Hello all, first post in this forum and for that I have a scenario that has to do with my current work and I’m looking for others opinions on it; using the napoleonic wars as an example. Assuming that at the beginning of the napoleonic wars, each of the nations of the world receives two thousand wizards who, for this thread are assumed to only have this ability, are capable of taking armour and enchanting it to better resist musket impacts. The first handful of shots--depending on how strong the enchantment is--will fail to pierce. After this though, the enchant fails and has to be re-enchanted, without the enchantment the armour is still very strong, the enchantment strengthens it to a very strong type of steel. Not every wizard is equal, this is the rough split for how long it takes a wizard to enchant and re-enchant. 100 Highlord wizards: can enchant 1 cuirass per day and a half/can re-enchant one every half day. 200 master Wizards: Can enchant 1 cuirass per two days/can re-enchant one every day. 300 High wizards: Can enchant 1 cuirass per three days/can re-enchant one every two days. 400 Court wizards: can enchant 1 cuirass per three and a half days/can re-enchant one every three days. 1,000 junior wizards: can enchant 1 cuirass per four and a half days/can re-enchant one every four days. The wizards cannot do both per day, they must choose one or the other to do and focus on that. They must take a day break in between enchanting or re-enchanting in which they'll eat and enter a magical trance to restore themselves. For a Highlord wizard to create a full plate suit of enchanted armour, it will take them three and a half days in total. The enchantment itself will last a full year before needing to be redone. materials needed to make the armour have to be a solid enough surface to chisel the spell runes into its surface, the enchantment also has the habit of taking fairly normal metal and making it slightly stronger then before. The higher quality the material, the better the enchantment. The range of musket balls a enchanted cuirass can take is around 2-4, though this isn't the only possible number, a junior wizard could screw up the enchant so the armour can only take one and like wise a Highlord could make the armour even better then normal, capable of taking five shots. Other armour, such as Maille can also be enchanted, which while it will not stop a musket ball, it can help defend against shrapnel. Scale armour is similar except it provides very small protections against musket fire. Melee weapons can also be enchanted, in this case they can he given an enchantment that can briefly disrupt the enchantment of armour, when a sword with this ability impacts against enchanted armour, the enchant falls off, so to speak, it's not permanent and the enchantment will return. A single enchanted sword impact against armour will disrupt the enchantment for a varied amount of time, between 1 minutes and six minutes depending on what level of wizard enchanted the armour. A gun cannot be enchanted, enchantments work by carving into the equipment with magical runes and weaving spells around them, you cannot do this with guns. Every piece of a weapon or armour must be carved with runes, for guns, this is impossible as each individual granule of powder must be enchanted. Here are some additional magical gadgets I've brought into the equation. Power Banners: Devices carried by a standard bearer that can triple the strength of all enchants within its radius, generally enough to cover a full company, but beware, when I said all enchants, that includes the enemies. Power crystal: generally these are high quality crystals, the higher quality the higher the amount of power they can store, these crystals are about the size of a fist. Soldiers carry these as they're filled with magical energy and help their armour defeat greater hits. Spell Banner: These banners don't actually stop anything, all they do is slow projectiles down so that when a projectile hits it is much slower and weaker. This banner will also slow the projectiles of those within it without being lowered first, which is done with a simple five word phrase and then raised by a six word phrase With all this in mind, what do you, folks believe warfare will look like if a month before eye napoleonic wars this happens. Specific questions. 1: Would armour be given to every unit or elites? 2: Would more heavy cavalry charges be used, more lances? 3:Would melee focused infantry return to use? 4: What would the practical use of this new armour, in general be? 5: Would there be any new radical changes in tactics?
You'd be better off enchanting the food so the French don't starve to death in Russia. Better enchant some mittens too so they don't freeze on their retreat from Moscow.
The reason they had cuirassiers was that if you made armor strong enough to resist musket and pistol shot, it was too heavy to cover the entire body with it. Cuirassiers wore breastplates that were, in fact, "proof" against small arms fire, at least to a reasonable degree. Your enchantment really isn't that big an improvement over the real thing. Time to get creative.
Napoleons troops didn't really wear much armour, because it weighed a tonne and cannons muskets would just tear right through it. Unless your enchanted armour could reliably stop firearms, then they probably wouldn't go back to melee weapons and armour. That said, if they did, the armour would probably be given to the Admiralty first and it would work its way down the line as supply saw fit, though an easy way around the enchantments would be to aim for the parts of the body the cuirasses didn't cover. Also, if the only part of the musket fire that hits the enemies is the ball, why would the entire gun have to be enchanted? That's like saying that an enchanted sword doesn't work if the arm swinging it isn't also enchanted. Couldn't they just carve some runes into a pile of musket balls?
The cuirassuers Cuirass would only stop a pistol shot at around fifty steps, around five steps it would pierce. An actual musket would go through it at actual far longer range. The musket ball doesn't propel itself, it's propped by blackpowder contained within the barrel and activated through the tripper with the flint striking the frizzen. A sword is just a sharpened piece of metal. For enchants to work each consecutive part of the item being enchanted has to be covered in runes. For swords and armour thus is simple--though some armour is more complex--whereas with a musket you can cover each part of the musket except for the blackpowder.
But swords and muskets still work in the same fashion: by putting enough force behind a metal surface to penetrate something. I guess my question is, what makes the force behind the musket ball different than the force behind the sword? If the person wielding the sword isn't also enchanted with runes, how come the sword works and the musket ball doesn't? If someone tripped on a sword, would the enchantment still work even though there was no force behind it?
Most armor did not and still does not protect against shots at point blank range. Even the US Army employs a bit of kit known as a "plate carrier," which allows a soldier to haul around something like 120 square inches (I guess a little smaller than a children's book?) of protection against rifle-caliber fire in the form of a plate that weighs for pounds. A hit literally anywhere else will penetrate the soldier's protection with ease, and the plate will degrade quickly, particularly when hit point blank. But consider the circumstances of period combat. For one, the odds of you getting shot at close range are amazingly shitty: the guy is going to fire at you long before you get that close, after which he won't have time to reload. Either he will miss, his shot will strike your armor and do nothing (reported by British soldiers firing on French heavy cavalry at Waterloo), or he's going to wait until you get close and put a bullet in your face, where the armor of the cuirass is known to be quite thin. In other words, in terms of real world effectiveness, I still think that the improvement offered by armor of this kind will be minimal, and the effect on combat tactics will be similarly small. It might produce a marginal increase in the effectiveness of heavy cavalry, but it might not even be noticeable in the statistics because most casualties were produced by artillery, and the concomitant increase in the cost of heavy cavalry (already prohibitive, as evinced by Napoleon's advice to his allies not to field heavy cavalry) might reduce the prevalence of such armor to such a degree as to cancel out its small effect. You must then also consider the potential opportunity cost. What else can powerful mages do for your war effort that might be handier than stiffening breastplates? Also: found this neat picture of what happens when a six pounder hits a cuirass.
This part actually makes sense to me, Dapper: the sword already wasn't going to penetrate the breastplate, in which case the person using the sword is in the exact same situation he was in before the enchantment.
That's my point. Guy with gun: "Enchanted breastplate? Crap. I better aim for his dick." Guy with sword: "Enchanted breastplate? Oh, guess I better aim for... Oh. Same thing I always aim for."
If this actually became a problem for musketeers, though, I wonder if they would just revert to something like the crossbow, something I don't think has any parts that can't be enchanted. Maybe some archers with enchanted bows and arrows to lay down some covering fire and whomever was hit and wasn't killed would have magically disenchanted armour that muskets could finish off. That is assuming the enemy wasn't just blasted to mush with artillery and mortars instead.
It's because a person is living and has their own energy associated with them whereas blackpowder is just an alchemical device. Against rifle rounds, yes. However with Lv-IV armour--the best armour there is for infantry in the modern world and what militaries use--will almost always stop a fairly numerous amount of pistol or smg rounds. You don't have to wear just a cuirass, you can deck yourself out in runic full plate and reap the benefits that would bring. Quite a bit, but the guys who make armour are quite a bit different from the guys who throw fireballs for example.
Might work in the 1600s. I imagine that would become prohibitive with the advent of Napoleon's industrialized warfare. Can't say as I understand the scale of conflict in the 17th century. Smaller, right? I had a magic item like this. Full armor, but only the cuirass was magical. The concept was that it tapped into the wearer's destiny to ward off random death. In context, it was protection against arrows, mostly; they would splinter in the air and glance aside before reaching the target. Never got the story that went with it to work out.
Larger, as time progress' through the 16th, 17th and finally 18th centuries armies were steadily getting larger compared to previous eras.
Yes, the 18th century--late 1700s--was the opening of the Napoleonic era, which is the sort of industrialized war I was referring to. The core difference is that Napoleonic war leveraged so much manpower that one had to decide how much equipment one could afford to provide each man. If you double the cost of the equipment for a foot soldier, you halve the size of your army. This is still a concern today.
Economics is always a big part of any war, and not nearly enough novels actually put any effort into it--kind of understandable really--but for this scenario we'll assume that the various nations are capable of outfitting their standard forces with runic armour.
A human is also an alchemical device. A large and ridiculously complex alchemical device, but one nonetheless. Unless you mean that people generally have some sort of soul, so to speak. Does this mean that runes wouldn't work if they weren't somehow connected to a person? Like you couldn't use these to enchant forts or walls or fences?
It has to partially do with the soul--or essence--and partially to do with being unable to fully enchant a ranged weapon because certain parts of it cannot take the runes. For firearms this is the black powder, for bows and crossbows it's the string. Forts are generally large enough and simple enough where they can also take runes, incredibly powerful ones as well.
So what effect would you expect from a fort with these kinds of enchantments? Having forts that could hold out against direct cannon attacks could seriously change overall battle tactics.
Question, why not, instead of enchanting ammunition and powder grain, you simply enchant the barrels of guns to be stronger. This could let you fire rounds with more force behind them as it would let you put more powder in with a decreased chance of the gun exploding in your hands. Not to mention that things like cannons with chain shot existed.
Because since each consecutive part of an item has to be enchanted it would be a very dangerous idea just to enchant the barrel and nothing else. Think of it like a chain, a proper enchantment has all thick steel rings for the chain and can resist a lot of stress. When only parts of an item are enchanted the chain is now got a handful of bronze rings in the chain. A partially enchanted item is a 50/50 item of chance, fifty percent chance it fires and works properly and fifty percent chance it explodes and kills you and your buddy standing beside you.
The main issue is what do you class as a component or a discrete object. Say I had a brace of pistols, it is composed of a series of pistols, along with the bandolier to hold them. Would I have to have each component of each pistol enchanted, then each strap in the bandolier? Or simply the pistols with the bandolier acting as a mechanism to hold them. Similarly, you could say that the barrel is simply a method of holding the powder and shot, with the wooden components simply being a way to hold the barrel.
The bandolier would be just that, something to briefly hold the item in question when not in use. For a Poston, it's parts are the barrel, the grip and other wood, the trigger, the frizzen, the flint, the bullet and the powder, and all other pieces that I haven't mentioned, the springs, the internal levers, etc.
Is each link in mail treated like powder in that it has to be enchanted individually or is it a will of the authour type thing and it can all be done in one go?
