>the crossbow shoots at 600 metres and pierces armor at 300 metres
>the founding fathers only had barely working muskets which could only shoot once per minute
And one of my favorite elementary school history teacher's quotes
>after firing a wheellock pistol you could throw it away cause it takes 5 minutes to reload
try that again in English
People think that primitive weapons (especially crossbows) were more powerful than they actually were and that early firearms were slower then they actually were
people also underestimate how early firearms started making a difference in warfare. Hits from firearms are pretty devastating compared to bows and crossbows, too. also checked
it was perfectly legible
legible =/= comprehensible
>perfectly legible
Yeah, it was typed.
>600 meters
That only applies to at least double-bow if not triple-bow, siege crossbow nigga.
>chinese make up crap about their technology somehow being significantly superior when all the records were destroyed in the cultural revolution
this is throughout wikipedia
Multiple bow siege crossbow are impressive for you? It's really inefficient.
The best siege engine that chinese had was the foreign trebuchet
Your teacher was retarded
You can reload a matchlock/wheellock in 30 and a flintlock in 20, and a crossbow is far less powerful and does not load like they do in video james.
they are retards
premodern crossbows were incredibly inefficient at power delivery. MUH 1K LB DRAW WEIGHT yes ok, but over a power stroke shorter than your dick. they were popular for being easy to shoot well, not for piercing armor. plate armor wouldn't be fully obsoleted until the musket.
The short heavy power stroke means you can laod massive heavy fuck off bolts and still have them fly at a decent velocity, allowing them better armor penetration especially at shorter ranges they were used at.
>decent velocity
>55 m/s
Try again
About as much as a longbow. Things were slow back then.
>you can fly the same bolts the same speed with a longer stroke and a fraction of the draw weight
yes
>as for armor piercing i have yet to see either crossbows or warbows of contemporary design pierce well made armor
It depends on what you mean by contemporary well made armor. A 13th-14th century crossbow wouldn't pierce plate armor most of the time but dealing with chainmail or other munition grade armor would be much more likely. Tod did an experiment where he fitted a pommel onto a crossbow bolt and fired it at a Bascinet and it snapped a wooden pole it was suspended on clean while putting a big dent into the helmet.
>Things were slow back then.
Unless things were guns...
you can fly the same bolts the same speed with a longer stroke and a fraction of the draw weight. they simply lacked the limb technology to accomplish this.
as for armor piercing i have yet to see either crossbows or warbows of contemporary design pierce well made armor (ie, not a foil LARP breastplate or butted maille). which makes sense, really. shields were always the primary way to deal with projectile weapons. they didn't go out of favor (except niche uses) for no reason.
Tod has some tests where it does pierce, but only a tiny amount. Probably would only result in a very minor injury at best. Not all armor if equal thickness. The center of a cuirass is thick but everything else is much thinner for weight reasons. The odds for the armored dude are really good though since it is hard to get a square hit even at close range (which it'd have to be to have a chance against armor). It is too much to assume historical armor was particularly quality. Iron and steel quality and metallurgy is godly compared to back in the day. A medium carbon steel hardened piece of armor from 2023 is going to be much stronger and harder and consistent than a historical piece.
The only reason for the short power stroke was material limitations of the bow itself, if they could have mass produced longer, they would have.
Crossbows and longbows, even of the heaviest kind, were never great against armor period, and did most of their damage via enormous weight of fire.
People create this kind of Aggregate crossbow in their minds that loads as fast as the lightest and shoots as hard as the strongest.
The earliest guns were, barring user error, actually still pretty decent compared to a crossbow. Directly competitive I would say. The longbow had a lot of advantages, but that's if you ignore the ludicrous buy in.
>The only reason for the short power stroke was material limitations of the bow itself, if they could have mass produced longer, they would have.
yes. using heavier bolts was a way to work around this and better utilize the bow power.
>Crossbows and longbows, even of the heaviest kind, were never great against armor period
There are tons of different armors, from gambeson to hardened plate. Crossbows have advantage in the weight of their bolts against armor, adding a substantial concussive effect to the obvious penetrating power they bring.
Even the most advanced crossbows were obsolete as soon as serpentines started coming into use, both in terms of effectiveness on the battlefield and logistics. Basically every complaint that people have about early guns (with the possible exception of powder storage) is equally applicable to crossbows. Crossbows rusted, suffered in weather, were heavy, were expensive to manufacture, were slow to reload, etc. and all of that while being less effective than even the very early matchlocks, the men requiring more training and quarrels being much less convenient logistically than powder and ball.
Not great =/= no effect and besides, we're talking about the transitional period here. I certainly wouldn't want to take a bodkin at 100 yards no matter what I was wearing but I'd still take my odds with that over a ball any day of the week. You can basically chart the decline of armor as a function of the effectiveness of firearms; when serpentines started coming into use it was the heyday of full plate for those who could afford it, by the time flintlocks started coming into general use armor had mostly been reduced to an increasingly thick breastplate and by the time flintlocks were standard the day of armor had ended.
>In reality more humans have died from arrows than any other weapon
*laughs in pointy stick*
>yes. using heavier bolts was a way to work around this and better utilize the bow power.
It's still a self defeating proposition. The strongest crossbows using specialized bolts only penetrated, at best, slightly better than longbows and only at close range.
>People create this kind of Aggregate crossbow in their minds that loads as fast as the lightest and shoots as hard as the strongest.
I see this happening a lot with drones too, people assuming that $100 500g drones have the sensor + range + networking capabilities of $200,000 100kg drones and no one has thought to use them
>Why do people give more credit to pre gun weapons than early guns
Victorian britbong boomers.
They spurted propaganda about "muh longbow" to show all world how unique and interesting they are.
>back in teh days we had bow that shoot further and more accurate then modern muskets swear me mum!
And should be pointed out that because they were dominating in the anglosphere culture these boomer fuddlores sipped into all layers of the culture.
Early guns were worse then bows and crossbows until they weren't. Advances in metallurgy, gun powder and gun building made them more and more competitive until their performance started to be better then the classical ranged weapons performance. It's not only performance on a techical level, appearantly the psychological effect of gun powder weapons was greater
>Advances in metallurgy, gun powder
Those were "solved" by the time of the earliest matchlocks, the gunpowder was pretty close to the 70% 15% 15% that was popular up to the 1700s. There're 150 years of developments for artillery before that.
corned gunpowder was invented in late 14th century, quite some time after the first firearms
>Early guns were worse then bows and crossbows until they weren't.
That happen much earlier than Foundling Farthers though. Around 1500s there were literally edicts by Emperors and Magistrates demanding that soldiers arm themselves only with the guns and that fudd bows and crossbows are not suitable service weapons.
Bows were useful at least until early 1600 because they had some advantages over contemporary guns, most importantly drawing a bow was quicker than lighting up a matchlock
The theoretical tactical usefulness of the longbow gives way much sooner to logistical futility.
Great ado is made of the Longbow's (And I mean warbows of the greatest draw) man-for-man power when all armor is abandoned, and it may have some advantage over the musket in this regard, but that must completely abandon the immutable fact that you cannot have one longbowman for every musketman, you cannot have one longbowman for every FIVE musketmen. It is simply impossible. And when you lose an Archer, the exaggerated expense in time that his training represents means that you cannot replace him like you would a musketman.
So as a simulation, as a quirk of tactical mechanics, it might be the case that 1000 bowmen could in the right place be far more lethal than 1000 musketmen, it's simply impossible to get them there without sacrificing a preposterous expense.
>It's not only performance on a techical level, appearantly the psychological effect of gun powder weapons was greater
t. Nobunaga Oda
I would guess crossbows which equals early firearms was quite complex and broke more often than their counterparts.
Because combat still revolved around butchering each other with melee weapons, even into the 1800s. Firearms basically guaranteed a casualty if you hit someone. Crossbows did not.
>BUT A CROSSBOW CAN PIERCE ARMOR
And the dude in the armor probably wouldn't die if he was at a distance. If he was hit by virtually any firearm, he was probably fucked because they had not quite perfected surgery to fix bullet holes in people.
"At Malplaquet, for example, the best evidence indicates that 2/3 of the wounds received by French troops came from the enemy's fusils, with only about 2 % were inflicted by bayonets.
Of the men wounded by gunfire, 60 % had been struck in the left side, the side facing the enemy as a soldier stood in line to fire himself.
Looking at a larger sample of veterans admitted to the Invalides in 1715, Corvisier arrived at the following breakdown of wounds:
71.4 % from firearms
15.8 % from swords
10.0 % from artillery
2.8 % from the bayonet
According to another sample taken (in 1762) in Invalides;
69 % of the wounded were wounded by musket balls
14 % by sabers
13 % by artillery
2 % by bayonets
In 1807 during the war between France and Russia and Prussia, chirurgeon Dominique Jean Larrey studied wounded on one battlefield and found most were caused by artillery and muskets. Only 2 % of all wounds were caused by bayonets.
The damage inflicted during "bayonet assault" was most often executed by bullets. Larrey studied one particularly vicious close combat between the Russians and the French and found:
119 wounds from musketballs
5 wounds from bayonets
>10% wounded from artillery
What happened to "artillery causes 90% casualties" meme? Did that only became a thing in WW1?
You need actual explosive shells for that, not grapeshot or canister.
Late 19th century fuze and HE filling revolution changed everything, before that it was crap.
Solid shells don't actually do much if they're not firing into fortifications or very tight formations.
>very tight formations
More specifically very deep formations, like like blocks. One cannonball bouncing through could take out half a dozen men, and cannister or chain shot is even worse. Hence the thin line formations of Napoleonic era warfare.
People are projecting post WWI meta on the previous history.
Most teachers are women, therefore retarded and unsuited to teach others.
im pretty sure elementary school doesnt have lessons about historic weapons.
He's a guy
I asked him why cavalrymen needed 2 pistols
Also, he said many weird things. My favorite quote of him is that Mongols could beat European knights because they were so smelly Europeans couldn't breathe
What kind of school lessons did you have that covered the technical details of historic warfare?
History lessons in Poland are 2/3 about warfare because that's what our history is
>Did that only became a thing in WW1?
Yes. And I think 90% is a little overkill.
You’re pretty far off. You’re pretending as if the entire world didn’t have common sense. For one, handheld crossbows at that time had no where even close to that level of power. They also still took a significant amount of time to reload, because you usually needed a lever or crank of some kind to get it ready. At least if the crossbow had any meaningful power. Even then, the strongest crossbows with armor piercing bolts like a needle bodkin fail to punch through plate at even 25 or 50 yards. It will definitely go straight through mail and other types of armor. Guns are actually pretty good.
They don't want people in noguns nations to know how deadly bows and crossbows are, nor how easy they are to acquire or make. It's to lead people to believe that bows just stopped being deadly sometime in the 1500s.
In reality more humans have died from arrows than any other weapon, and a mob of people firing volleys of arrows at men with guns would still very well kill them. When the white riots come just remember to distribute crates of bows and arrows.
(good) Arrows are very difficult to make.
If you want to hit someone beyond room distance, you need to have professionally made arrows.
Crossbows are more complex, but it might be easier to turn out bolts in bulk. Crossbows are easier to use as well.
Anyway, I'd be more blackpowder pilled than arrow pilled if I knew a reliable way to get sulfur. Everyone knows the basics of charcoal, and saltpeter is piss easy. It just takes half a year to make a batch.
>piss easy
hehe
Sulfurless powder is a possibility and if you're autistic enough you can extract sulfur from gypsum or pyrite
>Across a room distance
In a situation of uprising or urban Guerilla warfare, the piss-distance ambush reins supreme.
Because videogame balancing and movies are influencing mass consciousness. And they were often full of bullshit that came from earlier studies and common misconceptions.
If bows would be as good as they are in Half-life, TF2 or FarCry 3, they would be used more often, but no.
>Le strong crossbows
Old misconception dating back to 19th century studies. It's as old as "clumsy euro sword vs nimble rapier/katana"
>Crappy muskets
I've never seen anyone shitting on militia guns during War on Independence. However, people rarely bring it up outside of US.
>after firing a wheellock pistol you could throw it away cause it takes 5 minutes to reload
Maybe not as much, but it was indeed lengthy. It's easier to pop it, holster it and grab another pair, like Black Beard did.
Most people really don't think about it at all, and just regurgitate what they've seen in media. I had to to explain to a friend why I chuckled when I saw some of the shotgun blasts fling guys back like they got hit by a truck in Lonesome Dove (enjoyable series, but some of the stuff like that is very over the top). I'm pretty sure I've seen similar wire stunts with crossbow bolts, but I can't place them.
>the crossbow shoots at 600 metres and pierces armor at 300 metres
Lmao. Imagine believing this
I think he was saying "that's what normies pretending to know about history will tell you"
i think the other guy was agreeing with op that it was dumb