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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 5723563" data-attributes="member: 14159">Well, as a site I can quickly cite for an informal internet debate, it does the job.  I have a B.A. in History, my senior thesis was on the role of the Papacy in the Crusades.  I am a stranger to neither formal historical research nor medieval studies.  However, as a popular, widely used reference site that allows crowdsourced input I would strongly recommend you go in there and completely rewrite all articles regarding medieval warfare once you pull out the sources you are using to say that they are completely wrong and medieval armies were full of well trained professional soldiers instead of conscripts since you claim to be sitting on something fairly revolutionary in terms of evidence.I am a soldier in the United States Army, which is the standard I was using in referencing modern armies.  I know quite well the standards of professionalism and training of modern militaries.  If you want to use an Iraqi conscript or a member of the Afghan National Army as a "typical" modern soldier instead of a US Soldier or Marine, you're going to get completely different results given the radically different training standards.Given that the structure of the armies is completely different, I think you are being misleading in trying to compare modern professional soldiers to the relative handful of trained knights of the middle ages, instead of comparing the backbones of those armies: the modern professional soldier to the historic conscript and comparing the elite of those armies: modern special forces to historic knights.If you want to get game-mechanical about it, I once sat down and worked out using the stats for an M-16 in d20 Modern and the details of the standard US Army qualification firing course for that weapon to figure out what the average attack bonus of a soldier would be just to reliably graduate basic training and maintain routine qualification with an M-16 or M-4. . .I came up with a +4 bonus to reliably qualify with the weapon.I'm no infantryman, I am not even combat arms, but I shoot pretty dang well with my weapon and I see cooks and mechanics, analysts and clerks regularly shoot 300 meter targets and score well. . .and I see infantry and other combat-arms soldiers shoot even better.</blockquote>

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