Weaponry

Can you imagine how silly that would be as a form of woarfar?
To stand there across an open field from each other in one huge block and shoot at each other?

No, in fact, for the weapons of the time, that worked best. Remember, they were muzzle loaders. They had to pour the powder down the barrel. You cn't do that lying down; what are you going to do? Blow poweder down the barrel while you lay on the ground? Yeah, cartridges let soldiers hide. That--and machine guns--got us to World War I.

O.K., still. Even then, you couldn't really hide that well. I mean, every time you tried to hit the enemy, you telegraphted your position with a big flash of light and a cloud of smoke just in case they miseed that bright flash. Oh, and in case you didn't see the smoke, a very [really, it's a lot louder than you think if you've never heard it. Really--seeing people wearing sesereious ear protection at ranges is no joike] lout bang.

Yeah, that's true. Still, they could stay at the end of their range. You don't hit much when you shoot from that far (nor do you when you're that close, either, to bo honest), but you can still kill. And if your maximum range is farther their their maximum range, well, tehn you kinda gonna win.
That's actually always been so. The Monguls kicked frigging ass in part becuase they were light cavalary that could ass. They didn't break that diagram of what-beats-what:

digraph {
node1 [label="Light Infantry"];
node2 [label="Heavy Infantry"];
node3 [label="Light Cavalary"];
node4 [label="Heavy Cavalary"];
node1 -> node2 [label = "Dominates"];
node1 -> node3 [label = "Defends Against"];
node2 -> node4 [label = "Defends Against"];
node3 -> node2 [label = "Dominates"];
node4 -> node1 [label = "Dominates"];
}

Yuck.

Better.

But they showed how light cavalary could still beat light infantry (and thus everything), if they could also perfect the persistant raiding strategy and thus starve the light infantry and their families. (One thing about horses: By evolving to eat grass (itself an evolutionary coup in a different, inter-specific war), they've perfected living the persistent raiding strategy. And so the humans who could perfect horses as a weapon platform, man. I think that cavalary created that diagram--that before horse domestication (which started, remember, with chariots (which--look at the pictuyres--were frigging light cavalry).) In other words, it matter less how stable your platform (infantry always being more stable than cavalary) if your rickety platform can kill from farther out than your enemy's.Anyway, even though their weapons were loud and showy, they could kill from farther and farther out. Like pikes or artilary or whatever.

Right, so it wasn't until energy weapons that things got quiet.

Yep. You could still "see" them with the right sensors, but you had to be fast since the shot only lasted for nanoseconds.

It had to be that fast, right?

Yeah, there was so much energy packed into that beam, that you couldn't keep it on any lonbger than that or the air would "bloom"--get so hot it plasmasized and would scatter the beam (and glow that pointed right at the shooter in a beautiful orange cone). So, for atmostpheric battles, that became the limitting factor in energy weapon "calibre". If your current technology didn't let you squeeze more energy into your beam than your enemy before your beam would bloom, then you could kill less at that range than your enemy. Since an energy beam of the right wavelength (to cut through exactly that multiple frequency of radiation (visual and not) is a line-of-sight weapon out past any range the enemy could be at and still be within the atmosphere, then everybody can hit at every range. Instead what mattered was--among other things--how much damage you could do at long/hard ranges. [And how accurately you could shoot, but I'll get to that as the thing all of this was written to build up to.] It was no longer a battle of platform stability. Everyone had the same level of stability for shooting (even if movement speed never ceases to matter, but--again--another topic; I'm diving too much and often into rabbit holes right now anyway.).
So, accuracy/stability and range were both essentially maximized for atmospheric, energy weaponry: They could all shoot really accurately at any range. And so further evolution was in power: How hard you could hit and how hard you could take it. The game became tweaking beams to get higher dimensions packed with energy (since these four have been tapped out for getting energy-into-lasers (or actually gamma rays).

(And so, yeah. The idea of seeing energy beams per se is looked at in the future as one of those ancient people used to see things that it's even doubted in the future anyone really ever thought that way--that energy beams should be seen. No, you want the beam to be as invisible as possible because--by definition--that means that your beam was cutting efficiently through the air. Seeing a beam from anything but its business end meant the beam was scattering. (So, O.K., yeah, the Hollywoood versions of gunfights had gamma guns blooming all the time--even when you either weren't doing anything bloom-worthy or that you brought up a bloom at a really stupid time or in a dumb-ass way.))
(Oh, and kids don't pretend they make noises either. Well, not in that way. Gamma-guns do make a sound when they fire, but only to be another way of letting the shooter know that they actually did fire a shot. (No quiet clicky noise, no cooking enemies.) Instead, then, kids making a queer, wuiet sort of clicking to themselves when they're pretending to shoot at someone. Their is horrible disparity (sorry, but--really--I don't see us avoiding it and the intense evolutionary pressure that will bring. [And this story is, in fact, about that]), but among those who can afford toys, all toy guns let you know when (and how hard) you hit your target, so there's no need to run around shouting "bang" and then debating if your finger-gun hit your oponent. And so missing that "bang" moment is missed as little as us now missing calling out "Olli-olli-umfree!" or playing jax (you can throw how many jax?).

And if you couldn't get energy to flip into and out of higher dimensions at the right times of a shot (and no one really can), then the game was often about tuning your laser's frequencies to the air, making better and better (and more badass) armor, and in finding ways to screw the bloom and just keep shooting at its edge as much as you can, minie-gun style. Using the frigging bloom as a shield and blasting away like a TF2 Übercharged Heavy.
So ranges varied drastically, but mostly very short. Move as fast as you can really really close to your enemy, blast away furiously, bring up a sun-like bloom, and use that as a shield as you run quickly around the growing bloom to run around your foe, cooking him like a rosterie chicken. In badass armor.

Energy weapons made the game about speed and armor--the faster humans could go and the most they could stay hidden behind armor. Inter-atmospheric and in the void (well, in the void out to things short of "extreme" woarfar). In interstellar (void) woarfar, the issue was taking Gs that dealt with speed. (Armor was getting ther most the lightest out there.)

um, kinda forget what I was going to say. I guess how this would matter again, and how the mobilty issue that rises again does make light cavalary an important idea again, just for somewhat different reasons.

Here, accuracy/stability does matter. But it's also woarfar conducted over such a long distance that it's also a long time: You shoot anything at a target (another civilization, for example) lightyears away, then (without subspace--extra dimensional stuff) you won't hit each shot for a couple of years. And then you won't know if you even hit for another couple of years. ("And that one was a little high and to the right. Like 2 o'clock--or, well--two--I mean--1:30-ish.")

So, I read a few years back that the most successful predators (in terms of percent of successful predation attempts) were dragon flies. Lions had a success rate of something like 40%--and that was awesome among felines (the mammals the most evolved into a predatory role on mammals).

And, remember, one reason they know that Jurrasic land animals (the "dons" not the "saurs"--like dimetrodon) were cold-blooded was because of the ratio of predator fossils to prety fossils: There were a lot of predators realtive to prey. This meant that predators weren't that good at catching prey/prey could survive in close proximity to predators (and predators evolved to live off fewer prey. In other words, cold-blooded animals in general (dragon flies to the exeption) must have success rates of even less than that. (Right?)

Anyway, dragonflies have success rates around 95%. Sure, that's right int eh middle of the 90 - 100& range so saying 95% give or take, say, 5% still covers a lot of range. The reason they have that high a rate, I read, was in part because of their compound eyes. They used them, the article said, following the same rule that sailors used: If an object (like another boat) nd you are both moving, but that object stays at the same angle to you as you approach each other, then you'll collide. Change the angle (keep chaning the angle, I guess), and you won't collide. A dragonfly wants to "collide", though, and catch its prey. So, it uses its compound eyes:

Compound eyes are really bad at seeing details (although having many facets does mean you can tune your angle more finely--which obviously matters). It's not that each facet sees the same image (really? DId people ever really believe that flies saw hundreds of picutres of the guy about toe swat them?!). It's that each facet sees one (blended) color and one average intensity, making in essense a really low-rez, pixellated image.
So, compound eyes are really bad at seeing details--but they're really good at detecting very faint differences between those 8-bit pixels. They can detect movement very well. (It's that change in an image--not some faint breeze from your hand--that makes that housefly dart away.) Dragonflies, then, can be very precise as they close in on their target. They can use the slight differences in facets to keep a target at precisely the angel they want it at.
Compund eyes are accurate. More accurate than ours. As accurate as your display. In other words, only limitted in their accuracy by the limit of your display's resolution.
...as long as you can use your "display" as the mizzle of your barrel. (Think "woarfar" is a stupid word? What about "muzzle"? Or mizzen, or esplanade, or even barrel.) But with an energy weapon, you can do that. Because packing a lot of energy into a beam also means to try to make a really tight beam.

I guess? Maybe it is better to have a big beam/bore? This would make the barrel separate from the facets. At least for guns where firepower mattered more than accuracy. (Unless their mutual platform was very stable and responsive to both slight and great redirections. Then platforms do matter. So--yeah--I guess that was a stage in energy woarfar: At first, they had huge bores (like shooting with a camera--lenses that big) until a lot more energy could be packed into a much smaller space. After that was achieved, then you could work on developing a lens that could both detect faint, incoming light/radiation and also project not-so-faint, outgoing radiation. After that then the development became getting higher resolutions of facets and getting those facets to tweak the beam precisly to the air--faster than a coputer could do, and so based not on computation, but very close-by chemical reactions. (And speed and armor.)

Anyway, if you can use your facets as barrels for a gamma gun, then you have a really accurate gun. Hone that down, and you could make accuracy nearly perfect at any feasible range.