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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 488630" data-attributes="member: 4937">Dr. S.: What, are you Austrian? German?  An heir to the Hapsburg dynasty?"1.) guns means common troops gain a comparative advantage to elite troops which means more infantry which means vastly more expensive armies."Guns mean that troops can be trained faster.  Ok, we agree.   But I don't agree that lacking gunpowder, large armies wouldn't be fielded, nor do I agree that gunpowder armies were less professional of infantry (less elite) than armies that preceeded them.  If anything, they were more elite and more professional.  Professionalism was on the rise with or without gunpowder.  Larger armies were as much the result of larger populations, larger more unified states, better logistics, better food production, and better civil protection as anything else.   Armies would have continued to swell in size with or without gunpowder.And as far as arguing that gunpowder mitigated the professional advantage between armies, you are totally ignoring military history _after_ the introduction of gunpowder.   Better trained armies _still_ dominated battlefields, so much so that there was at one time the strange belief that the smaller army had the advantage in a battle.2.) "Without Cannons the Armada is an unstoppable force which overwhelms England..."You believe to much English propaganda.  Go look at the actual order of battle some time.  The English had as many ships as the Spainish (if not more), and had about equal tonnage especially when comparing the largest vessels of each fleet.   The English are all the time building heroic myths about themselves.   If you look, you'll find that the English actually outnumbered the French at Agincourt.  Shakespeare's populist propaganda was just that.I can speak less confidently about France, but you don't think that perhaps French nationalism had something to do with it do you?  "With the Hapsburgs in charge and super strong the world becomes a happier place..."*raises eyebrow* Justify yourself.  What makes you love the Hapsburgs so?"I still think the Conquistadors would have taken out the Aztecs and Incas. Horses are a HUGE advantage as is the innate super crazy mad gutz of guys like Cortes and Pizarro."Well, an even bigger advantage than the horses and the zeal and the pschopathy and even the gunpowder, was that the Aztecs were sincerely loathed by thier subject states and rallied behind the Conquistadors as saviors.   The Incans were still gelling as an empire at the time, and were because of that somewhat fragile.   Plus the terrain maximized the advantage of small better equipped units.  Ultimately, maybe the biggest advantage was small pox.   I think between that and the advantage of steel over stone weapons, the Conquistadors would have done pretty well.</blockquote>

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