Recent content by Saphroneth

My understanding was that those exceptions consisted of "whenever one was not with one's regiment" (i.e. whenever one's regiment was brigaded with others or the like). Brevet rank became honorary in 1869 when the 61st Article of War was repealed, but until then brevet rank was the true rank and...

I'm pretty sure Grant was 'only' a general by brevet as well, it's not any kind of honorary rank. It's just rank outside the sequence of promotion in the regiment.

See above.

And while both of these are true, it still didn't really help very much with producing mounted combat at a comparable range to foot combat. Pistols, sure, that happened, and carbines were used at close range, but long-range shooting with a musket type weapon from horseback was a bit harder than...

There's a difference between wholesale panic and a momentary flinch, but flinch is enough to throw off accuracy and indeed was one of the main causes for pre-percussion firearms to miss at short range.

Urban warfare going house to house happened in the third Punic war. Nothing new under the sun...

Tricky thing about pistols is that, owing to the suite of problems related to using a short barrel weapon from horseback, they're basically a melee weapon. The "party trick" of the steppe nomad army is to deluge the enemy with high-rate-of-fire archery from a moving horse and to generally remain...

There's also an arguable couple from the Napoleonic Wars (e.g. the Bourbons) and a definite one in the English government-in-exile during the Commonwealth - that one was the Privy Council of England.

I think the best approach here (or, without obvious pitfalls) is to have not Imperial Federation but Imperial Defence Organization (in practice) which retains the structures of the old British Empire. This would be a world where, say, nuclear weapons were developed during a peaceful period...

Globalization of naval combat is one of the relatively "easy" things to have happen - functionally you had a few Confederate commerce raiders and a rather silly Union strategy that had them sent wherever the raiders were last reported. In accounts of the voyages of e.g. the Alabama, the CS...

Yes. As one example, the entire Portugese court decamped to Brazil at one point in the Napoleonic Wars.

You think that's bad, the deliveries were all made in 1863 from an 1861 order of 10,000 (they had to ask the order to be reduced as they could not fulfil it). So yes, the Union was struggling to produce any repeaters at all. (Heck, I'm not sure the Union had enough domestic rifles being produced...

I'm hardly saying everyone else is blameless. What I'm saying is that the reaction of the time to Napoleon was much greater - hence the immensity of the response to him.

Depends how France is run. Effectively France was seen (due to the Terror and subsequent actions) as a "Rogue State" as it were, and in the early 1800s there was a hope that it had stabilized (though this came to naught OTL).

Not really. I mean, the author would have a very good selfish reason to say it wasn't "meant" for the South after the country erupted into a war and the South was the enemy, but the song is obviously on the face of it about the south - there's no other part of the country which fits. "Land of...