Why did they decide the new technology of firearms was the better way to go than sticking with bows and crossbows? Weren't they more expensive?
Why did they decide the new technology of firearms was the better way to go than sticking with bows and crossbows?
>Weren't they more expensive?
Yes. But the training for someone to use them was much, much, faster (read: cheaper). Bullets and gunpowder were cheaper than arrows. Also, it didn't take long before guns would penetrate armor, and that wasn't happening with bows.
Even back then there were logistical advantages as well. Powder and bullets are compact for their capabilities and relatively easy to transport. Powder could also be used not just for guns but for cannons, so there was commonality there which is logistically valuable itself. And speaking of cannons guns scale quite well and easily vs bows/crossbows. Different sizes started happening pretty fast.
Finally there was a good long period where a lot of opponents one might use them on had never encountered them in war before and they had some shock value just from that.
Also, there's a political dimension to it. Shot and powder production while cheap in the long run requires significant up-front investment and infrastructure, which means it indirectly facilitates centralisation of power.
And that's rather important. Consider the difference between the following:
>You have an army of archers
>You have to keep them trained constantly or they're useless
>If you piss them off then suddenly they're well equipped to fight *you*.
On the other hand:
>you raise an army of conscripts with guns
>no long-term training costs or needs
>they can't fight you because you own the guns and the means of producing the powder.
Someone with even a basic mold could make FAR more than 40 bullets in a day. Meanwhile it takes a lot of labor to make arrows. Tod Cutler has some good videos up with Will Sherman showing how medieval arrows were made. It is not a fast process, it requires a lot of materials and skilled labor. Once you have a mold a moron can crank out bullets.
>You can make more than 40 bullets a day
Yeah I know I was just throwing out a number.
Eh, it's less about your army and more about uppity feudal vassals. If your own army decides to bump you off, they're gonna be seizing their weapons anyway.
>Powder could also be used not just for guns but for cannons
no theyre not the same, they're different grades of black powder
if you stuff powder for a musket down a cannon, it will blow up
Training to use a muzzleloader is a PITA tho
Bows are much simpler
Utterly wrong. You could train a gunner to load and fire in a volley in a week. Bows take months of conditioning.
>You could train a gunner to load and fire in a volley in a week
it took the british three weeks just to learn how to handle their gun and to load it at the pace required, and it took months to learn associated but viral skills like forming up to maximize fire
saying it only takes a week to fire a musket is like saying it only takes a day to learn how to bake
sure thats how long it would take to follow the instructions, but being able to do it on command in the battlefield without fumbling is a lot harder
while faster to learn than a longbow, thats pretty much every weapon ever that doesnt require giant back muscles
This... Using a warbow takes not only time to get the aiming right, but YEARS to build up muscle mass to draw those bows into full lenght, and do so consistently again and again in battle.
You get tired of it, you know? It's physically taxing, and those english longbowmen were trained for years and had freakishly huge right arms from all the training.
With gunpowder, you don't need all that muscle mass and strenght. The gunpowder does the heavy lifting.
So yeah, it was faster, cheaper and easier to teach large amounts of grunts to load a musket and fire it in a volley. The benefits were too good not to miss.
>Bows take months of conditioning.
Try years.
>Bows are much simpler
They're not, and guns don't rely on physical strength past the ability to simply lift them.
Plus, there's the issue of disease.
A haakbusier suffering from dysentery has roughly 30% lower RoF.
A longbowman suffering from dystentery will blow the rotten lining of his intestines out of his butthole when he strains to draw the string. And he will likely fail to do so anyway.
Can you reliably hit a chest sized target at 100m with either a bow or gun?
I could with a gun after a couple of hours, the furthest I'm accurate with a bow is ~25m and that is a low draw weight.
Not at all. Any butthole can be trained to load and fire a musket. Becoming a competent archer takes years of practice.
>crossbows
Almost as slow, can’t go through plate armor. Similar low training required.
>bows
Fast rate of fire but still can’t go through armor. A huge amount of training required.
And just as expensive as guns.
>. A huge amount of training required
Only for longbows
Ignoring how much training is required, all war bows are long bows or equivalent.
there is zero meaningful difference in learning any type of bow. Composite bows were commonly the same weight as an welsh longbow.
The weapon was more expensive but the ammunition was cheaper. Arrows and bolts had to be crafted by hand whereas bullets could be cast in a mold and powder could be milled out in large batches.
>cast in a mold
Actually, mass production of shot was done without molds. Pic relevant.
For shotguns, yes. Not musket balls, those are much too big.
Erm, no? Big shot towers could make musket balls. Especially in the 19th century when the technology was improved with cooling airflows inside the tower.
Arrow/crossbow bolt production had the advantage of requiring far less infrastructure, yes. But it also required far more workhours in return, which menat it was quite a bit less efficient and more expensive in the long term.
>Erm, no? Big shot towers could make musket balls.
I'd like to see a source on that please.
Shot towers were a late invention and could not make buckshot let alone musket balls.
That's my understanding. According to Wikipedia it takes an 80m tall shot tower to produce 3.8mm birdshot. How tall of a tower are we talking to make a .69 cal (17.5mm) musket ball? How many of those were built in the medieval period?
The surface tension of the lead limits the maximum size that can be made. This is independent of the height of the drop.
Musket balls were cast. Late in their use they were also being swaged by the major idustiral powers like Britain.
>The surface tension of the lead limits the maximum size that can be made.
Yes.
>Musket balls were cast
Yes, anon. that's my point. I'm challenging morono to explain how high a tower is needed to make musket balls knowing damn well the question is impossible to answer. Is your autism preventing you from realizing this?
Could be a little more clear in your posts then. Sounded like you were actually asking.
You're also hung up on the tower bit. If the concept was known there were thousands of sites were shot could have been produced. Only the drop is needed. Plenty of cliffsides and deep hoels available.
>Sounded like you were actually asking.
I am. You have evidence shot was used for making musket balls?
>Only the drop is needed. Plenty of cliffsides and deep hoels available.
Cool, got any sources showing that was used? I'm not held up on a literal tower. But I am particular about proof....because I know you don't have it. Like anon said, it's impossible to make spheres of that size with gravity alone, no matter how high the drop. So let's see your verified historical examples of people making musket balls by dropping the molten lead off cliffs or down wells or whatever other nonsense you can think up.
Maybe direct your snippiness to the guy who actually cliamed it?
I'm
,
,
I've never claimed that they had shot towers let alone they were used for musket balls.
>Maybe direct your snippiness to the guy who actually cliamed it?
You just said "only the drop is needed". That suggests your physics knowledge is just as bad as the guy who originally suggested it was possible to make musket balls from shot towers. There is no drop, on earth, which could produce musket balls from molten lead.
That was not in relation to musket balls, only shot production. The first tower was simply a house with a cave underneath. There is no need for tall constructions. If the concept had been known there would have been no problems with the medieval folks from producing regular shot.
I'd already pointed out surface tension alone means musket balls are impossible to drop.
>the 19th century
yea you mean when everybody started using conical bullets instead of balls?
wouldn't bows have the logistical advantage because guns require fixed basic industrialization whereas armies literally traveled with fletchers whose dedicated job was to turn shit they picked up off the ground into arrows all day
No because making arrows in volume and transporting them was so, so much harder than manufacturing gunpowder and pouring lead into molds for bullets. Making arrows was expensive, time consuming, and tricky. Forging an arrow head, pinning it in place, fletching, and everything else could take several days. Meanwhile you can make 40 bullets in a day.
the best archers supposedly took 3 generations to train from scratch so you had grand-dads and dads teaching children.
either way it was years of training and building up strength.
anyone could learn to use a gun.
consider the logistics of PRODUCING archers as well as the ammunition.
just something to add onto all the OTHER stuff people have been talking about
it is not that hard to drill at loading for a few months at most anon.
that is a FAR faster training time.
Exactly the opposite, the army could (and did) bring a wagon full of lead ingots and bullet molds to make more on the go, arrowheads needed proper forging and shafts/feathers that were exacting and not always available. A mouthbreather can make plain lead balls at his cookfire after ten minutes instruction.
Dividends from cannon tech tree.
Fielding the first company of handgunners was probably some rich noble and his advisors' pet project
My guess is that it took off from there because it was successful
Keep in mind that cannons were already in widespread use by the time firearms started gaining popularity, so fielding small arms is perhaps less of a stretch of imagination than you might think
Bling, bro. Bling.
As soldiers became less trained (life long soldiers switched to peasant drafts), weapons that were easier to use and just as deadly was a good trade off. May have been more expensive but the state was paying, not individuals themselves like before.
>May have been more expensive but the state was paying, not individuals themselves like before.
Weren't soldiers still buying their own kit and uniforms into the 1800s?
Crossbows are quite cumbersome compared to a gun and has less range and punching power.Also gun technology was evolving at a rapid pace.
Picrel has a lot of interesting information about the early adoption of firearms, and firearms vs. bows specifically, including historical sources.
You can read it free online.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3156857W/The_gun_and_its_development
Guns will fricking kill you, arrows not so much
>Guns will fricking kill you, arrows not so m-ACK L'EBLEU
Way I understood it was that a bow requires a very specific type of wood from a specific part of tree.
By end of 100 years war, you were starting to run out of the trees requires for bows.
Guns don't care what kind of wood you use and were far easier to maintain than heavy crossbows, as anything that could be strung on a field by man was heavily limited by power.
Firearms however could fire rocks, and often did, making material costs for these weapons use relatively little of strategic resources while being perfectly adequate as a weapon even in its most infantile form.
Guns could also always fire multiple projectiles simultaneously.
>Guns don't care what kind of wood you use and were far easier to maintain than heavy crossbows,
That was absolutely true.
>Firearms however could fire rocks
Bows did too, for a time. I don't know much about them but "stone bows" absolutely were a thing historically. I have my they were useful militarily and I'm guessing they were more of a hunting weapon for small game, but like I said I don't know much about them.
>Bows did too, for a time. I don't know much about them but "stone bows" absolutely were a thing historically.
Do you mean stone arrowheads or something else?
I think he means, basically a bow with a pouch for putting shot (i.e rocks) in.
>Do you mean stone arrowheads
No, I mean special crossbows which fired stones, aka "pellet bows"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet-shooting_crossbow
Kinda want to hunt squirrels with one now for some reason.
Different anon, but think of them like modern rubber band slingshots but with the rubber replaced with blow limbs and string. They weren't really militarily useful.
>Way I understood it was that a bow requires a very specific type of wood from a specific part of tree.
Iberian yew IIRC for a longbow, with the plank cut so that the inside of the bow is heartwood and the outside sapwood.
I wonder if people may not be over-exaggerating the ease of training musketeers. Sure, the aim and fire part is likely more intuitive, but before you can get to that you first have to load the thing. This means juggling the gun (which may be as tall as you are), ramrod, maybe a musket rest, ball, powder and lit match all in close proximity to each other and with only two hands. You also want it done quickly, and on top of the general stress of combat trying to get you to fumble powder-flask and match together you also have the added mental strain of having to do it all just standing there upright with a giant (if figurative) shoot me sign dangling in front of your genitals.
So much like with pikes it seem individual martial skill may have become less important, but the need for drilling and esprit de corps increased.
>over exaggerating
Cmon now
>Weren't they more expensive?
Roughly speaking a 15th century firearm cost about 80% of a crossbow with a similar level of bling [Hall; Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe, the rest is msotly from him too]. A barrel is fundamentally much more forgiving than a crossbow prod, since the latter must bend a significant amount repeatedly without breaking, while the barrel can just be overbuilt to hell and back without becoming useless. Now a proper arquebus or musket is slightly more complex than a 15th century handgonne, but frankly not by much. The standard matchlock is a very simple construction, and by the time of the arquebus proper economics of scale should make themselves known more clearly than for the handgonnes.
I'm decidedly less well informed how the cost of a longbow would compare, but do keep in mind that suitable wood for them was considered a major strategic resource and one which the English crown had to go to considerable lengths to get a proper supply of (it was at leats in part, and IIRC mostly, imported). Thus they probably weren't all that cheap, and regardless of the unit cost normally the ability to make a bloody lot of them in a hurry was likely missing. Whereas for a gun... plain everyday iron will do.
Now gunpowder had been quite expensive back when the main source of salpeter was importing it form India, but that ended in the late 14th century. At that point I suspect the ammunition ended up quite a bit cheaper instead since gunpowder can be mixed in very large batches and bullets cast en masse, as opposed to individually crafting heads, shafts and vanes before assembling them into bolts. Ball and powder is also much more compact to transport, something that may become noticeable when you need a few hundred thousand units for a single battle.
Saltpetre remained a strategic resource and bottleneck into the 19th century. However by the, IIRC, 15-16th century most nations had figured out how to produce it but the nitre bed process is not fast.
Another pair of factors to consider. First guns were pretty good for defensive siege fights. They pack a lot of punch up close, and you can hide behind a wall while reloading or waiting for the enemy to come in range. This meant that city militias got find of them quite early on. (The Hussites also got good mileage out of them in the field by bringing some suitable walls with them.) People trained in these militias were also a major source of mercenaries at the time, and raising an army back then was generally more a matter of what was available than what you might have wanted. So a bunch of handgunners may have been what you got.
Second, once these got onto the battlefield it turned out, eventually at least, that these weapons were also uncommonly good at taking the momentum out of an incoming attack. Turns out the reptile brain in men and horse alike may have ideas about running straight into a thunderous wall of smoke and fire. Since momentum and cohesion were major factors in determining the outcome of a melee this was an important advantage to using firearms.
The dealbreaker for the adoption of early firearms has always been the ability to turn a bigger part of your population pool into "good enough" levies. Well trained and disciplined standing armies require a lot of wealth and logistics to maintain even in peacetime while 2-3 weeks of crash training and you can cobble up a pike and shot formation of levied peasants. Keep in mind that feudal societies are becoming more centralized at the time period and the crown is likely to shoulder the expense of a bigger army.
The "actually it was all about and training and logistics and conscription, not that guns go bang and kill people good" narrative has been pushed way too far lately.
Guns fire an extremely deadly and armor-defeating projectile in a flat trajectory. They're literally just better weapons.
See bowvsmusket.com for a collection of direct historical accounts of archers repeatedly being mogged by firearms even when outnumbering them.
Also a collection of historical sources having this same argument hundreds of years ago - notably, they didn't think training musketeers was easier:
https://bowvsmusket.com/2017/05/29/musketeers-were-not-easier-to-train-than-archers/
>The phase-out of bows from the English military in the 16th century inspired many military writers to opine on the advantages and disadvantages of each weapon, and whether the bow still had some use or if it should be set aside completely. Some of these authors, particularly John Smythe, Humfrey Barwick and Barnabe Riche, went into exhaustive detail.
>The authors hotly discuss issues such as lethality, range, accuracy, reliability, rate of shot, psychological effects of shot, and so on. But not once, not a single time, from either side of the debate, is quick or cheap training mentioned as an advantage of firearms. Check for yourself: >What we find is the opposite: a firm, repeated emphasis on the need for soldiers to be well-trained, and especially those carrying firearms.
Well, they're a better weapon which was obvious in hindsight, but we can't assume they acknowledged that before tactics developed.
The logistics angle is so you can't make the argument for tradition or maintaining tried and tested stuff anymore when you ran out of materials for it.
People talk a lot about how bows are better than the various matchlocks, and the therory checks out. But in practice, guns were simply better, and not just in the faster to train way, which is also a suspect theory. In practice, every frontier where guns met bows, bows would eventually lose out. The Japanese took to guns quickly. The horse archer of the Eurasian steppe seem to have enjoyed life right up to coincidentally when states started using gunpowder against them. American Indians also lost out, but they never had the population or unity to resist anyway, so I can't count that. The Manchu did take over China with bows, but the Ming was divided and invited them in. From contemporary accounts, the edge was effective range. Range was king, and far more effective than rate of fire. Yes, bows could theoretically shoot further, but that's not effective range.
American Indians ditched their bows for the best rifles they could get their hands on at first opportunity. By the time they were wiped out as an independent policy, they had more modern weapons than some armies in the Balkans at the same period.
I thought that was fricking Char Aznable for a second
Right around this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cerignola
Despite having a third more their numbers of highly trained mounted knights, France got their ass kicked by Spain because they had a thousand arquebusiers, and France had none.
Spain lost just 500 men, while France lost nearly half their number.
This was unheard of, and within decades everyone was developing their own pike and shot regiments.
An arrow or crossbow bolt may penetrate plate, a musket ball WILL do so, at longer distances
Neither arrow nor bolt penetrates plate.
Yes and no.
It went back and forth as guns got better and armor got thicker. Full plate was actually developed in response to firearms. But of course guns eventually won out when even the 40 pound cuirass' worn by Napoleonic cavalry was getting pierced with in 50 meters.
not really, crossbows require a lot of effort and high quality spring steel to make
early guns were just metal tubes which are easy to make
>spring steel was invented some time in the 17th century so crossbows didn't exist before then
first off, to correct you and
crossbows started using steel arms (or laths) in the 14th century.
they were using springs by then, anons, but it wasn't the good shit yet.
meanwhile,
the wooden ones were outclassed by english longbows and only used by people too stupid to produce longbowmen.
which is why the french gave up rapidly on crossbows after agincourt, and would rarely use them until after the hundred years war they were stuck in ended.
sorry, both the wood and the steel were outclassed by longbowmen.
and apparently its a pain to unstring a crossbow so a bit of bad weather could frick their strings up easily lol.
Steel that just happens to be springy is not the same as spring steel
I'd give anon #1 a pass but he literally said "high quality spring steel" which can't mean anything other than modern spring steel which was invented in the 17th century at the absolute earliest
yes, which is why I said I wanted to correct you both
Spring steel, which you said, was around before then.
but it wasnt high quality spring steel, like HE said.
the rest was just relevant to OPs initial stuff so I threw it in.
>Why did they decide the new technology of firearms was the better way to go than sticking with bows and crossbows? Weren't they more expensive?
A crossbow couldn't penetrate plate armor while some arquebus could. Anyone here talking about training fails to mention that training with crossbows is also easy.
Guns are more expensive than bows, but bullets are cheaper than arrows, without beating the dead horse that guns are just easier to learn than either crossbows or regular bows.
Much mug easier to get gud with a gun than with a bow. Decent bowman had to start training daily as children to be useful on the battlefield as young adults. Crossbows are easier to train with than bows, but a lot of effective crossbows took about as long or longer to relaod as early firearms, and crossbows couldn't penetrate plate armor
It's because guns make a loud Chad BANG!!! While bows and crossbows make a wimpy little virgin THWIP.
Because matchlock guns made bows and arrows obsolete. Bows are short range, inaccurate, and bounce off armor.
They weren't exorbitantly expensive compared to longbow companies or crossbows, which are also complex mechanisms. They were expensive though, like everything else war related. States in that era chose going bankrupt over losing. Lesser of two evils.
While the training aspect is true, the idea that these were arming levies is not. Muskets were arming professional soldiers.
have any of you frickers ever tried pulling back the string on a non compound bow? It takes years of muscle growth to get to the level of a professional archer that can even pull the string back far enough, let alone do it multiple times through a battle
Nah anon, fiction always gives bows to chicks because its a weak womans weapon. Doesn't need strength like manly close combat weapons.
the real question though is whether everybody was just deaf in those old armies.
Possibly, but those are subsonic, weren't fired very often, and many soldiers died young anyway.