What makes European weapons superior to everyone s else's?
>>65435502Europeans.
>>65435502Luck and a combination of complex social and geographic circumstances.
>>65435502Ottoman weapons were effective for a good century or two
And yet the Chinese invented gunpowder
>>65435514They had a lot of periods with high intensity warfare, it sharpens the art so to speak for weapons and armourWhat works gets improved upon, what doesn't gets discarded and no small amount of invention, adoption and learning
>>65435556by accident, so they could drink it.Every technology that makes your life better was invented by whites.
>>65435556And did fuck all with it.>>65435555
>>65435559also a highly competitive environment between many small nations and kingdoms, which either forced innovation out of you or you were absorbed.
>>65435556And never did a single thing of value with it. Thus always with non-whites.>uhm ackshually we invented thingOkay wow cool why does nobody care? Because you suck, that's why. When Europeans showed up with proper firearms, the Chinese response was to double down on voodoo saving the day believing their kung fu could repel bullets.The Japanese response, revealing the Aryan nature of Yamato, was to mass adopt the gun as quickly as possible.It is arguable the greatest strength of Europeans historically was flexibility. Rome exemplifies this>hey this hoplite thing isn't working out, let's try fighting like the Samnites>this is pretty good but let's copy Celtic swords>proceeds to conquer the world with this formula>hey we suck at naval warfare, let's just copy this Carthaginian ship we found and tinker with it>okay we added a ramp and now will conquer the entire Mediterranean with it>wow that weird chain armor the Celts have seems cool let's do thatAnd so on.
>>65435578At the end of the day all this really means is that europe was a complex environment with a lot of competitors that forced adaptation. Most of the places europeans rolled over were societies whose competition was more or less doing the same things they were, and whose way of life worked perfectly well most of the time. It's a big mistake to treat "Europeans" as a block historically, given that various european powers at various times were certainly not flexible at all and got rolled over by their neighbors because of it. Also your understanding of roman military history is flawed at best. >conquered the world with swords larp>hyping up the fucking corvusbarely used and barely mattered, the romans were a lackluster sea power almost their entire history. >chainmailEveryone used chainmail, it's simple as fuck to make as long as you've got enough people lying around to hammer bits of wire.
>>65435595spearfag is trippin>barely used and barely mattered, the romans were a lackluster sea power almost their entire history.And yet they defeated each and every naval power with their shit-tier navy. Maybe instead you're delusional and contrarian on impulse, lacking any rationality in favor UHM AKSHUALLY>Everyone used chainmailNo, they didn't, not until Rome spread it. Prior to Roman adoption the Celts used chainmail and there is little evidence anyone else anywhere used it. The Hellenic peoples still used the same armors they had for centuries, while further east scale armor dominated.>actually Europeans weren't flexible only the relevant ones that survived to present werek
>>65435595Well that’s kind of the crazy part, isn’t it.The colonial european powers conquered the whole world while constantly being at eachother’s throats.
>>65435609>spearfagNo i'm just calling you stupid for reducing roman warfare to>duh, they copied celtic sords!they didn't secure naval victory through the quality of their navy, they just gave up on trying to fight naval battles and hard-focused on boarding. They gave up the corvus entirely after they lost an entire fleet and 100,000 men to a storm because the thing was so stupidly unwieldy. After the punic wars there basically were no major naval powers to contest, so the romans let the navy deprecate, got embarassed by pirates, and then spent the rest of the republican and imperial era squabbling with other romans, skirmishing/raiding and sinking in storms. >Not until rome spread itDoesn't it undermine your point that europeans were notably flexible if everybody started using chainmail the moment they got their hands on it? >Only the relevant ones that survived to the present wereWell yeah, kinda? I didn't say europeans *weren't* flexible, but european powers are separate entities. The guy who adapts to a problem and succeeds one day might not adapt to a problem and fail the next. Plenty of kingdoms and polities just didn't survive to the modern day even if in the past they'd prospered, the same thing happened to Rome itself.
>>65435645>No i'm just calling you stupid for reducing roman warfare toI know you want to sperg for hours about shit nobody cares about, and be wrong about most of it, but I'm sticking to the bullet points with my shitposts.>Doesn't it undermine your point that europeans were notably flexible if everybody started using chainmail the moment they got their hands on it?Are you drunk? >europeans start using new technology when they become aware of it>other people don'tIt took a thousand years after the Romans adopted it for mail to catch on in Iran. The Persians had encountered it from the Galatians right away.
>>65435595>chainmail, it's simple as fuck to make I like how you sealed your bad post with this line to prove you are ignorant and should be ignored.
>>65435652>thousand years~400 years. I had a retard moment.
>>65435652the sassanids started incorporating chainmail into their cavalry armor by the third century, where the fuck are you getting a thousand years from retard? >>65435655Chainmail is *simple* to make, it's weakness is that it's time and labor intensive to produce, that's where the cost comes from.
>>65435672beat you to it
>>65435674>>65435659Anyhow, the primary barrier to ring chainmail being adopted was that most late adopters already had equivalent forms of lamellar armor, which the romans also used contemporaneously with ring chainmail in the form of lorica squamata. You wouldn't argue that the romans were being backwards or inflexible by adopting lamellar armor, would you?
>>65435698>was that most late adopters already had equivalent forms of lamellar armorNo they didn't. Numerous flaws in this logic: The late adopters had encountered mail armor centuries prior in most cases, and had not adopted it. Two, they did not yet have lamellar armor, but scale armor. Three, lamellar cannot be equivalent, as it cannot provide the full surface coverage mail offers.>You wouldn't argue that the Romans were being backwards or inflexible by adopting lamellar armor, would you?I ask yet again: Are you drunk? The Romans adopt a new technology and combine it with what they already have. No, that is not being inflexible. You're not even trying to make sense you're so desperate for a "gotcha" moment.>lorica squamataI'm somewhat confused by your wording but you're wrong in either case: lorica squamata was not ring chainmail nor lamellar. It was scale armor. That's a different third thing.Anyway, everyone would eventually come around to the western European method of rejecting essentially all armor but mail, just a few centuries late after western Europeans had moved on to plate armor. Pic related.
>>65435706scale armor is lamellar armor anon, don't be stupid. The only difference is in the exact arrangement of the scales and holes. >the late adopters had encountered mail centuries beforeYes, but it's not like they were completely without armor, they had their own armor which worked and was contemporaneous with mail. When entities which did not already have established sources and doctrines for the use of armor encountered mail they adopted it outright, like the various bedouin and arab tribes through the 5th-6th centuries.
>>65435758>scale armor is lamellar armor anon,No, it's not.>Yes, but it's not like they were completely without armor, they had their own armor It's almost like that's exactly the point. The Romans had armor before mail too!>oh b-b-but everyone else's armor was just as good! It worked fine!No, it sucked and they came to that conclusion too, it just took vastly longer.
>>65435502Who is this European? Europe is not a single entity. Are you talking about Britain? France? Portuguese? The Dutch? Each country have their own way to expand and colonize. Not just thru warfare.
>>65435595>larpSpearfags are insufferable.>barely used and barely mattered, the romans were a lackluster sea power almost their entire history.I think it matters that they were able to destroy the only other sea competition to the point they were able to ignore sea power afterwards.
>>65435768>that's exactly the pointNo, the point was that they exchanged the old tullian or camillan bronze cuirasses and pectorals for hamata and squamata, but armies using lamellar armor didn't necessarily need to exchange their armor for ring chainmail because they were already fielding flexible, simply made if expensive armor. The parthians and sassanids were using lamellar armor contemporaneously with the romans, adopting it by at least the 2nd century BC, and given they were cavalry-focused powers it wouldn't have made sense for them to focus as heavily on ring chainmail as the romans, an infantry-focused power would have.
>>65435825They disagreed and kept using ring chainmail as a primary armor longer than Europe did.
>>65435830eventually, but that in itself is part of my point. Lamellar doesn't go away until the powers that used it go away, even through the 4th-5th centuries the sassanids were still using lamellar/scale armor supplemented with chainmail, and it's not until the upheavals of the islamic expansion do you see chainmail as a primary form of armor truly take hold. Even then the rashiduns and other powers were still augmenting their chainmail with various forms of lamellar armor.
>>65435842>eventuallyYes, that's the point anon. As if they resisted the change longer, then finally gave in way too late.
>>65435556They invented gunpowder, gun, cannons, grenades, rockets, multiple rocket artillery, etc. The European dominates the last 500 years is due to us getting access to new world + rapidly industrializing first and establishing a dominant global trade where we're able to extract resources from the entire world. This was due to the threat of the mongols + new world information from the wars + spice trade from India + new worlds to explore + new information flowing back. An individualistic character driver loop that pushed our civilization. Nowadays, the anti-western sentiment is coming back with the ugly and the horrors of collectivism in the west.
>>65435851>spice trade from indiael em eff ayy oh
>>65435850but they didn't resist the change, they just didn't feel the need to replace what they had that worked with something else that also worked. Where mail was advantageous, they eventually incorporated it to some degree, for the same reasons that the people already using chainmail decided to incorporate *more* chainmail into their armor later on. They didn't "give in", like one day they just said "Damn this chainmail shit actually rocks", the structures that preferred and prioritized lamellar armor were replaced by other structures that preferred and prioritized mail. It's like being surprised that an army decides to use a different uniform after the government is overthrown. It still does the same thing the old one did, it's just in a different style.
>>65435865>They didn't feel the needRight up until they did, because they actually were wrong the entire time.
>>65435502For most of history? Nothing.Then the high middle ages arrived, and with them - glasses (made it possible to engage in high precision work for another two decades of one's life) - crop rotation and the replacement of oxen with horses as an agricultural beast of burden (supporting obscene population densities) - modern finance (supporting investments for long-term profits) - conflict between church and secular nobility (kept them busy with each other and limited their ability to steal abovementioned profits from commoners) - blast furnaces (absurd level of iron production)It is worth noting that east Asia, India and the near east all had some of these factors, China even most of them, available as well. The one factor that no-one else had was optics.Basically, European superiority stems from being able to make glasses. The downstream effects of scholars and craftsmen remaining productive for another twenty years of their lives were absolutely nuts. The surge in mathematics and its effects on finance, navigation and artillery, and through finance on the economy at large, were nothing short of a revolution.Without glasses, none of this would've happened.Megane is peak
>>65435502I'm going to step in here and plug "The Art of War in the Western World" by Archer Jones. It goes into great detail regarding how European warfare evolved from antiquity to the late Cold War.
>>65435867Anon you're being really autistic about this. You can draw a comparison with straight vs. curved swords. Across europe and the middle east pretty much everyone used straight swords, up until they didn't, because tastes and doctrines had changed. It didn't make using straight swords incorrect because they did something different later. I haven't even been implying lamellar armor is somehow better than chainmail, just that it worked well enough that unless you started with chainmail from the very beginning, the impetus to abandon lamellar just wasn't very strong.
>>65435878Europeans disagreed, and were correct.
>>65435524Hi, Jared Diamond. Your book is silly.
>>65435879Oh okay you're just a sperg nevermind
>>65435883>Europeans adapt to change faster>your entire argument is look at all these times the Romans rapidly adapted to change! This means you're wrong!>Okay, you don't like that answer? How about all the times dune coons slowly adapted to change? Huh?I think you're actually retarded.
>>65435885Anon the whole fucking point of this argument was that the romans were not this uniquely flexible force whose flexibility granted them mastery of the ancient world. Everybody around the Mediterranean was forced to adapt to everybody else around them, and the only reason people further away took longer to adopt changes made around the mediterranea was simply because it was further away, it took time to spread. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere invents a better, more expensive or difficult way of doing things if what you're doing right now already works. That's why so many of the people who encountered europeans after the late medieval were just steamrolled, not accounting for disease, what they'd been doing until that point worked just fine.
>>65435502Don't know
>>65435900>Anon the whole fucking point of this argument was that the romans were not this uniquely flexible force whose flexibility granted them mastery of the ancient world. Everybody around the Mediterranean was forced to adapt to everybody else around themYes, and others adapted as they were forced to, while the Romans often pro-actively adopted new technologies. Retard. >what they'd been doing until that point worked just fine.That's exactly it. You keep agreeing with me in totality, but the third world mindset is so engrained in your skull you can't see it. Yes, indeed, everyone else did say "why change what we're doing works" right up until it didn't, while Europeans pro-actively changed even when their strategy still worked.The Romans adopted chainmail from people they conquered utterly. They weren't forced to. Everyone else adopted chainmail after the Romans stomped on their necks.
>>65435905the romans also adopted new technologies because they were forced to, anon. Change everywhere is incremental, in europe those increments were shorter due to concentration and competition. The romans did not "Utterly conquer" the celts and gauls before they adopted chainmail, the fucking gauls sacked rome at the same time the romans were reforming their military, that doesn't sound like a choice made completely freely to me.
>>65435935>the romans also adopted new technologies because they were forced to, anon.That is false.>Change everywhere is incrementalAnd those increments happen at a much slower pace outside of Europe.>the fucking gauls sacked romeDidn't actually happen, made up mythological claim.
>>65435937>celts and gauls are major military threat, powerful enough to defeat roman armies and siege/sack rome>reform your armies to be more flexible and adopt gallic style swords and armorthis is forced>carthaginian naval forces are far superior to yours in skill at sea>adopt a ramp and exclusively focus on boardingthis is forced >mythological claimthe extent of the sack is in question, that the city was assaulted and plundered by the gauls has support. It was bad enough that it stuck in the roman mind long enough for the original circumstances to become muddled. Grow up retard, rome wasn't magic.
>>65435945Absolutely none of those are forced.
>>65435903
>>65435903>d-don’t know>angry passive-aggressive chink ritualposting ensuesThe thing in your image isn’t really proving otherwise, angry and indirect scared chinkshill.
>>65435502the introduction of whitepowder
>>65435556and did exactly fuckall with it
>>65436108That's actually not true at all though. The Chinese did have matchlock muskets that they used and they also utilized artillery. Notably during the imjin war the Japanese armies that encountered the ming reinforcements had difficulty dealing with their cannons.
