Discussion on Tactics At Aether Salon

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

This is one of my "better late than never" articles that temporarily got lost in the reporting about the SL23B and then Rita Mariner's passing. 

Besides being the last day of the Second Life Birthday, Sunday July 19 was also the day of July's Aether Salon discussion. 

Today at 2PM SLT: The Aether Salon presents TACTICS! with one of the founding Salonistas, Jedburgh Dagger. Sneak in unnoticed, steal a seat and brace yourself for further instructions.   

One of the central points of the discussion by Jedburgh Dagger of tactics was what face a commander on the field: "the three 'Cs,'" Command, Control, and Communications."Command, go there. Control, stay together. Communications, tell them to go there too." And in ancient times with no radio, communications wasn't easy, relying on visual signals, horns, and messengers which took time to reach where they were going and vulnerable to being killed. 

 

 

Jedburgh noted that tactics pretty much stayed the same for millennia. Even when firearms first appeared in European battles in 1419, they weren't a significant change at first, until "in 1525 the first battle that was pivotally decided by firearms was fought in Italy. Battle of Pavia, when the cavalry found out that you can't run pell mell at a block of musketeers. But even so, guns ended up not changing the formations a great deal."

Real change would have to wait until King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, "known as the first modern general, and the man who started the widespread use of 'combined arms'.What he did was use cavalry, artillery, and infantry together, each using their strengths to offset the weaknesses of the other."  

Still, the practice of men in lines marching in formation toward each other continued, even in the early and mid 19th Century that saw developments in firearms and ammunition that made rifles more accurate and quicker to reload. But then came Maxim and his machine gun, "it took Maxim's gun to provide huge amounts of fire that ended the large unit use of line formations, and also killed colored uniforms for that matter." But line formations didn't go away entirely, "even today, the riot squad and the infantry squaddie still do the same thing their Greek ancestors did."

 

There were some amusing moments with the occasional joking remark, such as someone responding to the comment "the same thing their Greek ancestors did" with Tepic Harlequin going "drink too much and fight the locals?" He would also man the machine gun on display. There were also fireworks unleashed at one point. 

 

Ceejay Writer, who organizes Salon events, would say, "we do not have a speaker for next month, but we do for the rest of the year," and invited people to sign up to be one.  

 

The Aether Salon discussions are announced in the New Babbage group inworld, and on it's Discord. They take place at Babbage Canals (195/63/105).

 

To read the group blog, including this week's transcript, Click Here: https://aethersalon.home.blog/

 

Bixyl Shuftan