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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