[OT] Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

[Krieg]

Nightfall, I understand your points I just strongly disagree.

Throughout history the majority of the combatants were poorly trained conscripts. For the nobly born wealthy general sitting on his horse at the rear in complete safety, watching his peasant levies marching into a meatgrinder isn't any more "meaningful" in a personal way than it is for a modern politician to order his troops into action half way around the globe.

Furthermore it takes more than a "modicrum" of skill to employ a firearm effectively. It takes a signifigant amount of training to learn to deliver accurate fire while under the stress of combat. A modern rifleman isn't an unskilled mook waving around his boomstick...

Warfare wouldn't be anymore humane today if they were fought without firearms. With the massively increased population levels you would just see attrition warfare on a scale that would make the battles of the Civil War & WWI look like ice cream socials in comparison.

"Senseless" slaughter isn't defined by the tools used, rather it is determined by the objective for which it was initiated.

Why? That's why most treaties get signed - if governments thought of them as truly binding under any circumstance, we'd live in a world without treaties. It would be a little much to expect a state to abide by any treaty if that treaty materially impaired its capacity to survive a dire threat.

As I stated previously I don't intend to travel down this road as it will kill the thread.

 

[Nightfall]

Krieg,

I understand YOUR points but I also feel you are wrong.

1) If that were true explain uzis, sub-machine guns or any number of fast acting auto spray stuff. Am I supposed to believe that other than maybe a trained sniper, that today's guns are LESS effective at maiming and wounding? Talk to the kids at Columbine. Or school shootings around the class rooms. Or the palastians and Iseralis that constantly fight each other. (Now I KNOW this will shut down the thread). I'm sorry but while a modern solider MIGHT be more skilled at using a weapon, he's still just a meat shield waiting for some guy to take a lucky shot or three in a place they weren't suspecting.

2) While I agree that it's not meaningful in that respect, you take the number of times a gun killed someone in today's America versus sword deaths or deaths by gangre in combat. Guarantee damn tee you, it's a hell of lot lower. So yeah while seeing people being marched off to senseless slaughter is no different then than now, THEN you didn't have people killing each other over what color nikes they had. Or just to prove how persave fear has become.

3) Warfare is NEVER humane. I would be idiotic to say that. Hell I'd prefer it if they just went back to gladitorial sport. At least then the number MIGHT go down. But what I'm getting at by eliminating guns, bombs, and other tools of a pre-gunpowder era, we have LESS cilivian causilties or accidents done by people of that time USING such tools.

 

[Elf Witch]

Since we are not supposed to have disscusions of politics on this board I am not going to get in to it anymore about land minds. We just have to disagree on the subject.

 

[Eridanis]

I'm going to close this thread, since we've progressed too far into the real-world politics to keep going on these boards (thanks for keeping it civil, though). Perhaps a new thread can be started in the d20 Modern forum that can discuss exploring what a d20 Modern-type game would look like with some or all of the discussed technologies removed?