User blog comment:Krayfish/Misc. Questions/@comment-3155949-20120503215034

I like gun questions. I know this is from a human standpoint, but most all designs for effective gunpowder weapons have aesthetic and mechanical differences. Modern militaries use machine guns and automatic rifles, each offering several advantages over previous iterations of the gunpowder weapon. We have, for the most part, ceased to come up with radical new inventions for guns, the last major improvement being in 1944 (Sturmgewehr). That is because the basic layout for infantry firearms, in my eyes, is perfected. The Eteno had also perfected the layour for infantry firearms, but many hundreds of year before coming upon Earth. That gave them time to make smaller technical improvements, which adds up to Eteno weapons being outwardly similar, but far more efficient than human designs.

That leads me to a question of my own. Have the Dhragolon faced Eteno-like forces before, or is the EIT a new sort of situation for them? Tank columns, carpet bombing, and machine guns are not at all similar to swords, so I'm interested to know how they have adapted, or plan to adapt.

I'm not saying that Dhragolon infantry are second-rate, for they far outperform Eteno soldiers individually, but Khalkhin Gol comes to mind. The IJA, adhering to infantry-centric doctrines, put tanks in a support role, to serve more as infantry combat vehicles as opposed to independent units in their own right. The Soviets, adhering to what I know as 'tank-goodness', spammed those iron coffins like zerglings. Even their lightest tanks (BT-2 I believe, will have to check) were highly effective against regular Japanese tanks. Needless to say, Japan was defeated soundly. At the end of WWII, when the USSR invaded Manchuria, the reds rocketed through Japanese defenses and wiped out the million-strong Kwantung Army.