The beetle saddle in the protagonist's mind is a saddle similar to that of an elephant, not a saddle similar to that of a war horse. After all, in terms of body size, the ratio of medium-sized beetles to big-headed ants is close to the ratio of African elephants to humans.
A saddle is a seat made of a wooden frame covered with leather, stuffed with soft material, and shaped to fit the rider's buttocks, with bulges at the front and back. It functions as a fixed position and can effectively prevent the rider from falling off the horse. It is stuffed with soft materials and has a shape that fits the rider's buttocks and can also reduce fatigue caused by long-term riding.
There are different types of elephant saddles, including soft pads similar to horse saddles, which allow the rider to ride on the elephant in a sitting position. There is also a tower saddle that stands high on the elephant's back, giving the rider and archer above better protection and a more stable platform. During the war between Rome and Carthage, the African war elephants on the Carthage side often used this tower-type elephant saddle, which caused a lot of trouble for the Roman legions.
Only the larger African elephant can carry such a huge tower saddle and several warriors on it. Asian war elephants tend not to use this type of saddle.
The warrior the protagonist plans to equip on the back of the beetle is a slinger for long-range attacks and needs a stable platform. As an insect, beetles have a proportionally greater carrying capacity than elephants. Therefore, the protagonist plans to install a platform saddle of a suitable size for the beetle.
Compared with the tower-type elephant saddle, the platform-type saddle is also made of wood, but has only one platform and eliminates the surrounding walls. Because humans are upright animals, while ants often stand on six or four limbs, walls will shield themselves.
The wooden platform is tied to the beetle's back with ant wire and ropes and can be removed at any time.
Depending on the size of the beetle, each battle beetle will have a commander, two worker ant handlers, several to a dozen warriors, and one or two worker ant messengers on its back.
The commander is responsible for commanding the entire team of beetles. The driver is located on the head of the beetle. According to the commander's instructions, he controls the movement of the beetle by controlling the beetle's tentacles or directly issuing simple instructions that he is already familiar with during domestication into the tentacles. The warrior stayed on the platform on the back of the beetle, responsible for attacking enemies in the distance with slings, and also defending against enemies trying to climb up the back of the beetle. The messenger must convey the commander's instructions on the broad back of the beetle, including instructions to the driver and warriors, as well as communication with the accompanying infantry.
In order to facilitate the messengers to quickly get on and off the beetle, there are ropes hanging to the ground on the left, right and rear of the platform for climbing.
In addition to having long-range firepower, the beetle army tactics currently organized and trained by the protagonist are basically based on the blueprints provided by the survivors of the big-headed ants.
Although if problems are exposed in actual combat in the future, the protagonist will definitely find a way to solve them. However, even now, the protagonist has also seen some shortcomings of the Beetle Legion.
For example, a beetle squad has one beetle as the core, but it is difficult to achieve tacit cooperation between the accompanying infantry and the beetle.
To be honest, infantry-tank coordination has always been a problem for the military, especially when communication technology was underdeveloped.
During World War I, even the inside of the tank could not communicate effectively during combat. Without a radio, the commander could only give orders by kicking the driver's left and right shoulders.
During World War II, the problem of poor communication between tanks and accompanying infantry was still a serious problem. Tank commanders often needed to probe to communicate with the infantry beside the vehicle. When the battle is at its fiercest, you can only rely on the tacit understanding and daily training of both parties.
Some countries will equip tanks with wired phones. Infantry can communicate with the inside of the vehicle through the phone outside the vehicle, which effectively solves this problem.
It is obvious that there is also this coordination problem between the beetles and the accompanying infantry. The solution for the Big-headed Ant survivors is to use the beetle as the core of the team, and the accompanying infantry must follow the beetle and cannot make their own decisions.
This is a feasible approach under extreme desperation, but it is relatively rigid. If the Beetle commander fails to see the larger threat that the infantry already sees, he may put his entire squad in danger.
The protagonist's improvement method is to equip the beetle with a full-time messenger, which makes up for the information barrier in coordination to a certain extent, and also indirectly improves the communication efficiency between the beetle commander and driver. And this kind of full-time messenger is only effective when it has the ability of a beetle that is moving up and down quickly. The key is the ropes hanging from the backs of the three beetles. This is the creation of the protagonist. There is no such thing on the beetles of the Big-headed Ant survivors. .
However, messengers are ultimately inferior to telephones. Just like semaphores and homing pigeons were commonly used to make up for communication barriers in World War II, electronic tools were ultimately needed.
Do ants have electronic tools? No! Are there any similar tools? have!
The protagonist thought about it. The ants' conference room can realize the common information exchange among many ants. Is there any way to put this communication tool on the beetle?
The protagonist once studied that information communication in the conference room mainly relies on those white pebbles on the ground. These pebbles look very ordinary and are mainly composed of quartz, feldspar, mica, etc. But this kind of pebbles can carry the communication signals of ants like a telephone wire.
And there is no need for a whole piece of pebbles, as long as different pebbles are close together, the same effect can be achieved.
However, it is unrealistic to use cobblestones to lay a "communication line" on the beetle. Not to mention the difficulty of processing the pebbles into a suitable size, how to fix many pebbles on the beetle and maintaining firmness, and the sudden sudden change on the beetle's back. The difficulty of what a burden it would be to have so many extra stones quickly dissuaded the protagonist from this idea.
But it may not be impossible to find a more qualified substitute for cobblestones. Since the protagonist speculates that the communication signals between ants are similar to electrical signals, and pebbles are similar to conductors, are there other easily processed materials that can also be used as conductors?
Like metal? Metal is almost an excellent material that conducts electricity and heat easily. Can it also conduct ant communication signals?
Although the protagonist does not yet have the ability to process and refine metals, there are still some metal elements in nature, such as gold, which can be found in some mountain streams. Even if the output is not high and it has no mining significance for humans, it is not for ants. Useful enough.
There are also some metals that are easy to refine, like copper, which can be easily refined and processed in the kilns where pottery is fired.
And copper ore is also very common. For example, the protagonist knows that there is a secondary nest in the Big-headed Ant Kingdom that produces beautiful green stones. These stones will also be sent to "Qingqiu City" to decorate the queen and male ants' palaces.
These beautiful green stones are malachite, a copper mineral!
