You had to know how to go from one formation to any other formation, and how to get there without ending up in a big rugby scrum in the middle of the field, which certainly happened a lot with green units. That’s how you win battles, being drilled to that level of being able to do it without thinking about it, because you’ve got enough to do with loading and firing and filling in the gaps as casualties are taken. When the colonel says wheel left, the feet need to do it without thinking. It had to be learned to the point of being spinal reflex, because you had to do it on the battlefield when all hell’s breaking loose around you and artillery’s going off and people are getting shot and there’s noise and smoke and chaos. JW: The average infantry unit would drill, weather permitting, four hours a day, every day, because the drill was so complex. Did these guys back in the day really have all that stuff down pat? I mean, you’ve got three hundred pages devoted exclusively to complex formation drilling. GO: I picked one up at First Manassas and thumbed through it. GO: When you’re modeling the different regiments and their how they interact, how do you model and calculate the formation physics? Does the computer see big blocky rows of guys, or discrete bodies? Are the gun ballistics modeled individually, or is it more of an abstract firepower aggregate? Although he was probably less polite than that. So I can understand where Jackson would be saying, on the march, you know, get down and walk. But they had the horses to spare where the Confederates didn’t. The Confederate artillery teams almost exclusively had four horse hitches, whereas the Union artillery had six, which gave them a little better mobility and speed over the ground. And the Confederates, being short of horses, had to take care of them to the greatest extent that they could.
But on the march, they would walk, because it reduced the load on the horses. JW: Well, it would depend…on the battlefield, riding on the limbers, they could get where they were going in a hurry. So I was playing around with the artillery in Scourge of War, and I see three guys get up and sit on the limber as I’m moving it around, and was wondering if the Jackson story was apocryphal, or is that a level of detail you’re not as concerned with modeling here?
0 kommentar(er)
