The other thing is that as far as we can tell, most of the dromaeosaurids were social, pack-based chasing predators. There are currently three terrestrial chasing predators today: Humans, canines, and komodo dragons.
Now, a Utahraptor might be large enough for a human to ride, especially considering that humans can ride ostriches, but a more effective method might be to train raptors to fight alongside the human troops, using smaller ones in conjunction with a pike block, or just having them with skirmishers and scouts.
The other thing is that as far as we can tell, most of the dromaeosaurids were social, pack-based chasing predators. There are currently three terrestrial chasing predators today: Humans, canines, and komodo dragons.
Now, a Utahraptor might be large enough for a human to ride, especially considering that humans can ride ostriches, but a more effective method might be to train raptors to fight alongside the human troops, using smaller ones in conjunction with a pike block, or just having them with skirmishers and scouts.
What makes you think raptors are domesticatable? I noticed a huge Darth of war-lions in African military history in OTL. There weren't even any scout cheetahs.
What makes you think raptors are domesticatable? I noticed a huge Darth of war-lions in African military history in OTL. There weren't even any scout cheetahs.
Lions and cheetahs run after their prey, yes, but they are ambush hunters, not endurance hunters. Cheetahs will spend a few minutes in a high-speed chase, as opposed to canines or humans who can't necessarily sprint that fast, but can keep up a moderate pace for hours on end.
*I want to point out Harris Hawks and Cooper's Hawks will work with non-mate non-kin to hunt.
I suppose that's an angle we haven't explored yet. I know they technically aren't dinosaurs, but what of the pterosaurs and their kind? What if humans managed to breed a species capable of bearing a rider in the skies? Some sort of souped up Quetzalcoatalus. Would make for great scouts, or skirmishing attacks from an unexpected dimension.
There's some wiggle room, I think, when it comes to theropods.
There's an emerging body of evidence that many birds are weirdly smart not because of brain to body mass ratio (why aren't mice as smart as people, then?), but because avian brains are actually just better per cubic centimeter than mammal brains. Much higher neuron densities, arranged in dissimilar ways. Mammals beat them by growing comparably gigantic brains. (A crow is about as good at problem solving as a chimpanzee. A chimp's brain weighs as much as an entire crow.
)
Birds had 150 million years since archeopteryx to optimize their brains for weight-savings, so maybe none of this applies at all to dinosaurs. On the other hand, AFAIK, all birds have a hyperpallium, so their last common ancestor must have had it, too, and troodontids are much more recent than archaeopteryx.
There's an emerging body of evidence that many birds are weirdly smart not because of brain to body mass ratio (why aren't mice as smart as people, then?), but because avian brains are actually much smarter per cubic centimeter than mammal brains. Much higher neuron densities, arranged in dissimilar ways. Mammals beat them by growing comparably gigantic brains. (A crow is about as good at problem solving as a chimpanzee. A chimp's brain weighs as much as an entire crow.
)
Lions and cheetahs run after their prey, yes, but they are ambush hunters, not endurance hunters. Cheetahs will spend a few minutes in a high-speed chase, as opposed to canines or humans who can't necessarily sprint that fast, but can keep up a moderate pace for hours on end.
*I want to point out Harris Hawks and Cooper's Hawks will work with non-mate non-kin to hunt.
I'm not saying that cheetah's are chase animals. I'm saying there are a shit ton of animals in africa that were never domesticated despite there being many advantages in doing so. And thus I'm dubious of the idea that raptors and similar such dinsosaurs can be domesticated given that they don't get a benefit from banding together with humans like dogs do (especially since creatures like UathRaptors would consider us food, which dogs wouldn't).
The issue with this is domestication, I'd think. You need to domesticate your main battle mounts, probably a big fucker that eats plants and makes puny arrows his bitch. Unless you're talking sophisticated bow making techniques, that's most everything that's measured in tons and eats plants. Yay team. These are your cataphracts, who're gonna be carting around one screwball with a lance and possibly two more with bows and axes to handle the flanks. Remember to use armor, because these are the guys that can take the weight. These guys are your line holders, and more importantly your way through a bunch of pansies standing around in an infantry square.
Next up is your food dino. Very important for feeding the below.
Third in line are your middleweight predatory dino. This guy should be large enough to hold a dude and his lance and his shield, or maybe a sword. Probably both, since his job description is to go really fast and skewer the Cataphract, then GTFO and skirmish.
Next up are your lightweight predator dino breeds. They follow the above and add mass to any charges versus infantry, and more importantly help savage the cataphracts when they take a knee. Make sure they breed fast.
Following this is your prestige dino. T-rex, whatever. Its big, it's huge, you'd geld it if it wouldn't kill you for that, and its fucking useless since it can't soak hits or press a charge. Keep it in the back as a living battle standard, ensure enemy has no artillery.
Presumably the same as a human with megalencephaly: It reduces their quality of life.
Brains are stupefyingly complex organs. Birds have evolved a very good design that packs a lot of capability into a very small package, but you can't just scale up over a few dozen generations and get a genius. You have to steadily evolve increasingly complex structures. Otherwise, phrenology would be true.
Tellingly, when some birds became flightless and grew big, they ended up with comically small heads instead of superintelligence.
e:
Though, since we're talking speculative fiction, it does show you don't strictly need human brain size to have human-level intelligence. Your superevolved alt-history corvids or straight-up space aliens could get by with small heads just fine.
Wouldn't the carnivores be difficult to keep supplied during a campaign ? You need lots of meat which is not easy to come by, and with out refrigeration can not be stored.
But in the weeks before that point you have... yourselves. I'm not a horse person, but I do know they occasionally decide to just fuck off and go eat an apple they saw. Imagine if you're riding a raptor and it does similar. Except it eats people.
But in the weeks before that point you have... yourselves. I'm not a horse person, but I do know they occasionally decide to just fuck off and go eat an apple they saw. Imagine if you're riding a raptor and it does similar. Except it eats people.
Oh yeah I totally know but on the other hand, if you're the kind of person who thinks riding a several-tonnes dinosaur into battle so it can devour your enemies is a great and flawless plan, you're likely also the kind of person who thinks demanding enormous amounts of meat, regardless of source to be delivered to your giant fuck-off dinosaurs is a good idea.
Wolves are pretty close to obligate carnivores, but dogs can be fed on bread or grains and a mixture of meat. (I was reading a book on medieval hunting the other day at the shop actually, and apparently even royal hunting hounds were fed quite a lot of bread.) So if you've managed the domestication stage, your raptors or small theropods or whatever might well be omnivorous, and could be fed on a sort of porridge of grains mixed with meat. Which is still a lot of meat, relatively speaking, but reduces the requirements substantially. Then again medieval men at arms tended to eat a staggering amount of meat anyway, whenever they could get it, so this isn't a totally unknown supply problem.
I'd guess that armies might carry small herds of goats or sheep or cattle with them as they travelled, to supplement the diet of their dinosaurs. This is not actually that dissimilar to something Charlemagne was reputed to do, driving herds of cattle with his army so his men could have fresh milk to drink on campaign. Which made him the first ruler and military leader who could truly say that his milkshake brought all the boys to the yard.
But in the weeks before that point you have... yourselves. I'm not a horse person, but I do know they occasionally decide to just fuck off and go eat an apple they saw. Imagine if you're riding a raptor and it does similar. Except it eats people.
The other thing is that as far as we can tell, most of the dromaeosaurids were social, pack-based chasing predators. There are currently three terrestrial chasing predators today: Humans, canines, and komodo dragons.
Now, a Utahraptor might be large enough for a human to ride, especially considering that humans can ride ostriches, but a more effective method might be to train raptors to fight alongside the human troops, using smaller ones in conjunction with a pike block, or just having them with skirmishers and scouts.
We don't know if they were the more pursuit predators or more of a group ambush predator. A combo of cheetah and lion tactics might have been their thing.
If you look at the three chasing predators you mention, each has very different tactics...
On top of that, Utahraptors and others aren't really big enough to be a common mount
Most descriptions I've read tend to put them at about 5' 6" as an average height.
They're also far more "front heavy" compared to things like Ostiches, meaning that the balance is shifted, plus a lot of the bulk in your pic would be feathers. You need to be further forward in order to not be directly seated over the legs. The size of a utahraptor is quite a bit to small to serve as a mount for humans.
The comparable situation here, especially for large herbivores, would be war elephants. So let's take a look at some art -- statuary, in this case -- of a Thai war elephant as an example:
We have the leader -- King Naresuan heading off to duel Mingyi Swa in this case -- up on the elephant's neck, with his glaive. Another guy atop the platform, with signalling devices, as the elephant doubles as a mobile command post.... rising that high above ground level, it's easy for troops to see. A third guy sits on the rear of the elephant, typically armed with another polearm. Racks of additional weapons are on the platform, because good luck getting yours back if you drop it! Escorting the elephant on foot are hand-picked guardsmen -- an elephant, and the king riding it, is too important to be left to its own in combat.
I think you'd see most of this duplicated on any kind of large trained dinosaur combatant. If it's strong enough to carry multiple people, you might as well use it for such -- why just one rider, if you can have multiple ones fighting from it? And providing a means of issuing directions to your troops even while you're engaging in combat would be quite useful for leaders in pre-modern scenarios. Since any very large animal is likely to involve significant investment in time and money to raise and train, you aren't going to leave it to its own devices, even if it is pretty capable of combat on its own... it is likely to be escorted by footsoldiers to keep pesky attackers from running up underneath and gutting it, or something like that. Any weapons used are likely to be polearms of the spear or glaive sort, possibly with pike-length hafts if the animal is quite large.
And, as with King Naresuan (don't believe those Burmese revisionists who claim the story is apocryphal!) personal duels between leaders on each side, mounted on their expensive and highly-trained steeds, may be a deciding factor in battle. The bigger and more dangerous the dinosaur in question is, the more likely this is to be true, because whoever loses the duel and has their animal dead or out of control after its rider is killed is going to see their side's foot soldiers get romper-stomped by an angry, exceedingly dangerous animal they can't easily stop.
I'm not saying that cheetah's are chase animals. I'm saying there are a shit ton of animals in africa that were never domesticated despite there being many advantages in doing so.
There is an extensive history of cheetahs as domesticated animals used for hunting, especially among the Mamluks. Nobody would have used them for military purposes because they were rare and expensive status symbols, though.
For example, from the Jahangir album, circa 1600, a hunting cheetah that has been trained to ride on a horse awaits its handler's release to chase some prey:
I could easily see similarly sized theropods being used for the same kind of thing. As it turns out, if humans want you bad enough, they'll hunt you down and force you to perform for their entertainment no matter what.
I agree with the side of Ceratopsids and Sauropods. They would be the most practical force until catapults could start slinging +500kg stones at them. Until then, they would easily outlive the use of Elephant Calvary units from history, because their bones, skin, and armor would be too dense to cause significant trauma to kill them.
Given my experience in Ark, I feel safe in saying that Gigantosaurus solos all, Rex is second best, but the most effective 'combat' tactic is to use an Argy to drop Titanoboas in enemy bases while they're sleeping.
The bolded is your biggest problem. Ark super-sizes the Dinosaurs beyond their RL selves and nerfs the human protagonists' running speed.
Any athletic human being irl like myself could out run T-Rexes and Gigas, especially if the terrain doesn't favor them. Current consensus puts them running around 15-20mph.
Given that fact, large therapods would only be used as status symbols and nothing more.
Any athletic human being irl like myself could out run T-Rexes and Gigas, especially if the terrain doesn't favor them. Current consensus puts them running around 15-20mph.
Given that fact, large therapods would only be used as status symbols and nothing more.
That is, in fact, enough to catch up to most humans over short distances. Usain Bolt's average speed on his record-breaking 100-meter sprint was 23.35mph. Most human beings are not Usain Bolt; this is especially true in circumstances where a human has no preparation for a running start, is carrying equipment, and is wearing footwear not optimized for racing. If a therapod were able to sustain this 15-20mph range over longer distances than two hundred meters, no human would have a chance to escape them in a straight chase. Even if they are limited to human sprinting ranges, most human beings will not be able to escape them.
That is, in fact, enough to catch up to most humans over short distances. Usain Bolt's average speed on his record-breaking 100-meter sprint was 23.35mph. Most human beings are not Usain Bolt; this is especially true in circumstances where a human has no preparation for a running start, is carrying equipment, and is wearing footwear not optimized for racing. If a therapod were able to sustain this 15-20mph range over longer distances than two hundred meters, no human would have a chance to escape them in a straight chase. Even if they are limited to human sprinting ranges, most human beings will not be able to escape them.
The average running speed of an athlete over the 100m dash is just shy of 16mph. That sinks down to about 13mph over marathon distances. So, if you were being chased by a particularly lazy T-Rex, you might be able to run far enough, fast enough, to duck out of sight and hope it loses interest. Maybe. If you were very, very lucky.
That is, in fact, enough to catch up to most humans over short distances. Usain Bolt's average speed on his record-breaking 100-meter sprint was 23.35mph. Most human beings are not Usain Bolt; this is especially true in circumstances where a human has no preparation for a running start, is carrying equipment, and is wearing footwear not optimized for racing. If a therapod were able to sustain this 15-20mph range over longer distances than two hundred meters, no human would have a chance to escape them in a straight chase. Even if they are limited to human sprinting ranges, most human beings will not be able to escape them.
1) T-rexes can only sprint in short bursts. So the average athlete can in fact out run them.
2) Assuming you're in a random encounter like you would have in Ark, the person would be standing around 80-100ft away from a T-Rex. That's enough distance to get away from them if you're just as fast as them. Even better if you're running down hill, because T-Rexes were extremely top heavy that they could fall.
3) If a person knew they would be walking into T-Rex territory, they would not be wearing shoes and pants they could not run in.
)
