Combat-Writing Thread

Because iron smelting and refining is a human invention which magically symbolizes our power.

And steel isn't? It's not found in nature, it's something we made.

I thought steel worked too.

I'm guessing everyone just lost the technology for steel-making too soon for it to get a cultural foothold.

Plus, going to emphasize that fairies aren't ALL bad. The Wild Hunt is somewhere in the 10% of "Run away immediately" fairies. Also, it's hard to nuke someone who can portal around the world with relative ease.

edited 18th Jul '15 8:53:17 PM by Sharysa

Ah, but more and more of the Earth is "urbanized", all those metal framed buildings, cars and trucks, artifical turf, blacktop.

I'd assume that the fae would be more of a danger to those out camping rather than those sitting in their apartment complex...

edited 18th Jul '15 9:39:43 PM by TairaMai

Indeed. Rural areas are REALLY vulnerable to the Folk, but urban areas have a pretty Bowdlerized view of fairies because only the stupid fairies would try to attack a city with tons of iron and magical enchantments.

Like the Hellboy ones?

I haven't watched the Hellboy movie with fairies, but yes! :D

Edit: Elf-shot can literally give you heart attacks now. I needed a reason for my protagonists to not reach safety in time, so the Wild Hunt pounded their car with arrows, one of which unfortunately landed on my nurse character. (They also ruined the back tires and broke the back window.) Now she has to coach someone else to help stabilize her with a spell.

edited 19th Jul '15 3:06:39 PM by Sharysa

Here's a discovery that may be of general interest: Choreographing the Dance of the Vampires.

For context, there's a crucial, extremely well-written sea battle in Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, the "Dance of the Vampires", that pits a US carrier battlegroup against a Soviet Naval Aviation bomber regiment^note A "vampire", in naval parlance, is an inbound missile.. And I mean well-written: the prose is cinematic and tense, and you could pretty easily close your eyes and see how the battle plays out, from the Soviets' first contact report, to the back-and-forth positioning of the two combatants in their game of hide-and-seek over a million square miles of ocean, to the launches and missile impacts.

As might be imagined, it took Clancy and co-writer Larry Bond a lot of time and effort to develop the chapter, and much of it was spent working out positions and capabilities. Over three sessions, as the article reveals, Clancy and a few others gamed out the likely scenarios, with individual people taking the roles of sub-commanders on either side. (Interestingly, in the few pages of game notes that are available, Clancy was the overall Soviet commander.)

That was amazingly interesting.

Not sure if this belongs here, but it seems like the best place to put it.

Wars feel different. It's an interesting thing for me to consider, and given my general writerly interests, it's something I'd like to explore a bit more.

I've played enough of the early Call of Duty series to tell that World War 2 is generally thought of as a fairly straightforward affair of good-versus-evil, extolling the heroism and sacrifice of the Greatest Generation. This stands in fairly stark contrast to the modern crop of wars, which tend to be murky quagmires of purposeless tragicomedy and spirals of unending suffering.

Being young as I am I've only really known the latter kind, and consequently I find myself gravitating towards them whenever I think of writing conflict. I have partaken of and enjoyed the former kind of stories on occasion, but there seems to me to be so much more dramatic potential in the modern breed of war.

I think that's more of a function of the west's tendency to focus on the Western Front of WWII. The most brutal fighting on the Eastern Front was very different from the clean-cut good-against-evil perception of Northern Africa and the West, as chronicled by Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Considering you managed to describe them in basically two adjectives, I'm unconvinced you've thought that through.

But I'm going to hit you with some Keegan to point out the obvious flaw in your thinking. Battle "is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sensor of honour and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them."

You're describing war from the perspective of a civilian, ex post facto, after the dust has settled (but arguably before the historical impact can be properly understood). It is not the perspective you would use, however, to describe war in the context of a story. To a man on the line, the attitudes and the way things seem to play out would have changed remarkably little. War has always been spirals of unending suffering and tragicomedy at the micro scale. It's arguably become much less so in the modern era if anything, because so few people on both sides are actually killed. There were rifle companies in ETO that suffered 270% casualties over the course of two months in mid-early 1944; complete turnover, almost three times. 4.5% of the unit killed a day, every day. No one in a modern war, on any side, has it that bad.

For a rifleman from WW 2, Afghanistan would be very recognizable. While measures of progress and pace might be different, the experience of being on patrol, manning a dugout overnight, or getting in a firefight would be instantly familiar. A lot of the jokes would be the same. A lot of the complaints would be the same too.

edited 22nd Jul '15 9:47:50 AM by Night

The Eastern Front was incredibly brutal, but as far as I know, a fair few old Russians still manage to have a sense of nostalgia for the Great Patriotic War.

I had thought I'd made it fairly clear I was speaking about how wars are understood in popular consciousness and how they are depicted in various media. I have no nostalgia for the second world war, nor am I making concrete, factual statements about the nature of real wars. I'm interested in what makes wars feel different from one-another from the perspective of the audience, and how this difference lends to telling different kinds of stories.

For instance, in an unambiguous kind of war there exists a definite moral delineation between the belligerents, and the clear objective is to kill the enemy. They can be gritty, brutal and uncompromising in their depiction of war, but the fundamental necessity of killing the enemy is never really in question. War is hell, but it's a necessary kind of hell. The kind of unpleasant, dirty work that you grit your teeth and get over with, but that doesn't otherwise entail any kind of serious consideration as to why it needs to be done in the first place. However scarred the experience of this conflict might leave the soldiers who participated in it, there is an underlying dignity in their willingness to fight and die in the course of their righteous struggle. An example of this kind of war in fiction is Halo. The UNSC’s war against the Covenant is a war for survival against an irrational and dogmatic coalition of alien races bent on Humanity’s extermination- fairly morally straightforward. War isn’t depicted as particularly glorious, but it is treated with a somber weight that speaks to the dignity of service and the heroism of sacrifice. There is a degree of moral ambiguity and murkiness, but it mainly arises surrounding the question of how far the UNSC is willing to go to ensure Humanity’s continued survival, exemplified by the heinously unethical nature of the various SPARTAN programs.

The nostalgia for the Great Patriotic War comes from the fact that the Russians consider it to be their finest hour. The greatest and defining moment in their history.

I've heard some go as far to say that it's their founding myth.

That's my understanding at least. Someone should go grab one of the Russian tropers and really ask.

There is a difference when the men in the battle feel that their leaders lied to them and their sacrifice is being wasted.

Gault, if you ever get the chance to, do try to sit down and chat with someone willing to share their war experience. Hearing a normally cool, soft-spoken immigrant teacher recount frantically running through the streets of Mogadishu, looking for his teenage son just hours before the boat left the port, tends to drive home the essence of the latter portrayal (or at least it did for me).

And I'm pointing out that when you're standing in the mud, the stories aren't very different. You're talking about how wars are viewed in their historiography. That is a very different and disconnected thing from how they are viewed by those who participate in them, as they are doing so.

Back to the Keegan. What defines men and women in combat is the struggle between their instincts, whether natural or developed by training. A UNSC Marine confronts many, most, of the same things a Panzer Grenadier would. Fear the sky; curse the mud; the superiority in weapons and material of the enemy; the sense that victory is not possible and this will be the end of everything they value. The universal tensions of fear, loyalty, and honor.

In the end those stories share more, probably far more, than they have differences. We are tempted to treat the Panzer Grenadier differently because he's German and his cause has been judged unjust, but that's purely projection. Few, if any, on the line would have had either knowledge or appreciation of such matters, being too busy trying to survive. (And what was the Stalinist Soviet Union if not a dogmatic and unreasonable empire based on a downright theological cult of personality? The Great Patriotic War is viewed as a holy mission, a crusade. It was hyped that way at the time as well, though relatively few line soldiers probably considered it that way for the same reasons line German soldiers wouldn't have commented much on the einsatzkommando; it's something that happens but it's not a part of the world they deal with every day.) It has little, if any, place in the actual writing of the work.

edited 22nd Jul '15 5:30:23 PM by Night

While everything you just said is true, I think you may be underestimating the unique experiences of soldiers who served in different wars, for different sides. At least in terms of narrative effect, it could easily feel different to be an American serving in France in 1943 than in Vietnam in 1965. Let alone to a German or a Vietnamese. While the similarities dont go away, the differences do exist.

I've been thinking about the Mordhau and how it would affect pommels and crossguards. Would repeatedly striking armored opponents like that cause a lot of wear and tear? Are those components usually tempered and would doing so help them withstand it?

The thing is, stiffening the cross-guard is going to unbalance the sword, make it heavier overall, and increase the cost of manufacture, all in order to create a sword that could never be as effective at that technique as a weapon that is specially designed to do that, like a war-hammer.

I meant heat treating it to get the right combination of hardness and strength, as opposed to making it more bulky.

There would obviously be an increase in cost due to extra fuel required, but the weight distribution would stay the same.

edited 27th Jul '15 3:28:36 PM by VolatileChills

IIRC, heat-treating a sword blade is intended to make the blade sharp and to keep it's edge, not necessarily stronger overall.

There are multiple steps, from what I've read. Heating it up and rapidly quenching makes the blade hard and good for holding an edge, and then tempering is done to make it flexible enough to take blows without shattering.

The problem is that nobody details whether or not this was done with the crossguards. >.<

Hey, guys, maybe we can do this like the other critique threads?

My suggestion:

With the nation critique thread up and running, and so many of you having done much world building, I figured, this is the next step. I mean, so many people have created worlds with diverse history, sprawling empires, political feuds, and the like, so, why not. For this thread we'll mention both armies, their histories, set up, corps, divisions, technology, etc. for wars we'll discuss causes, length, casualties, average technology levels, distinct battles, effects, and participating nations.

edited 28th Jul '15 3:20:54 PM by OmniGoat