Quote: (01-25-2015 10:45 PM)Hades Wrote:
For a general PSA, traditional archery is more science than art these days.
Quote: (01-25-2015 09:01 PM)Blobert Wrote:
Not to be a spoilsport, but that video has a lot of bullshit info in it. It gives the impression that ancient archers fought similarly to how this guy fires, but in reality firing those fast bursts, you have no power on the draw to do damage. In combat you wanted to have a heavy bow, and draw it fully. That bow of his wouldn't penetrate historical gambeson+mail, unlike shown in the video - if that was so easy why would people spend their whole lives practicing their strength to draw as powerful bows as they can - or alternately why would people have bothered with armor if it was so useless?
Bows are good obviously, but it's not an ultimate weapon - a lot of extremely succesful armies did not utilize bows much, or used crossbows instead and so on.
This is extremely impressive trick archery, integrating some historical, forgotten techniques, but it's not the same as training like a historical archer. Sensationalism is understandable when doing a hit piece like this, but it should be put into proper context still by the viewers.
Contemporary accounts of English longbowmen suggest that they didn't often exceed shooting six arrows per minute in battle (wikipedia).
The bolded comment makes little sense. Are you suggesting that holding a bow at full draw will somehow increase it's stored kinetic energy? The opposite is the case.
I'm not saying you should ever hold the bow at full draw. You shouldn't. What you should do is actually draw the arrow properly to the ear, what the man here mostly doesn't do.
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Even considering the "trick shooting", deer can be killed very effectively using a 40 pound bow and a 400 grain arrow (10 grains/pound of draw). I wouldn't doubt that this guy is using something similar (though likely lighter arrows), so given decent hunting arrows at medium to short range it would definitely be a man killer, provided they're not armored. If you put this Danish guy in a mini mall of pedestrians he could surely rack up an impressive kill count in short order.
He couldn't, not as much as a gunman anyway. Arrows are nowhere near as lethal as bullets, since they don't tumble in the body. Hunting depends on hitting the deer perfectly, or it runs away for a long long time before dying, and a human can suppress bleeding with their hands and clothes unlike a deer.
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Crossbows themselves were developed as a response to armored knights. Staffing an army of vassals had a lot more to do with economics than actual combat effectiveness.
It was much cheaper and more effective for feudal lords to arm low ranking peasants with crossbows and teach them how to kill knights than it was for them to house and provide for expensive knights (or archers) to counter other knights. Low skill ceiling, relative ease of ammunition production, effectiveness against armor, interchangeability of crossbowman, lots of factors for why crossbowmen are an attractive option for any feudal lord, particularly in times of siege when fire rate is not a huge concern.
I'm not sure if crossbows were a response to armored knights. It's not fully known how effective exactly bolts were vs different types of armor, how big part of the time they could wound a man they hit in mail, plate, or whatever armor. But crossbows became popular before plate armor did. Their spread may be due to the invention of better ways to make them - composite and then steel insteadof just wood - and them then being better in terms of range, armor piercing, and such than conventional bows, maybe as a response to armor getting better and more widespread... But as a response, a hard counter to knights specifically, I'm not seeing that, at least it's not that simple and straightforward. If that was the case why didn't the English have employed crossbows more?
They were not really weapons used by peasant levies so much, if that was the case why would anyone pay premium to hire expensive Genoese crossbowmen? It was an expensive and somewhat difficult to maintain weapon.
It's very hard to get a full picture of how exactly military technology and organization exactly affected each other, how and why it all evolved the way it did. I can't say I have definitive knowledge on the subject, but there's a lot of blatant bullshit out there that's demonstably false, in credible looking sources (including wikipedia).
Quote: (01-26-2015 07:12 AM)Dalaran1991 Wrote:
Can a mongolian horse archer firing a recurve penetrate mail armor?
Here's a great source on that and more:
http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthr...ur-FAQs&s=
Relevant quote to that specifically
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The Franciscan friar, John of Plano-Carpini (who was an envoy to the Mongols) described the Mongols making armour-piercing arrows by heating the heads red-hot, then quenching them in salt-water. He then recommended that "doubled mail" be issued to knights to protect them from these arrows. One can infer several things from this passage. Firstly, that it wasn’t normal practice in Europe during this time to harden arrowheads. Secondly, it was believed that hardened arrowheads stood a greater chance of penetrating mail. Thirdly, a type of mail known as “doubled mail” was considered arrow-proof, even against arrows specifically designed to be armour-piercers.