[Dragaera] Speculation on weapons and sorcery

[Davdi Silverrock]

While we're waiting for Jhegaala to be revised and polished and sent
on to Tor, and like that...

[Um.  Possible minor spoiler for Dzur, if you haven't read it]
[*Really* minor]

A perennial topic that comes up around here is the question of why the
Dragaeran troops in /Dragon/ are only using javelins and swords; why
even bows and arrows are absent, except as being used by mercenaries
of the opposite side; why no-one has firearms or anything like them.

As with all debates, this has never really been satisfactorily
resolved (and probably never will be).  SKZB is on record as saying
that Dragaerans are really very conservative, which seems rather
inadequate.

Does a better explanation exist?


There's been something that I've been mulling over in the back of my
mind ever since reading the bit in /Dzur/ where the researcher
mentions using a spell that can find patterns of text in printed
works.  How long has this spell been in existence?  How generally can
it be made to work?

If we can generalize from this one example that this type of spell is
actually very old and very common, and can be used to find nearly
anything that stands out, perhaps we can answer the Dragaeran Question
of Weaponry and Armor.

Addressing armor first:  What is armor?  Well, it is often made of
metal -- bronze or steel -- purified and refined and strengthened with
various substances.  It works by distributing force across a greater
surface area, thus weakening the impact of a blow.

Yet armor has serious drawbacks as well:   Metal armor is very
expensive to forge, rather heavy, restricts movement, requires special
training to use, and it takes up energy to move it around, and
requires time to put it on and take off.

In Dragaera, there is another danger as well: if a finding spell can
be created and tuned to "find all concentrations of metal greater than
the mass of a sword", then someone wearing armor can be sorcerously
found and targeted.  And worse, from the point of of view of the
armor-wearer, sorcery can be used to deliver rather different kinds of
energy against armor, that the armor is no defense against: electrical
and heat energy.  So now it looks like armor is worse than nothing at
all...

And finally, sorcerers of sufficiently high level appear to be able to
use sorcery to block physical attacks.  So they have the benefits of
armor without the physical drawbacks (obviously some drawbacks remain,
in that it takes lots of training to learn how to do this, and energy
to maintain the sorcerous armor).

How about Lyorn vambraces?  Well, there are several points that I
would keep in mind:  First off, the amount of metal in a vambrace is
about the same, and probably less than, that of a sword, so it would
be harder to find and target.  Second, if I were designing vambraces,
I would include a layer of leather inside to insulate against heat and
electrical attacks.  Third, it may well be possible to sorcerously
protect vambraces, and other pieces of metal in small amounts
(consider how Dragaerans still use swords).  And finally, if I were
designing vambraces, I would make it very easy for the wearer to take
them off if things got too hot...


Someone will probably bring up leather and/or laminate armor now.  Hm.
 Well, I don't have any better answer than to suggest that perhaps
such types of armor (that is, made of the sorts of leather and
laminates that make good armor) would only be a little harder to find
than pure metal, and would be also vulnerable to heat attacks.

This may need more thinking through...


Addressing weapons now:  Weapons that perform in a certain way
necessarily must have a similar manufacturing process, and therefore
have some aspect that can be searched for, and targeted sorcerously.

Thus, while Cropper Company was briefly attacked with arrows shot from
bows, the necessary similarity between all bows - no doubt the dried
length of intestine under tension - could be searched for, and quickly
broken, by some form of sorcerous energy (high heat at the bowstring
itself, or perhaps the string could be snapped by a sudden
overtension).

Other weapons are necessarily even more vulnerable.  All firearms and
explosives rely on chemicals that release energy on being rapidly
destabilized.  Again, any concentrations of these chemicals could be
searched for, and the necessary detonation energy delivered to them,
destroying or badly damaging their bearers.

Other types of weapons (spring-loaded, air-pressure-driven) presumably
also have detectable materials, and perhaps even detectable energy
signatures.

And yet.

There are still swords.  Hm.  Perhaps swords can be manufactured in
such a way that they are protected from the worst of the sorcerous
attacks?

But if swords can be protected, why not a few other types of weapons?

An additional thought that occurs to me is that spells to protect
weapons might go through their own arms race.  Perhaps during Vallista
reigns, battles involve more and more complicated weaponry, protected
by ever more elaborate spells.  Whoever has the best toys wins?

The Cycle may be involved as well.  I note that the Vallista reign is
pretty much opposite the Phoenix.  Perhaps that explains the
simplicity of the weaponry that we see during the Phoenix reign.

This still needs thinking about as well....