>>6229036>>6228786>>6229030>TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM>believability / setting plausibility of warfare in worldbuildingJust like how we might ridicule those silly horse gas mask cavalry riders with pickelhaube and lance / spear in WW1 I wonder if HISTORIANS OF THE FUTURE will mock all of us for how maladapted we all are to the age of drone warfare, we will all look as believable as Tom Cruise RUNNING (he is always running, running from gay thoughts)
>>6226413Tom Cruise Mission Impossible 3 DroneExplosionFace, all first person shooter videogames even hardcore military simulations will look laughably antiquated and risible (ha, you are still using the pathetic personal handheld metal bullet shooting stick in the age of the loitering munition steerable fpv swarm KNIFE MISSILE??)
I don't know what the counter to drones will resemble, maybe it is some silly dronejammer antenna rifle, but they have those wired unspooling cable connected drones now. I watched a SERE video recently that claimed Afghans used wet wool blankets to evade thermals / aerial surveillance lol. So this should clearly be the strategic rearmament plan for Europe zeitenwende, wet blankets
I read an interesting analysis on some random blog that explained the effectiveness of weaponry as akin to a game theoretic rock paper scissors game (cyclic / intransitive payoffs, there is no Nash equilibrium no dominant strategy) basically weapon ECONOMIC effectiveness depends on what the adversary is doing or equipped with, their warfighting doctrine, there is no absolute best weapon necessarily because the weapon exists to counter what the enemy is doing or equipped with (also consider dimensions of cost, training / recruitment, manufacturing lead time etc when outfitting or equipping the military force, ie sophisticated or powerful overmatch doctrine / standoff weapons). So maybe your cool sword is defeated by my cheap shield, but the cheap shield is defeated by an even cheaper extremely long sharp stick (and I can train 4x the number of sharp stick wielders in the time to make a shield etc)
So maybe using this logic, one way you could assess the "believability" of fantasy warfare, coherence of the setting with a large anachronistic assortment of various historically handpicked armaments across disparate time eras would be to see if the opposing forces are in a sort of Nash / stalemate (ie their weapons counter each other, hold each other in balance). I think a good example of this Nash type equilibrium in the Prince Of Nothing series (powerful sorcerors, but hereditary Chorae trinkets exist that instantly kill magicians turning their cursed flesh into salt upon touch, hence magic is constrained). Game Of Thrones I am not so sure about, because dragons are the equivalent of nuclear weapons / air dominance etc, those castle siege crossbows don't seem to really do much against them (ignore House Of The Dragon tv series, it is not canonically legitimate because there are no nude breasts)
