What would Cyber-Feudalism would be like?

Depends on what you mean, I guess. IRL, individual knights were never "a force unto themselves." Collectively, they could be decisive on a battlefield, but by themselves they could be surprised and taken down.

If you're talking about other knights, yes. But a knight versus peasant, the knight may as well have power armor.

It's a bit relative. Knights weren't invincible, no, but they were definitely very deadly. We're talking a guy who's trained since the day they were 7 on how to kill and who is equipped with the best armor and weaponry of his era. Fighting a knight would generally be a very risky proposition.

Likewise, even a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier or a guy in power armor, while very deadly, wouldn't generally be invincible either. Take Adam Jensen for example, he's a force to be reckoned with but is quite mortal.

That's not entirely because of the armor, though. For much of history, a reasonably well trained group of peasants could take out even a riding and fully equipped knight.

The problem was, there weren't many well trained peasants, because all armies were variously conscription or levy-based. To make matters worse peasants could get hung for killing a knight in combat, because capturing rich people alive means they can be ransomed back for enormous amounts of money, and if they're dead, you can't get their money, so they were incentivized heavily to be gentle with the angry, heavily-armed rich man and his horse.

>That's not entirely because of the armor, though. For much of history, a reasonably well trained group of peasants could take out even a riding and fully equipped knight.

And i'd say that doesn't matter. One-on-one, a knight is effectively invincible against peasants. The analogy thus holds: enhanced or power-armor equipped people would be akin to knights. A group of regular people might beat one, but individually they stand no chance. The difference in armor, training, and general equipment was simply night and day.

It was also a matter of tactics. Knights would use the mobility of cavalry to hit and run a mass of peasants before they could leverage their numbers. Likewise, it was difficult to get enough peasants on a wall to bring down a knight, both attacking and defending.

But there's more than just military power here. Knights commanded a measure of social and economic power. Even a landless knight could find ways to pay for maintenance of their gear while landed knights could often afford to hire men-at-arms. Knights would also benefit from various customs like Hospitality or Parole.

As a result, a knight was very independent and capable of fighting for his own interests and not just the interests of his liege. It's not something we see with Tank Commanders or Fighter Pilots.

"One-on-one, a knight is effectively invincible against peasants."

Not true, and everyone knew it. If it had been, there could have been no peasant revolts, and there were. While it is true that peasants generally weren't well trained in battlefield weapons, they could have extensive experience with back street (behind the hedge) gang fighting. Judicial duels were also a thing, and included the peasantry. They wouldn't have had access to the kind of weapons and armor the knightly class had access to, but knights couldn't wear their armor 24/7, nor did peasants lack access to pole weapons and shields.

"Knights commanded a measure of social and economic power."

That's pretty much it. Knights (more accurately, the landed aristocracy) had access to resources and "soft power" that peasants depended upon for their survival. Revolts were often put down by armies of knights (and those peasants willing to fight with them) but they were more often kept under control via access to food, manufactured items and religious ideology.

"One-on-One" is the key term here. While peasants might have had some experience with a judicial duel, a Knight almost certainly had daily training since childhood and most likely participated in Tourneys and Feuds. Furthermore, judicial duels tended to be kinda bonkers. Like they combatants had to fight with goats horns or purpose made dueling shields. Peasants would generally avoid dueling for just this reason.

Besides that, there was a matter of nutrition. Knights usually had first pick of the food while farming peasants were usually the last in line. As a result, peasants usually had to deal with meager portions. This usually wasn't enough to starve them but it certainly kept them from bulking up like a knight. A knight would not only hit harder than a peasant but also keep fighting long after a peasant's stamina ran out.

Add in equipment and peasants would struggle to face a knight three on one, never mind one-on-one.

Incidentally, there's multiple instances of various armored members of the nobility dying against a lone peasant, usually from being struck in the head by a thrown object.

It's not a question of if an individual knight would USUALLY beat an individual peasant, there's no question there, of course they would. They had access to more training and better quality of life, but they weren't even close to invincible. It mattered a lot more what weapons were being used against them and how ready they were to face an attack. A sling, for example, could easily kill a period armored knight if it had a lead bullet and hit something important, not to mention the obvious power of the quintessential weapon for millennia, the stick with something sharp on the end. If the knight isn't ready, or is surprised, it's much more likely a peasant could win right out of the gate.

I get the distinct impression that we have very different ideas of what we mean by "armored knight".

Also, again, i AM talking one-on-one. On no battlefield, in no rebellion, in no war is anyone going to one-on-one someone else. It's not how any ancient battle worked, no matter what Hollywood tries to tell you.

Armor was historically good but not great until plate armor came to town, some time after guns became a thing, and even then, weapons accessible to peasants were no less deadly. Bows could pierce most period armor (though inconsistently), especially in societies that really liked bows (like the welsh, for example). Sling projectiles were almost invariably injurious, though slinging accurately is more difficult than aiming a bow. Armor makes things less bad, but while it is an unevenly matched fight, there is not an insurmountable difference.

One on one, it depends a lot more on who gets the initiative. A spherical duel in a vacuum obviously is going to favor the knight strongly, but there are no spherical vacuum duels. If someone is going to fight an armored knight and they don't have the skills or weaponry to reasonably beat him in a fair fight, they're going to try to make the fight unfair, and if they get somewhat lucky, it's not difficult to inflict a fatal wound, with how easily things got infected back then.

In pretty much no scenario is a peasant going to stand there in front of a horse-rider and punch him and his horse in the face, they're usually going to hide somewhere and try to equalize the position as much as possible by surprise assassinations, ambushes, and asymmetric tactics, which are very easy to come up with the idea for. An arrow from a window, a sling from behind a hedge, a thrown iron pot, all these things were major health hazards whether you had armor or not. One-on-one scenarios that don't exist are irrelevant, one-on-one scenarios that were likely to happen do favor the knight, but not overwhelmingly so.

Notably, the nobility was absolutely terrified of peasant uprisings, and rightly so. They regularly fled ahead of them, and often the uprisings only failed because the leaders all gathered in one place to negotiate terms of surrender and got ambushed.

Bringing this back then to the original matter of comparing someone in powered armour to a mediaeval knight, I think that the comparison holds:

In a one-on-one "fair" fight (is it really fair if only one side gets armour? :P), the knight/powered-armour-user seems likely to win: they have better protection, better weaponry, and likely greater strength (if for different reasons).

But indeed, they're not outright invincible.

For the peasant/non-powered-armour-user it becomes, then, a matter of finding advantage against the more-powerful foe: of fighting on terrain that favours them or disfavours the other; of finding weaknesses in the armour; of exploiting disadvantages to the armour; of attacking unseen; and so on.

Sounds about right to me.

If we're going the Power Armor route we can also give our "knights" knightly steeds. Well, quad bikes with A.I.s, at least. It would be a good way to keep the armors supplied with ammo and power. Many quad bikes still use gasoline.

As for the Knights themselves, I have trouble seeing them as real princes of the battlefield so long as tanks and attack helicopters exist.

I can see mecha-horses and motorbikes working out decently. Or going a step further from Powered Armor into straight up Humongous Mecha territory a la Gundam and Code Geass (which also use knightly imagery with their terminology around the mechs)

There is the question of course of why they're knights and not merely security goons.

How did that come about? Why are high ranking members of society running around being soldiers when they could be sitting at home watching the line go up, an easier and safer thing to do, generally? Why have large professional armies fallen by the wayside and been replaced with a very small group of men-at-arms and knights? Did drones and other killbot types render a standing army irrelevant? If so, why are humans going outside to fight at all when a robot could fly in, fire a missile, and go back? If not, why is there no proper standing army?

There are many questions that need to be answered.

I've been struggling with that question and so far I've got three possible answers.

• First, the power armor in question gives the user superhuman agility in addition to firepower and toughness.
• Second, Man portable guided missiles have gotten so advanced that helicopters and tanks just aren't viable anymore so the largest practical armored unit is the man in powered armor. However, since suits are expensive only the most elite forces get power armor.
• Each Knight also commands a unit of drones that do most of the fighting. Due to issues with jamming and bad AI you need a local commander who can give the drone horde direction.

As for why Knights and not professional soldiers? Probably socio-economic reasons. The corporate overlords can't appeal to patriotism so they have to command loyalty through money and fear. The poorly trained rank and file get fear while the knights get money and lots of it.

There is the question of course of why they're knights and not merely security goons.

I dont think that really matters. knights were well-equipped to maintain their status. any sort of cyberpunk equivalent would also have the same reason to be equipped. Knights went to war to defend their lands and status. A cyberpunk crimeboss may do the same.

They do not have to formally be the army, or cops, or whatever. Simply that, by virtue of their wealth they would be able to have the firepower of an army and that they would have, for the same reason, the power of the law behind them.

I'd say the cyberpunk equivalent of a knight would be a supersoldier mercenary (a cyborg or something like that) given advanced technology by their megacorp I'm exchange (such as cybernetics) in part for their services. These enhancements are likely too expensive for the average Joe.

They'd needn't be the end-all be-all of armed conflict, but the idea isn't too implausible in the context of a cyberpunk setting.

I'd imagine the distinction is that security goons need a supervision and salary that knights can't get. Instead you rely on trust and land.

So if your corporation can pay or actually employ your soldiers, then you don't have a feudalistic system. If the only pay they can give are resource extraction rights on an asteroid (or planet, or whatever) and don't have many means of enforcement, instead having to rely on trust, then it's a feudalistic system.

If the currency system is unreliable because the government is on the verge of collapse then it might be easier to pay someone in goods and assets rather than money.

One way to do it might be to incorporate (so to speak :P) travel-time issues into the system, of sufficient scale that the central governing power—a megcorp, since this is cyberpunk—isn't in a position to exert direct power (military or financial).

Specifically, I'm imagining a system in which planets take the place of capital cities, and outlying objects like moons and asteroids take the place of smaller settlements.

However, while space-travel is possible (hence the settling of these smaller bodies), it remains slow. As a result, military and financial power flows only sluggishly.

As a result, the central megacorp sends out trusted agents to rule over the lesser bodies. With limited backing from the 'corp, they have a lot of free reign. But they also know that, even if it's slow, the megacorp can bring to bear much more firepower than can they, which keeps them (more or less) in line.

Now, the was the question of why the elite are warriors; of why they would go to battle rather than watching their numbers tick up.

My thought there is that, at some point, a shift in culture led to a prevailing philosophy of "might makes right", and acceptance of things like Klingon Promotion. As a result, leaders tend to be those most inclined to combat—and if they slip at that, someone is likely to make a violent bid for their seat.

"So if your corporation can pay or actually employ your soldiers, then you don't have a feudalistic system."

Paying them in stock options functions rather similar to being paid in farmland.

As for company mid-level executives being warriors, if there is no effective rule of law, then any company can attack and destroy any rival's assets. Might get quite rambunctious out at the periphery.

I am inclined to treat stock options more like money - they can only be used to make more of it, and if the money is worthless due to lack of state capacity so are the stock options.

What about crypto, maybe it would actually be more than a scam in a feudal system where centralized banking is untenable for some reason?