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Let’s say all those Stark-loyal riverlords and the BWB manage to overthrow the Freys and Lannisters in their lands. How long can they maintain their rebellion (winter and dragons notwithstanding)? Any chance of a Jan-Zizka-style general or a Dornish-style insurgency lasting longer than a few months? Or are the Riverlands just too hard to hold?

Pretty good, given that the Lannisters and Tyrells A. aren’t working together, B. are split up between the Riverlands, Crownlands, and the Reach, and C. also have to deal with the Ironborn and the Golden Company.

What about war wagons in Essos? Valyrian roads, Myrish crossbows, Qohorik wood and steel, and the Dothraki seem like the perfect enemy for war wagons to engage. I bet dollar for dollar (or whatever Essosi currency) a war wagon is more effective than Unsullied at repelling unarmored horse.

tylandlannister:

racefortheironthrone:

Well, if you’re trying to set up a Boer-style corral system, that’s your best bet. Still running into the problem that the Dothraki are excellent archers who have a superior rate of fire to the Myrish crossbow tho. 

What exactly is a ‘Boer-style corral system’? Is it like hussite war wagons? 

It was a strategy of using wagons circled into a corral as a mobile fortification, used by the Boers against the Zulu in the 1830s and 1840s. 

What about war wagons in Essos? Valyrian roads, Myrish crossbows, Qohorik wood and steel, and the Dothraki seem like the perfect enemy for war wagons to engage. I bet dollar for dollar (or whatever Essosi currency) a war wagon is more effective than Unsullied at repelling unarmored horse.

Well, if you’re trying to set up a Boer-style corral system, that’s your best bet. Still running into the problem that the Dothraki are excellent archers who have a superior rate of fire to the Myrish crossbow tho. 

Now I’m trying to wrap my head around why Tywin decided, of all things, to make his battle-weary men march on foot day and night to reach the Ruby Ford. Setting aside the wagon idea, there’s the Green Fork itself for water transport (and he would later do the same with the Blackwater, so it’s certainly feasible). Or he could learn from Robb Stark and split his cavalry and foot. Is he just that mediocre of a general?

1. Tywin was trying to get to Riverrun in time to save the army there. 

2. If Robb defeated the army at Riverrun, Tywin desperately needed to get across the Trident before he was trapped.

3. Water transport requires large numbers of boats to be ready ahead of time. Mace Tyrell had organized a large number of barges that were ready to go at Tumbler’s Falls, but without that, you can’t really move tens of thousands of men, thousands of horses, and tons of supplies by river.

The Kingsroad seems pretty good (good enough for Robert and Cersei to have wheelhouses on their way to Winterfell). Could Tywin have wheeled his troops down to the Trident instead of a force march after the Battle of the Green Fork, losing less men to exhaustion and getting more out of his mounted knights? What about amphibious boat-wagon hybrids? (Sorry for all this, it’s just the series seems to lack military engineering. There’s Tyrion’s boom chain and that’s about it…)

The Kingsroad is as good as it gets, but it still took Robert and Cersei two months to get from King’s Landing to Winterfell. 

Had Tywin wheeled his troops down the Kingsroad, it’s quite likely he would have been caught north of the Ruby Ford and been trapped between the Green Fork and the Mountains of the Moon. 

How viable/useful would horse-drawn armored personnel carriers be in Westeros for transporting infantry across large distances? E.g. you cram 20-30 men into the back of a large wagon and have horses draw the wagon to the destination instead of having them march on foot. What about Hussite war wagons?

Not particularly. Unless they’re on good roads, horse-drawn wagons are as slow as all hell, and then you have the added problem of getting them across rivers, etc.