed to perform a specific maneuver like the testudo.

 

The Roman military declined as the empire declined, but the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire used legions in the style of Marius and Diocletian well into the 600s, long after the West had fallen. They were reformed away as the times changed, not lost. The Western Roman empire did collapse partially because of its inability to field a functional military, but not really because it got too hard to find land. Land was not even always a term of a legionaries service, especially later on, as the empire began to fight more and more defensive wars and fewer wars of conquest. Among other things, soldiering just started to look like a really hard, really dangerous, and really stupid career choice for Roman citizens, and the wealthy proto-feudalist estate owners did not appreciate their money-making peasantry being conscripted, literally hiding people or bribing officials for exemptions. Much like they did with taxes. But the decline of the Roman military is tied in many ways to the decline of the empire as a whole, and the decline of the Roman Empire is way too complicated for me to get into any more here.

[Student of Trinity]

The Republican legions did indeed fight in a three-line checkerboard formation (called the manipular legion), arranged from least to most veteran soldiers and given different, specific armaments, for a while. But this changed eighty years before the fall of the Republic, with the reforms of Gaius Marius in 107 BC, which (among many other very important things) dissolved the distinctions between three different types of troops, standardized equipment and training, and ended the practice of three rotating lines to instead rely more on the commanding of individual manipoles reinforcing or relieving each other. This system would remain more or less the same until the reign of Diocletian around 300 CE, who had his own sweeping reforms. But no Imperial legion ever fought in the way you describe.

Yeah, I recall now that this same book also mentioned that at some point they abolished the special gear of the triarii. It probably gave the right timing. But the important thing about the tactics I described, from this one book whose sources I don't know, is not the three lines, but the ten ranks within each line, which would steadily move up through a battle. That's the thing that makes a lot of sense: it would obviously be a good way to fight primitive battles, if you could pull it off, but it would obviously be hard to pull off, without a lot of training. So that's the thing I'm most interested in pinning down. Is it somehow an established fact, or just a speculation, even just a speculation from one crackpot author in that one book that I happened to find?

 

Of note to this discussion is that legionaries were spaced six feet away from each other, to allow plenty of room for swinging a weapon - these formations were not usually extremely close unless things had gone very wrong and soldiers were being physically forced into one another, or they were directed to perform a specific maneuver like the testudo.

I don't remember my book having anything about how far apart the legionaries stood. I always wondered about it. Where does the six feet figure come from? A spacing like that would certainly make it more feasible for ranks to move through each other, but it does seem a bit wide. One man couldn't reach over to help the guy next to him, without opening up a large gap on his other side. Was it six Roman feet, that were shorter than modern ones? Or was it a parade-ground figure that allowed for the fact that men would bunch up more closely together in battle?

 

The Roman military declined as the empire declined, but the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire used legions in the style of Marius and Diocletian well into the 600s, long after the West had fallen. They were reformed away as the times changed, not lost. The Western Roman empire did collapse partially because of its inability to field a functional military, but not really because it got too hard to find land. Land was not even always a term of a legionaries service, especially later on, as the empire began to fight more and more defensive wars and fewer wars of conquest. Among other things, soldiering just started to look like a really hard, really dangerous, and really stupid career choice for Roman citizens, and the wealthy proto-feudalist estate owners did not appreciate their money-making peasantry being conscripted, literally hiding people or bribing officials for exemptions. Much like they did with taxes. But the decline of the Roman military is tied in many ways to the decline of the empire as a whole, and the decline of the Roman Empire is way too complicated for me to get into any more here.

The bit about land was exactly what I meant by my speculation: it got too hard to keep giving veterans free land, so that deal stopped being offered, so fewer recruits signed on for long hitches. That would erode a military system that depended on extensive training for its success. It might have been possible to maintain the same numbers of legions on paper, and even field units with the same equipment, but if the soldiers lacked training and experience then the legions would have been far less effective. It may be that the Roman legions really only worked as an army of conquest, because colonies on conquered land were the only way to draw the committed recruits that could acquire the necessary training, and so the system was unsustainable as a defensive force. I think the Romans were basically a bunch of brutal gangsters, so I wouldn't be surprised if their supposed military genius were ultimately based on pillage.

 

I'd like to know whether sophisticated movement tactics that required immense training really were the key factor in Roman military success and decline, or not. It's not enough just to say that legions disappeared because everything was complicated. Maybe nobody knows just why they faded away, but then one should admit that. For a long while the Roman armies were unbeatable, and then they were gone. Things like that don't just happen by Yada yada yada. They happen somehow. I'd still like to know how.

[Randomizer]

I remember reading during the declining period, the Rome began to rely on foreign troops to replace Romans. While they may have been members of the Roman Empire, they were less inclined to support Rome's plans.

 

But the ability of a group of individuals to fight as a group where they could shift positions at the leader's command carries over into modern fighting. No matter how talented the individuals are, they don't have the time and information to see how a battle is changing and to respond to changes outside their view. During the American Revolutionary War, there was a period at Valley Forge where European soldiers trained the American army in formation drills so they could fight and shift as the English troops instead of what they had been doing previously.

[Student of Trinity]

Part of musket drill was just loading the thing quickly. It's a multi-step process. Drill was also important for quick formation changes, like forming squares to resist cavalry or shaking out of squares into line so that cannon didn't hit everyone at once. If it took too long to get your square or line tight and straight, somebody might run through the gap and start stabbing your guys in the back. So lots of movements that are purely ceremonial today were tactically vital in those days.

 

And even some movements that didn't strictly need to be done in formation actually did need to be done that way, in practice, because in the terror of battle it would never work to say, "All you guys run over there and reassemble into a nice line, under fire." Once a unit lost formation, it would never get it back, and it would be useless until the battle was over; so you had to learn to do everything in formation.

 

A fair amount of all that would presumably have been true for the Romans as well, even though swords didn't need complex loading drills.

[Sudanna]

I didn't say that nobody knows how it happened, I said that I'm not gonna take the time to explain how I understand it happened, cuz that would take a while. If you want to spend a lot of time learning about all the little details, I direct you to where I got most of my information, this fantastic podcast series.

 

In the latter days of the empire, most legionaries were Germans rather than Italians, but only some of these really counted as auxiliaries, and while there were more and more instances of revolting legions, the ethnic origin of the troops was never a real sticking point. They fought against migratory German tribes as well s they fought against anyone. Most of the commanders were not German, after all, and it was them that kept trying to claim the empire. It might have been easier to get non-Italian legions to go along with it, but it's still more a symbol of the decaying investment of Roman subjects in the Roman Empire and a byproduct of the aforementioned proto-feudalism than some kind of ethnic strife.

[Tyranicus]

I direct you to where I got most of my information, this fantastic podcast series

You have excellent taste in podcasts. I greatly enjoyed it as well.

[Student of Trinity]

Certainly you don't have to take the time, Nalyd; but I'm afraid my fixed view is that anything that is really understood can be summarized briefly. If the only answer is 'listen to a whole podcast series', because the only answer is a mass of details that defies organization into coherent chunks, then there is no answer.

 

And it seems that there may not be one. A couple of hours of googling around, starting from some of the sources cited by your podcast guy, shows that great controversy remains over just how many ranks the Roman centuries fought in, at any time, with different scholars preferring any number from three to ten. This issue of ranks within a century is a separate discussion from how many lines of centuries were then formed, and whether or not those century-lines had gaps; those issues are also controversial. It also appears unclear how far apart the men stood, with six feet and three feet being disputed alternatives (presumably because of some ambiguous ancient text). The theory from my old book, about ranks relieving each other in succession, seems to be a speculation that remains plausible on some grounds, but also problematic.

 

It appears that original Roman military manuals have only survived in quotations by a fourth century guy who had no military experience of his own, and said many things that were obvious nonsense. Julius Caesar wrote about his battles, but he was hardly concerned with fine-grained detail, and it's hard to deduce much unambiguously about how his troops actually fought.

 

Anyway, my question is not so much about the collapse of the western Roman empire as about the disappearance of legions forever afterwards. If it was such a good military system, why didn't somebody recreate it a few hundred years later? What did the Romans do to make it work, that later armies couldn't duplicate? Or what new threat appeared, before the late middle ages, that the old legion couldn't match?

[Alorael at Large]

I think the disappearance of legions has to do with the decline of professional armies in favor of feudal systems with conscripted levies. Legions were effective because they were highly trained and highly disciplined, assets in any kind of fighting. But they were also salaried (in fact, their pay is the origin of the word salary) and expensive. Less powerful and less centralized states couldn't maintain that kind of standing army. Explaining the political changes in Europe is well beyond me.

 

—Alorael, who believes the three feet between men, six feet between ranks. That's room to not jostle neighbors while not leaving literally enough room to have your formation ridden through by cavalry.

[Edgwyn]

Going back a few posts to why nobody copied the legions, since there has already been a better explanation of why the roman legions died out within the empire than I could give. The legions were professional soldiers with outstanding training and discipline. While the Roman sword drill was undoubtably easier than musket drill, mastering all of the formations required a lot of work. And then there is a lot of practice required to chance formations in the middle of the chaos and stress of battle. A single big block like the earlier phalanx requires training and discipline. The formations of the Romans were far more complicated and therefore required a lot more training and discipline. All of this training and practice is really expensive. You have to have a sophisticated economy with a sufficient surplus of resources to support a professional army as opposed to a militia.

 

I also seem to recall that the Roman legions had some tactical issues against the Parthians. The Roman Legion was a very powerful formation, but there is a limit to how fast a legionnaire could move due to their heavy equipment and relatively tight formation. Against opponents who could be counted on to come at the Roman formation (either due to the opponents aggressiveness or good tactics by the Romans), life was good. A primarily mounted opponent, especially one with substantial numbers of archers could prove difficult for the Legions as long as they were smart enough to not let themselves get to close to the Romans. Hit and run tactics can be effective against a more powerful but less tactically mobile foe. Some of the crusaders ran into the same problems a 1000 or so years later.

[Dikiyoba]

If it was such a good military system, why didn't somebody recreate it a few hundred years later?

Well, for starters, no one knew exactly what they were.

 

I know that army sizes were significantly smaller during the medieval era than they were in the time of the Roman Empire. I don't know how plausible it is, but maybe legions were only effective past a certain army size, and medieval armies didn't reach that size on a regular basis.

 

Dikiyoba has now entirely exhausted Dikiyoba's deep pool of knowledge on the subject of Roman and medieval armies.

[Student of Trinity]

That's a good point, actually. A lot of ancient Roman knowledge was lost very quickly, and how a legion really fought may well have been as much of a mystery to wistful western Europeans in the Dark Ages as it is to us now.

[Goldengirl]

re:Land issues with the legionnaires

 

I highly recommend the book Debt by David Graeber. It's not a Roman history, really, but it does provide a broad sweep of fascinating anthropology and history behind debt relations and the way debt is viewed in a myriad of world cultures. I bring it up because that's where I'm drawing my analysis from on this issue.

 

Graeber's analysis of this time period is that rich people have excess that they want to invest, while other people, rich and poor, have a need to borrow that wealth. When people can't repay their debts, they become debt peons. In the long run, this is extremely unstable for a society because it creates extreme wealth inequalities that can lead to class conflicts. Indeed, Graeber posits the fall of the Roman Republic as due to this very reason, as people were forced to sell their land in the chaos of the Second Punic War. Where the military enters into this equation, then, is as a stabilizing mechanism for social movement. The Roman military gave land to dedicated legionnaires, creating what Graeber calls the military-coinage-slavery-welfare complex. The Roman military conquers a territory, and in doing so enslaves the population to keep their economy powerful and harvest bullion for the maintenance of a coin economy whereby debt cycles could be abstracted. These coins, in the Roman treasury, were used to sustain a welfare system of "bread and circuses" and thereby placate the population. This managed to stave off the instability of pure debt cycles, but in the end it proved unsustainable and the complex had to be scrapped in favor of a more defensive military system.

 

Using Graeber's analysis, the nature of the complex may very well have been the reason that the practices of using legions fell out of use. After the Romans had conquered enough, they were able to keep their system more or less functional and thus had no real incentive to keep conquering. Rather, they could afford to let their military wane as they merely defended their territory.

 

I'll admit that I don't find this analysis particularly compelling in relation to this particular question, but it does provide some meta-historical rationale for the loss of Roman military tactics.

[Edgwyn]

While the legions themselves fall out of use in Western Europe (where arguably there was not anything large enough and organized enough to field a professional army like the legions), heavy infantry did dominate Western European battlefields until around 1000 AD and then did again around 1400 AD.