>But probably key is the trainers. Armies and factories all over the
>world have shown pretty conclusively that you can take a random
>assortment of people and train them to work cohesively and with
>considerable precision, if
>a) you give them a limited number of tasks to master, and
>b) you have skilled trainers who know how to teach these tasks and
>enforce the discipline to always do it the same way when ordered, no
>matter what else is going on.
>
>I have no idea what the positions would be called in the case of
>galleys, but I'm sure they'd have one--the equivalent of the centurion
>or NCO. I know in the big "war canoes" the lead paddler on each side
>was key, but I have no idea in galleys. In Glorantha I'm sure that
>there is magic associated with this task.
I'd imagine these people were the drummers. There was at least one on every galley and the importance of keeping everyone on stroke means there would have to be assistants. So in Glorantha that might well be a subcult of Donandar.
>It is those people that I think the RAI would provide, the people who
>are used to turning a group of people into a crew, and who have the
>right skills and magic to be able to do so repeatably. How many of
>those people were lost in the fleet sinking may be key in how well the
>navy recovers--there are functionally an infinite number of Esrolian
>peasants with strong backs, but if you don't have skilled trainers
>you'll never get a good crew out of them.
Could be, but triremes also had sailors. A small number of people who handled the sails and other boat handling tasks probably under the authority of the helmsman. I think those are the positions the RAI people would fill.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
Powered by hypermail