This guy seriously fires arrows in less than half a second each and can hit three simultaneously-thrown face-sized targets while running backwards and firing at that pace. Seriously. (Sidenote: I'm kind of curious as to why this was voiced by XtraNormal. That seems like an odd decision.)
It's amazing what can be lost and forgotten. In this case, a different technique clearly replaced this more fluid technique. I'm wondering how and why that happened (there has to be a reason why people started to fire one at a time from their quivers instead of from arrows held in their hands. Maybe bows got too big and heavy? I don't know. When one technique is forgotten in favor of another, there has to be a practical reason for it (even if that practical reason goes away, there had to be a reason for it to begin with). People don't just abandon knowledge, it goes away only when it stops being relevant to those individuals.
In this case, I'm fairly certain that the technique was forgotten due to being made obsolete by guns. Probably died out when this guy kicked it.
Bows are in many cases superior to guns as a weapon. You can make arrows that will pierce thick layered armor that would stop bullets. You can also make arrows that barely pierce it but then burn hot enough to make anyone ditch the armor. You really cannot do that with a bullet. In fact, the displacement of an arrow is close to that of a grenade. 'Nuff said.
Actually, the reason why guns replaced the bow and arrow was that guns took minimal training and practice to use, so when you say that the bow is superior, you clearly mean in a singular sense, and to a person who's spent many hours mastering it. From a practical point of view, the gun is far superior. Hand a man a gun, and he's a deadly killer. Hand a man a bow and arrow, and give him a year with it, and MAYBE he's as deadly. Or maybe not. People, if the bow were superior, it wouldn't have become obsolete, period.
I does not take a year to master a bow. It takes a day. No exaggeration. You just have to play with it a while. A bow also has the option of being less than lethal, You do not have to pull back all the way. Aim low and fire a half drawn bow and you will at most hurt a persons feet/legs. There is no such option with a firearm. You can point and shoot the legs/feet, but it is going to be the same every time. Hand a man a gun, and he has the POTENTIAL to be a deadly killer. He does not lose his conscious. He remains in every bit the control he had before holding a firearm. Hand a man the keys to a car and he has the same exact potential. I have never had to fire a firearm nor a bow at anyone. And strangely enough, I was not compelled by the mere action of holding one. (I know what you meant. I am just being a whinny person.) But this is not the place for this argument. So I will not bother to argue.
I never brought up any moral issues, let's keep it to practical ones. It's simply not true that a bow is as easy to master as a gun. If it were, guns would not have replaced them. Bows are quiet, don't require machined parts to manufacture, and so on. But they did become obsolete -- if it wasn't the easy of use, then please illuminate me as to why you think bows became obsolete. I'm asking because just about every scholarly article I've been able to reference upholds what I've said.
I would argue that the reason the gun is superior to the bow has nothing to do with individual lethality, and much more with the idea of suppressive fire. Tactically, the notion of keeping your enemies where they are by filling the air full of copious quantities of noise and just enough hot lead to be threatening is much easier than doing the same thing by firing hundreds of arrows -- if for no other reason than that carrying that many arrows provides it's own tactical issues. If guns vs. bows was actually as one-sided on the individual and small-group level as you make it sound, Cowboys vs. Indians would have been a very short-lived game.
There are 3 or 4 reasons why guns are superior to bows: 1) Guns can be manufactured in bulk with replaceable parts. 2) Guns require a minimum of training to fire and manufacture. 3) (over time) Guns have been able to produce consistently higher velocities and *much* longer ranges. 4) (over time) Machine guns make bows look like absolute shit in close quarters, rifles make bows look like absolute shit at range.
A bolt just zipped by me and stuck to the wall. It has a note taped to it. The note reads as follows: "Guns do not have bolts to fire, and thus the conversation must end. Signed The Bolt Council."
Actually Haldurson, I disagree here. Bows were made obsolete because the guns did not require their users to get anything more than basic training (contrary to bows which required far more time if you wanted really effective archers) and thus every trooper could use them if necessary, and because firearms had the advantage of being loud which was helpful in decreasing enemy morale (and as we all know, a deserting battalion is a battalion not trying to hit you in the face with something deadly). After the firearms were commonplace and archers slowly died out (because "why train for 10 years how to shoot a bow really well if you can just learn how to shoot a musket in a week?"), people who tried to get into archery only had last European archers as their reference, and with these being the remainders of British archers who just practiced archery as a way to pass time, the modern archery became something much more leisurely than the old art. Of course, nowadays guns are superior, there's no arguing about that. But at the time of their introduction, compared to bows they (colloquially said) sucked - it's just that "500 archers" sounds worse than "2.000 riflemen" (though, had these archers been any skilled, nobody would bet the money on the riflemen even with that sort of numeric advantage). Heck, they actually had something even deadlier than the bows at the time - repeating crossbows. The very same ones Vatican banned, by the way, for the ease with which they could kill knights (yay for nobles in metal clothes) en masse. I'd say it takes a day to learn how to shoot well. "Mastering a bow", on the other hand, is something that would take years, the same as "mastering" any other thing. But the point you made still stands.
The only thing that you said which was different was that the sound of the gun was an advantage. That's kind of a mixed blessing, at best. The smoke also was a disadvantage, as was the routine of loading the gun which (initially) was not as easy as loading a bow. So you still haven't told me anything that made the bow superior that I haven't already admitted. The ease of training was EXACTLY my point. But you didn't get that. That's what made it superior. Initially, guns were a tool of war, and they replaced bows because they were easier to use and hence OVERALL superior. That is VERY important when you are trying to build an army. You take your peasants, and you have a choice of giving them bows or guns, you are going to pick guns -- they are the better choice because they are, as even you point out, easier to use. That's all I'm saying.
As mining said, the cost of good bows was also a lot higher. A good bow takes a long time to take, starting with the wood drying for a year or more, etc.... Arrows as well, a single arrow is more expensive than a ball of lead and some gunpowder, at least when gunpowder gets produced on any kind of scale. Also, let's not forget the strength issue. To be able to wield a powerful bow effectively, you need to have quite a lot of power in your arms. Not so with a rifle. This plays nicely into the training argument. Now, let's look at modern times... The army tests and has tested crossbows quite a number of time, and they have some advantages, namely being silent without needing subsonic ammo. However, a crossbow with similar power is a lot bulkier than a pistol or even small rifle, as well as having a much longer reload time. And again, training. You need specialized training to use it, while a soldier knows his guns. The ability to deliver different payloads is nice though Not sure how much of an advantage that is, since there are incendiary and explosive rounds as well as tracer rounds already.... Still good for long range postal service I guess.
Oh well, maybe we simply have different ways of calculating what "superior" is. But I do agree that if pure effectiveness isn't the primary factor in there, even the primitive firearms they had back then can easily be seen as superior (only I like pure effectiveness the most; I'm sort of broken that way). Anyway, what I disagreed with earlier was that particular statement, not your post as a whole (and I just used that one difference in opinion as a reason to write a lot). What you stated about the ease of training being the primary reason for firearms' superiority and about the archers' superiority being mostly in a one-on-one comparison was right, I would have to be a fool to say otherwise. And what I disagreed with was the statement that the bows would've had become obsolete had they been superior - and I did that because humanity as a whole has its moments of idiocy and/or weird thought trains and did, occasionally, forget about "superior options" for reasons which were stupid. But, of course, the fact that in my earlier post this immediately derailed into a discussion about the differences between earlier firearms and bows of that time did not help me (I like history and weapons, in case it doesn't appear to be obvious from what I'm posting; sorry for not noticing that I managed to derail myself after just five words).
People using a bow to some extent - easy. Firing a *heavy* bow - lifetime of practice. Making a gun? Maybe a year, tops. Making a bow? Firing a gun? Physically easy, and it'll kill, maim and terrify. Longbow? Anyway, on a website discussing bows/guns from an eastern and western P.O.V:
We could argue back and forth for weeks on this subject, but each has advantages. And even the advantages are all disputable. I read Sun Tzu. So I know that wounding an enemy is several times as effective as killing them. Unless you are practiced and accurate with a gun, you simply cannot wound a person without at least an equal chance of killing them. With a light longbow, you can easily wound a person badly enough to require multiple surgeries and months of recovery time to be able to effectively fight again. But on the other side of the argument, with a modern automatic firearm you can kill dozens of people in the time it would take to injure one with a bow. The bow still has the advantage of being silent, and having no heat or chemical fumes to give away the position. If we are not discussing modern archery and riflery, then the discussion is a whole different matter. Muzzleloaders *CAN NOT* function in high humidity, rain, and with the speed of a simple bow. Arrows are easy to make, and bows cannot explode if the bullet gets caught in the barrel as infrequently happened even to trained muzzleloader troops back then. You cannot really fire a muzzleloader twice in a minute. Argue this if you want, but I have fired them before. To remain safe with a "Modern" muzzleloader you need to clean the barrel a bit before reloading. And if you make a mistake and it misfires, you are effectively holding a potential grenade waiting to explode. You can buy hollow aluminum arrows. If you are licensed to manufacture explosives and incendiary rounds for weapons, you can readily make explosive and incendiary arrows. The would cost no more than a few dollars each. Anyone here know how much grenades cost for a grenade launcher? Lol. You do not even want to know. The point of this whole thing is that both have advantages. Bows are cheap and use cheap munitions. Some argue they require more experience to use. I never found them difficult. People also argue that a manual transmission is something that requires more experience to use. People who drive a manual would probably argue that is a point only made by those who never bothered to try. All positions are valid points of view. Mine is that each has advantages and neither requires any real training. You either figure out all you need to know in a day or two playing around, or you are too dumb to manage. And Mining, you certainly do not need 600 newtons of force to push an arrow through even plate armor. Watch the video above. Does that look like a "Heavy Longbow"? Not to my eyes. It looks like a simple target Longbow. And it punches through chainmail with no sign of effort. I actually made chainmail myself years ago with loads of time and Steel links. (It was not riveted, but rather the cheap bend into position links, but it would probably never have stopped an arrow fired with any real force.)
Almost 100% in agreement here, except this point: If that were true, you'd expect the amount of random/accidental gun deaths to be about equal to the amount of random/accidental gun wounds, and it's nowhere near. In fact, until you get into fairly high-caliber rounds or specialized bullets like hollow tip, it's fairly difficult to kill someone with a gun, accidentally or not. Once you've hit them once and they're laying relatively still on the ground, sure, but most initial gunshot wounds let you live long enough to get to a hospital and get the medical attention you need to not die.
Well look at it from a combat prospective. If you are fighting armed soldiers, are you going to shoot them once and walk away and just hope they are in too much shock to fire back? I would argue that you are the vast minority if you would. A more realistic idea is shoot them until they are unable to shoot you. With a bow, you simply would not enter a combat against armed soldiers, because modern military would wipe the deck with you. But if you need to assassinate someone while loads of modern detection apparati are at work, firing a gun gives away your position even if it has a suppressor. But anything sensitive enough to detect the sound of a bow firing would go off when someone drops a pencil. The short version of this is that if you use a gun, the odds are you *WANT* to kill anyone you fire at. A bow is specialized and not really suited for the same things. But I should have chosen my words more carefully. I concede that against an unarmed person who is no threat to you it is as easy to wound a person than to kill them with a gun.
This is true, but note: The reason that arrow wounds were so lethal was due to the combination of dirt getting into wounds, and very few antiseptics. A) Arrows are not easy to make. You cannot mass produce arrows in the same way you can mass produce bullets. B) Bow's can't explode, but if someone whacks your bow, you're out of luck for the next 4 years. Explosive and incendiary arrows are *the* most bullshit plot device ever. Sure, you can make them, but they're a hell of a lot less useful than a grenade. Bows are not even remotely close to cheap, and the training required to use a bow at high rate of fire, high range, and at high draw weights is insanely more - and insanely more upkeep - than learning to use a gun. You may have shot a bow at, what, 50m? 100m? Look more towards a 150-200m maximum dangerous range. You wouldn't need to be accurate, but the arrow would need to make it that far at a high proportion of their original speed. Look to a military perspective. An amateur archer *can not* fire with much precision, fire rapidly, or fire a heavy draw weight bow. Every single rifleman can shoot the exact same weapon. " As far as I can tell, nobody thought arrows could pierce plate armor in the sixteenth century. Even Sir John Smythe, a ardent believer in the English bow, wrote of arrows finding unarmed parts. This may have included the mail bits for him, as he gave a specific example of an arrow killing through a gusset of mail. Of course, by the late sixteenth century, armor had generally become thicker in order to provide some hope of a defense against the gun. Writers even doubted the ability of the couched lance to penetrate during this period; François de la Noue thought it would be a miracle for an armored man to die from such an attack." " -Armour quality varied hugely, and even an armourers stamp did not (by modern testing) guarantee your armour was of a given resistive value. A good quality Milanese plate would certainly turn away longbow arrows from your chest. But the same type of armour with the same stamp might just as easily (via production factors) be only 50% as strong as the one next to you and be vulnerable. Cheaper stuff, the type lesser nobles and others would afford, was much less strong and far more vulnerable. -Aimed fire, longbows were precision weapons, any knight was vulnerable, centre of mass would've worked fine for the mass of your targets, but if someone came up in properly expensive gear, you could just as easily watch an arrow break or bounce off his breast plate and then either shoot him in the face (visors are vulnerable), a joint (no plate if you're lucky) or just anywhere else (as above, everywhere but the centre of the breastplate is thinner)." You'd need either a hell of a lot of draw force, AND close range to have a chance of beating plate. Weak spots? Sure, but you still need damn high draw rates.
Mining, please decide which side you are fighting about. Modern or ancient? I cannot really argue both at once without sounding like a moron.
