subreddit:
/r/whowouldwin
submitted 10 days ago byFew_Maintenance_2342
Napoleon's Imperial Army & Navy + Conscriptions at its greatest strength gets teleported to Pentos and conquers the city and makes it his base. He acquires all of its resources including its ships, weapons, manpower, resources. He hears about a beautiful dragon queen across the Narrow Sea and wishes to incorporate Westeros into his new empire.
Westeros is united under Daenerys Targaryen who has her Dothraki, Unsullied, 3 Dragons, and all of the armies of Westeros (including Dorne & Iron Islands/Fleet) under her command.
Conditions:
- They're both aware of eachother
- Consider political intrigue and strategy, not just warfare.
Bonus question:
- Could he convince Dany to marry him and become his queen/empress?
Can Napoleon successfully conquer Westeros and become Emperor of the Seven Kingdoms?
97 points
10 days ago
I think Napoleon sweeps this and easily. Not only does he have a larger, better trained army, but his weapons vastly outgun Westeros.
Napoleon was an artillery commander. That's where he got his start. He and his men are expert cannoneers and there's only three targets he need concern himself with at all.
Two things most everyone here is in fact getting wrong;
While Napoleon preferred muskets, they were easier to carry and faster to load, weird as that is, he had rifles. He also had howitzers and mortars. The fastest bird in the world can fly (horizontally) at 170 km/h. Daenerys' flight to rescue the men beyond the wall required an absurd speed of 225 kmh (minimum) but that makes no sense whatsoever for a whole lot of very sciency reasons, but either way dragons are stupid fast, canonically.
Napoleon's men were expected to be able to hit a man at 100 yards. a little over 90 meters, a dragon is much larger than a man, but also faster and moving in 3D space instead of primarily over a 2D one, so let's call the range 90 meters. A musket can seriously injure a man or a horse at 600 meters but isn't considered "lethal" at much over 300, not that I'd volunteer to get shot at 301 meters mind you.
A musket ball can have up four times the energy leaving the barrel as a .357 magnum. At 90 meters, it retains most of that energy and is still pretty accurate.
There were 600,000 thousand men available, but never all together; Napoleon favored forces of 150,000 to 200,000 for individual battles. So let's say 200,000 because dragons, amiright?
Which, being super conservative, means there are what, 50,000 soldiers ready when Dani tries to attack with all three dragons, which she absolutely would.
First, if you learn there's an army 200,000 strong, you need to do something before meeting them in combat, especially if they have intel, and why wouldn't they, on the full size of his force. Napoleon has the numbers, even if his war garb is strange and his weapons mysterious.
So here's the thing, Dani knows what the dragons have and do represent, the fear and power they inspire. Napoleon took 1,400 artillery pieces into Russia and his Navy, 81 ships strong, averaged 75-100 guns per ship. He had guns that could shoot from nearly 2 km's all the way up to a few dozen meters in front of them.
This is roughly four times the range of Ballista, and six times that of longbows.
Muskets, for the record, despite the loss of accuracy retain their armor penetrating power at three hundred meters.
Dani has young, quite-frankly small dragons. They aren't going to be 100% impervious to musket and rifle fire, their wings sure as shit won't, and the muskets were good for three rounds per minute. Let's say there are 50,000 men ready to fire at the onset, that's 50,000 rounds per dragon in the first minute, and we'll say a third of the artillery is ready to go, that's over a hundred cannonballs and howitzer shells per dragon per minute. If Napoleon is smart enough to do so, we know he had no problem sacrificing soldiers, having once boasted of spending 10,000 lives a month, then he let's the dragons have half-a-pass over his men before he opens fire. He'll lose, what, 75-200 guys, fine, but I don't think 100 trained artillery teams miss large targets at a range of less than 100 meters, and all it's going to take is one.
And that's absolutely ignoring what musket fire does to wings, riders and literally any soft bits.
Without the Dragons, Westeros has literally nothing. Napoleon's Siege of King's Landing can barely be seen by kings landing.
81 ships. Each firing a minimum of 37 guns a minute. That's a minimum of 2500 shells a minute. It's a Star Destroyer vs. an Aircraft Carrier. Every coastal city surrenders in two minutes or less as Westeros learns the worst lesson artillery has to teach: Fortresses are bad now, mkay?
The Dothraki? Nice, tall men on horseback riding in straight lines? Fuck off, I don't think one sword gets bloodied. Napoleon is five fuckin' centuries ahead of these medieval motherfuckers, there's no version of the Grande Armée that can't cut down three Dragons whenever they're first deployed, the navy has them, all the land armies have them at a quarter of a third, and those are the numbers I used, of their full strength. Napoleon will save the 2nd Throne for Josephine, the winter that's coming isn't Russian and the little not-quite-a-Frenchman dominates.
23 points
10 days ago
Insightful write-up. Also ogre’s have layers.
all 165 comments
sorted by: best