Shadows of the Apt

5 comments to “Ironclads”

1. 

   Daniel, September 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 am:

   Smashing good read.
   ive allways liked the guy in heaps of armour, but have never found any story about them.
   And after reading ironclads, i thought wasps had the only "sentinels". but then, reading EiBaG (for the third time), i discoverd that there are betlee sentinals gaurding the procession for the great games in colligeium.
   so, a question, is "sentinal" a term for a soldier wearing super-heavy armour, or were there imperial beetle "sentinal-auxillians" in colligeium?

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2. 

   Adrian Tchaikovsky, September 2nd, 2009 at 11:49 am:

   Sentinel is a standard term used by many kinden for soldiers who fight in extremely heavy armour. The first sentinels were Mantis-kinden, way back in the Days of Lore, but these days the tradition is mostly upheld by Apt cultures.

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3. 

   ito, June 5th, 2010 at 11:01 pm:

   Mantis sentinels? Holy Crap, imagine Tisamon in one of those. Oh well… 🙂

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4. 

   Max Woldhek, May 21st, 2012 at 9:21 pm:

   Excellent story. I've got a ton of questions about the Commonweal, but I'll limit myself to one.
   Do the Commonweal nobles have no military training whatsoever? They're confronted by Sentinels, the absolute élite of the wasp military, the mailed fist of the Empire, and what do they do? They send in unarmoured, untrained, barely armed grasshopper peasants. Against SENTINELS! And this was several years into the war, so they must have heard at least something of what sentinels are capable of. A saying regarding the British military springs to mind: lions led by donkeys.

   Ps. I read through all seven books in just a few weeks after I discovered the series, and now I've got a metric ton of observations and questions. Would it be acceptable if I posted the lot of them somewhere here on the site?

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5. 

   Adrian Tchaikovsky, May 21st, 2012 at 9:38 pm:

   You can kind of see how the Commonweal military works from sections in Heirs of the Blade. There is no real emphasis on military training, tactics or anything like that, instead there is personal skill and honour for the nobles, and sending in vast swarms of peasants, none of whom are particularly trained — they're all just conscripted out of the fields, just as Dal Arche recollects. The Middle Ages saw some armies that worked (or failed to work) just like that. 

   As for other questions, by all means. Will try to answer most of them when I can.

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