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Post by theropod on Mar 17, 2021 23:12:04 GMT 5
^Big powerful warbows are very difficult too use and very tiring on the arms, so in a 1v1 fight against an armored opponent its probably not terribly useful, and might actually tire him out before they start brawling. We could turn this on its head though; someone actually physically trained to shoot a powerful warbow might, by default, be at a strength-advantage over someone who is not. The physical training required is one of the main reasons archery was outcompeted by gunpowder weaponry, which is easier to use and therefore more readily employed in large numbers.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 18, 2021 1:11:14 GMT 5
If we were talking about the specific motions necessary for pulling back a bowstring I would suppose so. But I don't think that would mean greater strength in everything else (e.g. striking or pushing), would it?
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Post by theropod on Mar 18, 2021 17:42:47 GMT 5
If we were talking about the specific motions necessary for pulling back a bowstring I would suppose so. But I don't think that would mean greater strength in everything else (e.g. striking or pushing), would it? When shooting one is pushing against a bow, and I’d imagine the musculature used for pulling a bow can also be used for pulling other stuff. This is merely anecdotal, but people I’ve seen trained to shoot heavy war bows certainly look like they would be at a severe strength advantage over most others in a fight (including people trained to use swords, which requires comparatively much less strength). I also don’t know how powerful a yumi of that period would actually be, but supposedly if used in war, against heavily armoured opponents (and so successfully it was the primary weapon of the warrior class) it could hardly have been a weak bow. It seems hard to find concrete numbers on poundage, but yumis have an enormous draw length, which further increases the energy of the arrow. So I’d expect it should be able to go through chainmail and gambeson (which is, after all, what warbows are made to do) and still kill or seriously injure the person behind it. This is what a 105 lb warbow does to someone armoured in maille and gambeson: youtu.be/JqkiKjBQe7U?t=872And this is what the equivalent of a 160 lb warbow does to someone’s arm, covered in chainmail and behind a wooden shield: youtu.be/y6IlEUm_Eo4?list=PLIUWkznLJcsHEqN0d2iei8iHo7Dcr99GvEven if the chainmail would still greatly improve the wearer’s chances of survival (because the arrow would likely go straight through an unarmoured target), the utility would be somewhat limited in a 1 on 1 fight with an opponent intent on killing you as compared to a battle. We also shouldn’t underestimate the usefulness of horse archery in this context as it allows the archer to basically dictate the terms of the engagement and attack without even getting into range for a counterattack. Against someone in full plate, I could see how the use might be limited (although despite arrows’ seeming inability to deeply penetrate well-made plate, they were apparently still effective enough during the 100 year war), but for armour mostly consisting of chainmail the chances aren’t seeming so good. A powerful warbow also makes hiding behind a shield everything but a sure bet, at least unless you don’t mind your arm getting skewered (which at the very least I would expect to seriously impede the wielder for the remainder of the fight). Once more, the shield will do a great job at helping the wielder survive, but it won’t prevent every injury or necessarily ensure he is still in shape to fight after a hit.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 18, 2021 21:38:19 GMT 5
EDIT: I completely forgot that knights were actually taught how to use bows and crossbows during their training. Even if these weren't weapons they were likely to use in war, it was still valuable for them to have some experience using them ( link) ( link). Indeed, knights were familiar with all types of weapons and could use whatever they needed to use for a particular situation, and that sometimes meant a bow or crossbow ( link). So while the knight probably isn't going to be carrying a bow with him to battle against the samurai, he too should have a lot of the strength that comes from training/using a bow. I don't have concrete numbers for how powerful an 11th century yumi would be, but a draw weight a little over 100 lbs honestly doesn't sound unreasonable to me. A few notes regarding the shield: 1.) Matt Easton noted that the reconstructed shield Tod used is probably on the lightest end of the spectrum of knightly shields. Accordingly, historical ones would often be thicker with more layers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn6TmPPGg0I&t=18m07s2.) It should also be noted that the Norman knight has a kite shield with much larger surface area than the heater shield used in Tod's test, so there's more leeway for the arrow not to hit the area where the arm is directly behind. 3.) As someone in the comments pointed out, that is at extremely close range. Well, yeah. Not everyone had the same type or quality of armor. There's no doubt a powerful warbow could go through maille and gambeson with the right arrowhead and seriously injure the wearer underneath (EDIT: okay, operative word is 'could', but we all get the point), and the same could be said for any plate armor that was low-quality, mass produced munitions armor. And as Supercommunist alluded to on the previous page, there were arrowheads that were great against brigandine too. Even if warbows were ineffective against men-at-arms in high quality full plate, there were plenty of soldiers (most of them, in fact) who weren't as well armored and who could be killed by arrowfire (with the right arrowheads, distance, etc.), while heavily armored men-at-arms could be dealt with some other way. Also, the particular samurai I pitted against a knight in full plate was one from the Sengoku period, at which point their main weapon seems to have been the spear instead of the bow ( Turnbull, 2008), contrary to what I said in my first big post.
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Post by Supercommunist on Mar 18, 2021 22:03:56 GMT 5
It's true that a longbow was useful when plate armor was around but that doesn't mean they were effective against heavy armor. M16's for instance are very useful weapons today but it would have little effect against a tank for instance. The disparity in power between a knight and a longbowmen is not nearly as big as a tank and a rifle men, but barring a few exceptions, a longbow men doesn't pose a direct threat to a man wearing decent plate armor. Chainmail and gambeson is not perfect against bows, but they are still pretty good defense They are apparently accounts of men in gambesons walking around with arrows jutting out of their cloth armor. Also theropod in regards to the thegnrand video you posted: thegn points out that a lot of modern mail is of subpar quality as it is a time consuming process and most people don't expect to use it. 17:50 www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqkiKjBQe7U&t=872s&ab_channel=ThegnThrand
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Post by theropod on Mar 19, 2021 14:15:46 GMT 5
Well, as I explicitly wrote I acknowledge the inability of longbow arrows to go through high-quality plate. I guess we’ve all likely seen the same videos where this is tested (and for that matter, probably have also all seen what the archer who shot them looks like). So yes if that armour covers everything and doesn’t have weak points an arrow will not do much. From what I’ve seen the armour will however likely not be equally protective everywhere, and just because a breastplate or helmet is arrow-proof that doesn’t mean the entire body would be invulnerable. But that likely would put a 15th century knight at a distinct advantage as basicallly nobody can match the degree of protection of his armour.
I’ve also acknowledged that mail and gambeson would provide far better protection against an arrow than nothing at all. It will likely greatly increase survivability of such a hit, firstly because the needle bodkin used to penetrate it will do far less damage than a barbed broadhead you could use against an unarmoured target would, secondly because it will not penetrate so deeply (or, in fact, pass through entirely). But in the end, even an arrow that were to not penetrate at all at a kinetic energy of 100 J would likely still be pretty damaging (apparently that is similar to axe or club blows, or, for that matter, the impact of a kylie which of course is perfectly capable of breaking bone), especially when concentrated on a relatively small impact point. Just like a flexible bulletproof vest will protect you far better from bullets than nothing at all will, but being shot right in the chest while wearing one will still stand a good chance of putting you out of the fight. But then again, arrows do go through chainmail and actually penetrate into the body underneath, even if they don’t do so effortlessly. I think that at the very least is pretty solidly confirmed by testing and history. As I said the variable in this is the power of the yumi, but seeing how it was used in war, successfully, against armoured opponents, it is not reasonable to assume it was somehow far weaker than its european or mongolian counterparts.
And about strength of modern chainmail, you could equally make the argument that medieval steel was likely lower quality than modern steel. Sadly all we‘ll likely ever find will be tests against modern steel, of course, but I don’t think speculation is of much use here either.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 19, 2021 17:11:10 GMT 5
No one assumed that. I even explicitly said that I thought the yumi was comparable to the English longbow in power (or at least that examples of both could be easily have the same draw weight). Only reason I wasn’t sure was, like you said, I’m not 100% sure how powerful its 11th century iteration was due to advancements in yumi construction since then, as well as how variable warbows seem to be in power (e.g. English longbows on the Mary Rose had draw weights of anywhere from 100-185 lbs, and the strongest longbows ever were 200 pounders).
Is it possible that modern steel is variable enough in quality that some things might actually be lower in quality than medieval military-grade steel? I know our best steel is obviously far better than anything they had back then, but maybe people who make modern reproductions of maille just don’t gaf and create something less durable than what they would have actually used in the Middle Ages (both in Europe and Japan).
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Post by theropod on Mar 19, 2021 18:54:54 GMT 5
One would expect the modern steel to actually be much more uniform compared to the material used for medieval armour, nowadays steel is mass-produced in largely automated and tightly controlled processes, back then it would have been down to the individual blacksmith and the specific raw material. So it’s unlikely you would get as much variation between cheaply produced and expensive or even just random variation as you would in historical times.
The construction is of course a variable, but the example from the test I posted seemed to be properly riveted (as it should be), not butted, so that is not the issue. Maybe the size or thickness of the rings is, I am not familiar enough with that subject to tell.
Of course there are and always were different TYPES of steel, so if the original example was supposed to be made of hardened carbon steel and the modern one is made of mild steel, that may make a difference. But I was under the impression that mail wasn’t usually made of hardened steel, but rather wrought iron (due to the nature of how it is made), so if anything I’d expect the modern material to be stronger than what they would have used in the high middle ages.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 19, 2021 21:51:11 GMT 5
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Post by Supercommunist on Mar 19, 2021 22:18:41 GMT 5
I don't think chainmail or gambesons are impervious to arrows but generally speaking I think that they effectively protected most wearers from serious harm as they aren't many battles where arrows cutdown a bunch of people, even when the majority of soldiers were probably wearing fabric type armor rather than the more expensive steel/iron/broze armor. Here are some examples: At the battle of marathon, the greeks rushed through a storm of arrows and defeated the persians with minimum losses. Somebody on reddit posted an account of men walking around when covered head to toe in arrows, or as they describe them, war darts: www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mzioo/how_effective_was_mail_armour_against_arrows_and/It is true that is probably made of better steel but in the case of mail construction method is probably more important than material quality. A lot of youtube enthusiasts will tell you how awful butted mail is so improperly riveted mail made of modern materials was probably worse than properly riveted mail made of crappy middle age stuff. In addition, a lot of these videos are conducted at rather short ranges and in a fight, shooting when somebody is that close is pretty risksy since they can cross that distance in a few seconds. I know that the samurai is mounted and might be able to kite the knight but given that he will be decked out in steel/iron armor himself I doubt he'd be any lighter than the knight and his horse is probably not going to be moving any faster than the knights. Shooting somebody from a distance also presents its own issue as arrows quickly lose a lot of their power after they are shot. Lastly, I am not sure samurai have arrows well-equipped to deal with chainmail as that armor type doesn't appear to show up that often in east asia. Just another thing to articulate the importance of the type of head used. Super specalized pilum managed to breach chainmail but a more generic javelin keeps bouncing off.
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Post by theropod on Mar 20, 2021 16:39:54 GMT 5
I don't think chainmail or gambesons are impervious to arrows but generally speaking I think that they effectively protected most wearers from serious harm as they aren't many battles where arrows cutdown a bunch of people, even when the majority of soldiers were probably wearing fabric type armor rather than the more expensive steel/iron/broze armor. Well I can think of some examples where they absolutely were. And while I do not know the precise percentage of fighters equipped with each particular type of armour at those battles, the French armies at Crécy and Agincourt are described as heavily dominated by knights wearing not just maille but full plate. Again, full, high-quality plate was apparently effective against arrows. But I don’t see how archery could have been effective at all in those battles if generally speaking maille offered sufficient protection from it, as entirely unarmoured combatants, or those only wearing gambeson, would not have been that numerous at that time (we are talking about a period where even lower-quality plate armour was reportedly available to even those with more modest means). An army composed almost entirely out of archers would not stand a chance in a battle if only a small part of the opposing army where actually vulnerable to arrows. It rather appears like whenever archery was actually employed as a mass tactic (and not just by auxiliaries) and coupled with really bows actually built to work against armoured opponents (english longbow, mongolian-style composite bow, presumably yumi) it was very effective, often being a preferred weapon that was dominant on the battlefield. The largest contiguous empire in history was built on the back of horse archery, I would not call that "not cutting down a bunch of people". This seems hard to explain if even such ubiquitous armours as padding + chainmail provided more than adequate protection against arrows specifically made for armour penetration. Granted, archers were often relegated to support roles in ancient armies, and that may well be why they generally did not rise to high prominence (again, there are reasons for that, chiefly that shooting a really powerful bow is a lot more physically demanding than using a spear, and archers would hence commonly need to be drawn from populations already trained in its use, such as Crete, or trained for extensive periods of time, as done in Wales and later England during the middle ages). The classical greeks did not use chainmail, and it is unlikely persian bows where adapted to counter heavy armour (bronze-covered aspis employed in formation+linothorax) seeing how the achaemenid idea of "heavy armour" seems to have been "wicker shield". Such a comparison is incomplete without considering the type of bow, and as you point out yourself, also the type of arrow involved. Obviously there are no achaemenid bows to directly determine the power of, but the abilities of a weapon are usually a result of its required use, and if a bow was not designed to counter heavy armour, then it likely would not be strong enough to do so when suddenly faced with it. And, except for the greeks, against whom they failed miserably, the Persians did not come up against opponents in anything we would call heavy armour from our modern perspective afaik (certainly not when compared to high-medieval knights, let alone samurai of the same period), and thus likely would not have had a need for immensely powerful bows. Isn’t it thought that the greek military successes in the persian wars were because of their technological advantage, chiefly much heavier armour? I would not say that the arrows (and weapons in general) of one particular ancient military were ill-equipped to deal with armour translates to all weapons of the same type being poorly suited to penetrate an entirely different kind of armour. Achaemenid arrows were apparently rather flimsy too, with shafts made of reeds. And the accounts from Thermophylae see them used at high ranges. As you point out yourself, an arrow will lose energy over longer distances, and for a 1 on 1 duel I was not envisioning them to start out 200 m apart (or at least, that distance could and would necessarily be reduced if it did render the arrows ineffective, up until they came to a distance where one of them was actually able to score a kill).
Using a heavy war bow requires a substantial investment in terms of training (and building such a bow is damn difficult too btw), to the point where in medieval England all sports except for archery were banned to ensure a supply of trained longbowmen. Clearly it would not have been used if its military utility was barely higher than that of a normal hunting bow that everyone can shoot without much training. Even a 50 or 60 pound bow goes straight through an unarmoured target. In fact it goes straight through the shoulder blade of a deer, even with a stone tip.
escholarship.org/uc/item/9819d1v6Now granted these estimates are rather tenuous, seeing as there is no real way to know the power of persian bows reliably, but I think the general idea we get based on depictions, historical accounts and experimental archaeology is that the arrows that were apparently so ineffective against greek heavy infantry are nowhere near comparable to a sturdy medieval war arrow shot at a reasonably close distance. And there are actually accounts from Herodotus that suggests persian archery was a lot more effective against the greeks at a shorter distance: www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology-news/master-archers-powerful-achaemenid-empire-003884Hmm well this contains an account of someone covered head to food in "fire darts", which I presume means fire-arrows. I don’t know what the saracen examples in this specific case would have looked like, but I would expect something like this: You point out the importance of head shape for maille penetration yourself. It is not surprising something designed to set fire to buildings during a siege would not be good at penetrating deeply through armour.
But of course there are even accounts of people "doing a boromir" and continuing to fight even when skewered by arrows. I’m sure there are also such accounts involving people shot with bullets, which are even more damaging. But that does not make it the norm. I think it’s safe to say that being hit by one or more arrows will on average greatly reduce the chances of winning a fight, if not end it outright (which, if shot in the torso or head, I would expect to hold true at least in a majority of such cases). In fact the page you linked yourself also contains an account of a test in which a simulated arrow did in fact penetrate maille and padding, which it dismisses on somewhat flimsy grounds (using a drop machine and arrowhead rather than shooting a real arrow, which just seems like good scientific practice for the sake of repeatability. The target doesn’t care if the arrow is dropped or shot, as long as it has the same speed, and the penetrated armour doesn’t care what’s behind the thing it is being penetrated by). But then I haven’t read the book they cite and don’t know the details, but the result certainly is not surprising based on tests that I have actually seen.
Well butted mail certainly would be weaker than riveted mail, no doubt about it, but that is irrelevant here as we are not talking about butted mail. Was the example I posted improperly riveted? I saw no evidence of that at all in the video. Are we relying on mere speculation that the maille used in tests was improperly constructed, and just assuming based on that that "real Not if you yourself are also moving to maintain your distance. Why do you presume it would have to be faster? As long as it could prevent the distance from being closed, or at least closed quickly, that seems unnecessary, being equipped with a ranged weapon. Chainmail is present in medieval japan. Actually a whole lot of it. Granted it is often butted, which would be weaker, or split, of which I am unsure. There was riveted maille as well though. But again the fact that this was used, even in high-status armours, and that the bow was a high status weapon suggests neither was ineffective at doing what it was actually used for. Chainmail is already plenty effective if it simply stops cuts. Arrows are ineffective if they cannot penetrate their target (except for the blunt impact I discussed earlier, but that seems like an unlikely strategy to invest that heavily into). commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Yajiri_(yanone)I can see a few arrowhead designs that would appear quite suitable against chainmail, e.g.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Presumably whatever worked would have been used on the battlefield (those more crazy-looking arrowheads are hunting heads and really not representative of war arrows). I do not want to sell the use of chainmail short here! Maille does a great job at protecting someone from cuts as well as most thrusts/punctures, namely those from weapons not specifically suited for armour penetration as well as executed with great force. You literally do not need to worry about your arms getting cut off by a sword when you are wearing long maille sleeves, I’d say that alone is plenty of reason to recommend maille. Thus the ability to shrug of projectiles is not necessary to explain its success. Arrows however would have to show effectiveness against the more common armours of their day, otherwise they would have been ineffective on the battlefield and fallen out of use (as the persians’ apparently were against the greeks, which was not without major historical consequence for the dominant style of warfare used in the eastern mediterranean and middle east for the next few centuries, as you surely know). This is just corroborating what is seen in tests: All the ones I know show war arrows going through mail, often with gambeson underneath, or even a shield in front. Not necessarily always and not necessarily very deeply, but if you get hit by an arrow, shot from a powerful bow and equipped with a suitable head, then it is a good bet you are going to be seriously injured. Sure, the type of head is important. Again however, japanese archery was used against armoured opponents too. If anything, ones that where rather more heavily armoured than the high-medieval european knight, who wasn’t wearing any plate, except for the helmet that is. It probably would have been quite ineffective against the thicker plate in samurai armour, but if arrows had not been effective against maille (which can be used to cover literally everything), then what would justify their prominent use in warfare?
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 20, 2021 20:19:33 GMT 5
I feel like it kind of is, though. As one of the sources I linked to above points out, you could flip this on its head and say the same about maille.
Just to be clear, I'm not denying that a warbow COULD penetrate maille+gambeson and seriously injure or kill the wearer underneath, because it absolutely could; this same source actually mentions some accounts where just that happened. However, I think it's better to think of it in that the success and effectiveness of both arrows and maille on the battlefield were contingent upon the fact that both COULD (but not always) defeat the other (which I think you alluded to earlier). This same source goes into detail on maille vs arrows and has some historical accounts where the former defeats the latter.
What era in Japan's history are you talking about here? If you're talking about plate armor (tosei gusoku) then I'd absolutely agree, but I never pitted a Sengoku period samurai against a knight from the High Middle Ages.
Digressing a little from the arrows vs maille discussion: I also wanted to point out that there were ways of proofing maille against arrows if you were really worried about them. For example, you could wear a padded jack over the maille and it could stop even powerful warbows.
This is what Saladin's biographer wrote about Norman crusaders during the 3rd Crusade who wore thick vests of felt (not clear if it was worn over or under the maille).
There was also something called "double mail", which was some kind of variant of maille that was stronger than the regular type (and it was mentioned in many sources). Now, it's not really clear just what was meant by "double mail" (there are multiple possibilities for what it was), but regardless, it was recommended even against the hardened armor-piercing arrowheads of the Mongols.
Granted, I'm not assuming either of these warriors get prep time and don what they think would be most effective against the other's weapons. I'm also not actually sure if a Norman knight from the 11th century (specifically) would have or do any of these things, since I'm not sure when exactly these practices or maille varieties became common. But later on during the High Middle Ages, if a knight were really worried about arrows penetrating his maille hauberk, he could have at least one of these options available to him.
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Post by theropod on Mar 20, 2021 22:09:37 GMT 5
I feel like it kind of is, though. As one of the sources I linked to above points out, you could flip this on its head and say the same about maille. Just to be clear, I'm not denying that a warbow COULD penetrate maille+gambeson and seriously injure or kill the wearer underneath, because it absolutely could; this same source actually mentions some accounts where just that happened. However, I think it's better to think of it in that the success and effectiveness of both arrows and maille on the battlefield were contingent upon the fact that both COULD (but not always) defeat the other (which I think you alluded to earlier). This same source goes into detail on maille vs arrows and has some historical accounts where the former defeats the latter. Yes sure, neither is a 100% counter to the other, but it’s a question of percentages here. How often and how well will mail stop an arrow, with a suitable head shot straight at it from a powerful bow? Even if the mail does offer significant protection, there’s not that much of a downside to using the bow here, it’s not as if the knight can shoot back and stand a better chance of killing his opponent. On a slightly different note, the horse is still susceptible to arrows, is it not? As for the inference "maille was around for a long time so it must have been good protection against arrows", I don’t really agree. Maille was around for a very long time, sure. And there are really good reasons for that, some I already mentioned. But as I pointed out massed archery tactics using truly powerful bows were not that widespread, and whenever they where they seem to have made quite an impact. Success of a type of armour (just like a specific functional morphology in evolution, one might say) is not just measured in how strong it is, but also various other factors such as cost, ease of use and repair, wearing convenience, and of course how common the threats it was most effective against actually where in the environment it was used in. If archery was not generally employed en masse (because trained archers able to shoot bows powerful enough to penetrate armour reliably where not around in sufficient numbers), there would be less selective pressure on armours to be arrow-proof, making other considerations more important. And then of course maille did get replaced or supplemented by plate repeatedly. In the case of medieval european armours, surely quite a significant improvement in protectiveness would be needed to justify the added weight of wearing plate (at least at first) in addition to maille (yes I know, plate alone is lighter than maille, but initially a coat of plates would simply have been strapped on above an already existing coat of maille).
And then also, there is again a high dependence on the context here, as in the example of the persian wars I discussed previously. Maille may do a fair enough job protecting you from arrows at larger ranges, that doesn’t mean it will still save you at short range. And this is where the horse archery comes in again, because while an archer on foot would of course be very vulnerable faced with charging cavalry at such short range, a mounted archer could maintain that distance and still shoot at his opponent from relatively close range.
Certainly by reinforcing it enough or just layering enough of it you could make maille arrow-resistant to arrows in and of itself, although of course that would make it even heavier (maille already being very heavy). O yoroi is lamellar armour incorporating iron plates, and rather heavy one at that. I’d imagine a solid iron plate should stop an arrow at least as well as any iron ring would, probably more so. Regarding hardening, japanese arrowheads being constructed and hardened using the same techniques as their sword blades would presumable have been very hard. gunbai-militaryhistory.blogspot.com/2017/07/yumi-japanese-bow.html
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Post by Supercommunist on Mar 20, 2021 22:43:03 GMT 5
At agincourt, the longbow men didn't directly kill the knights they killed their horses and left them stranded in a very muddy field which made it easier for hand to hand fighters to bring them down. The counter to this is, if arrows could reliably kill men in mail and gambesons why would people bother wearing them. Armor can be very hot and uncomfortable and the rise of gunpower weapons show that when armor becomes unreliable people are quick to discard them. Mike Loades, the old guy in that gambeson wrote a book and believes that the main purpose of the arrow was to whittle away at soldiers by imparting an unpleasant thump and slowly discouraging them. Obviously killing a fighter would have been ideal but generally they aren't many accounts of men being cutdown by arrows even after being shot at for hours. That isn't to say bows were ineffective. A weapon doesn't neccessarily have to get a lot of kills, according to some sources on average one insurgent dies for every 250,000 bullets shot in modern wars the USA is engaged in and I remember hearing some other absurd statistic that stated for every few thousand artillerly shells lobbed in WW1 or WW2 like two people were killed. www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=2003Suppression fire is a very valuable tool in battle even if it doesn't dispatch a lot of combatants. The thing is, I doubt that the greeks would have been able to equip all their soldiers with bronze armor, given that most armies in the ancient and medieval world struggled to outfit all of their fighters with iron armor, and iron was far more abundant than bronze which required both tin and copper, which were rarely found in the same place. In addition, it slipped my last mind last post but the famously competent swiss mercenaries were not heavily armored but it is noted that even when heavily outnumbered, surrounded by their enemies, peppered with crossbow bolts, and utulizing a relatively immobile battle formation were able to continue fighting on for hours and inficted heavily losses on their enemy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_St._Jakob_an_der_BirsYes I am aware of how much training is required to wield a longbow and how much more effective they are than hunting bows, but that is not saying much as a hunting bow would basically be useless against pretty much any armor. I admittedly am speculating as I am not chainmail expert myself but people more knowledage than myself on the topic seem to think that while chainmail is less suited to protect people from bodkin arrows than other weapons it still usually would have been very good protection against arrows most of them time. The below comes from Mike Loades bow book, very extensive literature on historical bows and crossbows. In addition, he notes that textile armor was very popular among archers. Given that one of the principle threats to an archer would have been return fire, I think this is good evidence that even humble gambesons or jacks were good at protecting people from arrows. The thing with those accounts was meant to highlight the fact that while the arrows were sticking out of them, they did not get through the armor or only barely pierced the flesh. I am guessing the issue with the test is that it is essentially simulating a shot from point blank range which is probably never happening in a real fight. On the subject of horses, it is documented that horses were often equipped with textile armor: Horses belonging to nobility, are known to be killed by archers so textile armor is not invulnerable to arrows but it probably provided good protection.
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Post by theropod on Mar 21, 2021 0:18:14 GMT 5
At agincourt, the longbow men didn't directly kill the knights they killed their horses and left them stranded in a very muddy field which made it easier for hand to hand fighters to bring them down. So you think the only thing the arrows did was kill the horses and that then allowed the 1000 english men-at-arms to defeat at least 10 000 French ones? I am not claiming the arrows would have killed many of the French knights directly, seeing how they were wearing a lot more than just maille (although that goes to show how well killing the horses would have worked out), namely full plate armour. Still, seems unlikely that heavily outnumbered English infantry would have been effective against dismounted knights (both forces being stuck in mud then) if the arrows had little effect on anyone from the French force besides reducing their (already reduced) mobility and maybe giving them some unpleasant bumps. To protect against swords and spears, the most common weapons on the battlefield throughout history, as well as all manner of high-range or glancing hits from projectiles, arrows shot from weaker bows, or to at least (as I acknowledged) provide far better chances of survival (unless that is the injured soldier would have to fight a duel immediately afterwards) than nothing at all when sustaining a full-on hit. Is that not enough? Well people in japan actually weren’t that quick to discard armour as gunpowder weapons came about. Neither where they in Europe actually, plate armour was widely used well into the 17th century, including by soldiers who wielded gunpowder weapons themselves (and here it is actually true that. But armour continued to evolve, and the obvious counter to archery would have been plate armour (whether or not this was specifically a result of archery). On the other hand if maille stops pretty much everything already, why go through all the difficulty of coming up with plate armour, which is actually a lot more complex, hot and inconvenient than maille? Ok so whole wars were supposedly won and lost and whole empires built because one side was discouraged by "unpleasant thumps"? Sorry, but that sounds far-fetched. Unless you are talking about weaker bows used for skirmishing, as was the norm for large parts of history. Well the site I cited in my last post cites arrow wounds as being the most common injury sustained on japanese battlefields, at over 80%. Suppression fire certainly is effective, but works on the principle that people couldn’t just walk through it unscathed, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to suppress anyone. I never said they necessarily would have. In case by "armour" you mean the cuirass/linothorax. They definitely were able to equip all of them with fairly heavy shields though, seeing how that is the basis of their entire form of formation warfare.
Again against a force dominated by heavy cavalry, not primarily archers or crossbowmen. And the accounts of that battle actually go into detail, to emphasize the bravery of the swiss I would imagine, how they were actually mortally wounded. And who said the swiss were poorly armoured? Maybe compared to knights of their day, but there was still an awful lot of plate used (in contemporary artwork this is the case). My guess would be that a swiss halbadier of the 15th century would likely be a lot more resistant to arrow-fire than an 11th century knight, as at least the former’s vitals are fairly well covered in plate. So why would you use a war bow if it was barely any better? Why do they think that if tests do not show it? I’m not sure how this supports your point, as this also says that mail will probably not stop an arrow shot straight at it, only slow it down or maybe stop glancing blows. Not necessarily, especially not in the european armies this is referring to. So again, why would you have 5/6 of your army use a primary weapon that could kill barely anyone on the battlefield, and then win? Why not? Which was apparently not effective at preventing them from being shot, not even at Agincourt when armour was far more advanced.
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