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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2306565" data-attributes="member: 4937">Elite warrior societies tend to develop whenever a weapon is expensive and requires lifetime devotion to gain useful degrees of skill in.   For example,  the European Knight required equipment worth about one million dollars in modern terms, and spent 14 years training to master the mounted lance.   The Spartan Hoplites had to master formation drill with the long pike and shield.  The Japanese samurii is most commonly associated with swordmastery, but also mastered such demanding skills as mounted archery and wielding a halberd from horseback.Mastery of the musket as an elite weapon would be highly unusual, and would depend on the ability to control the technology to a very high degree.   A peasant militia suddenly finding itself in the possession of muskets might not be an actual threat to a well drilled aristocracy of musketeers, but individually outside the level of armies meeting armies a group of peasants with muskets is a series threat to any aristocrat.   Note that the same wouldn't be true of a Samurii or Knight who suddenly finds himself beset by a small group of peasants that have acquired arms.   The difference is that the Samurii or Knight got really huge dividends in skill from that lifetime of training, but with firearms the marginal returns on additional training get smaller much quicker.   The more effective that the firearms become, the more that is true.   Between the Napoleonic wars and WWI you have a real true age of the conscript soldier, when numbers and tactics tended to matter far more than small differences in the skills of the soldiers on either side.   Prior to that time, muskets were ineffective enough that you got huge dividends out of the speed with which you could reload under fire.   After that time, warfare became complex enough and units had to spread out enough to avoid taking high casualties, that formation tactics became impossible, and skills training for individual soldiers started yielding big dividends again.I think that it would be in theory possible to have such a society, but it would be really brittle because the society is based around a social structure that the technology just doesn't really support.   A single Knight could effectively face a dozen or so unarmored peasants with improvised weapons.   A single Musketeer just can't, if only because he can't reload fast enough to prevent himself being overrun.   A force of Musketeers with early muskets could probably not face off against a force several times its size armed with bows and other 'primitive' weapons if that was the only advantage that they had.One interesting take on the notion of an elite warrior society though is Sean McMullen's "The Miocene Arrow" in which a Feudal society with external constraints that keep its technology stagnant develops around producing WWI era fighter technology.</blockquote>

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