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[Pvt. Pirate]

Jesterhell, the last vid convinced me and changed my mind about the topic, but i still think that crossbows and bows aren't represented even arbitrarily close to realistic.
Of course armour was not useless, but most chainmail and even some plate doesn't withstand a bodkin-arrow.
especially if you take into account that warbows were >120lbs.

in conclusion to ScholaGladiatora's video, i'd say a ☼Adamantine Platearmour☼ would withstand most attacks as even a ☼Steel Kingsmaille☼ with a ☼Llama-wool Gambeson☼ will reduce an arrows impact to the result of a punch with a ☼dwarven fist☼

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Stationary crossbows are siege weapons called "ballista" and not infantry-carried weapons.

still none of the arguments stand against the fact that shooting a crossbow doesn't require even 1% of the skill and bodycontrol needed to shoot a longbow. it's just aim and pull the trigger and reload. the "archer"s skill doesn't in any way influence the force of the impact.
while only a skilled archer can shoot certain bows and without enough skill, he can't get enough force into the arrow, thus reducing the potential damage dealt.

[Grimlocke]

The 'questionable garage test' really does not do either the bows, crossbows or the armor any justice. A thin, flat sheet of mild steel strapped to a hay bale is not an analog for a knight, its an analog for a hay bale wearing a thin sheet of mild steel. They are the historian's equivalent of the 'Perfectly spherical horse in a vacuum'.

So, as my part in correcting common misconceptions and myths:

Plate armor was pretty much impervious to both crossbows and bows when shot at frontally. Actual historic accounts (ie Agincourt) make this pretty obvious, as do the more legitimate practical tests.

Mail still had a pretty impressive resistance to arrows and bolts, as can be figured from accounts of crusaders being turned into walking pincushions by their Saracen enemies. And contrary to popular belief, the Turks had fairly weighty bows of their own, of similar construction of other nomadic, central Asian tribes such as the Huns, Cumans and Mongols.

Nobody would have bothered with armor if it was as useless as modern media makes it look.

The same goes for the endless crossbows vs bows thing. They were both used extensively. If either of them was crap, they would not have bothered them.

Bows generally hit harder at long range as the arrows have a lower front profile/mass ratio, but long range shooting against armored targets was not really done in the first place as it was a waste of ammunition. If possible, archers went for the poor sods with poor armor, if not they waited for the enemy to get closer and shot at them with flat trajectories, not the piss-arch you often see in movies. That still didn't kill them, but still hurts and demoralizes them.

One thing about crossbows I haven't seen anyone bring up: They are quite a bit more convenient to use behind cover. A crossbowman can reload behind a crenelation, wall or pavise and then only needs to stick out his head and a bit of his shoulder to shoot. This is a very big advantage in long-term shootouts like sieges, which also happened to be significantly more common in the middle ages than field battles. Rate of fire becomes a lot less important when your battle can last more than a year, and your supply of ammunition is finite.

...

To get back to something more relevant to the actual game, raw modding hasn't gotten me all that far. All the things like damage fall-off, accuracy, rate of fire, skill scaling and AI behavior are completely inaccessible with the raws. Getting the game to differentiate between hunting and war bows/crossbows has also not gone well for me.

I'm hoping DFhack and future version of DF can get a bit further with this.

[Pvt. Pirate]

the garagetest is a very bad joke.

and the "labratory test" doesn't even state the power of the "bow" they used.
also the arrow swings during flights and that swinging unloads a lot of additional power upon impact.
so just punching an arrow at the target at approximately typical arrow flight speed isn't in any way a good representation for this topic.

the two reenactors shooting at the plate on the haybale is bad too, as the armour is uniform 2mm.
also their bows aren't as strong as warbows were (120lbs and stronger, shooting arrows with 1inch barreled shafts).
it's a nice reenactment armour and the two are good archers though.

ScholaGladiatoria explained this very well.
Most dead who wore such masterly crafted armour were hit on said armours weakpoints, at the gaps inbetween the armourparts or on unprotected areas of the body. others wore either bad armour or no armour at all.

even if bows and crossbows could penetrate the armour, it would still be worn for the melee fights that wouldn't just vanish from the battlefields.

[perkel]

Ahh crosbow vs bow thread. That debate is like years old frankly.

First of there is no such a thing as DEFINITIVE armor, crossbow and bow.
Each of those evolved and were made for different things.

So let's go to nitty gritty.

Bows generally are a bit shit toward penetrating armor because their main advantage is range. Problem is that main force comes from moment when arrow leaves bow not when arrow falls from sky. That initial momentum is when arrow has the most penetration not when it starts to fall.

People used bows in warfare because momentum of falling arrow is still enough to kill people who are lightly armored, it could even penetrate chainmail at distance. Still bows use big arrows which easily loose force over flight which is why warbows had to be really really strong to be effective.

Now longbowmen were quite special bunch of people. They had to be trained basically from youth and they were deadly on domestic ground. Problem is that outside of domestic grounds and squable between lords they weren't really that effective. Sure they had quite few successes in 100 years war but they came before they worst looses. What is more important we have actually accounts of new type of armor that was basically arrow proof and italian mecrinaries wearing that armor (one of first uses of milan tempered steel) basically decimated brits ranks and from that moment war was basically lost.

Enter the crossbow. Easy to pick and shoot, you don't need to train whole life to be deadly, it shoots almost straight and with proper crossbow you can punch hole in any armor. I think only coat of plates from early middle ages designed for direct lance hits maybe would have chance to survive it. And what is best you can fill reapeat shoot problem with just more people.

Someone rightly pointed out that crossbow has shorter stroke thus it requires much higher draw force but forgot to mention that bolt or quarrel was much lighter than proper war arrow. They were basically darts compared to war arrows.
So arrow having same amount of force vs crossbow is just false. Naturally one does have to take into account that crossbows and bows had different sizes strokes and designs but it is frankly inpossible for any bow to reach 1000 pound siege crossbow which was essentially hand balista and required complicated mechanism and two people to properly operate and they could punch hole in any armor old or even from modern steel.

This is where it gets tricky. Bows having less force overall isn't a problem. Knights in europe weren't really that common and especially people in full plates were even more rare because full plate cost literally a fortune and latest one from better steel were essentially out of reach for even wealthy nobles. So common bow actually had to deal with lightly armored forces or cheap breastplates max which made them effective and since you can reaload bow in a second or two it was commonly used on battlefields even when crossbow became relatively common.

Crossbows on other hand stayed in either low or high zone. Either as a tool to get cheap ranged force or actually force that can dead stop mentioned knights here. Especially crossbows were popular during sieges and basically made french cities siegeproof later in war once better designed crossbows came out.

So yeah if you have dudes who from youth hunted probably best case would be bow for them and there is big chance they won't even see a knight in full plate on battlefield.
If you have city dwellers defending their town then crosbow should be get go thing and would be way more effective than bow in hands of skilled archer due to sieges usually involving crop of main forces with heavy armor.

Bows advantages eventually died out really as crossbows reloading mechanism got really quick.

Also bolts aren't effective at high range not because they loose force quickly but because they are super inaccurate due to bolt being short. There were though types of bolt that were designed for long range sniping but they still had shorter length than arrows.

[Grimlocke]

@perkel overall pretty accurate, though with a few misconceptions.

The one that irks me the most is the 'Longbow man had to train from childhood to be effective'. We have people today who picked up longbow in their late 30s and became quite effective with it. It takes a couple years to build up the muscles and learn how to actually hit things, but battlefield archery mostly came down to hitting large formations of men as hard as you can. Accuracy was valued at the time as we can see from the various archery contests, but that most likely related to hunting archery rather than battlefield archery.

Another one is that only knights wore decent armor. The period of the 100-years war was the time when North-Italy was starting to churn out immense quantities of armor and when professional soldiery became more and more prominent. Knights were not all the relevant any more and towards the end of that war both sides were equipped with armor that would give archers a pretty hard time. The longbowmen themselves are often depicted wearing all sorts of armor, from a simple sallet and gambeson to full plate armor. Longbowman was a starting point for a career as a mercenary, guard or of course a brigand (these three things could be hard to distinguish sometimes, depending on what you paid them).

But yeah the general conclusions you draw seem pretty solid.

[catoblepas]

People often don't realize how darn effective armor can be, particularly against longbows... I think the french defeats at Agincourt and Crecy had a lot to do with that perception, but there were other factors at play there that complicated things immensely.

The bow vs breastplate test from Weapons that made Britain .... 140 mph is about 205 feet per second....which is actually pretty good for a longbow. In another video in the series, the host wails on a similar (perhaps the same) breastplate with a warhammer with no visible damage to it, so it too is likely pretty high quality. Mike Loades puts a bit more effort into his demonstrations and testing than your average R Lee Ermey History channel stuff.

Bodkins can be pretty nasty, but a good reason for their prevalence is their ease of construction. Something like a swallowtail is probably more likely to take down a charging mounted knight by killing his horse, but is going to be a lot more involved in its construction.

Another thing to keep in mind in regards to the hundred year war and the effectiveness of the longbow is that for a large part of the war, perhaps the majority, they weren't using 'full plate' as it's often colloquially known-even on the knights, met at arms, etc. - this was in a somewhat less advanced form than in later periods. A far cry from the protective attributes of later medieval/renaissance armor.

Have you ever heard of the phrase 'Bulletproof'? It actually comes from the practice of armorers firing guns at their products (typically the breastplate) to prove their effectiveness. So a breastplate with a dent in it from a bullet was 'proof' that it could resist bullets.

So it's not quite 'accurate' (ha) that no medieval armor could resist a bodkin arrow fired from a yew longbow.

I do agree that there needs to be better simulations for how projectile weapons work though. Bow material, draw strength, efficiency of energy transfer, and reloading speed should all be factored in somehow. Generally though, crossbows should have a higher possible draw weights, but less efficient energy transfer and longer reload time.