Chapter 68 Special War Horse
The so-called special war horse is an effort made by the conservative military nobles of the empire to improve the strength of the knights at the end of the Age of Knights.
After all, anyone with a discerning eye can see that with the advent of the steam age, traditional knights are indeed no longer capable of meeting the needs of battlefield combat, so the conservative military nobles began to try to improve the knights in other aspects. combat power to maintain their position.
For an extraordinary knight, there are three main aspects that can affect his combat effectiveness: one is his own quality, the other is his weapons and equipment, and the third is his mount.
Needless to mention weapons and equipment, this has always been the focus of the knights, even more concerned than the improvement of their own quality.
Since the establishment of the feudal system, powerful nobles who own fiefs have been recruiting excellent alchemists and craftsmen in order to create the best equipment for their knights.
When the concept of the modern country was formed and the original feudal system began to collapse, it became the country and the royal family that researched high-tech equipment.
So now most of the knights in the empire have begun to change to uniform equipment. Because of the development of productivity, craftsmen have been able to mass-produce weapons that only top craftsmen could make with a lot of effort in the past. Or armor.
This is the meaning of technological advancement, turning equipment manufacturing that may have been no different from lottery draws in the past into a guarantee now.
As for the improvement in the quality of armor brought about by scientific and technological progress, it was not that obvious in the steam era. Although the quality has improved significantly, there has been no qualitative change. At most, it has been upgraded from chain armor to plate armor.
After all, many scientific theories in this era are still in their infancy. It is more of a summary of experience, sorting out the original scattered knowledge and experience into a systematic knowledge.
It’s just that armor can be produced in large quantities and the quality has been significantly improved, but mounts cannot.
To cultivate a horse, you still have to follow the laws of nature. It takes two years for the horses to mate, become pregnant, and give birth. It then takes two or three years for the pony to mature before it can become a qualified adult horse. Come for a ride.
Among these, the cultivation of war horses is particularly troublesome.
In addition to the screening of horse breeds, training also needs to begin soon after the pony is born, whether it is desensitization and adaptation to people, adaptability training to the battlefield environment, and more important combat skills Training requires a lot of time and energy.
Therefore, it is not a joke that a good horse is more valuable than ten soldiers.
In fact, the cost of maintaining the combat capability of an excellent war horse is almost the same as the cost of maintaining ten soldiers.
Because his family is a knight family and they also keep war horses, Perficott also knows something about this.
Take a 500-kilogram war horse as an example. It needs to eat four meals a day, and each meal is probably at least five kilograms of grain or fodder. That is, a horse eats almost 20 meals a day. Kilograms of food.
Even if part of it is fodder, the grain portion is enough for one person to eat for almost half a month.
With just a little conversion, you can know that if the land used to raise one horse is used for food, it can probably feed twenty-five people.
This is why knights need fiefdoms, because without fiefdoms they really can’t even raise horses.
But the military nobles of the empire were not satisfied with this and formulated a special war horse breeding plan.
They selected all available horse breeds, and then used alchemy to extract the outstanding characteristics of different horse breeds, brought them together, and completed the breeding by artificial means, thus obtaining a combination of speed, A new breed of horse with excellent qualities in many aspects such as endurance and intelligence. It wouldn't matter if it was just like this, but after they obtained the new horse breed, they really started to cultivate special war horses.
First, they interfere with the development of the pony by means of alchemy and magic. They feed special feed mixed with alchemical potions to promote the development of the pony, and apply some special strengthening magic to the pony.
Although the power of mages in this world is not particularly strong. In terms of quantity, there are still more alchemists who can create various magical creations and potions. However, there are only fewer mages, not none.
And they also have some special methods to suppress the bottom of the box, and it is not just fireball.
In short, with the cooperation of at least one alchemist and one mage, it takes three years to cultivate a special war horse that can almost be said to be made of gold.
But the empire at that time reaped the dividends of the development of the times, and those military nobles really had money to burn.
So they burned it for seven years and spent millions of gold pounds, and finally they finally bred the special war horse they thought of.
This kind of horse has a shoulder height of nearly two meters and a tall and muscular body. You can feel its power just by looking at them.
Coupled with the enhancement of alchemy and magic means, the special war horse not only sprints at least 50% faster than the best purebred horses.
And the endurance is excellent. Running at the highest speed can last for half an hour. After that, you only need to take a short rest and add enough forage to recover.
In addition, their load-bearing capacity is also very strong. According to the official data of the empire, they can carry a maximum load of one ton. In fact, according to what Perficott heard from Foster, this is Horses can pull up to 1,200 kilograms.
As for the accuracy of this statement...Perfect's grandfather had a special war horse, and Brandlis Manor also had some second-generation special war horses.
But Purficott was not interested in this, so he instructed the old butler to keep only a limited number of horses for riding, and sold the rest.
After all, the maintenance cost of this kind of war horse is too high. Just in terms of food intake, a special war horse can eat five times the food of an ordinary war horse.
According to the explanation of the old butler Foster, a special war horse needs to eat seven meals a day, including three meals of grain and four meals of forage. The grains are mainly corn, oats, carrots, apples, honey and eggs. , and at least one meal a day needs to be added with powder ground from shells to supplement calcium.
You can imagine how expensive such a horse is, and it is undoubtedly a top-notch luxury item that only nobles can afford.
So much so that with the current size of the Victoria Empire, only the Guards Knights are fully equipped with this top-notch war horse. Both the Princess's Sword and the Rose Knights can only be equipped with the second-generation hybrids.
The second-generation hybrid special war horses are much inferior to the special war horses. The shoulder height has dropped to 1.8 meters, and the endurance, load-bearing and speed have declined by 20%-50%. , relatively speaking, they are just better war horses.
Regarding the food intake of horses, I am not exaggerating at all, so the kind of horse that often carries 100,000 heavy cavalry... I really want to ask you, does your horse not eat?
(End of this chapter)