War links

[erudito]

On longbows. On arrowheads. On bows.

Performance tests of a Japanese WWII tank.

Wondering why victory in the Cold War is not talked about more. (The 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolutions is coming up.)

What do you get for winning a quiz in Somalia?
The winners -- a team from Farjano district -- were given a first prize consisting of one AK-

Comments

[assassinus]

Yes, my reading also says that Longbows did not penetrate mid - late 15th c armour

[findalexh]

They couldn't penetrate the padding worn under the armour...

Arrows arrive more slowly than a cricket ball from Brett Lee, with a whole lot less weight.

[thorfinn]

Your average longbow fired arrow may not penetrate full plate armour, no.

But not everyone on the battlefield is wearing plate - I'd hazard a guess that very very few people on the battlefield were wearing full plate. It's not exactly a cheap item available to the common soldier... Your warhorse is certainly not fully covered either, and if you're wearing full plate, you're not walking more than a short distance before you fall down and are unable to move, so if your horse is down, so are you.

And a freak arrow through the eyehole will still kill you, or an interesting hit on a weak joint can penetrate and injure... and when you're hit with a couple of hundred arrows, odds are good that something bad is going to happen.

[thorfinn]

I'm not saying they're a great anti-heavy-cavalry weapon - that's clearly not the case. :-) But stick a block of pikes in front of the archers, and you're pretty much set for defense, since the cavalry can't reach the archers effectively, and the archers can nail anyone else approaching, provided they don't run out of arrows.

[assassinus]

English archers didn't think that arrows could penetrate padded jacks which were the cheapest form of armour available. The French crown has left us specific details of arrow proof jacks to be worn by troops. There is no surviving evidence than any longbow arrow ever penetrated plate armour. There is evidence that mail provided pretty good protection against arrows. There is plenty of evidence that padded jacks, gambesons and akertons were, while not arrow proof, pretty effective at stopping arrows. When nobles are killed, like Lord Dacres before Towton, we often read things like "removed his bevor that he may drink" in the description of his death. Horses were well protected over the frontal arc by mid 14th. Knights were more or less invulnerable over the frontal arc by the mid 14th. I've handled period arrows and period Hundsklugels and bascinets, there are no holes of sufficient size to let an arrow through