Will cavalry ever be relevant again?

WW2 is a fun case.
For all the fuck up the japs did, having bicycle units did enable them to run in circles around pretty much everyone when doing longer infantry campaigns.

Just a fucking shame it was a sea war, so they still lost.

The role of cavalry is filled by armoured cars and tanks.

Actual horses are only good for patrols, they are just too easy to shoot.

It never stopped being relevant; armies just went from using horses to using armored vehicles (especially tanks and armored cars) and aircraft.

Consider this, for a marching army you need at least 3 horses x 1 man for speed, and you can advance barely 50 kms per day (without opposition ofc)

I want to see motorcycle lancers.

>Japan was the only military that knew what bicycles were
Please stop this retarded meme. Please don't post again.

Aye, they just added extra terms, like armoured cavalry and mechinized calvary. Horses might not be relevent anymore, but the concept of fast, mobile warfare is very much still here.

Yeah basically this. The functions of cavalry remain, whether as scouting, rapid response, shock, etc.

Armoured cars, or in today's world lighter AFVs and the like, plus helicopters and drones I guess fulfill that role, they can move quickly and can scout ahead of a main force. Meanwhile, AFVs, tanks, etc have taken up the shock role.

My question is, will blue water battleships and the like be relevant for much longer (if they are now)? I get that submarines and air craft carriers because they can serve a strategic role, but what do other ship classes do that aircraft don't?

t. Einstein

>interplanetary travel easy enough to set up colonies
>easier to bring horses than dirtbikes

OK...

naval blockades, patrol, SAR, minesweeping, etc.

Cue the Wagner

Guys I'm so fucking gay. I have greasy fat warts all over my smelly pubey dick.

>never heard of gene bank colonizers.
Hell, ya don't even have to bring people to populate a planet.

My understanding of naval warfare is really limited, but surely it's similar to the function infantry perform on land. The vast majority of casualties are caused by artillery, less htan 5% (on average) by small arms. It's got the point where some (very dumb) theorists are suggesting we phase out small arms entirely.

Yet infantry and small still exist and are integral to combat operations.

There's nothing on your alien world for a horse to eat, even if environmental factors like atmosphere, gravity, and electromagnetic radiation are favorable to Earth life.

Those weren't cavalry, they were dragoons.

I no rite?

Are you a Hussar?

It's making the assumption that any colony ship would be a slow ship, separated from Earth by centuries of travel so it wouldn't exactly be practical to send supplies from Earth, so we'd have to grow a society out of a virgin planet.

And are you still going to have fuel and replacement parts for your dirt bike in 50 years? 100 years? What if your sons/clones want dirt bikes, will there be enough to go around for everyone when the population starts exploding? Building up the resources to construct an industrial society is going to take many years of habitation and building up the agricultural infrastructure necessary to grow towns and cities which can finance larger construction and resource extraction projects. This won't happen overnight.

No matter where we plant humans, it would have to be a place conducive to all life on Earth. We'd have to bring the species which we are dependent upon and put them on the planet for us to live off of. Horses are perfectly fine eating different kinds of grasses and these are species which we'd want to bring along anyway.

>are you still going to have fuel and replacement parts for your dirt bike in 50 years? 100 years?

If you don't have machinists and machine tools around, you're kind of fucked.

And by kind of I mean "irrevocably"

Oh no, you'd probably have 3-D printers to effortlessly make whatever part you needed

But would you have the raw materials to make them? Would you have access to oil, gasoline, or the complex pieces necessary to make electric vehicles?

...

They aren't relevant anymore. The honest question is how much longer aircraft carriers will be relevant: As it stands now, the job of the aircraft carrier is to host a bunch of planes who will then launch a bunch of missiles at your targets. Missiles keep getting cheaper and smaller and better, and while we're not there yet, there will probably be a point where we can just lob the missiles without bothering with the planes to carry them about, obviating the need for a carrier.

> but what do other ship classes do that aircraft don't?

Mostly the various escorting classes (and yes, that's pretty much everything that's not a CV or sub these days) are there to provide fire at a second's notice. If something slips through, you probably won't have the time to scramble your planes to intercept whatever it is. A ship that travels with the carrier, and can even interpose itself between the CV and whatever it is, can do that.

> but surely it's similar to the function infantry perform on land.

Not at all. Infantry take and hold territory, which is a conept that only vaguely applies to naval warfare, you can't occupy something as big as the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, especially with small, discrete ships whose numbers rarely exceed 3 digits and never 4, to my knowledge. They also provide a lot of your eyes on the ground.

A battleship, at least, for his core question, was the centerpiece of the fleet in its heyday, the main deliverer of firepower. Its role is completely non-analogous to infantry; to which there is no real equivalent of such in most naval warfare. You really only have escort, patrol, and strike missions, never attempts to sit on a stretch of water and shoot at anyone who goes by without permission.

I'm kind of presuming that the future uses a hydrogen economy.

Then again, fuel cells would be a bitch to make.

But yeah, specifically metal parts, that's something that's a prerequisite for any kind of industrialized society.

If you aren't routinely smelting steel and using CNC machines to make it into parts, I seriously worry about the future of your colony.

>Will cavalry ever be relevant again?
again? cavalry is most definitely relevant.
maybe not so much against hard targets, but a light fast moving highly maneuverable armed force will always succeed where a slower moving but more heavily armed force falls short.
as long as the focus is on their strengths (scouting, recon, mobile operations), and not their weakness, they will do fine.

Fuel cells would be useful, but how long would they last? Would they still be functional after 50 years? And what happens when your colony goes from 10,000 members to 10 million?

Acquiring new sources of metal would be an important part of the emerging planetary economy but that infrastructure would have to be grown out of a virgin planet, so that might mean needing to resort to older methods of extraction until more sophisticated infrastructure can be put in place.

Cavalry BTFO by technicals
>faster
>more maneuverable on every level
>parts are easier to fix
>easier to make more
>the technical always obeys you and has no sense of self-preservation
>more people familiar with basic automotive use nowadays
>gas more space-efficient than fodder (IIRC a German study found that one train-car of gasoline could fuel more trucks than five train-cars of fodder could feed horses for the same distance and time, or something absurd like that)
>you can strap missiles and shit to their backs and they don't care
Cavalry only worked in WW2 because every country had a metric fuckton of horses just laying around. Germany experienced a major logistical crisis because they couldn't make new horses fast enough, they used up too many supplies, and they couldn't be "repaired" easily. Russian cavalry limped on for use in terrain so horrifically bad that nobody would dare send a tank in after them.

Motorcycles are indeed better, but you might as well just stick them in a truck at that point. You already have the industry and you can also store other shit like ammo in it.

Drone swarms are the new cavalry.

>Slow trip
>Let's have horses which need methane vented, tons of hay inedible to humans, and produce feces which is useful for fertilization but still a sanitation issue onboard the colony ship

It's a bad idea. Mars has no native grass so you would need to carry hay on you to supply the horses for the years to decades it will take to terraform significant meadowland on Mars. That hay takes up weight. That weight could be used for food and fuel for humans. You mentioned supplies, you're sundering valuable supply space for heavy consuming domestic ruminants.

If you're gonna carry animals, carry hogs or chickens which can sustain themselves on many types of foods (hogs will live happily off of human shit go look up pig toilets).

Dirt bikes don't eat anything. Replacement parts (for a dirt bike) weigh less than hay and can be fabricated on the surface. Biofuel can be sequestered from cyanobacteria/algae farms which will be required to generate oxygen, fix free nitrogen, and reduce iron sulfates in the Martian soil.

t. Civ 5

You wouldn't take the animals with you in the ship, you'd send a seeder ship ahead of time to artificially raise the animals once it has landed on the surface. You'd have to slowly build up the ecosystem so that by the time humans arrive they have a sustainable ecosystem that they can begin exploiting for their survival.

And Mars is a different case because you can send a supply ship to arrive in a few months. I'm talking about a planet light years away.

Unless you're getting artificial wombs, you're going to need at least one living female.

Actually, I'm interested to see the genetics of this. If you have one live female horse and a shitload of different frozen sperm samples, will that be enough to reconstitute the species without inbreeding totally destroying it.

>send a ship full of frozen horse semen
>the guy you pick for the mission turns out to be an /mlp/ poster
>it's empty when the ship arrives

I'm thinking the most efficient thing would be ethanol until you find some petroleum deposits.

>runs in boring old fossil fuel engines
>you're already growing carbohydrates
>doesn't have the space, health, and care requirements of a horse

The really big question is "is the atmosphere breathable"

If the answer is no, it's solar powered rovers for everyone.

The only real advantage that a horse would have over an armored car at this point is its adaptability to varying terrain. Horses aren't the only animals to do this, but they were particularly useful in America because of their capability to navigate mountains and forests/streams as well as roads (for example, also consider Hannibal with his elephants). Although armored cars these days wouldn't be able to scale a mountain the way that a house could, we have helicopters for that. In the future though, on a more sci-fi note, maybe we will genetically engineer animals to serve as better, faster transports than horses or elephants.

>Implying robotic terraforming isn't the pipiest of pipe dreams

Even on a seeder ship you wouldn't send fucking horses you'd send scavengers who could live off of harsh terrain and cold climes.

>b-b-but muh robots will take care of them!

>Bring a dozen horses to an appropriate environment
>leave them alone
>More horses

>Bring a motorcycle to an appropriate environment
>leave it alone
>no new motorcycles

>>>appropriate environment
Just nanofab a few thousand more bikes on demand out of planetary dust

A dozen is probably way, way too low to sustain a population.

You seem wildly optimistic.

Even better:
If you're not a steppe nomad and don't have motorized transport, it's going to be more like 20k, because the oxen pulling your supply carts move at a VERY specific pace and will never, ever go any faster.

>harsh terrain and cold climes.
If we're going to be planting humans on another planet it would have to be pretty damn similar to Earth, with a strong magnetic field, temperate zones and liquid water on the surface. At the present we have no idea if the nearest Earth-like planet is 5 light years away or 5,000. But even if we were optimistic we're still talking about a voyage taking centuries so it would probably be easier to send a series of ships, the first few to survey the planet, the next few to deposit Earth micro-organisms and simple life, and then seeder ships to raise up the temperate areas to where it is sustaining an advanced ecosystem. Then by the time your human colonists arrive they can immediately begin large scale agriculture and wouldn't have to send them with an obscene amount of food. Shoot, it will probably be easier to just have the seeder ships make humans once the ecosystem is capable of supporting them.

Your later ships can be sending industrial equipment to facilitate getting the colony off of the ground, but realistically we're still talking about a single technological city when there could be people living all over the continent living off the land and establishing settlements which in the future will grow into major metropolitan areas. There will be areas where technologically advanced equipment will be difficult to come by so everything will need to be simple, rugged, long-lasting, and utilitarian, and since you already have an ecosystem capable of supporting humans, you also happen to have one capable of supporting animals like dogs and horses, which would prove invaluable companions for these rugged folk (just like they do today even with automobile infrastructure) in the areas of the continent beyond the reach of automobiles and aircraft, both of which require a refueling infrastructure in order to really work as intended.

Ask China. The PLA literally keeps a cavalry force in the Mongolian Border.

Mostly as mounted police since they're part of the PAP (People's Armed Police), which is both a Gendarmerie and a military reserve force.

>the technical has no sense of self-preservation

take it back

meme weapon that loses to literally russian hackers