Due to fallout from an incident on the discussion forum I was unable to post for the whole of last week; I apologise.
We also have to account for troop formation density, and the fact that in your mind longbows are basically railguns so a hit to the armour still counts.
And no, this was not the situation created by crossbows and longbows in the middle ages, infantry still existed and made up the bulk of most armies, even during battles on open fields.
Infantry is a term that covers archers, light infantry, heavy infantry and pikemen. By heavy infantry I mean heavily armoured footmen with shields, think roman legionaries as a pure version of that and Greek infantry as a form of hybrid between heavy infantry and pikemen, with the pikemen side of things prevailing over times (Macedonian Phalangites vs hoptiles) as cavalry goes into greater use.
I figured I should source my arguments, since if you try to do the same you might realise how wrong you are.
If I had said what you think I said I would have been wrong but I did not.
As the middle ages progressed (and beyond) heavy infantry which prevails in the earlier middle ages (so viking/sakon infantry with their axes) are phased out, infantry tend to be a mixture of pikemen and archers.
Good part about sourcing your arguments is that you can find out when you're wrong; the pope did outlaw crossbows (or rather the use of them against christians) because of ease of use and armour penetration, you were right about that. However if you look up the dates, that law was made in 1139, and the first proper plate armour since the fall of western Rome was made in 1420 (presumably this is why DF plate armour seems very hoplite-y). The armour penetration was likely in reference to maille armour, which, when unriveted was totally penetratable by more or less anything stabby, and when riveted was still suceptible to quite a few ranged weapons.
Perhaps this is because plate armour was invented to counter the effectiveness of longbows/crossbows at penetrating the armour used before? It was invented for use by armoured knights on horseback, not for use by the kind of heavy infantry that prevailed in earlier eras. When in the later middle ages they needed such infantry, they tended to dismount their knights to fight on foot rather than having a dedicated force of heavy infantry as they did in earlier eras.
In some kind of alternative history where gunpowder did not exist it is conceivable to think of mass-produced platemail equipped heavy infantry coming dominate the battlefield, but they never had the opportunity to make plate armour cheap enough to equip massed formations with it before they had guns. The question is did they have such armour armour at Agincourt, I would probably bet on this *not* being the case, at least for the majority of the knights.
As for your actual argument in this post, it entirely relies on your railgun long/crossbows being real, since I completely agree that horses charging at you will reach you fast. I'll just leave this here.
I have already demonstrated with historical evidence that longbows were quite capable of killing heavy cavalry before said cavalry reached them. This is pretty scary since such troops are the rock-paper-scissors answer to archers in all previous eras.
If you're strong enough to use a longbow properly they take the same amount of time as any other bow, the motion is the same, the distance you pull the string back is the same, it just takes more power. They did tire out faster than people using lower poundage bows, obviously, and would have paced themselves so they didn't exhaust themselves before they exhausted their arrow supply, but it was a negligable difference, especially when compared to the massive range advantage they had compared to the lower poundage bows.
With a firing rate of three – five volleys per minute they were however no match for the English and Welsh longbow men who could fire ten – twelve arrows in the same amount of time
That was English & Welsh longbowmen vs Genoese crossbowmen at the Battle of Crécy. 5-6 seconds to pluck an arrow out of the ground, load it, draw, and loose as a volley with all the other archers, is not slow by any means. I can't find a figure for other bows, but they'd have to be pretty damn fast to have their speed be a big advantage over the longbow
As for the armour piercing comment, I refer back to the link in the previous section.
The more power it takes to pull the bowstring back, the slower the rate of fire is.
I already covered the issue of the differential rate of fire of the two weapons. The reason that people use crossbows is that the materials needed to make longbows are very specific, while crossbows can be made out of most materials. The French did not have access to the needed woods to make longbows, while the English did in large quantities. This gets back to the basic problem of this thread, why have crossbows?
I provided a source. If you think my source is wrong, provide me with a more reliable and up-to-date one, rather than simply making the baseless claim that my source is wrong.
I spent the last several pages demonstrating why your source is wrong. The way that warfare works in the ancient world points very much to the absence of longbows and crossbows, because the introduction of such weapons revolutionizes warfare by obsoleting the heavy infantry that dominate the ancient world.
Or maybe it's because Greek armies had lots of training, enough for the crossbow's advantage of being easy to use to be irrelevant, because plate armour actually works.
You cannot train people to not die when you shoot them with missiles that can go through their armour.
Here's a video of faulty replica plate armour still working against functioning replicas of crossbows from the century after the armour was used. Makes some dents and small holes, but never actually hits the "body" underneath until the plate is removed. Also note that the crossbows have those metallic limbs that you claimed wouldn't work.
The first arrow to hit the target does not need to go through, only one does; the armour does not fix itself. But as we already discussed, plate armour was invented to counter the crossbows and longbows that obsoleted earlier forms of armour. It was invented too late before gunpowder to ever have been mass-produced.
In rock-paper-scissors, there is no situation in which scissors turn into rock, so already you've gone against your own analogy, but there's also some other questions it raises, like what happens when your cavalry has bows? If infantry is rock and cavalry is scissors, why were cavalry charges into infantry formations so common? Where does siege equipment fit in? Since numbers afford an advantage in warfare, how many pairs of scissors does it take to cut a rock?
It does if the environment is simply swapping one role for another. In effect a heavy cavalryman bogged down in the mud is closer to a heavy infantryman than to a cavalryman in normal situations, so we can determine that heavy infantry are completely countered by archers at this point.
We actually need these kind of scenarios because people tend to avoid obviously suicidal confrontations. We are not going to have a heavy infantry VS archers fight once the archers can reliably penetrate their armour, since nobody will actually order such a charge at that point anyway.
noun
- the act of fortifying or strengthening.
- something that fortifies or protects.
- the art or science of constructing defensive military works.
- Often fortifications. military works constructed for the purpose of strengthening a position; a fort
Stakes driven into the ground to protect against cavalry charges, under these definitions, are indeed fortifications as they are constructed for the purpose of strengthening a position. Small fortifications when compared to most others, but fortifications none the less. Boats on the other hand are not built for defence. Some boats do have fortifications on them, but Rome used polyremes, rather than defensive fortifications, they had offensive rams that were used to puncture the other ship's hull and sink it.
Stop quoting the dictionary at me when I have already clarified that by fortifications I mean things that actually prevent the enemy from making physical contact at all without special equipment. So a boat is very much like a castle wall in this setup, you cannot engage the folk on the other boat without special equipment (a ramp to do so). Yes the degree to which different boats take advantage of this varies, but all boats however have a primitive function as fortifications in the sense we are talking about, not in the dictionary definition.
the trireme was essentially a ship built for ramming
Also why are you bringing up the testudo again? I agreed with you, it's used for sieges, because shields are quite good at stopping arrows, but the troop is left very open to flanking due to poor visibility, and has little to no oppourtunity for retaliation to melee attack without breaking formation.
Shields are not inherently good at stopping arrows simply because they are shields. If the romans had tried to use the testudo formation at something like Agincourt, they would have been shot down because the arrows would have simply gone through their shields. The formation's very effectiveness derives from the lack of armour penetration of contemporary missiles.
I wasn't the one making claims though. You said that there was a thing that definitely never happened, I asked how you knew that, explaining that absence from Roman records isn't a reliable way to draw that conclusion, then you called me a conspiracy theorist. The burden of evidence lies firmly upon you.
No it doesn't, because this is a double negative. That Romans do not have longbows is a negative claim, you would normally have to prove that they do. However for them to *not* have longbows when we have proof that cave men had longbows, the negative implies a positive claim (that the human race at some point forgot how to make longbows). I however also would presumably have to prove this claim, but it is a positive claim (something that happened) implied by a negative state being so. You cannot prove they had longbows and I cannot prove that the event when longbows were forgotten happened either.
So we have actually run across an unusual situation where the burden of proof does not work.
Because war is not rock-paper-scissors, good archers don't always beat heavy infantry.
If the heavy infantry has no archers, artillery or cavalry backing them up then yes they do. Because the heavy infantry cannot catch the archers and they can always get more arrows, especially if said archers are on horseback. Even if it takes a thousand arrows to take down a single guy, they will win since they can always get more arrows as long as their enemies cannot catch them. The problem for ancient archers is that the Greeks and Romans did have cavalry.
They did not use bronze upper body armour at this time, but that of leather or linen
'Clever' people are actually gullible enough to believe that was actually so?
Will modern intellectuals believe anything however ridiculous?
Since Persian soldiers are equipped with scale armour, the idea that the Athenians won at Marathon wearing armour made entirely of linen by their usual hoplite tactics is insanity.
the Greeks' wooden shields (sometimes covered with a very thin layer of bronze) and bronze helmets deflected the arrows...
...In 1939, archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, excavating at Thermopylae, found large numbers of Persian bronze arrowheads on Kolonos Hill
Thermopylae had been a key strategic point and battlefield for centuries (Herodotus backs me up). The bronze arrows are from an earlier battlefield from the bronze age fought at that location. People want it to be from THE Thermopylae, but there were lots of them.
So what you're saying is; the harder the material, the less it deforms from external pressure. Congrats, you have successfully described hardness.
Not just that. The important thing is that a harder material takes less damage from an equally hard material given the same force than a softer material does an equally soft material. It is why punching people is so effective.
Your argument still relies on the idea that the longbow provides enough force to pierce plate, which I already provided evidence against. Sure it'd probably do more damage to bronze plate, cause steel is harder than bronze, but the steel was literally just scratched by a close range shot. At best, from the same range, I'd wager bronze plate might get slightly dented. Feel free to test it out, or find someone doing so online.
The plate armour used in the very late middle ages is considerably better than the plate armour used by ancient greeks; it was also invented to counter such weapons. There is also the issue that we are using modern metallurgy to make ancient armour, the steel we are using is of better quality that was used back then. We need sufficiently rubbish steel to test this, since modern steel is just too good.
They had a lot of archers, yes, but that wasn't all they had, and they certainly didn't hastily arm their archers with melee weapons and send them in. Some lessons in Persian army composition:
Xenophon (Cyropaedia 6.4.1; 7.1.2) describes the guard of Cyrus the Great as having bronze breastplates and helmets, while their horses wore bronze chamfrons and poitrels together with shoulder pieces which also protected the rider’s thighs. Herodotus, instead, describes their armament as follows: wicker shields covered in leather, short spears, quivers, swords or large daggers, slings, bow and arrow. Underneath their robes they wore scale armour coats
Cyrus is long dead by this point, he ended up as a head inside a waterskin full of blood when he invaded the wrong people's land. We are talking about Darius and Xerxes which come several generations later. Again the Persians rose to power when bronze was still the basis of warfare, this is why they had a force that emphasized archery so much, the problem was that the Greeks equipment better suited the iron age and the Persian tactics were obsolete.
I am basing my understanding of the Persian armaments off Herodotus, whose works I have access to and have read. Bows and arrows are described as part of their troops basic equipment, so yes they are archers. Said archers are also capable of fighting in melee as (fairly) light infantry. So yes the Spartans were fighting archers at Thermopylae in melee combat. It is just that the Persian archers were to a mediocre degree equipped and trained for such combat, which I guess is why they also won eventually.
Not as well equipped for melee as the Greeks, sure, but certainly not hastily converted archers.
Also they were both still using bronze, I've already given you a source for that. Their bronze helmets and bronze-plated shields still protected them from the arrows, so bronze isn't as flimsy as you think, nor were people so quick to abandon it when a cool new metal was discovered.
Granted they were archers with some melee capability (and some light armour). But archery was clearly the main use of Persian soldiers not fighting in close combat.
The cool new metal is both lighter AND stronger than bronze. There is no reason to use bronze whatsoever as soon as steel is available at a reasonable cost. As a Dwarf Fortress player you should know that this is the case. That means that they are not using bronze shields at this point, they using steel shields and steel everything. Because they are not stupid enough to jeopardize their lives by using metals that are inferior in every relevant sense.
