Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook | Hacker News Reader

Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook

acoup.blog

119 pointslittlestymaar14 comments

For anyone that's curious about this, there's a fun 'medieval fiction' book set in a made-up universe called Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker that follows a military engineer during a siege:

> This is the story of Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, and his history of the Great Siege, written down so that the deeds and sufferings of great men may never be forgotten.

> A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all.

> To save the city will take a miracle, but what it has is Orhan. A colonel of engineers, Orhan has far more experience with bridge-building than battles, is a cheat and a liar, and has a serious problem with authority. He is, in other words, perfect for the job.

* https://bookshop.org/books/sixteen-ways-to-defend-a-walled-c...

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37946419-sixteen-ways...

It's the first in a trilogy (third book scheduled for 2022).

So I'm about halfway through and just have to say thank you, it's really great entertainment and I just love the setting!

These days I am quite skeptical for unfinished book series :-/

Given that author has delivered multiple trilogies, I would not be overly concerned about them not finishing this one.

I haven't read any of the Siege books yet but did enjoy their Engineer trilogy and would recommend it.

> Expected publication: January 11th 2022 by Orbit

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48897284-a-practical-gui...

It's already in my local library's system with a few holds.

Not really the typical fare here, but it was interesting how different the actual challenges were from the sort of general fiction/fantasy inspired stuff I'm familiar with. The combined siege tower/battering ram/archer firing platform described seems like a really cool setpiece, I'm surprised it hasn't shown up more often in fiction.

> Not really the typical fare here

I've gotten pretty used to seeing the weekly acoup.blog post show up on HN over the weekend. It's actually probably one of the most reliable bloggers in terms of having their blog posts make it to HN front page.

Yes, there's really a ton of submissions [1]. It looks like the author's prose and topics really resonated with the HN crowd.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Extremely typical fare here. Writes engagingly, about games. G.A.M.E.S. -when he's not doing a deep dive on real siege warfare, he's on Sid Meier's back about how it works in the civ series...

I’ve come to view the famous Roman Legions, at least at their height, as a very well organized construction crew that would occasionally fight.

The Rhine Bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar%27s_Rhine_bridges) is a good example.

Caesar comes, builds a bridge over a significant river, because why not, peeks on the other side and tears it down again. No big deal, he can build another any time.

Interesting to also look at how US troops finally got the upper hand in urban Iraq, with large amounts of concrete walls of varying sizes. In the film "American Sniper" you can see the walls getting put up under fire from an expert Iraqi sniper. Not sure about the accuracy of the film, but I believe the walls were pivotal in the success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremer_wall

are there anywhere that go into this level of detail?

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