Siege engines in field battles

[Didz]

All right, this has gotten quite silly. You do realize that using ladders would be totally impractical. You'd never get the elephants to stand still long enough for you to place them, the defenders would fight against you, and the other elephants would simply knock them to the ground. It would never work, never in a million battles.

You would need a variation on DVX's Peanut Thrower Squad, which places baskets of peanuts under the nose of the Elephant at the precise moment when the Ladder Assault Team were about to launch their final attack.

The ladders would need to be self-supporting, perhaps something like an early model for an airport gangway where the ladder is propped up on a wheeled carriage so that it could just be pushed up against the side of a feeding Elephant perhaps with the first of the assault squad already at the end.

A variation on this could be some form of early trampet system where the first squad merely throws the trampet close to the side of the Elephant so that a clevely trained set of warrior gymnasts could then bounce their way up to the men on its back, perhaps doing a few back flips to just to confuse them.

Another option would be to issue pikemen with modified pikes that have a 'V' shaped termination capable of supporting the end of a ladder. Using this a group of pikemen could march up to a feeding Elephant and raise the ladder above their heads so that the assault squad could rush up it.