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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)


  • If it’s more serious misinformation, it probably warrants taking down the post, even if unintentional. The nuance would then be that genuine error doesn’t immediatly warrant banning, even if the post is taken down.

    This one is a mild and unintentional case with little implications either way. If someone were to cite this as “But this one you left up!” as excuse for a different, more severe case, the mods would justifiably say that it doesn’t apply.

    Besides, it’s not like setting a precedent is as serious for community mods as it is for courts of law - mods can change the rules when a situation arises that warrants it and enforce them accordingly, make one-off decisions for special cases or admit a previous decision was a mistake and generally have more leeway.



  • Most foot soldiers would wear chain armor with pieces of plate here and there, and thats only the extremely rich who could afford things like that.

    Mail was much too expensive to produce to outfit “Most foot soldiers” with. For much of the middle ages, most foot soldiers wore some kind of Gambeson and a helmet. A mail hauberk was the next step up, as it was still cheaper than a full mail shirt.

    Plate cuirasses became common among the more wealthy in the late middle ages. By the early modern period, when the Almain Rivet (half-armour) became cheap enough, you’d see smaller professional armies be outfitted with them. But the common peasantry generally couldn’t afford either for the longest time.

    Its funny when people talk about full plate being ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’ when it was mostly a sign of status, ornamental and incredibly impractical.

    As a rule, if something didn’t work in war, people wisened up and stopped doing it. They weren’t stupid, just because they didn’t have the same wealth of knowledge thay we do.

    Knights didn’t want to impress and get killed, they wanted to win and live. No amount of status will help you if your opponents dance on your grave. If plate was as much of a liability as you claim, it wouldn’t have become more popular, comprehensive and accordingly expensive over time, until Gunpowder started accelerating weapons development far beyond anything protection could keep up with.

    You’re right that full plate was often worn by heavy cavalry, both as a matter of wealth and as a matter of utility. Heavy Cavalry were shock troops, morale breakers, designed to make your (often not professionally trained) soldiers falter, break order, open gaps in their ranks to get out of the way of the thundering beast charging at them. The appearance added to the indimidation, but it also helped protect on the way to and through the infantry lines.

    There were mounted heavy infantry too that would ride to battle, then dismount and advance with the soldiery, and there too did plate help protect. It’s easier to confidently walk into a line of levied peasants pointing spears at you if you’re hard to actually wound.

    In either case they were made of much thinner plate than some pop culture depictions would make them out to be - about 20-30kg. A modern soldier’s kit isn’t lighter than that.

    many battles by extremely well geared soldiers were lost because they couldnt out maneuver barely armored militia, or even just rain.

    Most battles that saw heavy cavalry lose were because of miscalculations, not because the armour made them immobile. If infantry in good order maintained cohesion, but the cavalry kept charging instead of turning to feint, they likely got stuck in a melee where numbers would be against them. If they rode into heavy missile fire, no amount of mobility will magically let them dodge the arrows, but a good plate would increase your chances of survival. If they got stuck in the mud as sitting ducks, that was because horses don’t always deal well with running across uneven ground, particularly with sudden pitfalls where the ground is softer, and even more if heavy rain and blinders impeded their vision.

    Yes, bodkin arrows from a sufficiently powerful warbow at sufficiently short ranges and steep angles of impact may well penetrate plate, particularly the less solid visors, and arrows in general bear a risk of felling your horse, but some armour is better than no armour.

    Like I said, if it didn’t help in battle, they wouldn’t go to such lengths and expenses to produce it and wear it to battle. They’d wear it to ceremonies, to parades and to tourneys, but not to war.

    I’ll leave you with this demonstration of mobility