"Space taken by cavalry" Topic

Any thoughts on how much space a mounted soldier takes on the battlefield compared to a foot soldier? I have been thinking about base sizes and was just wondering what people thought.

Depends on the fighting formation and order adopted by the troops in question.

Roughly twice as much as an infantryman in the same formation (close order, open order, skirmish etc). That's for individual frontage. Depth of an individual horseman would obviously be greater still.
However, the depth/frontage of an entire formation might be similar due to less ranks in a cavalry unit, spacing of of sub units etc. Basically, it depends.

In some periods horses were about 4 horse lengths between each other. Obviously some cavalry units fought more densely packed than this but there had to be a lot of space for cavalry on the field. They took up much more space than infantry on a man to man basis.

WRG basing system has formed infantry 15mm wide and 20mm deep. Formed cavalry is 20mm wide and 40mm deep. There is a rational explanation for this in old war gaming books. Hope that helps.

A horse takes up about 6 feet of depth for itself, and IIRC another 3 feet minimum to avoid kicking.

however US cavalry regs of 1862 specify as little as 2 feet between ranks in close order.

width depends upon order – IIRC the closest I've ever seen mentioned is 32" for knee-behind-knee for a much later era.

Roman spacing was c. 4.5 frontage (3 feet for infantry). Descriptions of medieval close order cavalry use graphic descriptions similar to this: "The horses were so closely arrayed that if you had tossed an apple into the air it would not fall to the ground without first striking man or horse". If the horses were literally that packed together (riders knee to knee), the rear ranks would have the horses' noses BETWEEN flanks, and not stuffed in the rump-tail of the horse in front….