Sharonian Aircraft?

The reason people are talking about sniping dragons is the incredible, impossible, nearly absurd success that Sharona has already had at shooting down dragons. Some of that can clearly be attributed to bad Arcanan doctrine but the fact that a significant number of dragons appear to have been shot down while diving on Fort Salby points to dragons being much much easier to hit then airplanes.

Nicholas

Bewildered wrote:Why are people even talking about sniping aircraft? Massed soldiers firing at aircraft in WW1 had trouble hitting planes. Sure a sniper is an expert but one bullet to hit a target rapidly moving in 3 dimensions? Please! Unless the snipers are Sharonian gifted they won't hit anything!

Also, what if some bright spark creates spellware that either shields against bullets, or redirects them? Other series by other authors definitely have projectile defences. Of course until the Arcanan "boffins" get involved it's unlikely such defences\countermeasures will be created but it's reasonable to think something might be possible eventually.

Assuming the military establishment is anything like that proposed by DW in Mutineer's Moon then it'll be professionalism not cronyism that rules.

I guess I'm not a Sharonian supremacist.

And of course we've no idea the direction DW plans on taking this series!

Bewildered wrote:Why are people even talking about sniping aircraft? Massed soldiers firing at aircraft in WW1 had trouble hitting planes. Sure a sniper is an expert but one bullet to hit a target rapidly moving in 3 dimensions? Please! Unless the snipers are Sharonian gifted they won't hit anything!

Also, what if some bright spark creates spellware that either shields against bullets, or redirects them? Other series by other authors definitely have projectile defences. Of course until the Arcanan "boffins" get involved it's unlikely such defences\countermeasures will be created but it's reasonable to think something might be possible eventually.

Assuming the military establishment is anything like that proposed by DW in Mutineer's Moon then it'll be professionalism not cronyism that rules.

I guess I'm not a Sharonian supremacist.

And of course we've no idea the direction DW plans on taking this series!

I think people are taking about sniping grounded dragons, to shoot a flying Dragon with a rifle and have it be a lethal shot would be next to impossible, but one focused on ripping up track might be possible. I still think there are better ways of spending man power than putting snipers covering several thousand miles of track.

How many of those aircraft came back with holes in them?

I think "the incredible, impossible, nearly absurd success that Sharona has already had at shooting down dragons" are due to the fact that dragons are not airplanes. An airplane with a small hole (half inch or 12.67 mm) in the fuselage doesn't normally suffer severe damage. To really cause damage to an aircraft you need a larger round, 20mm, or to damage the engine/cripple the pilot. Much harder than just hitting the plane.

A dragon internally isn't series of metal parts and cables, it is a living creature with tendons, muscles and other organs to damage. Once you penetrate the hide, its all essential to the organism as a whole. damage the tendons to the wing and the dragon crashes, if it is diving at the time, it slams into the ground at two hundred miles an hour and dies. It seems it would be easier to cause catastrophic damage with small rounds and shrapnel to the dragon, than an aircraft.

Also the dragons appear to be somewhat larger than most low flying aircraft, weighing forty tons. A fully loaded apache weighs eight tons, and a fully loaded F-22 weighs 30 tons.

The success would be amazing rather than impossible.

The dragons without the heaviest underside scales, the reds and blacks, attack by diving directly at their target. Shooting that is like shooting at a still target that grows in size as it approaches. No jinking and not moving laterally with respect to the shooter. Enough people shooting at that sort of relatively easy target will generate hits.

The injured red that survived in HHNF was hit many times with the .40 Cal infantry rifles. His wing mate was downed by the .54 Cal machine guns. At Fort Salby the blacks again drove straight down at the guns making for a relatively easy target.

The toughest shots came in the ambush with the heavy machine guns. The first two dragons were surprised. That the gunners got more suggests that the dragons should have dove forcing the gunners to lead a fast moving dragon. By climbing the dragons presented a slower moving target for the gunners to lead which kept the dragons in the kill zone longer.

jeremyr wrote:I don't see them trying to develop guns when they have magic. They'll just go on researching better magical weapons. So long as the magic is working, I think they'll stay with what they know and understand.

Sticking to magic they'll still have to change things up some, since at the moment they're at a major disadvantage trying to force a heavily defended portal (not that anybody's hit a really well defended on yet). Imagine the Sharonana equivalent of WWI trenches, backed by machine guns, mortars, and artillery all the way around both faces of a portal.

The Arcanans can't employ their current magic weapons through a portal, they have to cross through before any of those work. Which means they've got 10+ miles of approach under indirect fire, then a thousand yards or so under machine gun fire, and all they can currently fire back through the portal is basically crossbows.


I imagine at a minimum they're going to develop some kind of thrown or launched spellware crystal that can be fired/launched (from what they believe to be a safe distance) through the portal to explode, or shake apart, or whatever upon impact.
But even if they figure out how to make spellware that can safely self-trigger after being thrown through a portal there's probably a non-trival bottleneck is making it since each
(likely expendable) crystal requires the personal attention of a suitable powerful Gifted person to make and charge.
And last time we saw a major breaching magic it (IIRC) required the direct hands on attention of a Gifted operator to use.

But having some equivalent of guns and artillery, that can be build by non-Gifted people, and used through a portal would really help with those assaults where direct magic is limited.

Though I do wonder if the Arcanan logistics can deal with having to haul up lots of expendable munitions. Their slideways are quicker to lay down than railroads, but don't carry nearly as much mass. Right now they seem to rely on the ability to recharge most spellware fairly close to the front. So the major complex manufacturing is done back on or near Arcana, while the recharging which seems to require a less Gifted individual, is done near the frontier. But if you can't recharge because it's a bullet, or a crystal that is expended in an attack... That doesn't seem to be a problem that Arcana has really had to deal with much before.



OTOH the Sharonan defenders don't have it all their own way on defense because the Talents used for artillery plotting / spotting also don't work through portals (and if you forward deploy them through the portal then any attached Voices or Flickers can't realtime the results back to the artillery). So the artillery is firing fairly blind, unless they can put up something like observation balloons for visual spotting. And it especially means that the Talents from the Sharonan side of the portal can't hope to detect any cloaking spells used to approach one of the Arcanana portal faces.

I suspect everything else you said is true but I want to question the idea that there is a "specific mage talent that is required to pilot dragons."

It may be right, I went looking a bit to check and found it HHNF the line that piloting battle dragons "was a calling which tended to run in families, because it absolutely required a particular Gift" (emphasis mine). That may mean there is a special and rare gift that battle dragon pilots need. On the other hand it may just be an odd word choice, we have no other evidence that I recall for any other distinctions among gifts except the strong to weak scale and the magister/magistron distinction. So it may be that any person with a weak gift can be trained to fly a battle dragon. Maybe we will find out for sure some day.

Nicholas

Mil-tech bard wrote: ...snipped...
The specific mage talent that is required to pilot dragons runs in families.

See Hell Hath No Fury.

...snipped...

I view this passage --

"was a calling which tended to run in families, because it absolutely required a particular Gift"

...as definitive.

Battle Dragon pilots are a small minority of the Arcanian mage gifted population.

A small minority that requires careful training, presuming they have the proper gift in the first instance, to use exacting spellware under the pressure of directing a dragon in combat.

Killing a lot of Battle Dragon pilots is going to do more to hurt Arcanian combat power in the near term than killing dragons.

And note, centuries of combat experience in Arcanian versus Arcanian dragon combat has taught the exactly wrong combat instincts to existing Battle Dragon Pilots than what is needed versus Sharona.

For instance, climbing only works versus the limited engagement range of Arcanian cross bows and "infantry dragons."

You need to be a accelerating, maneuvering, crossing target versus Sharonan anti-aircraft fire. And you have to limit your exposure to automatic weapons.

You don't climb under Sharonan anti-aircraft fire, you dive for speed, jinx, and make yourself a crossing target.

You don't dive on prepared positions with fire breathing Reds, the traditional way Dragons limited their exposure to cross bows and "infantry dragons."

You use blacks at a distance on a lateral/crossing course and spit lightning at Sharonan heavy crew served weapons. Only after you have suppressed the Sharonan heavy crew served weapons with lightning do you go after a position.

And carefully note, very few battle dragon pilots have survived thus far to even begin to develop such tactics.

Frankly, the best bet with battle dragons is as a raiding, as opposed to a main combat, unit.

Battle Dragons are magical battlecruisers, expensive sledgehammers with eggshell protection facing radar directed (Sharonan predictive far-viewers) coast defenses.

Battle Dragons need the equivalent of WW2 "Flak intelligence" on every Sharonan position prior to a battle Dragon attack.

The problem with that thought is that the Sharonans are going to be far better at overhead camouflage than the Arcanians very quickly given the Distance viewer talents. Asking such talent to look down on a position from above and comment on how well aerial camouflage is done will make the delay in recon-griffin imagery a deadly disadvantage.

From Chapter 3 of Hell Hath No Fury

In fact, replacing a dead or crippled pilot was the easy part; a fully seasoned and trained battle dragon like Razorwing took literally decades to hatch, raise, and train.

\

The pilot is much easier to replace than the dragon, at least in the short term.

Astelon wrote:From Chapter 3 of Hell Hath No Fury

In fact, replacing a dead or crippled pilot was the easy part; a fully seasoned and trained battle dragon like Razorwing took literally decades to hatch, raise, and train.

\

The pilot is much easier to replace than the dragon, at least in the short term.

Yes, but there's the pipeline, how many new pilots are there just sitting around ready to take up the fight? At the front. And remember a dragon that loses it's pilot is probably lost as well, and will likely damage at least one other dragon in the process.

Please note that this --

Astelon wrote:From Chapter 3 of Hell Hath No Fury

In fact, replacing a dead or crippled pilot was the easy part; a fully seasoned and trained battle dragon like Razorwing took literally decades to hatch, raise, and train.

\

The pilot is much easier to replace than the dragon, at least in the short term.

...assumes the loss rates inflected by Arcanian weapons.

The pilot whose thoughts you read died over Ft Salby based on his mistaken read of the threat he faced.

Dragons landed and unloading troops on the ground hit by Sharonan artillery fragmentation and small arms are far more likely to survive than their pilots. Especially when the Sharonans start using scoped rifles.