Re: Map Prototype: rice
On rice paddies -
From the memoir Baptism by Larry Gwin:
(Gwin was for a short period an advisor to the 21 ARVN Division but transferred to the 1. US Cavalry Division as this unit arrived to Vietnam and served as a (rifle) company XO in the division 3rd Brigade).
p24
“The Mekong Delta was nothing but a seemingly endless expanse of rice paddies shimmering in the sun and crisscrossed by rivers, canals and occasional roads. Flying over the paddies, I marvelled at their crude symmetry, one after the other, side by side, like a never ending patchwork of rain-soaked football fields, each with its own particular shade of brown.”
p33
“The paddies were very different on the ground from what they had looked like in the air. Each was blocked off by small dikes of packed mud, about a foot or so think and a foot above the water. Some had weeds or grass growing on them. Apart from their agricultural importance, they served as dams, boundaries, and high-speed highways for our cross country trek, and it didn’t take long for me to master the secret of paddy humping.”
I’ve made a 30x30 rice paddy map with a set of huts surrounded by paddies. There are dikes framing the paddies, and in one version of the maps the dikes have been “raised” to Height 5 (provides some cover). Being one hex wide I guess the dikes are a lot larger than in real life but it’s possible for units to move at greater speed along the dikes (compared to wading through the paddies), which seems to have been the case. I’m not sure the system of dikes was used outside the “paddy universe” of the Mekong Delta though.
Now, should I upload the maps to this thread... and everybody interested can have a say about the paddy dike-thing...
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