Editing Vikings (section)

==Viking Longships==


The thing that put the Vikings on the map were their Longships (or LongBOAT if you're not [[skub|American]]). Basically these were large canoes made from planks with a mast to catch the wind. They could, however handle rough northern seas very well, and allowed some Vikings to reach such exotic locales as Newfoundland centuries before other Europeans. One thing that helped to make the Longships such a gamechanger was that the vikings worked out that properly curing and drying out timbers it made it stronger and more resistant to being eaten at sea by nematodes and similar grody things. Another thing is that the ship didn't go much under water, which allowed it to be used in almost any river. This led to things such as a fleet of 120 ships and 5000 men suddenly appearing in the middle of Paris in 845. It was also possible to bring the mast down for increased aerodynamics and decreased risk of detection when the ship was moved by rowing.

Sometimes to save travel time, the Vikings would pull their Longships overland for kilometers. No joking, no hyperbole. A few tricks (like log rollers) helped, though. One of them (Oleg, the prince of Kievan Russ) even mounted his longships on wheels to quickly move them into Constantinople harbor, bypassing the defensive chain pulled across the path (which possibly inspired the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II when he used a similar trick to help him capture Constantinople).

Their Longships also had an [[derp|early warning system]] so that people could tell whether they were going to fuck them up or not. It's to do with the shields:
If the Shields were on the outside of their Longships, then they were coming to trade goods.
If the Shields were not on the outside of their Longships, then they were going to use them in battle, and you should prepare to fight or run for the hills (if you get that far...)