Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Intro


Hey guys.

I wanted to start with the blog, and perhaps offer a first structural format to the project.

War, although is s bit of a narrow topic when compared to the whole civilization, is still quite broad. Perhaps we could start by either dividing war into sub-categories and describe them briefly while we advance in time along history.

A couple of these sub-categories could be:
a.) weapons by user:  What person, or military unit uses the weapon.
b.) weapons by function: The construction of the weapon ans principle of  operation.
c.) weapons by target: Type of target the weapon is designed to attack.

Now, these categories are not mutually exclusive, we should probably pick one and stick to it, or the will overlap (no problem with that, but it bothers my sense of organization..lol).

I would propose to go with the ''by function'' category, and here is why: If you check Wikipedia (which is where these categories are from) you will see that for example the ''by user'' category is still quite broad in itself. For example ''vehicle weapons'' the list of vehicle weapons is quite large and there are probably sub-sub-sub categories inside it; It seems to me that we will be doing meaningless listing and we don't have enough time for that.
The category "by target" is more specific, but as you can check by yourselves, it spans very modern times (Aircraft, submarine, satellite, tanks...etc) and we would have empty hand for older periods...its not evenly distributed along the time axis ;)
On the other hand, the "by function'' (or purpose) category is perfect for us. It spans all the historical eras and since its based on the functionality of the weapon, we wouldn't be doing meaningless listing, but instead, we would describe why they are good for that purpose from the material-science point of view.

If you have a better structure, post it, and we could discuss it.

Cheers,

Luis




PS: Here is the classification of weapons by functions:




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