YourStepDad said:
Thanks, those were very informative.
Where you you draw your sources from, by the way? You seem to have access to many for many an occasion.
I just kinda read a lot and remember names.
If you know a name, then you just put the keywords and google gets you what you want.
For instance;
push pike Sir Francis Vere = source above
Hazzardevil said:
there's someone who claims to be studying the period for her PhD. She says that formations tended to be very spread out.
There are also people who claim warhorses cannot charge into people, warbows were 60lbs tops, silk armor was useless etc.
People just like to debunk stuff.
Hazzardevil said:
The musketeers needed the room to be able to run around doing fire by march and countermarch
They did not do this in most cases.
Frontal formation battle shooting is one thing, skirmishing with enemy is another.
Hazzardevil said:
plus they need to have room to make sure they don't actually set the man next to them alight when fiddling with a lit match.
Match ropes weren't dosed in napalm.
This is a matchlock rope fully lit and prepared to strike the flash pan;
It is like a lit cigarette.
Hazzardevil said:
My memories of the Lucky Dogs making us do organised formations with proper firing drill act as perfect evidence to me, since I remember us being tightly packed never worked well.
Most of the reenactors I see are quite densely packed;
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DWGMNJ/english-civil-war-musket-fire-in-battle-17th-century-battles-firing-DWGMNJ.jpg
Now, to the actual argument;
Yes, sometimes gunners would spread out when needed, but the default formation was tight all around the world;
Asia;
http://i.imgur.com/zkEGgst.jpg
https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c220c2effa5e816637e93a262e946efb?convert_to_webp=true
http://www.yibar.com.cn/uploads/allimg/c120209/132W6320Q9120-63R9.jpg
Europe, look at the middle of the painting(above the reiters/cavalry);
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Batalla_Sebastian_Vranckx.jpg
Apart from that in the middle, notice that there are groups of gunners marching around without pike support, they are still packed tightly.
However, sometimes they are spread out(skirmishers to the top right);
http://www.outpost-art.org/images/Snayers%20Pieter/Siege%20of%20Groenlo.jpg
Hazzardevil said:
How pikemen themselves acted when the opposing pike blocks clashed is very contentious.
I do not believe it is.
We have sources of push pike since the Austrian knights dismounted and used their lances against the Swiss.
There are simply to many contemporary writers stating push pike to be a reality.
Our own(modern) inability to understand why would they do such an insane thing is not enough to debate whether it happened
at all.
The question is merely how often.
Hazzardevil said:
I personally think that the blocks would reach the very edge of the pike distance and then more or less shake or thrust forward, while trying to avoid moving any closer.
That most probably did happen, but not always.
If one block decides to slow down while the other charges with their pikes, they may overrun the other formation simply because of the force of the pikes, regardless of how many will be impaled.
It is also a thing of morale;
A group of men sporadically jabbing and stationary may waver upon contact, while, if you get a group of men marching forward, drums and song, marching faster, nothing but forward, the morale factor will be much higher because they are on the assault and not on the receiving end.
There is also the fact that most of the men do not see what is happening, while the men at the front may be terrified of the pikes coming their way, there are about 10 rows of men behind them pushing them into those pikes, they do not really have a choice.
Hazzardevil said:
The Swiss were able to do so much better than everyone else for so long by having better drilled men, so their formations were neater and faster, making men more likely to run away. Or having longer pikes.
The Swiss were very interesting because they actually used shorter pikes, the argument presented by one historian(can't remember the name) is that the Swiss answer is in the halberds.
They used far more polearms than other pike formations and used those polearms to either wade off pike points or drive them to the ground(like a billhook does) then let their own pikes push forward.
Those zweihander maniacs were used the same way apparently by ze Germans.
There is also the argument that(at least in the early days) the very front rank would be very heavily armored(pikes/spears, regardless how pointy, are extremely unlikely to properly pierce plate armor, it is near impossible with human muscle power) and then those armored dudes would somehow mess up the other formation while the pikes behind them pushed with them.
We have little idea how the Swiss worked, but they were, by far, the greatest pikemen who ever walked the Earth, perhaps even the greatest infantry ever.
Some time ago I read a dissertation which analyzed a lot of their engagements(most of which do not have a wiki article) and they were so successful it is almost comedic.
They just kinda won everywhere always, with kill death ratios up to 10-20:1
