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Got a story post up. Still haven't written my OOB up yet; busy month, sorry guys.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:

madd0ct0r wrote:Great obat.


Would anybody be up for a major invasion?

Define "major invasion." I may be interested, though I have a nascent naval war brewing in the Chesapeake as well.

On another note, I will be making one last "winter" story post in a couple hours or so, but that only serves to continue setting up my succession crisis storyline and will not directly affect anyone else.

Hmm, invading you is difficult since i don't have a navy, giving you coastal supoport impunity. Should a civil war be in earnest, I'm sure heyenork mercs would be available. I'm planning a starvation induced migration plot line, so tribes fighting for both sides in return for food is quite possible...

While I'm kicking off this Succession Crisis stroyline, please don't think I actually have a solid plan for where it's going, it's mainly to give me possibilities for future posts that are more interesting than "Technomage discovers something new" or "Diplomat says something fucking stupid."

Hey, E_F, did we agree on Terreglaize as Charles' title or did you come up with that on your own?

I am 100% okay with it either way, just trying to remember.

Prince Charles' holdings within Ohio proper are considerable, and are in the mountainous, rugged parts of OTL eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, where the Ohio Valley shades into the Appalachians. The local people are surprisingly loyal to him, but are of course a bunch of fractious hillfolk. Any resemblance to certain other hillfolk known to support Prince Charlies, such as their accents, their choice of musical instrument, their habit of charging musketeers with broadsword and targe and winning, are... less than purely coincidental.

EDIT:

I like the river monster, Raw Shark.

And maddoc, while E_F nominally has an advantage on account of having a navy, the magnitude of this advantage may be limited in any operation besides harassing the hyenorc tribes very close to the coast. If they pull back a few miles and the ships try to land marines to sail further inland outside range of their own guns... well, that's a rather different sort of fight.

Terreglaize was the ducal title you gave me for him, Prince of Hephaestus was my suggestion.

And I absolutely love the purely coincidental supporters of his

[nods]

Got to remember to factor them into Detroit.

[wanders off, humming Hey, Johnnie Cope...]

Also the parts of my Siege Regiment as well.

Additionally, I'm surprised there are no comments on my new Flagships, they are going to be utter beasts and I really really want a naval war to spring up so I can have Dreadnought or Defiant leading a squadron of Battleships.

Simon_Jester wrote:I like the river monster, Raw Shark.

Thanks! Actually a subterranean monster that has growths that closely resemble the local trees sprouting from its belly to lure in prey and happens to live right next to a river; sorry if that didn't come through in my writing.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Additionally, I'm surprised there are no comments on my new Flagships, they are going to be utter beasts and I really really want a naval war to spring up so I can have Dreadnought or Defiant leading a squadron of Battleships.

Oh, I think we can work something out, after I get my shit together. Next planned story post takes place on a slave ship.

I'd forgotten you were slavers. Excellent...

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Also the parts of my Siege Regiment as well.

Additionally, I'm surprised there are no comments on my new Flagships, they are going to be utter beasts and I really really want a naval war to spring up so I can have Dreadnought or Defiant leading a squadron of Battleships.

Oh, I already have plans for "the great cast-iron columbiads of the Orion battalions."

Simon_Jester wrote:

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Also the parts of my Siege Regiment as well.

Additionally, I'm surprised there are no comments on my new Flagships, they are going to be utter beasts and I really really want a naval war to spring up so I can have Dreadnought or Defiant leading a squadron of Battleships.

Oh, I already have plans for "the great cast-iron columbiads of the Orion battalions."

As much as I like the idea of using columbiads, they weren't invented until 1811, so that may be outside our time limit.

A pity I can't get warships in range of Detroit.

Honestly, a plausible 120pdr gun will look like a columbiad of necessity; I for one am calling artistic license on this.

"Columbiad" isn't a technology as such, it's just a name used regionally for unusually large-caliber smoothbores of iron construction- in more or less the region we operate in, no less! So a War of 1812-vintage ten-inch columbiad isn't actually that different from what the major powers of 1790 could have produced if they were bothering to make guns that heavy, and is a good mental model for what such a monster gun might look like.

Now, something like a Civil War-era Rodman or Dahlgren gun would definitely be "too advanced" in my eyes... but that's not what I'm describing here.

Fair enough.

Though now I have a mental image of using one of those 120 pdr guns loaded with grapeshot and canister against charging Highlanders...er, I mean, residents of Terreglaize.

On another note, I've been thinking of fleshing out some of Orion's early history, based on Arthurian myths, with the First Emperor William pulling a mythical sword from a stone, since in a world with magic that can actually happen and have some significance.

And if anyone is curious, this is entirely because I want to name one of next year's new Battleships Excalibur and need an excuse. I will be using the older myths where Excalibur is the sword pulled from the stone rather than being given to Arthur later by the Lady of the Lake.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Fair enough.

Though now I have a mental image of using one of those 120 pdr guns loaded with grapeshot and canister against charging Highlanders...er, I mean, residents of Terreglaize.

Eh, those are some pretty high lands.

And go for it... except, well. Those guns likely weigh about seven and a half tons not counting the carriage; even with weight reduction they are horribly, horribly unwieldy.

Maneuver warfare can be a cast-iron bitch sometimes.

Good point. Still...

"For Prince Charlie! Forward!" ... BOOM....huge crowd of angry gingers get promptly eviscerated.

Hope you like your firing position with a side-order of Chicossacks? Charlie knows a few good ones...

Meh, I'm indifferent to Chicossacks personally.

Well, they're pretty good light cavalry, so they merit being taken seriously in my opinion, but we'll leave the matter there.

What I guess my point comes down to is that there are good reasons why nobody used two or three ton field artillery pieces much in real life; with animal traction that is just too heavy to move easily. Also, the recoil on those siege guns is going to be absolutely immense, so it might be nearly impossible to operate them anywhere except from a fixed and heavily braced mount. Sure, a lighter framework could support the weight, but it wouldn't stop the guns from recoiling all over the landscape.

Oh I completely agree with you on that, but the idea of 240 pounds of grapeshot and musket balls hurtling downrange at a horde of gingers is highly amusing.

Infantry suppression is what my light 18 and 36 pdrs are for.

Idly I wonder what the point of diminishing returns is with case and canister shot. The lethal footprint of the individual canister projectiles is determined by aerodynamics more than muzzle velocity, and the cone of effect doesn't get significantly wider as a function of barrel width, I suspect. At some point, you've fired enough fragments to kill everything directly in front of the gun, and pouring more fragments into the same cone won't actually accomplish anything.

Good points.

But surely the threshold of 'enough fragments to kill' is a bit more variable when demons are a battlefield fact?

Canister is a choice of weapon based heavily on the assumption that being shot with a a relatively limited number of individual low velocity fragments is reliably enough to kill the target.

Against a creature with the kind of durability of a very large tough animal, or a tree, or the like... One against whom individual canister fragments have more like the stopping power of, oh, birdshot...

You wouldn't use a bigger cannon, you'd use grapeshot (against formations of them), ball, or possibly something exotic like bar or chain shot that increases hit probability while still carrying enough force to, say, smash right through a tree.

Yeah, standard loads are:

Roundshot for very large creatures or tightly-packed lines of troops
Canister for human-sized and toughness groups
Grapeshot for larger creatures or groups of tougher-than-human soldiers