Kesalahan umum tentang senjata api di dunia fantasi #1: melompat langsung dari nol ke senapan modern

Lho. Senjata api di cerita fantasi? Bukannya senjata di cerita fantasi terbatas pada pedang, tombak, busur panah, dan senjata kuno lainnya sebelum kedatangan senjata api? Tidak juga. Latar yang sering dipakai cerita fantasi cenderung memiliki tingkat teknologi yang kurang-lebih setara dengan Abad Pertengahan atau masa Renaisans, dan periode sejarah ini di dunia nyata justru merupakan waktu kemunculan dan perkembangan pesat dalam teknologi senjata api. Sebenarnya sudah cukup banyak cerita fantasi (baik dalam bentuk novel, komik, film, ataupun bentuk lainnya) yang mengandung penggunaan senjata api secara terbatas, terutama sebagai senjata baru atau eksotis di dunianya. Oleh karena itu, panduan ini akan membahas salah satu kesalahan umum yang muncul akibat kurangnya pengetahuan penulis tentang sejarah perkembangan teknologi senjata api, yaitu melompat langsung dari dunia tanpa senjata api ke persenjataan modern dalam waktu yang terlalu singkat tanpa memperhatikan rumitnya perkembangan teknologi yang memakan waktu berabad-abad abad di dunia nyata.

(The original English version can be found here)

Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part IV: Why Do We Need Units?

Now, I guess, would be a good time to synthesise the things I’ve previously explained in Part I and Part III (the latter of which would have been Part II if not for the digression on wedges). And for that we’re going to move to a slightly larger scale. Let’s use this line, with four groups of nine individuals each:

Now imagine we’re marching the line forward — but whoops. There’s an obstacle lying in the path of the blue group.

This is where the division of the line into several sub-units really comes in handy. Instead of the entire line getting stuck at the obstacle, now it’s only the blue unit that has to solve the problem of how to get ahead. In this case, let’s use one of the simplest solutions, where the blue leader moves to the clear end of the blue sector while the other units continue forwards.

From this point Blue Leader can resume the march while the rest of the unit “snakes” in into a file behind them. This time I’m going to remove the shadow of the units’ old positions to declutter the image.

On Rendering Military Courtesies (Saluting in the Valkyria Chronicles and How to Deal With It in Your Own Fiction)

Remember the last post where I overanalysed the treatment of reconnaissance in a chapter of the Valkyria Chronicles? To be honest, I think I have a weird attachment to that chapter and the associated combat mission in the game since they’re full of low-hanging fruits for discussion. When we left off the last time around to go on a tangent with the whole reconnaissance thing, there were three officers — Captain Varrot and her two platoon leaders, Welkin and Faldio — gathered in an orders group. Immediately afterwards, the game ended up sidestepping the need to discuss the Gallian Militia’s reconnaissance doctrine (or the lack thereof) by having Alicia — one of the three sergeants in Welkin’s platoon — simply barge in and interrupt the meeting. And that’s hilarious. I mean HILARIOUS.

But why? Well, first, the fact that she could make an unimpeded and unnanounced entrance at the orders group implies that there was no security at all in Varrot’s command post, not even a sentry posted outside the briefing room. So they’re lucky that it was just Alicia who barged in, not an enemy infiltrator with a grenade or something. This is one of those small things that could really annoy readers with military experience (or even readers who don’t have any military experience but have read enough stuff about daily life in real-world military forces), and the lesson here for fiction writers is please make sure that your fictional command posts have security. Except, of course, if the lack of security is the whole point of the thing and you want the characters inside the command post to suffer for it. You know the drill.

The other thing that stood out to me is that Alicia didn’t make any overt displays of military courtesy — no saluting, not even standing at attention and offering a formal greeting. Now, this is a slightly more complicated subject, so let’s break it down into several smaller issues.

On Reconnaissance and Battlefield Intelligence in Valkyria Chronicles (Operation Cloudburst/Battle of the Bridge)

For today’s post, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and talk about Valkyria Chronicles, a game I used to play — or to be strictly correct, one I mostly used to watch while other people played, though I played a fair amount of it myself. I’m choosing it because some of those gaming sessions sparked interesting discussions about military science and its representation in popular culture, and none more so than the fourth chapter in the game (titled Operation Cloudburst, with the actual combat mission being named Battle for the Bridge). And I’m not even going to discuss the entire chapter or mission here — one scene from the briefing alone should give us plenty of material to go by.

Let’s start with a little background information. The player takes the role of Welkin Gunther, a lieutenant in the militia forces of a fictional country called Gallia. For the most part Welkin commands Squad 7 of Captain Eleanor Varrot’s 3rd Militia Regiment. Readers with some familiarity might notice something odd here; why is a lieutenant commanding a squad, and why is he directly under the command of the regimental headquarters with several levels of command (most notably the platoon and the company, probably also the battalion) missing in between? On the other hand, what is a captain doing at the head of an entire regiment when it’s a command normally assigned to a much higher rank? I think some of the nuances involved might have been lost in translation from the original Japanese version of the game, and in practice it’s much easier to treat Welkin as a platoon leader (and his “squad” as more of an understrength platoon than a real squad) while Captain Varrot’s actual role in the game slots much more neatly into the billet of a company commander, which happens to be a good fit for her actual rank too.

At this point in the story, Gallia had been invaded by the neighbouring Empire, and the Imperial troops had seized large portions of Gallian territory in their drive towards the Gallian capital of Randgriz. The major Gallian city of Vasel lies along one of the principal avenues of approach towards Randgriz, and the Imperial invasion force had seized the Great Bridge of Vasel linking the two halves of the city before a counterattack by Squad 7 (in the previous chapter/mission) stopped them from expanding their bridgehead on the near bank. Now Squad 7 has been ordered to seize this momentum and launch a counterattack to retake the bridge. During the orders group with Captain Varrot, Lieutenant Faldio Landzaat — leader of Squad 1, Squad 7’s sister platoon in the “Regiment” — correctly remarks that the mission is suicidal since there’s no way that Welkin’s platoon would have enough mass to accomplish the task on its own. This then leads to the following exchange between Welkin and Varrot:

Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part II: Wedges

No, not potato wedges. I know we’re all hungry but bear with me. Remember the previous post on changing formations between the line and the column/file? More specifically, this illustration on what happens when a line attempts to march forwards without redeploying into a file?

You might have noticed that the three figures in the centre were forming into a wedge. Indeed, this is what often happens when a line has to travel forwards a considerable distance without stopping to dress the formation — it tends to break up into a number of smaller wedge-like clumps, as shown in this illustration starting from a similar situation but taken one step further:

Why unpredictability isn’t always a desirable trait in a militarily skilled character

I guess by this time I can dispense with the introductions, or at least I can just direct people to the index if they’re wondering where this series comes from. Anyway, what we’re going to discuss today is one out of many aspects in writing militarily skilled characters into a work of fiction. One thing I see very often is writers trying hard to make such characters unpredictable, always able to take their enemies by surprise, coming from unexpected directions, all that kind of stuff. This isn’t really a bad thing in itself. The element of surprise is an important ingredient in military success. But it can be taken too far, and the results in such cases aren’t pretty.

The thing to remember here is that military operations don’t really just involve the military character’s forces and the enemy. There’s usually going to be some friendly and/or allied forces they’d have to account for, and the principle of surprise works the opposite way with these forces: one doesn’t want to surprise them, for several important reasons. First is the prevention of fratricide. One of the most common causes of friendly-fire incidents is a friendly force moving to an unexpected position and being misidentified as the enemy. This can be mitigated to some extent with good communications, but the fact is that means of communication tend to fail in the chaos of combat. Radio sets break or get jammed. Field telephone wires get cut or tapped. Verbal or letter-carrying nessengers get lost or killed. This was an especially serious problem in eras before the invention of the telegraph and wireless (i.e. radio) communications. So, to account for these communication issues, most effective armies and navies in history developed the kind of thing we’d know today as standard operating procedures. Sometimes these were permanent and instituted in peacetime, but just as often they were ad hoc rules developed at the beginning of hostilities or even in the middle of it. What matters is that friendly forces following the same set of procedures would tend to behave predictably to some extent, so that it would be possible to make a reasonable guess at their location and/or speed and direction of movement even when communications had been lost. This is equally important for the second reason, which is planning and execution. Any kind of manoeuvre that splits a force into more than one element requires those elements’ movements (or lack of movement) to be predictable to each other or the plan is likely to fail. One of the most extreme examples is the friendly-fire incident at Karansebes (1788), where scouting elements of the Austrian army fell to fighting among themselves over a stash of alcoholic beverages and sparked a panic that led to other parts of the Austrian army firing at each other in the mistaken belief that the Turks were mounting a night attack against their camp. Less extreme examples also exist and don’t even have to involve friendly fire. For instance, the largest Japanese attack against the US perimeter at Henderson Field in October 1942 was supposed to begin with two near-simultaneous assaults on the 23rd, one a diversionary attack from the west along the coast while the other would strike from the inland jungle to the south. But difficulties in traversing the jungle meant that the southern pincer of the attack had to be delayed to the 24th. Most of the western attack force received the message, but the leading elements — including a light tank company — had already set out on their advance to contact and could not be raised on the radio. As a result, this isolated spearhead carried on with the original plan to attack on the 23rd despite the fact that they’d have no support from subsequent echelons coming up on their rear or the main attack force in the south, and they ended up being overwhelmed and massacred by the firepower of the American defenders.

All of the examples above are at the tactical level since the consequences of unpredictability at the operational and strategic levels (let alone national policy) are subtler and more difficult to isolate, partly because they tend to unfold very gradually (and are thus hard to notice until it’s too late) but also partly because the timescales involved tend to allow some chance to mitigate them through communications. Maybe one of the least ambiguous examples is Hannibal’s invasion of Italy; nobody back home in Carthage seemed to have expected him to be so successful, so nobody anticipated this success by preparing to send supplies and reinforcements. As such, Hannibal was forced to rely upon a mixture of war booty obtained from the Romans and support from Italian allies to keep his forces in the field, and neither source could be relied upon to provide a consistent amount from one year to the next. It wasn’t until several years into the war that the Carthaginians made a serious attempt to reinforce Hannibal and it certainly didn’t help that this attempt was ambushed and defeated at the Metaurus before it got anywhere close to Hannibal’s field army. All of these certainly contributed to Hannibal’s failure to bring the war with Rome to a rapid conclusion.

So, bringing it back together, military leaders in history generally had to balance unpredictability towards the enemy with predictability towards friendly forces — and presumably so do skilled military characters in well-written fiction. Overemphasising one at the expense of the other is obviously going to lead to some pretty bad consequences. But striking the right balance is never an easy thing either, since the two elements involved generally act in contradiction to each other. And now that you know this, remember that the principle can be pretty handy in developing twists or complications to military arcs in your plot. Have some fun with having your military characters cope with the unexpected downsides of their own unpredictability!

Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part I

This is going to be yet another redo of my old writing rants and tutorials on military stuff for fantasy and science fiction (and historical fiction to some extent, I guess, since the examples tend to be taken from history). It doesn’t correspond directly to any of the articles on the old site, though, since I realised there were some basics I had simply failed to cover there, and this is one of them. I’m going to call it “Manoeuvre is Hard.” Or maybe an even more dumbed-down version: “Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard.” Because it is. I know, I know. I don’t want to fall into the Clausewitzian cliché that everything in war is simple, but everything simple is difficult. The problem is that it became a cliché because it’s true.

For this first installment, we’re not even going to get into a battlefield at all. Or at least pretend that the opponent isn’t doing anything to harm us directly. They’re there, and we may feel their threat, but they’re not hurting us. Yet.

Now, one of the simplest kinds of fighting formations is the line. It puts the maximum number of people and weapons facing forwards where they can hurt the enemy (and, well, be hurt, but remember we’re pretending it’s not happening yet).

Looks like there’s nothing wrong, right? Not if the line stays and fights in place. But let’s say we have a line and the enemy is still some distance away. So we decide to march the line forwards. What happens?

Now the line is a mess. This is because a line formation is inherently difficult to control. One’s comrades are to either side and can only be seen by turning the head to the left and right (especially in a helmet that cuts down on peripheral vision), so each person or element within the line must split their attention between looking forwards along the line of march and to either side in order to keep track of the other elements. In addition, people have different natural walking/marching paces and they tend to drift towards their own most comfortable speed when they’re not paying extremely close attention to how far they’re falling behind or pulling ahead of their comrades on the line. This means a line has an inherent tendency to lose its alignment during a long movement unless it stops frequently to dress the formation. Marching in cadence or in lockstep helps, but the loss of alignment still happens eventually; and if the line halts to dress, it slows down its own progress, gives the enemy an opportunity to act while it’s halted, and all other kinds of nasty things. So it’s better to perform long marches in column formation instead — or, in this instance, a particularly simple variant known as the file.

Common mistakes about gunpowder in fantasy worldbuilding #1: going straight from no gunpowder to the modern rifle

Wow. All right. That’s one mouthful of a title. But anyway, that pretty much describes what I’m going to go over in this post: one of the most common mistakes I see in how people try to treat/insert/wangle gunpowder and gunpowder weaponry into their fantasy stories, and maybe — if I’m not too lazy — some ideas on how to avoid them. The first and the most glaring of these mistakes is when a fantasy world goes from no gunpowder at all to modern rifles in a single leap.

(Versi bahasa Indonesia dapat dibaca di sini)

Walker mechs aren’t (going to be) that useful in combat. At least not on Earth.

OK, so I’m getting rather fed up with my writer’s block on this blog, and maybe that’s because I’ve been overthinking the subjects I need or want to write about. I guess there’s nothing wrong with choosing what would simply be fun and easy to write — and I happen to have several subjects like that, not the least because I’ve done the thinking but never bothered to write it down or upload it to my old LiveJournal thingy when I stopped writing there nearly a decade ago. So what is it this time?

Well, walker vehicles intended for combat. We’ve seen many varieties of these in popular culture, especially in the Mechwarrior and Heavy Gear series (well, in Star Wars too), as well as Japanese “mecha” like in the Votoms, Gundam, or Patlabor series. It’s no secret that I enjoy these things as much as anybody else. Well, as long as nobody takes it too literally and drops an orbital colony on Earth, that is. But I digress. The point is that, as much as I love these combat walkers, I don’t think they’ll ever play a major part in combat — at least not on Earth. And there are multiple reasons for that.

Some things to consider in writing a battle scene

I used to write about various military and martial-arts topics from a fiction writer’s perspective in an old blog I no longer maintain. Unfortunately most of those old articles have grown too outdated and updating them is no longer a viable proposition, so I suppose I’ll just start over and pontificate out of my posterior on new subjects altogether. And this time it’s going to be some things one needs to consider in writing battle scenes. Here I would define “battles” as massed (and usually organised) violent encounters, as opposed to one-on-one duels or small-scale impromptu brawls that take place without any considerable amount of planning or organisation. Obviously there’s going to be a grey area between the two, but I’m pretty sure I can trust my fellow writers to judge whether and when they need to apply the following points to their fiction.

(Versi bahasa Indonesia bisa dibaca di sini.)