The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics

Another distinguishing factor is the widespread building of castles. During the classical era, fortifications were less useful because there were powerful states that could capture them anyway. But when even the nominal king or emperor had trouble mustering a force of fifty thousand men, the castle vs. the siege (and the raid) dominated most warfare. During the classical area many of those same places would have been sparsely populated, and certainly not well fortified.

What is interesting about that particular war though is that it did span the literal generations of the Barca family, of which Hannibal was a member, and for whom at least two full generations that I know of all became leading generals in the Carthaginian army.

Rome is also somewhat unique in that they were basically in a state of perpetual war after a certain point in their history. War begat war, especially as the territory grew and the results of victory were wealth and prestige for the families involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall

Some veterans and historians have cast doubt on Marshall's research methods.[15] Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) argues in his 1988 article, "S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' appears to have been an invention."[16] This revelation has called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall's other books and has lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier.[17]

In his 1989 memoir, About Face, David H. Hackworth described his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to disillusion after seeing Marshall's character and methods firsthand. Hackworth described Marshall as a "voyeur warrior", for whom "the truth never got in the way of a good story", and went so far as to say, "Veterans of many of the actions he 'documented' in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias".[18][19]

As you know, the maximum throughput of any connection is the buffer size divided by the round-trip time. If you're using horse-drawn carts to move food and forage, the buffer size will be quite small; carts don't hold very much and there aren't a lot of them. Horse-drawn carts are slow, so the round-trip time will also be quite long. A number of generals had the idea of supplying the army this way, but nobody could do it further than a few dozen miles because the round-trip times get so high. Before WW1 everyone figured that trains had solved the problem; you would just load your supplies up on big fast trains and send them right to the front. Unfortunately, armies really love blowing up the enemy's trains and railways, so the railheads were never as close to the front as anyone liked and they were always having to be rebuilt. There weren't enough motorized vehicles in the world to deliver all that tonnage more than 100 miles, so the fronts in WW1 were very stagnant. In WW2 there were tens of millions of trucks of all sizes, and the Germans estimated they could deliver sufficient supplies to the army as far as 400 miles from the railheads. Unfortunately, it's over a thousand miles from eastern Poland to Moscow, so that didn't go so well. Also, it's over a thousand miles from Tripoli to the Suez canal, so they didn't have much luck in that theater either.

If you want to read more on the subject, I recommend "Supplying War: Logistics From Wallenstein To Patton", by Martin Van Creveld. Great book.

(The character - a diplomat - was very clearly inspired by Lord Curzon.)

In a previous time, when Britain's place in the world stage was not as assured, it could be less lenient to them:

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

> As you note, this is good evidence that cannibalism is not practiced by the orcs.

Institutionalized cannibalism is characterized by strict taboos about who can eat whom, when, and how. It would make sense for an insult between two related cannibalistic societies to be based on either "you fail to observe the taboos we both recognize" (a heavy put-down) or "you don't recognize our taboos / you have specifically disrespected us in the way you violated a shared taboo" (insults with deep roots; a likely casus belli). In either case, angry denial seems like an orcish way to counter the insult without escalating a potentially volatile situation. So while cannibalism-related insult is consistent with societies in which cannibalism is never acceptable, among societies where the practice is formalized absence of such insults might have been more surprising.

They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually.

Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment.

It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.)

Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything.

The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.

Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target.

Edit:

My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it.

The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.

Oh dear, now I'll have to read it all again just to check.

Edit: Superb book, horrifying and laugh out loud funny (although not in the same places).

Edit2: BBC/HBO please do a version of the Laundry Files once you are finished with HDM!

The only canonically named Ringwraith was Khamul, the Witch-king's number two. (Roleplaying game company Iron Crown Enterprises once put out some nice but totally unofficial names for all the Nazgul.)