Hey, Veeky Forums. I got a question concerning Air cavalry during the age of sword and bows in fantasy

Hey, Veeky Forums. I got a question concerning Air cavalry during the age of sword and bows in fantasy.

In a land filled with airborne beings such as dragons, hippogriffs, griffons, and the like used primarily as air cavalry, how would this change the battlefield for those on the ground? How would one counter the flying beasts from the ground without the use of magic or gunpowder based weaponry? Is there no way to counter them without magic or gunpowder?

How would castles defend such an attack? Would they take on a new shape to counter such an attack and keep them at bay?

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A couple of ways:

>Pitched Battles
I'm assuming two scenarios: one where air cavalry are used like the Nazgul in LotR; shock and awe, with swooping melee attacks; and one where they're more Mongolian and use bows and arrows to rain death from above.

In the first scenario, the best way to deal with them would be Pikemen, same as standard cavalry. In the second, things become a little more difficult. I would assume that adopting a Testudo formation (see attached image) would help, while using archers and ballistae to shoot them down (the Roman repeating ballista or Korean hwacha would be good for this). And all of this is assuming that the flyers don't have to deal with enemy air cavalry as well.

>Castles
Castles could take a number of approaches to dealing with air power. The most obvious are stationing a bunch of ballistae on all the battlements, essentially forming medieval AA batteries. You could also coat the rooves and battlements with something slippery or sticky to prevent airborne troop deployments and the like.

Insofar as construction is concerned, you might also see castles that look more like modern bunkers than traditional castles, with heavily fortified roofs as well as walls, or castles that are built into the sides of mountains or hills.

Or designed to give the defenders an edge incase of said flyers landing, bunker in the middle of the keeps roof gives cross fire on the roof / protection from archers and landed monsters.

Probably just masses of archers, not much else would be able to track a flying target fast enough and provide enough volume of fire if you rule out gunpowder and magic.

Other options would rely on ingenuity and luck. For example, I'd imagine you could perhaps come up with some sort of chain shot to fire out of a ballista, but I doubt itd be very useful or even able to hit the target.

Essentially, youd either need aircav of your own, or would have to wait for them to come to you. However unlike traditional cavalry aircav would be far more mobile and difficult to counter with tactics like forming a square. Aircav would wait for infantry to be distracted and swoop in to harass them, or pick off support troops who are unaware or unprotected.

And if a route happened, the fleeing army would be doomed. You wouldnt be able to form any kind of serious defence.

So basically, theyd work like regular cavalry, except theyve removed the weaknesses of being vulnerable to terrain and would be insanely difficult to hit with bows, two of the best counters to regular cav. Maybe pikemen could fight back, but think about if a guy DID succeed in sticking a flying steed. The damn thing would probably plow into the unit crushing men under it and cause more damage than it would have had you ignored it.

Massed crossbowmen would be your best choice if you didn't have any aircav of your own. Crossbows have the greatest ease of training and use if you haven't any gunpowder. Flight characteristics of crossbow bolts make hitting flyers easier if still rather difficult, hence massing the crossbows. I wouldn't expect ballista to be able to take down anything but the largest and slowest flyers. Accuracy and rate of fire would be too much of an issue.

Should of had a few wands of magic missile handy. Duct tape a few together...

Castles are somewhat open to air attack in the middle. In your scenario, traditional castles designed to resist frontal assaults from the ground will be untenable. Instead, caves high in sheer cliffs or steep mountains would be better. Alternatively, you build down, essentially a WWII bunker, with a cuppolas connected using underground tunnels.

You can't really discuss the topic without discussing the details of what the air cavalry consists of, and if your setting has any kind of internal consistency and logic, or if it's just world of warcraft levels of silly. It's just impossible, unless you only want to talk about videogame-tier rock paper scissors tactical stuff.

Dragons and Griffons, for instance, would reasonably represent an absolutely massive investment in training and resources compared to a horse, to the point where crossbows alone would make them completely unrealistic to use for war.

Imagine if airplanes flew so slowly or had such a low attack range that every person with a ranged weapon stood a chance of hitting them. And on top of that, that if you just scratch it, it might still die, bleed out, or get crippled in a way that you can't just swap in another part for. Airplanes would suck. And all of the above is true for living breathing flying creatures.

Like, just have lots of guys with crossbows, and have all of them dip the bolt tips in shit before going into battle. Now every time one of your gryphons or hippogriff gets as much as scratched, they stand a pretty big chance of getting sick to the point of being out of action, or just dying from infection.

Add in how ridiculous the amount of food dragons or griffons would need is.

Like, it's not always easy to even feed horses, especially not big ones (tiny ugly steppe ponies are easier) but imagine something bigger than a horse, that eats meat? Jesus. It's a logistical nightmare. Then factor in what happens if someone deliberately tries to make it harder for you.

Flying riding beasts in a setting that's not pants on head stupid should be limited mainly to scouting.

Fantasymedieval warfare is mostly about attack the other guy when he's in a bad position, not about lining up an equal amount of guys and whoever has the most killy guys wins.

>crossbow with two triggers
Ow my autism.

That's what happens when someone looks at images of a crossbow and doesn't understand it, and then paints a COOLER crossbow with MORE AWESOME.

Why does he have hooves?

> I wouldn't expect ballista to be able to take down anything but the largest and slowest flyers

The thing is though, that for every single trained gryphon knight or whatever, you could probably have a ballista or several scorpions, easy. (smaller, but still big enough that you want a tripod for it)

The cost of a gryphon egg (if you buy them from the people who steal them from wild nests, is probably very high, on top of that you have the cost of feeding them as they grow up, followed by training, the losses of those that get injured, die from disease, have the wrong temperament etc, etc. Bottom line, a gryphon is retardedly expensive. I think people severely underestimate what an absolute bitch it is to feed something that doesn't eat grass.

Compare that to the cost of building a scorpion/arbalest/ballista. Skilled labor and crew, sure, but probably nothing compared to some kind of gryphon knight.

And when you compare the two, you realize that hey, if the war machine wears down, you can fix it. And if you have skilled craftsmen and materials, you can just keep building them.

Last of all, flying cavalry gets kind of stupid when you consider counter measures.

What is a guy with a bow or a lance on some flying horse going to do when the other army puts a steel cage or big shield in front of their scorpions? Or mounts them on carts with arrow slits?

As soon as you think logically about knights on flying animals you realize that it's actually hella stupid, and probably a terrible investment of time and resources compared to the things that can kill said knights on flying animals.

>Castles are somewhat open to air attack

Sure, castles exactly like the historical ones. But making them safe from flying attacks would be really easy if you put your mind through it. Ropes or chains strung across the courtyard makes it incredibly dangerous for anything with wings to land there, for instance.

These are some amazingly well thought out arguments.

What the fuck are you doing on Veeky Forums?

Mind you, it gets a lot better if your setting has any form of explosives. Even just Alchemists Fire sort of stuff. At which point you've changed to WWI early bomber tactics.

>What is a guy with a bow or a lance on some flying horse going to do when the other army puts a steel cage or big shield in front of their scorpions? Or mounts them on carts with arrow slits?

Knock it over? Hit it from blind spots? Drop things on it?

If we are to apply real world economics and logistics to the problem, I agree that Dragons and Griffons themselves will probably be way to expensive to train, but hippogriffs would probably be a different story.

Hippogriffs are small enough to gain a good amount of food just from very small animals and even insects, specifically worms, from the ground as it paws for it. So logistically, they wouldn't be as a complete nightmare as dragons and griffons. If one were to domesticate or raise them en mass, then I don't think that the price of the eggs would be all that expensive.

An air cavalry wouldn't be all that far fetched as one doesn't truly need lances or spears as claws can do the close combat damage, Death from above archery would be devastating even if inaccurate, and it also puts the defenders in a position that would force them to also compensate for different angles of attack.

Most cavalry would be used against siege equipment, artillery, and certain important objectives. So not only do defenders have to defend against air raids and land forces at the same time and prioritize who should be attacked first.

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In OD&D, they make mention of "sling ended catapults" presumably to throw a bunch of small projectiles into the air, as well as ballista mounted on the turrets of castles to defend from aerial attack

I would think a setting that has air cavalry as a normal thing would result in much different sort of fortification than your typical medieval castle.

For starters they'd probably be enclosed.

Also if dragons with breath weapons are a thing, I'm not even sure people would bother with castles at all.

On the other hand, dragons and griffons can travel huge distances, and if they do so at night, completely invisibly. Food? Just kill and eat some cows from the farms they're passing over. It's not their peasants they're robbing, after all, and an army on the march would do a lot worse anyway.

Then they can just swoop in on a castle in the night, and if they're on a dragon, start belching flame onto the sleeping inhabitants, or if they're on a griffon, land on the castle's roof and drop off an assassin or two. Then the griffon and rider could either wait for the assassins to do their job and return, or just fly away and leave them behind, depending on their commander's strategy.

And this is just assuming the dragon/griffon isn't sentient. If it is, then you've got an airborne soldier that can be even sneakier than a riding animal, because they know not to growl or squawk their discomfort at flying in the middle of a frigid night, and can identify good weak-points in an enemy's defences to exploit.

Who need explosive ?
Just fly high enough to avoid crossbow bolts and then drop a box of nails on that infantry formation.
Gravity is a bitch ans so is terminal velocity

Or pegases (pegasi? Whatever...). Flying horses with all the advantages of horses and the benefit of flying.
Still, I think aerial cavalry in a straight up battle with armies on the ground would be impractical. If you swoop down an do flyby attacks, you give up your advantage of elevation.
Firing a bow or crossbow while riding a flying horse would be kinda difficult I think, you'd run a risk of hitting the wings of your steed and your aim would be completely thrown off, you could do massed volleys, but you can also do those with regular archers.
Dropping explosives onto the enemy army would be more efficient, but the question is how much you can carry with you.

Overall I think units with flying mounts would be of more use disrupting the enemy's logistics and forcing them to devote more troops to simply guarding their supply trains, for scouting, for infiltration, or, if you have a sufficient number of flying units, to drop off a number of regular soldiers to flank or ambush the enemy. I imagine it could be pretty useful to bypass some natural defense, like a river or ravine, and drop off a platoon of soldiers who then proceed to disrupt the enemy's formation.

Arbalests, ballistas and scorpions, target the wings.

You can use aerial threat to justify dungeons, or simply add bartizans, stronger roofs and concentric forts if that isn't a thing already.

But has the best argument.

I wouldn't use flying creatures in battle, except to have a top-view of it. That alone denies Hannibal's tactics at Cannae, it's a staggering change.

Use gryphons as ultra messengers, and your realm can respond to threats much faster, depending on their endurance.

Send an aerial team to fuck with the besieged town source of water up in the hills, make holes in their aqueduct, shit in there, clog it with a corpse.

Wait... Use the gryphon rider to dig latrines, and train the gryphon to carry his former rider's weight in sling bullets. Throw those from 200 meters or above because most missiles can't reach that high and so the bullets get quite fast. A leaden bullet was about 100g and it could pierce flesh, so a gryphon could throw about 800 of them into the enemy's heads.

Forgot the vid about slings' piercing.

youtube.com/watch?v=Tpu-BCSfJ2c&list=PLkMIaCcWSxvxhsuJvH70MgTlIV-gUAH2w&index=82