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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 2000672" data-attributes="member: 1879">Not quite true. There was a succesful pure air defense of an air base against a combined arms ground assault over the course of weeks during vietnam. OTOH it required round the clock carpet bombing by B-52s. The day you develop the fantasy equivalent of an arclight drop is the day you rule the world.Reguarding the effectiveness of airborne archery. Yup it's pretty useless unless you want to become a flying pinchushion. However there is plenty that a flying troop can do from well above the absolute (Not effective, I mean beyond golden BB range) range of the ground forces. And that is to drop things.There are basically three things you can drop.1) Firepots. Worthless against troops, devastating against any city not made purely from stone, think the Doolittle raid, or the fire of Rome. The Air forces can break any besieged city much much faster than would be possible without them by dropping firepots, or rotten carcasses to spread disease.2) Flechettes. Short heavy arrows dropped by the handfull. The french tried this early in WW1 and found them ineffective. However it wasn't long pursued as better weapons (IE machine guns and bombs) were developed. With enhanced tactics they might prove reasonably effective against massed troops. By enhanced tactics I mean formation drops by whole units of ariel troops. If the Pegasi can be trained to fly in tethered formation then each rider might have another pegasi  tehered behind him with nothing but a full load of flechettes and a dump mechanism. These are not precision weapons, but as with the longbow (which is an acurate weapon, the problem in a mass battle is target aquisition) massed fire is effective when you have nowhere to dodge. Since this is only effective on troops in formation it can only be used when your ground allies have brought them to battle and they must form up or be destroyed.3) Green slime. Halfway between a nuclear bomb and gas this (if your low magic world has it) is the most utterly devastating weapon available to a fantasy airforce. One night bombardment by ariel troops on the camps of the enemy will result in a giant pool of slime that goes away as soon as the sun comes up. This is the one tactic that is more effective against troops in a forest than on a plain. (Firepots would be effective only if the forest was in a drought.)Aside from scouting, communication and dropping things the last effective use of ariel mounts is to deliver guerilla forces behind enemy lines, or to conduct supply line raids. This depends on the effective radius of your mounts. The predatory mounts like giant eagles and owls have the advantage here as they have a reasonable chance of living off the land or enemy livestock/draft animals. Otherwise without magic like bag of holding the pegasi only have a days flight radius to work in, although supply caches can extend this of course.-Andor</blockquote>

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