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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8293969" data-attributes="member: 7028554">You're absolutely right that old-fashioned armor and guns coexisted on the battlefield. But I think that's a pretty serious misreading of how warfare typically worked at that time. There was some shooting, but also lots of melee. For calvary you tried to deal with the former by moving fast and being on a big terrifying charging horse, and you addressed the latter (as much as you could) with armor to help deflect bayonets and other calvary dude's sabers. But if that sort of armor was really a great defense against bullets, you'd have seen American Civil War-era calvary using it. Rifling and other techniques weren't all that better by then compared to Waterloo, and calvary were mostly well-heeled bros who could have afforded all sorts of armor, even if the military wasn't providing it for them. It just wasn't useful against bullets. And if they came up against other calvary it often meant an exchange of revolver fire, not sabers--revolvers firing the same old balls that muskets were using, essentially, not the pointier, more armor-penetrating stuff of later eras. I think it's possible to recognize the fact that bullets changed the game, and made most armor essentially useless, without it being a matter of buying into some sort of gun culture mythology. If anything, it's the opposite that's myth-making. If there was any dude on any battlefield just riding around in his plate armor, lighting up ranks of riflemen with his mighty arming sword while bathed in a shower of sparks from deflected rounds, it'd be the only thing some historians would ever write about. Guns just happen to be as mean and cruel and destabilizing as they are.</blockquote>

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