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Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 12, 2022, 05:36:26 AM »

The more modern musket men of 16th-17th century was way more effective in general than one armed with bows. A musket with a bayonet also was a very good close combat weapon. The shock from massive fire of the musket should not also be underestimated. All this when you factor in the training and everything made firearms allot more attractive than using bows.
Posted by: GodEmperor
« on: June 10, 2022, 02:53:55 PM »

Its a well known conundrum of industrialized military - For X people to be a competent fighting force you need 5 times X people supplying them and then 5 times the 5 times X people producing supplies, fuel, ammo etc.
Posted by: serger
« on: May 12, 2022, 04:12:57 AM »

I'm an owner and have an experience of training with "historical" bow / eastern shooting style. That's only a training bow, not so strong to be a weapon really, although obviously strong enough to kill an unarmoured man up to 50 meters or so with 1-2 shots.
Aside of arms strength that's also a point of finger roughness - it's better to use archer's thumb rings; have these also, my thumb just isn't even nearly rough enough even for this weak bow.

As for building a skill with this Easterns style archery - it's apparently even harder comparing to Western (English) style, because Eastern style was an adaptation for mobile combat archery (horsemen and mobile light infantry), shooting on the move or with very short stops. It's not an easy trade, obviously it's better to train from the early childhood to achieve a sound level of skill without being some inbred unicum. Yet even on the early stage of training you can catch some strange feeling, I just cannot describe without obviously irrelevant words, such as singing or liberation. That's great and I regret there is no opportunity now to practice with a bow.
Posted by: misanthropope
« on: May 11, 2022, 06:29:20 PM »

suffocating the enemy under several feet of money, it's the American Way
Posted by: skoormit
« on: May 11, 2022, 02:49:02 PM »

815 MILLION pounds in todays equivalent to field all the arrows for Agincourt.

If nothing else, this number makes me feel a bit better about occasionally throwing downrange, in the span of a few minutes, more than a quarter of my entire empire's annual economic output.
Posted by: Arwyn
« on: May 11, 2022, 12:53:29 AM »

Just to clarify my earlier post, that was 815 MILLION pounds in todays equivalent to field all the arrows for Agincourt. In comparison the London police budget is around 66 million pounds per annum. Thats a LOT of arrows.

As far as making them, production was a massive problem for the English. The crown actually had to sponsor "goose gatherings" every few years to get enough feathers to fletch arrows. There was a the medieval equivalent of a military industrial complex, just to supply the English army arrows.

Maintaining the longbows in the army extended to foreign policy as well. The English started levying port taxes on ships coming into to English ports that required 2 bowstaves per ton of cargo. By the 16th century that was up to 10.

By the end of the 16th century the English appetite for yew had rendered the tree almost extinct in Germany, and the English were going as far afield as the Baltic to try and find yew wood. Ironically the largest surviving stocks of yew were in France, who was in no conceivable way going to let the English have any of their yew wood, as they had experienced it on the receiving end more than a few to many times at that point.
Posted by: Migi
« on: May 10, 2022, 05:25:15 PM »

I think there are lots of factors which add up to longbows being amazing weapons when deployed en-mass, but with a number of large strategic costs and limitations which led to their demise.
On top of that, the heaviest bows took a great deal of time to train up to use. To punch through increasingly heavy armor, took increasingly heavy draw weight bows. To use the top end heavy bows, the archer literally had to be trained for years to build up the strength to use them. They were so heavy that it literally left skeletal changes on the archers, and the heavy ossification that resulted took years to build up.
The training and physiology has been mentioned above, but I think is one of the more important.
If you want to field longbowmen, you need to start training about a decade before the war.
Your pre-war training rate is a hard cap on your supply of new recruits for the whole war, whereas with crossbows or muskets you can draft people and have a functional unit in a matter of months.
Even if you win every battle and don't lose any longbowmen to direct combat, you'll still lose them over time from disease, desertion, or accidents. If your training rate isn't high enough to counter attrition, you'll lose strength over time. If you do lose a battle or skirmish, any longbowmen you lose are more or less irreplaceable.


Another thing I remember reading that producing arrows was a bottleneck for English armies.
It's a multi-step, multi-material process, you need an arrowhead, a shaft, and the fletching. The fletching needs glue, a protected space to dry, and time. I'm not sure to what extent archers made their own because of this. I'm not sure if it would be all that difficult to mass produce them compared with gunpowder, but transporting the arrows would take much more space, as others have mentioned. Volume is just as important as a limiting factor as mass when considering logistics, even in the modern world.
Mass production and industrialisation were concepts that developed over time, so I wonder if arrow production would have been a non-issue in later times.
Posted by: Demetrious
« on: May 10, 2022, 04:45:37 PM »

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Everything you just said was spot-on. The note about skeletal changes in longbow archers we have actual historical evidence for - the English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 and was well-preserved in the bottom mud. When she was raised in 1982 she provided an incredible wealth of archaeological finds, and one of them was the skeletal deformations of many of the crewmen that you mentioned; mirroring a lifetime of practice with heavy-draw bows.

The longbowman I was talking had a medieval war bow with a 140 lb draw, plus a modern competition bow, which had a much lighter draw - might have been about 35 lb. The technique used to draw the two bow types was completely different, because you couldn't draw the war bow using a modern competition stance. The modern bow was an upright stance, whereas the war bow was almost a rotational draw with his back taking most of the weight which ended up with a forward-leaning stance and a bent leading knee. Totally different. I tried drawing the war bow and couldn't get any even close drawing it fully.

That's amazing. I've been trying to get into archery myself with a home-made 30 pound bow (it turns out that PVC plastic is a thermoformable materiel, so with a little effort and a campfire you can make some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVid9WVMSO4"[/youtube]really incredible bows.) The same mad genius who did that has also demonstrated a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYp2rDeatS8"[/youtube]]120 pound capable bow made of PVC that I've wanted to try. I had no idea I'd have to modify my drawstroke so much for that - I had better get back to the gym sooner rather than later!
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: May 10, 2022, 04:13:34 PM »

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Everything you just said was spot-on. The note about skeletal changes in longbow archers we have actual historical evidence for - the English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 and was well-preserved in the bottom mud. When she was raised in 1982 she provided an incredible wealth of archaeological finds, and one of them was the skeletal deformations of many of the crewmen that you mentioned; mirroring a lifetime of practice with heavy-draw bows.

The longbowman I was talking had a medieval war bow with a 140 lb draw, plus a modern competition bow, which had a much lighter draw - might have been about 35 lb. The technique used to draw the two bow types was completely different, because you couldn't draw the war bow using a modern competition stance. The modern bow was an upright stance, whereas the war bow was almost a rotational draw with his back taking most of the weight which ended up with a forward-leaning stance and a bent leading knee. Totally different. I tried drawing the war bow and couldn't get even close to drawing it fully.
Posted by: Demetrious
« on: May 10, 2022, 03:55:40 PM »

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Everything you just said was spot-on. The note about skeletal changes in longbow archers we have actual historical evidence for - the English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 and was well-preserved in the bottom mud. When she was raised in 1982 she provided an incredible wealth of archaeological finds, and one of them was the skeletal deformations of many of the crewmen that you mentioned; mirroring a lifetime of practice with heavy-draw bows.

The only thing I can add is that crossbows had similar problems - crossbows were very accurate and very powerful, and additionally didn't require that built-up strength to use, nor the experience to get the most out of the accuracy. Unfortunately the mechanisms that made that possible (especially for the heavier crossbows that used winches requiring gears/sprockets) were expensive to produce, and quarrels have most of the logistical/cost issues innate to arrows. (Note that melting and casting lead is trivial compared to making arrows - you have to balance the shaft, glue on the fletching just-so so it imparts a spin, etc. It's not difficult, but it's much harder to scale up to make lots and lots of ammo. Arwyn's logistical comparison via cartload is very informative vis a vis why early firearms quickly found favor with many armies even well before technological advancement had pushed the power and accuracy of the nascent technology past the peak of the preceding mature technology.

So, I was pondering afterwards that if the longbow was more accurate, with a higher rate of fire, why (strange as it might seem) was the British Army not using longbows at the Battle of Waterloo. I can think of only three reason, but it would be interesting to hear alternative opinions

Training: I suspect that training someone to shoot accurately with a longbow is a lot harder than training them with a musket
Logistics: You can transport a lot more bullets than arrows given the same transport capacity.
Damage: Not completely convinced on one this one. Arrows have a 'muzzle velocity' of about 120 mph (I asked) whereas the Brown Bess is a 0.75" calibre firing a 1oz ball with a much higher muzzle velocity. Conversely, the war arrows are about three ounces (I asked that too) so the kinetic energy on impact is not going to be too far out.

Anyway, in conclusion, I though it might be interesting if logistics was partly the reason that the British Army didn't use longbows at Waterloo :)

About a decade ago I was trying hard to develop my marksmanship skills in my spare time, (as we are wont to do here in Yankeeland) and was frustrated about hitting a seeming wall in my skill, past which I couldn't advance. A more knowledgeable friend gave me a wink and suggested I try a better, more expensive brand of ammunition. To my surprise, my "groupings" (average miss distance from the bulls-eye) improved considerably. Before then I had been suffering (as many shooters do) from a blind faith in the quality of modern manufacturing technology; I'd had no idea that even modern weaponry can have as much mechanical deviation, from round to round, as it actually did. This had hindered my progress as I couldn't tell how much deviation was the firearm's fault, and how much was mine. The angular deviation of a projectile from the intended point of aim is measured in minutes-of-angle; 1/60th of a degree, which equals 1 inch of deviation at 100 yards. (Naturally, some prefer to use milliradians instead. :) ) It's a way of formally measuring the average deviation of the projectiles from your weapon.

Once I grasped this, I remembered a statistic I'd read many, many years ago - that the English longbow could put an arrow clean through the arrow-loop of a besieged castle, but it would require six shots to do so, on average. Being young at the time I hadn't grasped the significance - longbow archers in the Medieval era were true marksmen who were perfectly aware that they could "out-shoot their weapon" and even thought of accuracy in terms of averages just as modern marksmen do. Thus, they'd be familiar with the concept of "minute-of-Deer" accuracy espoused by some American recreational hunters - i.e. there's a non-insignificant cost investment required to acquire or modify to the "sub-MOA" standard, and for many applications it is in excess of requirements. Massed volley fire against enemy soldiers marching in ranks is certainly another example.

But of course it's not always so simple - as the arrow loop example shows, sieges are definitely one place where the more accurate weapon will pay dividends. See also the American Revolution, where the fabled "American longrifle" made good account of itself as a sniper's weapon against British officers, but who's excessive length and slow-loading (due to the rifling gripping the projectile as one tried to ram it home) simply made it inferior to muskets in mass combat, which reloaded faster and had only an area target to contend with. Ranged combat in Antiquity was usually massed shooters raining projectiles on men marching in ranks as well, and had the benefit of being hilariously cheap - rocks could be used for ammo, the sling was but a cord, and you can teach a man to hurl a rock in the general direction of the enemy, and what angle corresponds to what rough range, in an afternoon. And yet the slingers of the Balearic islands were fabled for their skill and much sought after as mercenaries; it was reputed that their children weren't allowed their supper until they could strike the bread loaf with their sling. In other words, they were renowned for their accuracy, which is of especial note as a sling is very easy to learn to use, but very hard to master, to gain real accuracy with against a single point target. Clearly, accuracy was of some concern to armies even in Antiquity.

So while the brutal realities of economies-of-scale and logistics will always have their say, the finer points of marksmanship have mattered as well, and our forebears were every bit as knowledgeable about them as we are. Longbows lingered on for a good while even after gunpowder assumed a primary role in war and it's not hard to see why.
Posted by: Arwyn
« on: May 10, 2022, 01:15:16 PM »

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Longbows were built by specialized craftsman, and took years to go from start to finish, from curing to the actual construction. Added to that, only certain portions of the yew tree were usuable for bows, which required a lot of wood, but left a lot of wasted wood. This in turn pushed up demand and the constant demand for yew wood was literally stripping Europe bare of yew during the middle ages. For example in the space of a hundred years, the price of bowstaves rose from 2 pounds pe hundred bowstaves to 16 pounds per hundred. That was an astronomical increase in cost and not all of those bowstaves wound up being usable bows.

On top of that, the heaviest bows took a great deal of time to train up to use. To punch through increasingly heavy armor, took increasingly heavy draw weight bows. To use the top end heavy bows, the archer literally had to be trained for years to build up the strength to use them. They were so heavy that it literally left skeletal changes on the archers, and the heavy ossification that resulted took years to build up.

Conversely, 100 arquebuses cost double that, at 32 pounds, but anyone could be trained to use them in a matter of a few weeks, and gunners could be rated as proficient in several months time. One top of that, guns were much less fragile than bows, and even when broken, the barrel could be restocked and put back into service, which happened quite often. Even guns that were "shot out" were often rebored and put back into service

Compounding that, guns were far less expensive to feed. Led was cheap and plentiful, and most gunners would melt and cast their own bullets from common lead. A standard load for most gunners was 20 to 25 bullets and powder charges, and that load ran about a pound of lead, and a pound of powder and gear. A longbowman carried around 10 arrows for the same weight, and the arrows were bulkier to boot.

For early 16th century armies, that bulk and weight was a major factor. A typical horse or ox drawn cart could hold roughly 4 tons, or 8000 pounds of cargo. A cargo load of led shot for 500 gunners for a standard engagement was about 1000 pounds of led and powder. In simplistic terms, that was eight engagements for a unit of 500. One top of that, there was 2 pounds of food per man per day in general rations carried. That amounted to another oxcart for that unit for a days rations, on top of what was carried by the soldier. So, roughly a bit over a week of rations per cart. So for a month of campaigning, it would be usual for 5 carts of supplies to maintain a unit of 500 gunners. However, those same carts requited fodder for the draft animals, around 20 pounds per day per animal. That amounted to another cart in fodder for a month, or another wagon. So, six wagons for a month.


Compare that to a similar unit of longbowmen. Longbowman would be expected to expend 60 to 72 arrows per engagement. That is roughly one barrel of arrows per man, per engagement. That results in around 250 barrels of arrows carried to supply the unit of 500 per engagement. That was roughly 20 cartloads of arrows. This sounds like a lot, but for context the estimates are that the English had almost a million arrows at Agincourt. The cost to supply his archers with arrows for that campaign cost Henry the V 815 pounds sterling in todays money. He had to take out loans to finance that campaign.

In short, guns presented a massively compelling financial argument for most nations, and had the further advantage of cutting down the supply chain for trained soldiers. While more expensive per piece, they were far less expensive to actually use.

Needless to say, from a purely logistics standpoint, guns presented a MUCH cheaper logistical chain than longbows.
Posted by: db48x
« on: May 09, 2022, 07:57:18 PM »

I’ve heard that it was training as well. In fact, training is apparently the reason France didn’t use the longbow at all during the 100–years war, during which they had plenty of time to adopt the technology if they had wanted to. The reason I heard (I’ll have to find the book though), was that the longbow took so much training that the English government had to mandate that everyone’s leisure time be devoted to archery in order to have adequate manpower. The French could easily have done the same, but it seems that France was a lot less stable at the time and arming literally every citizen didn’t seem very appealing to the French. Also, France always had more Yew trees than England, so most of England’s longbows were built from Yew bought from France.

However, I don’t think that logistics matters at all here. As you pointed out, the weight of ammunition is not very different (a 3oz arrow vs a 1oz musket ball plus powder and wadding). The really important figure is the number of days of fighting compared to the number of days of marching. An army could march for a month before actually fighting anybody, and each man needs 2lbs of food every single day without fail. Every soldier can carry a few pounds of ammunition with them and the survivors will probably have some left over once the war is over. The same cannot be said for food. It wasn’t until WWII before every man in the army could be fed entirely from food shipped in from home.

As a side note, horses require 20 lbs per day of forage. You can definitely only send cavalry to places with grass and hay ready to feed them.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: May 09, 2022, 11:31:54 AM »

From what I remember of what was covered at the British Infantry museum , it was training. A good archer needed years of training and usually started off young, they also needed to be fairly fit and have good nutrition to get the musculature, an infantry man at Waterloo needed very little training, although British infantry did tend to be long service the continental armies did not to the same degree. This also factors into numbers the size of the British army in 1815 is a lot bigger than the medieval armies and it was easier to train the number of musket armed infantry than archers. Also of course musket armed infantry by the time of waterloo did not need protection by pikeman or heavy infantry they could stand off cavalry on their own while archers needed at least some protection against cavalry.
The tipping point in England seems to be the civil war when large armies were raised quickly from urban populations they could become effective Pike and Shot units in a few months while training them as archers would not have been finished before the war ended.
Posted by: kilo
« on: May 09, 2022, 10:52:11 AM »

--- Armor Penetration as well. Guns went through mail a helluva lot more readily than arrows.

There are different points for arrows and bolts depending on the target you intend to engage. For thin armor plate they were using this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodkin_point
The rectangular shape lets the plate rip in the corners instead of stretching the material, which would happen when using a point with a circular cross section.
There were the pointy field points for mail, which would enter through a single ring of the armor and broad heads for hunting.
Posted by: xenoscepter
« on: May 09, 2022, 10:04:44 AM »

 --- Armor Penetration as well. Guns went through mail a helluva lot more readily than arrows.