Shrykull wrote: Straha wrote:Historically when did military technology/capability recapture what was once lost and become able to fight on parity or beat the Roman legions of old?
What about at the renaissance when canons made castles obselete. And I'm guessing they must have had some fairly powerful guns, or shields wouldn't have become obsolete.
It wasn't just the advent of more powerful guns that made castles obsolete. I doubt a classical Roman army would have had
any difficulty taking the vast majority of medieval castles (though the really heavily fortified ones, like Krak des Chevaliers might have given them a tough time).
Part of the reasons castles were so effective in their day was that they were very good in providing an adequate defense against the relatively small armies of the Middle Ages. Most medieval armies were not that large, and much of their manpower consisted of barely trained peasant levies. It was beyond the logistical capabilities of most medieval states to keep a really large army in the field for a great length of time. William the Conqueror, for example, was thought by his contemporaries to have done something really remarkable in keeping an army of somewhat over 5000 men sitting on the Norman coast all summer in 1066, and in maintaining discipline. To the Romans, this would have been nothing at all.
As the Renaissance came on, states grew richer and more powerful, and their tax gathering mechanisms grew more efficient, their military, and particularly logistical capabilities increased. So in addition to better guns, they were able to field larger armies. There also came to be more dependence on professional troops, and less reliance on peasant levies, which increased their effectiveness still further.
Shrykull wrote:One history teacher I had said that a civil war rifle couldn't hit the big world map 8 feet away, I don't think it could be THAT bad, if you pointed a gun at me and had a 85% chance of missing it might not be that threatening.
Sigh... yet another example of how our educational system is going down the tubes. If this ignoramus is teaching history... The blind leading the blind.
He was talking out his ass. Even an unrifled Revolutionary War-era musket was accurate enough to hit a man sized target within a range of about 80 yards every time, given a good marksman. Rifled arms were accurate at much longer range. Rifles existed since the 15th century, but were slower to reload due to the greater difficulty of ramming a very tight fitting (and it had to be tight fitting in order for the rifling to impart spin to the projectile) ball all the way down a 30 inch (or longer) barrel. All this changed in the mid-19th century with the invention of the minie ball. The ball got its name from its inventor, Captain Claude Minie of the French Army. It was conical in shape and made of soft lead, with two or three grease grooves around its body. The cylinder-conical ball usually had a cavity in the base. It fitted loosely in the barrel, and so was easily rammed down. But upon firing, the hot gases produced by the burning black powder charge expanded into the hollow base of the ball, forcing the soft lead into the rifling grooves inside the barrel of the musket, making a tight fit to the rifling, which then imparted a spin to the ball, making its range an incredible 1500 yards, with extreme accuracy at 350 yards or less. At 600 yards, a .58 caliber Minie ball fired from a Springfield or Enfield rifled musket could penetrate six 1 inch pine boards. When it hit the human body, destruction of tissues, cartilage, vein, and bone was massive. The soft lead flattened and broke apart as it hit flesh. If a man was hit in the arm or leg, the bullet shattered the bone from 6 to 10 inches and necessity for amputation was certain. If hit in the torso, a man was usually left to die.
It was the accurate, rifled musket, which could be reloaded every bit as fast as the old smoothbores, which pretty much made the old tactics of tight infantry formations fighting in close order obsolete. It took the generals a while to realize this, and horrendous casualties resulted.
