#another fun fact the battle of agincourt had one of the first recorded uses of an arquebus in european warface

[kradogsrats]

Hello, I had a question for you about the Katolis army.. do you think it is meant to be a standing army? If Opeli says they could take on all the other human kingdoms (and Aanya was worried about losing a million?) that would be a very large army to maintain on a permanent basis? But they seem to just.. be there.. ready to go.. and food, housing, equipment - this would be super expensive, especially if there’s been ten years of relative peace? I don’t really understand why they would have it set it up this way.. surely magma Titan could have been averted if some of these soldiers were farming…

OKAY SO uh ha ha well I am not actually a historian, much less a military historian, but I will do my best to convey my largely-unsupported thoughts

Basically, this would be a much, much easier question to answer if we didn't have Queen Aanya's line about a million men and women being sent to war against Xadia. That's just like... a staggering number of people, even if she's referring to the combined total forces of the Pentarchy and not solely Duren's contribution or the expected casualties.

If we take the size and population of Xadia according to the old reddit post that put it at roughly the size of Mongolia and 40 million, just so we have some kind of ballpark numbers to attach to this, a force of one million from the 20 million humans would be 50 people per 1000 being in the military.

Like, just grabbing some random numbers from the internet, around 200 CE the Roman military was about 450,000 strong for a population of something like 70 million. Only men could enlist, so we’ll knock that population number down to 35 million, which puts us at only 12 men per 1000 being in the military. Just for fun, if we estimate 20% of the Roman population as citizens (free men, essentially) and eligible to be legionaries (rather than auxiliaries), we still get a comparable 13 citizens per 1000 in the military.

(Side note: here in the modern world, only North Korea has an estimated 50 people per 1000 in active military duty. Israel, with compulsive military service, has about 33 per 1000. Just to give a bit more insight into those proportions.)

So we’re already looking at an army more than twice the size and composed of  quadruple the percentage of the populace as Rome, literally notable for it's crazy huge standing army and the society-wide logistics that went into supporting it. Flash forward to a more medieval conflict like the Hundred Years' War, where you get numbers like the Battle of Agincourt having somewhere around 6,000-9,000 English defeating probably 14,000-15,000 French. (For reference, France had a population of about 14 million at the time.) That French number varies depending on whether you're counting an armed, armored military servant to a knight as a combatant, which the 14-15k estimate does not but like... idk, man. Including those dudes, it's more like 24,000... but even if you imagined each of the five kingdoms of the Pentarchy fielding an army that size, you wouldn't even break 100,000.

Now Aanya, bright, forward-thinking young queen that she is, is probably actually estimating based on the assumption of a campaign against Xadia being potentially years-long (if she’s not being entirely figurative). I'm way too lazy to pore over battles of the Hundred Years' War, but we can look at something like the Crusades, instead: the notably "successful" (in that it captured Jerusalem and established a kingdom there, after which everyone went home because their pilgrimage was complete) First Crusade was fought over three years with total crusader forces of 160,000-180,000. The significantly less successful Second and Third Crusade (and we're ignoring like four unnumbered ones in-between) were four years with 35,000-ish and three years at 36,000-74,000 (yeah that's a big estimate range, blame Wikipedia).

Getting into some much... vaguer... numbers, military casualties of the Hundred Years' War (including wartime disease, starvation, etc.) are estimated at 2.3 million-3.3 million. Over the course of *checks watch* 116 years of on-and-off fighting. You just couldn't kill people all that efficiently, back then. Now, granted, a war with Xadia would have a) magic, and b) FUCKING DRAGONS, but... Opeli estimates the casualties of an immediate war between Katolis and the Neolandia/Evenere/Del Bar forces to have an upper end of “tens of thousands,” which really, really suggests that we are not talking about a combined million people, even if Duren was included.

ANYWAY that was a lot of fuzzy math to kick this off, so let's talk about Katolis and realistic-ish possibilities for its military.

First of all, a standing military is not really unheard of even in the actual real-world medieval Europe, it just looked a bit different. Professional soldiers did exist, perpetually equipped and ready to fight, and they made up a large portion of most military campaigns. However, they were broadly dispersed among the nobility, so if you wanted to have a war, you had to wait for everyone to show up. Because of the nature of the feudal society, you kind of had a trickle-down (trickle-up?) standing military--the king could call on his vassals to fight, who would call on their vassals, etc. etc. down the chain until you had an acceptable force of dudes who came with their own armor and could kill each other with a decent amount of skill. (There were also non-professional peasant militia infantry forces, but generally they were not worth the logistical burden of fielding them.)

You also could have mercenary forces, which fell in and out of favor over the medieval-renaissance eras. On the one hand, you then didn't have to be paying the salaries of a whole-ass army during peacetime, but on the other hand... once you stop paying the mercenaries, nothing stops them from getting frisky with all your nice, safe cities to take a bit extra off the top, because they know you don't have an army to stop them. It was found to be more cost-effective to just have your own dudes with some degree of loyalty to king and country, and then pay them on the regular.

But right, Katolis. With the slant that this is a faux-medieval setting with heavy emphasis on the faux, because everyone is wildly over-fed, over-healthy, over-cleaned, and over-educated, I'm willing to fudge things like period-accurate agriculture techniques to allow for feeding a decent-sized group of people being paid to stand around and train for war. Maybe wandering dark mage hedge wizards routinely zing up everyone's fields, or they're all using fertilizer from fancy Xadian livestock with Earth primal poop. Whatever. At some point (which to be fair is probably post-industrial), having more people working the land doesn't actually produce any more. Same kind of deal for housing, we’re just gonna assume much more advanced understanding of and techniques for sanitation and waste removal than would be “realistic,” which removes a lot of the problems with having a bunch of people all living close together. Because let’s be real, none of us really want to think about how much literal shit is just sitting around in the open at any given moment or running into the water supply to give everyone dysentery. (I’m pretty sure it’s only in the post-antibiotics era that you stop having at least as many of your casualties be from disease as from battle.) I personally haven’t decided whether I think the setting has running water and sewage systems for the sake of my own fic purposes, but I kind of lean toward “yes,” because it’s the kind of thing that honestly isn’t that far out of place with all the other modernized incongruities going on. My main problem is how you run indoor pipes through a stone castle, but I also don’t know anything about plumbing.

Katolis also shares the vast majority of the border with Xadia, and controls the Breach--the one place you can march an army through from either side. It makes sense that they have an entire subsection of their military (the Standing Battalion) devoted to guarding that one point, but I would definitely expect there to be at least small fortified outposts along the entire border. I mean, dragons can fly. The only other kingdom that shares any part of the Xadian border is Duren, and it's a pretty small slice north of the Breach. So since Katolis is everyone's primary defense against the persistent threat of Xadia, I would bet they regularly collect some kind of support from the other kingdoms that goes toward maintaining the forces necessary to keep up that security. Whether that's food, other war materiel, straight-up money (it can be exchanged for goods or services), whatever. In a sense, Katolis is acting as a mercenary army for the rest of the Pentarchy. (Though they also have a non-mercenary stake in not fucking around, since Katolis is also the most threatened by Xadia due to proximity.)

We also see that towns in Katolis seem to have fortifications and military presence based on proximity to the border, so in addition to general border surveillance/security, you'd also have forces dispersed for that. It's likely that even the more interior towns have small forces of military ("guards") for general security and law enforcement, since there doesn't really seem to be anything else filling that role. So my general assumption would be that there are some large concentrations of military forces in places like Katolis City, and/or maybe there's some other military-centric location for large-scale training and mustering that isn't on the map or mentioned anywhere, and then you've got a spread-out force across the other population centers, maintaining the security of the major roads, keeping an eye on the borders shared with the other kingdoms, etc.

An alternative could be having a complex rotation of reserve forces in effect, where Katolis has the capacity to muster a large number of troops but only a portion of them are on active duty at any time and the rest go home and maintain the general labor force. That does make things a little more complicated in the “making sure everyone is actually armed when you call them up for war” area and having to suddenly increase your supply logistics by however many times over, but it’s something you can at least plan for. I would assume that in addition to the higher level of discipline and training the Katolian army has (according to Opeli), it also has a more coordinated and robust supply infrastructure. Like I’m sure it’s there somewhere in the force Viren marches with. Way at the back. Out of sight.

We’ll leave what exactly Viren’s plan for an extended campaign in Xadia beyond “reach the Storm Spire, eat the dragon prince” was as an exercise for a later time. Like good lord, dude, if Aaravos hadn’t thrown the Sunfire elves as a whole into complete disarray as a casual side effect of chowing down on the Sunforge, was he like... going to lay siege to Lux Aurea? Did he imagine that once the dragon throne was empty everyone would just capitulate?

Basically I do think it’s possible if you fudge a lot of setting stuff that is honestly already fudged, so I’m willing to allow it. However I will remain almost as salty about the “million” thing as I do about Star Wars claiming that a three-year, galactic-scale war was fought by fewer than half as many soldiers as the US alone served in WWII.

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Thistle

The Daily Thistle – The Archaeology News From Scotland

Friday 24th August 2018

"Madainn Mhath” …Fellow Scot, I hope the day brings joy to you…. Archeology Friday is with us once again, it rolls round with accuracy of a Rolex, same time same place each week…and you don’t even have to pay a watch cleaning bill to get it on time each week…What a deal! .. Hot and Sticky as we leave the house this morning with a heaven ablaze with stars, like walking down the Las Vegas strip there are so many of them.. walk completed Bella fed and sleeping it’s back to the hospital for me to be with Sandra as she recovers from her operation later today, she’s been in since Thursday and should come home tomorrow…

TRACES OF 17TH-CENTURY BATTLE FOUND AT SCOTLAND’S CASTLE FRASER….  ABERDEENSHIRE, SCOTLAND—According to a report in The Scotsman, volunteers who assisted in excavations at Castle Fraser, the historic stronghold of the Fraser Clan, uncovered large quantities of broken window glass that could date to an attack on royalist supporters in the structure by Oliver Cromwell’s forces sometime between 1653 and 1655. “The mid-seventeenth century was a volatile time in the northeast,” commented archaeologist Daniel Rhodes of the National Trust for Scotland. The investigation also recovered two coins—one made of a copper alloy, and a Turners, or two pence piece, marked with the image of Charles I and dated to between 1632 and 1639. Charles I had been executed by Cromwell and the English Parliament in 1649. His son, Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660.

'FIRST' DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS RECORDED ON SCOTTISH MAINLAND…. Dinosaur footprints have been found preserved in rocks on the Scottish mainland for the first time, a leading palaeontologist has said. Dr Neil Clark, vice-president of the Geological Society of Glasgow, discovered the prints at a coastal location near Inverness. Previously, dinosaur footprints have only been recorded in Skye. The new fossils may have been left by different dinosaurs in the Middle Jurassic about 170 million years ago. The location of the discovery has not been made public to allow for further research at the site. Dr Clark, who is curator of of palaeontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, said: "I have frequently bemoaned the fact that dinosaurs have not been found elsewhere in Scotland. "But I now have discovered some new dinosaur footprints in a completely different location." He added: "They are from a completely new part of Scotland for dinosaurs and will add significantly to our understanding of dinosaurs of that age in Britain." The site near Inverness contains fossilised impressions of footprints that are thought to be from several different types of dinosaur. The size of the raised footprints suggests they were left by a member of the sauropod family of dinosaurs - huge, four-legged herbivores with long, slender necks that stood up to 18m (60ft) high. Dr Clark has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the £5,000 needed to search for and map dinosaur footprints across Scotland. The money will be used to buy a drone. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh are to take part in the research project. Dr Clark made his find after attending a conference in Inverness in March. He decided to walk along the coast and noticed dinosaur footprints on the shoreline. He said: "I was pretty excited. I knew the significance of the find straight away." About 170 million years ago, shortly after the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up, the land that is now the Isle of Skye was part of a smaller subtropical island. Until the new discovery, Skye was the only place in Scotland where evidence of dinosaurs had been found. It has more than 10% of the world's Middle Jurassic dinosaur species and more than 15% of the Middle Jurassic dinosaur sites. The fossils found in Skye include more than 100 marks left by a lizard called Isochirotherium - also known as the hand-beast - 270 million years ago.

THE BATTLE OF VERNEUIL WAS FOUGHT - IN THIS WEEK IN HISTORY….Scotland suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Verneuil on 17 August 1424, part of the Hundred Years' War. More than 4,000 Scottish soldiers were killed in the fighting, where French and Scots were pitched against the forces of England's King Henry VI. The Scottish/French defeat came after five years of largely successful military campaigns, which saw Scottish troops established as an individual unit within the French army. The bloody battle was later described as a 'second Agincourt' and Scotland's future military prospects were damaged by the deaths in battle of two leaders - the Earl of Douglas and the Earl of Buchan. The defeat saw an end to Scotland's participation as a nation in the Hundred Years' War, although individual mercenaries stayed on to fight alongside the French.

SCOTTISH ENGINEER JAMES NASMYTH WAS BORN - IN THIS WEEK IN HISTORY…. Scottish engineer James Nasmyth, inventor of the steam hammer, was born on 19 August 1808 in Edinburgh. Nasmyth was the son of painter Alexander Nasmyth, who encouraged his son to develop his interest in all things mechanical, which increased when he befriended the son of a local iron founder. At the age of twenty, Nasmyth made a full size steam carriage capable of carrying passengers and his success encouraged him to seek a career in engineering. One of his greatest inventions was the steam hammer which allowed huge pieces of metal to be worked efficiently and could deliver a range of blows, from the lightest to the heaviest. One of the hammer's earliest uses was in the forging of the paddle shaft of the SS Great Britain.  Nasmyth died in 1890, at the age of 82.

ON 24 AUGUST 1947 THE FIRST EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF MUSIC AND DRAMA OPENED….. The festival was inspired by the arts festivals organised in Salzburg before the Second World War, but has grown to become the largest event of its kind in the world. It has also spawned a book festival, film festival and the festival fringe. The festival was also responsible for the creation of Scottish Opera and forced a greater amount of funding from the Arts Council to be given to Scotland.

ON 24 AUGUST 1953 SCOTTISH GOLFER SAM TORRANCE WAS BORN….. After turning professional in 1970 Torrance became a regular member of the European Ryder Cup team, and gained golfing immortality when he hit the winning putt in 1985 Ryder Cup to win the trophy back for Europe after a break of 28-years.

On that note I will say that I hope you have enjoyed the historical news from Scotland today,

Our look at Scotland today is of a hiker on the trail up Ben Nevis, the British Isles' tallest mountain at 1,344m, I cannot credit the photographer as is my norm as no credit was given...

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Friday 24th August 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus #Scotland #News #Spain