A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
This is the third part of a three part (I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last post, we outlined what 'foraging' actually entailed - how armies got supplies both from friendly populations but also from neutral or hostile populations. In particular, we focused on the … Continue reading Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
This is the second part of a three part (I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last post we outlined the members of our 'campaign community,' including soldiers but also non-combatants and animals (both war- and draft-); they required massive amounts of supplies, particularly food but … Continue reading Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, we noted that before gunpowder the ability of a general to affect the course of a battle … Continue reading Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
This week, we're going to take a break from the more serious topics to look at infantry tactics and compositions in the Total War series, particularly in the light of the recent Total War: Warhammer III, a real-time strategy game set in a late-medieval/early-modern high fantasy setting (the Warhammer setting) and how well (or poorly) … Continue reading Collection: Total War’s Missing Infantry-Type
Happy New Year! Good riddance 2020! Fireside this week. Next week, we'll be finishing up our look at the Dothraki of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones by looking at how they are shown to fight and comparing that to the fighting patterns of actual historical horse-borne nomads. Of course, it's … Continue reading Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021
This is Part IIIb of our four-and-three-quarters part series (I, II, IIIa) on what we're calling the Fremen Mirage. Last week, we traced the origins of this idea in the Greek and Roman ethnographic tradition. We found that the tropes that make up this concept - the poor, unsophisticated, but morally pure and militarily powerful … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part IIIb: Myths of the Atreides