[Award Winner] Fortifications I: How to build a fortress

[Hoel]

This is chapter I. I'm doing one on the evolution of fortresses from medieval high walls to the star shaped forts made to counter gunpowder artillery. The third part will be about the modern fortifications made to counter the rifled cannon barrel and explosive grenades. After the great war, fixed fortifications were made more and more obsolete, so I won't go into that period.

[Redrobes]

Cool - this will be a stupendous serial then. I'll be particularly interested in the latter castles to withstand the rifle etc. Though I am fantasy minded I don't know about much of that stuff. Should be good. Our best castles over here were improved and extended up to about Henry VII or 1450's then they didn't build such nice fancy ones after that. Constantinople's 'great walls' fell to the cannon in 1453 so that was the end of that as far as big walls went.

[Vandy]

Hi, Hoel.

First of all (and I'll get around to thanking you in my thread), thanks for your advice on defensive structures for my Kimarnock's Ruhba map. I appreciate your advice and certainly will be implementing some of it.

Your advice and this thread has gotten me thinking about defensive structures in general and I've created a PDF document in which I have detailed six different types of defensive structures. The information was take from Wikipedia and reformatted.

The defensive structures detailed are as follows:

Bastion
Barbican
Defensive Walls
Gatehouse
Redoubt
Towers (both Castles and Tower Houses)

I certainly hope that you and others will find this information useful.

Regards,

Gary