Weapons That Changed the Course of History (And My Fiction), Part 2

February 28, 2013 in General Topics

We’ve come to the second and final part of this miniseries on weapons that changed the course of history. In my first post, I covered two real-world weapons, and then one near-world weapon that appeared in The Tyrant Strategy: Revenant Man (and will, of course, show up in the later books in the series).

Today we’ll tackle three more, including the deadliest, most human event-affecting weapon of all time.

Historical Weapon: The Horse

Horses. Courtesy Wikipedia.

These guys. Courtesy: Wikipedia.


Am I going too primitive? I think not. When thinking of mobile warfare, it was the horse that kicked everything off.

Four hooves, plus some training, plus some gear, plus about twenty five-thousand calories a day, got a warrior an animal capable of making them taller, faster, stronger, and more mobile. Environments like the Mongolian Steppe–these “oceans without water” gave us the greatest cavalry forces of all time. And without the horse, they would have been a pale shadow of what they actually achieved. Read the rest of this entry →