Starter Quest
As both a decent engineer and a siege combatant, Lorogh is in a rare place for a Cadouri. As such, his commanding officers have given a unique assignment. While scaling down the controls and such of siege weaponry is certainly possible, and has been done, to make them usable by the Cadouri, the Imperial Army is interested to see if more can be done to make full use of the Cadouri's relatively small size. As such, they would like him to see if there's something that only the Cadouri do in regards to siege weaponry.
2nd of Ashan 722
When the task to determine the usefulness of small-statured combatants and siege engineers in the Imperial Military was given to Lorogh, he knew that the tiny, model catapult he'd constructed out of balsa wood wasn't what Sergeant had in mind.
Nevertheless, Lorogh spent bits to breaks pondering that little object that he'd constructed, pouring over its mechanical function, and trying to figure how a smaller soldier, roughly two feet shorter than average, could be of more use in operating such vehicles of defense and destruction. Although many dismissed smaller folk for their size and relative lack of strength, Lorogh knew from personal experience that there were advantages to being smaller and slighter of stature.
He started from the basic premise of a Cadouri's relative height compared to the average soldier. The number one advantage of having smaller soldiers was that they could take up less room, and fit into smaller spaces. Clearly, this would make them superior in the process of sapping. Of undermining enemy positions and structures from beneath them by digging holes, and possibly even planting explosive charges beneath them. Lorogh thought this was too obvious for Sergeant or even his higher-ups not to have considered, but wrote it down anyway. When it came time for him to finish a draft of his report and proposals, he would put it toward the end, so as not to bore the officers with obvious advantages of having smaller soldiers in the force.
And so he was left with a conundrum. What use, other than fitting into smaller tunnels and taking up less space, did a cadouri serve that no other soldier could with regards to siege combat? Cadouri were known for their ingenuity, but then that was something that anyone could be taught. It was hardly unique to his people alone. They had smaller, dextrous digits, that could manipulate tinier controls, and be used to perform precision repairs. He jotted this down, although he wasn't entirely impressed with the thought. He furrowed his brow, deep in pondering this question.
He looked out the window of his cabin, considering all he'd learned of engineering, building, and undermining structures. He remembered his time in Saoire's Dream, living briefly among the beaver folk Cadouri in the riverlands and waterways of the Dream.
His old mentor had picked up a small stick from the dam they'd built, while Lorogh watched in rapt attention. The beaver cadouri tossed the stick down over the dam, to flow into what had been a great marsh, but was now ripe for fertilization and planting of gardens. The Beaverfolk of the Dream served a very important purpose in that, regulating the irrigation of large swathes of the land in order that it might be suitable for planting large stores of food for the growing population.
Lorogh watched as the stick flew through the air, and was almost tempted to run after it. Yet he held his spot in the water and looked expectantly at his mentor. "Y'see Lorogh. Less is oftentimes more efficient than heaping on all the sticks in the world. You don't know that you've reached perfection in a design, until there's nothing more that you can take away from that design, without compromising its base function. Anything superfluous to that is model inefficiency..."
Lorogh thought back to his old mentor's words and considered them deeply. Was he referring to the Cadouri themselves? Simple folk who weren't particularly ambitious (most of them) and tended to get by in contentment with what they had at hand? No, or maybe, but there was more to what he said than Lorogh thought at the time.
It took his orders from Sergeant to make him realize how that principle could be applied to industrial pursuits. Then, he hit upon an epiphany.
Or perhaps it was really more of a conundrum. The problem that all fledgling engineers with their new and exciting ideas faced. How does one achieve perfection by removing features and structural complexity, without compromising their vision? He considered the concept of the Cadouri as a race of smaller beings. On the whole they didn't like to rush around, or waste energy at things that didn't bring joy to themselves or others. In a way, they were a model of energy efficiency, with their tendency for hyper focus on one or two areas of great interest, and also exhibiting a sort of laziness (for most types of cadouri). Well one could see their tendencies to find an easier way around problems, and their reliance on technology as a product or cause of laziness. But really what it was was avoiding the waste of unneeded expenditure of energy.
That was where Lorogh decided to start his research, with the unneeded expenditure of energy.
So what, as far as siege engines and similar devices, constituted wasted energy and superfluous design principles? What could he afford to take away from a simple catapult for instance, while maintaining a happy medium of effectiveness over time? It wasn't an easy question to answer. At times in his musing over this question, he wondered if he might need a mathematician or a physicist to answer it. But he only had himself, an engineer, and someone who was accustomed to trying and failing and trying better the next time.
He decided to sleep on the question, as it was bothering him to no end. Perhaps in his sleep something would jostle clear of the rubble of ideas jumbling through his mind.
The next morning, Lorogh took pen to paper and began detailing a report of ways in which a Cadouri could be of unique use in siege warfare. As he went through the motions in his head, of pre-drafting before writing down to parchment, he almost felt like he was justifying his own existence. But he knew that his commanding officers hadn't meant to do that to him. No, they'd always appreciated his expertise and enthusiasm when it came to his work and his approach to training.
He began at the end, with the use of Cadouri as sappers, able to fit into smaller tunnels and thus spend less energy-sapping structures. This was a simple concept to elucidate and understand. He didn't want to conclude with it, however, so he left room at the end of the parchment for final arguments. Then he backtracked to the beginning, and what would be his opening statement. He began writing:
The Cadouri are uniquely suited to many aspects of siege warfare, not least for the fact that we are trained from birth to learn our various crafts and passions to the utmost by our mother Saoire, but also because of our curious and knowledge thirsty nature. At the risk of generalizing, many of us reach our level of craft expertise because of a tendency to deconstruct ideas, and break them down to their constituent parts.
All of that fluff and flavor aside, there are real advantages to having a small soldier in a siege capacity. Not merely for the operation of siege machines, which often have small mechanical bits that we are well suited to access, by virtue of being able to fit into small spaces, but also to the actual sieging of fixed fortifications, whether through sapping, or just warfare along the walls, or covert sabotage.
Our lightness of frame, in general, is a boon toward this end, and we're able to maneuver around the narrow passages that siege warfare often takes place upon.
Lorogh paused over his words there, and thought if there might be more. He already had the details of how Cadouri might set up sapping operations beneath walls. That part was very technical and less philosophical than the opening had been, which he knew his commanding officers would approve of.
But now he was left with his closing statements, which often enough were expected to be the most persuasive. Lorogh wasn't the greatest with words, and as such, perhaps might be forgiven by his commanders for phoning it in a bit. Afterall, he'd probably be put in charge of putting into practice the technical aspects of what he'd described on paper.
So he capped off his report with a few simple summary of what he'd already written, and how he was willing to stand on the principles and technological aspects of what he'd written in the rest of the document. He finished his paper with a few special lines of text, plucked straight from memory of his mentor:
To conclude, we Cadouri have always been a people to avoid the unneeded expenditure of energy. While some may see this as a tendency for lazy indolence, we know what most don't. Modulating our approach to problems, with the appropriate amount of force and energy to do a job is the best way forward. An overwrought response to a small problem is not a good way to spend the Empire's resources, as considerable as they may be. Shock and Awe have their place, but then so do precision and reacting to problems on scale.
