When I was pillaging my way through Norway, Denmark and Sweden, I noticed that a lot of the forts/castles I saw there reminded me of the military designs I would come up with as a kid, when my friends and I would use sand, Lincoln Logs, wood scraps, or whatever to built forts for our playtime wars. Moats were a prerequisite, of course, and our view was that series of walls and bastions protruding at crazy angles was just darn good defensive planning.
So when I was walking through this:
I couldn't help but wonder if the designers of Kronberg were seven years old.
As it turns out, that design is called a
star fort, and my earliest visions of defensible fortifications were sort of correct (for a given level of technology, anyway)
4 comments:
As a kid, I built steel reinforced concrete bunkers complete with nuclear-biological-chemical defenses.
No need for a moat when you have a minefield in the interlocking fire zones, and class IV energy shield protective dome above the bunker keeps out missiles as well as paratroopers...they sizzle on the shield much like a mosquito in a bug zapper.
Still, nothing could stop the dread Giant Foot Stomp.
If you are ever in Paris, the military museum (behind Napoleon's tomb in L'Hotel des Invalides if memory serves ) has scale models created of Vauban fortress designs from the 17th century.
Thanks for the tip. I hope that I'm not the only guy who idly envisions plans of attack as he tours old European castles and forts.
There is at least two of us.
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