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I would have been curious to hear the arguments of Tersites pertinent to these recommendations, but before, when it had become clear how radical and, I gather, absurd were his proposals, he had been hooted from the chamber. I recall men shouting, "Many men could not all sit through the stroke of an oar! Would you have them stand?" "So great an oar could not even be held by the hands of a man!" "Two masts with their sails could not be quickly removed before battle!" "You will slow the ship if you deepen the keel!" "If many men sit a single oar, some will slack their work!" "What good is a ram that does not make its stroke below the waterline?" Tersites had been permitted that once to address the council because he, though thought mad, had once been a skilled shipwright. Indeed, the galleys of Port Kar, medium and heavy class, carried shearing blades, which had been an invention of Tersites. These are huge quarter-moons of steel, fixed forward of the oars, anchored into the frame of the ship itself. One of the most common of naval strategies, other than ramming, is oar shearing, in which one vessel, her oars suddenly shortened inboard, slides along the hull of another, whose oars are still outboard, splintering and breaking them off. The injured galley then is like a broken-winged bird, and at the mercy of the other ship's ram as she comes about, flutes playing and drums beating, and makes her strike amidships. Recent galleys of Cos and Tyros, and other maritime powers, it had been noted, were now also, most often, equipped with shearing blades. - (Raiders of Gor, Chapter )