There appears from the map to have been an attempt to fortify the passages in lower Schwei Bay, but since they appear to be around 40 miles wide, that's not going to do a lot to bottle up any raiders out of Sodar. Schweimouth passage is at least 60-80: any Harchongese 'control' of the bay is going to be nominal at best. And that assumes that they had the slightest interest in bottling up said raiders in the first place. Rahnyld was making himself a pain in any number of butts, so South Harchong might well have seen it as a reasonable investment to pay Sodar to go bother him instead of themselves, assuming that they needed to go beyond providing loot-disposal services in the first place. And that ignores the coast of Shipwreck Bay completely, although since it would be a much longer trip Dohlar wouldn't be high on the target list for raiders on that side. [Heck, it wouldn't be all that odd, historically, for the Harchongese on Schwei Bay to be cooperating with Sodarans while folks in Queiroz or Kyznetsov are fighting off their cousins]
Dohlaran naval power does complicate things, but having a navy doesn't always provide that much protection against raiders. If the fleet's down at Thesmar, it won't do the folks at Bess much good. You can't, particularly with galleys, even count on catching the raiders on the way out of the Gulf. And, if you try to spread out more, you're simply inviting 40-50 raiders to jump a squadron of your galleys - and then go on to loot the places they were protecting anyway. If the Sodarans are making a living raiding, they're likely to be better seamen than even Thirsk's Navy have become to date, and that's the kind of thing that happens to amateurs when they swim with the sharks.
There's also the fact that one gets the impression that the Dohlaran Navy is pretty recent as a serious institution. It may actually be a response to a Sodaran threat, which Rahnyld then decided made a nice support for other ambitions. So while fights with raiders may figure prominently in some officers experience and memories, they actually lie a couple of decades in the past.
SWM wrote:Isilith wrote:
The only coastline Sodar has is in Schwei bay, the same bay that is controlled by the Schweimouth strait... that south Harchong controls. Not to mention that Dohlar was a naval power, and Sodar most definitely is not a naval power.
Also, we are talking about an ARMY officer remembering his many battles against Sodarian raiders, battles on land, with the "cut and the thrust" as he put it in his memories. Not naval battles.
I think this was definitely an Oooooops, brain fart of a nit. As there is no way, at least not a plausible way, for Dohlar and Sodar to have fought.
The fact that the mouth of the bay is controlled by South Harchong is largely irrelevant. Sodar can still send out raids in force by sea, which drop land forces along the Dohlaran coastline.
I don't rule out an oops, but it is not implausible. Land forces fought against Viking raiders quite frequently in the early Middle Ages.
