Comment by zrobotics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zrobotics | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No, the comparison to an APC (armored personnel carrier) is apt- knights were armored enough to be nearly invulnerable to the weaponry a peasant would have access to. To compare to something modern, I'm sure enough street protestors would be able to disable an APC and kill the soldiers inside at least some of the time, but the soldiers in the APC could likely win the 40:9000 battle cited in the article. Remember that knights had the height of military technology, this was an age where any iron tool was still extremely valuable.

The only thing that would hamper modern soldiers is that from everything I have read medieval knights weren't possessed with any qualms about killing; life in general was much more violent than we experience now.

For more reading about this mindset, acoup.blog [0] has an excellent review of Bertrand de Born's work. What struck me is just how casual violence is treated, and that war is a treated as the expected normal condition. The peasantry definitely did not hold these views, but given that the nobility had a vast armament advantage and copious experience in killing I doubt many modern soldiers would be quite so callous. The only modern exception I can think of is child soldiers; but they have been subjected to abuse specifically to train them to be able to commit horrific acts. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think most soldiers in modern militaries would easily be able to slaughter their countrymen with quite the same abandon. This is speculation, but I suspect that the nobles were able to do this because they viewed the peasantry as semi-subhuman; see the American antebellum south for the types of atrocities that that mindset enables.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-ber...

Tiennanmen square would be a case in point. I believe that they brought in troops from other areas, because they were alienated enough from the citizens of the city, and the local garrison wouldn't have shot their own neighbours and families.

I might be wrong, but I believe the only soldiers hurt were not on tanks, but foot soldiers after leaving the transport vehicles.

However this doesn't fit the "A peasant vs. a Knight" comaprison. A huge mass can also easily stop and defeat a knight.

> No, the comparison to an APC (armored personnel carrier) is apt- knights were armored enough to be nearly invulnerable to the weaponry a peasant would have access to.

No. A knight prone on the ground was very easy to kill very quickly - just stick a dagger through the visor. There is nothing comparable a civilian today can do to an APC.

Additionally, a single knight on a horse was not that hard to take down using relatively easily-available polearms, at least to a group of peasants. It doesn't scale down linearly - 40:9000 is a very different matter than 1:200, because a charge of 40 mounted knights is still inescapable death to the part of the enemy force they're charging at. A single knight would be much less terrifying even to a relatively group of peasants.

Lob a molatoff cocktail from above and hit the engine intakes and you can get a Mobility kill.

Armour in built up areas is very risky with out infantry support and the APC's would not be just driving around with out having dismounts supporting them.

This, or spray paint in windows and periscopes. Or, smokey fires in air inlets, crews carry gas masks but not hours of supplemental O2.

Modern armor isn't invulnerable, but as I suggested it isn't easy to take out and likely would achieve similar to 40:9000 or worse in confrontations with civilians. Thankfully armor rolling over civilians like that isn't common enough for me to pull actual statistics, so we have to guess at efficacy compared to knights fighting peasants.

And a knight would frequently be either backed by other knights or have men at arms as well - effectively dismounts.

I guess that in the days that most jobs were either be being a soldier working for the local lord or a peasant in some random village had naturally a profound effect about life and death.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com