Ask me about archery, longbows especially.

[Malik]

About armor: I don't know. I have never shot a person in armor. (For that matter, I've never shot a human being with an arrow. Maybe there's something in human anatomy that automatically stops arrows and I'm way off base on all this.)

My gut tells me that once you got penetration of the armor, the arrow will keep going, and you're going to get a pass-through or at least massive penetration. Bodies are soft and squishy; there's not much resistance there.

There are so many types of armor that I just couldn't give a definitive answer. Thinking it through, though:

You won't get a pass-through on a 15th-Century field harness. Even if you penetrated the iron, the drag on the shaft from the sides of the hole would slow the arrow down. That's a no-brainer.

I'd think that mail wouldn't slow the arrow down enough to stop it, but the leather and felt beneath might prevent a complete pass-through. Some arrowheads were specifically built to defeat armor, of course, and this is what you'd want to use, but that initial shock as the arrowhead breaks the mail rings would burn up some of the kinetic energy, similar to a round shattering a ceramic bodyplate in modern bodyarmor. That coupled with the drag from the layers beneath the mail might slow the arrow down. It might.

Also, arrows spin, and when you stab a sword into riveted mail the links twist up and trap the blade. You never hear about that in fantasy novels, either, but that's physics. If you want to talk about that phenomenon, start another thread.

I've seen arrows hit hardwood trees and explode, leaving the heads buried in the trunk. I have to wonder if, given just the right amount of armor, this would be reproducible. You'd have a hell of a time getting the arrowhead out of the body. Ick.

Your best defense against an arrow is armor in layers, to strip the energy away. A coat of plates (I might be the only fantasy writer whose characters use a coat of plates, though), over mail, over a suede tabard, over a felt jerkin, over a linen arming jack. Even then, I wouldn't want to get shot with an arrow. No way. I'd be watching for archers every waking moment.

 

[Ireth]

About pass-through or the lack of it, what if the arrow lodged in a bone? What effect would that have on the wound?

 

[Malik]

(EDIT: Another thing: you count on a pass-through because recovering the arrow is key to tracking and recovering the animal; the type and amount of blood on the arrow lets you know where you hit the animal and therefore what to watch for.)

Would you mind extrapolating on this point a bit? You touch on it a little further on in the post, but I'd like to get a few more details if you'd be so kind.

Sure. This is gonna be gross so again, NSFV. (Not Safe For Vegans.)

Deer have remarkable reflexes. They have a habit of "jumping the string," meaning that in the quarter of a second between the time the arrow is loosed and its arrival they can jump in the air, or duck, or even spin around 180 degrees. I was hunting with a buddy who took a broadside shot on a deer at 15 yards, except it jumped in the air and turned 90 degrees at the sound of the string; the arrow entered the deer just under its tail, traversed the body cavity, and exited the neck. It fell over like it was poleaxed. That's gruesome but the point is, with a bow you don't always land the shot you take.

This is important because you don't see the arrow in flight or when it makes contact. You have to find the arrow after you make the shot so that you know what you're looking for. The blood and hair on the arrow will tell you how to proceed. It's a puzzle and nothing is definite, but what follows is a quick overview.

Bright pink frothy blood with bubbles means a lung shot: look for big swaths of blood like a paintbrush at hip height; with a lung shot, the deer should be down in a few minutes and dead inside half an hour so don't start looking just yet. Let nature do its thing.

Copious red blood with bubbles: you nailed it. You hit the lungs and heart. This is the shot you want, the shot you train for and the one you pray for. The deer should already be down by the time you find the arrow. Circle outward from the point of impact. It will be within 40 yards of you and it will be dead when you get there.

Dark blood with tufts of hair and strings of meat means a meat hit: there's a "black hole" just above the lungs and below the spine, and another in the brisket (just before the shoulders under the neck) that a deer can walk away from and live out the rest of its life wiser for the experience -- it's like the "just winged me" shoulder-wound trope in TV westerns only in this case it's real. With a meat hit you start tracking now and see how much blood there is; if there are just a few drops here and there, odds are you're never going to find it. Mark the spot and the tracks, go back the next morning and start your search. Bring sandwiches because you'll be looking for a couple of days. Maybe you'll get lucky and have nicked a lung and it died during the night. Also check the tip: if the tip is folded over or mangled, then the deer jumped the string and you hit it through the hips. You may have hit the femoral artery and it's bleeding out not far from here. Probably not, though. You're usually not that lucky.

Green matter -- grass or cud -- on the arrow means a stomach hit. Creep away quietly in the opposite direction and come back in 12 hours. A stomach-hit deer can and will keep walking (or running!) when it hears you coming. They can be in the next ZIP code by the time you find them if you push them. That's the last thing you want. In my youth a buddy of mine called me to help him track a deer he'd accidentally pushed; I recovered it thirty hours and five miles from the initial hit. Five. ****ing. Miles.

Brown chunky matter is fecal matter and you are screwed. Sit down, break out a book, and don't even move for at least four hours. It's a very painful wound and often the hip or rear leg is involved so the deer won't go far if you don't chase it. The bad news is, sepsis is likely what's going to kill the deer so a lot of the meat will be ruined. Start looking the next morning and find a butcher you trust with your life.

It's your duty and responsibility to track the animal and give it a humane death, and to use as much of the animal as is usable. That is the inviolable rule and it has not changed since the days when we were hunting with rocks.

I have found myself in places that I never would have dreamed of while tracking deer. More than once, I've stood on a ridgeline with a bow in my hand, listening to the wind, looking out over a valley, and beating my brains in trying to figure out where my deer went, only to realize that a thousand years ago -- maybe even five thousand years ago -- a man stood where I'm standing, doing the exact same thing. It makes my hair stand up just thinking about it. That's hunting. You're part of something so much older and so much larger than yourself that there are no words for it. In a world with domesticated cattle and farming -- the world that a lot of our characters inhabit, as do we -- men don't hunt for food and they don't hunt for killing. There, as here, men hunt for hunting.

 

[Malik]

About pass-through or the lack of it, what if the arrow lodged in a bone? What effect would that have on the wound?

Arrows don't lodge in anything. They split bone and exit. See post above regarding arrow sign; when you find the arrow you can tell if it hit bone because the tip will be mangled or maybe bent over.

A shoulder on something like a bear or an elk will stop an arrow, but that's a bone that's far more massive than a human. I've seen pictures of feral hogs that have partial penetration but hogs are immensely tough. Their hide, their muscle, and their bone are all far more dense than other animals and they can weigh 400 lbs.

 

[Sparkie]

If there was a member-of-the-month award here, I'd nominate you, Malik. Thanks!

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Arrows don't lodge in anything. They split bone and exit. See post above regarding arrow sign; when you find the arrow you can tell if it hit bone because the tip will be mangled or maybe bent over.

A shoulder on something like a bear or an elk will stop an arrow, but that's a bone that's far more massive than a human. I've seen pictures of feral hogs that have partial penetration but hogs are immensely tough. Their hide, their muscle, and their bone are all far more dense than other animals and they can weigh 400 lbs.

That's not always true. Although I agree that arrow penetration is underwhelming in books, and that most of the time full penetration and arrow exit is exactly what happens, I've seen two kills in my lifetime where the arrow did not exit. On both occasions, the prey was a whitetail deer and neither of massive size. One was an average sized, year and a half old buck (spike) the other was larger, while not huge, eight point which was 2 1/2 years.

The spike was shot at an almost straight down angle, as he passed under my stand, with a 55lb recurve & black diamond, 4 blade broadheads (that head is really double bladed with two smaller blades radiating out from the center). The heads are always razor sharp as my family believes that less than sharp blades are a form of cruelty. The arrow, in this case, passed at a angle from the right side of the spine, towards the right foreleg, striking the inner side of the right shoulder blade towards the bottom. The wound cut the right lung but the arrow did not exit the body cavity. During tracking we saw pink, frothy blood which sprayed from the nose & mouth. The animal died quickly.

The second was shot through the shoulder bone at about 20-25 yards. Normally you wait until the animal is looking away or has his head down to eat, and has the foreleg closest to you extended forward. This exposes the internals behind the shoulder. That's in a perfect world but it doesn't always turn out perfect. The arrow striking (and breaking through) the shoulder blade, slowed sufficiently to stick through the other side, causing an exit wound while not fully exiting. This deer didn't even go 40 yards before dying. This was not my kill but my uncles. He used a longbow that I'm unsure of the weight but I would say its substantially more powerful than my recurve. He makes his own bows from Osage orange wood and does phenomenal work.

Regardless, I agree with everything else you've said & it's a great post Malik. These two cases have been the exception among many. Yet, it is possible.

 

[Malik]

4-blade Zwickeys have a reputation for not penetrating but I haven't had a problem with them and I've been shooting them for 30 years.

I agree; I shouldn't have said "never, ever, ever."

How about "Hardly, hardly, hardly ever." And sure as hell not as often as we see on TV. The partial penetration is definitely the exception; the rare shot where something goes wonky inside the critter and you hit every obstacle somehow.

The point remains -- and I'm glad you agree -- this did not happen:

Unless you were shot by a six-year-old.

Cheers.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

4-blade Zwickeys have a reputation for not penetrating but I haven't had a problem with them and I've been shooting them for 30 years.

I agree; I shouldn't have said "never, ever, ever."

How about "Hardly, hardly, hardly ever." And sure as hell not as often as we see on TV. The partial penetration is definitely the exception; the rare shot where something goes wonky inside the critter and you hit every obstacle somehow.

The point remains -- and I'm glad you agree -- this did not happen:

Unless you were shot by a six-year-old.

Cheers.

Haha...right on! The types of details you provided are one of the strengths of this community. People with knowledge in certain areas can make everyone's writing more accurate and realistic.

I wonder if the same is true in arrow volleys. The kind we see in mass warfare with large teams of archers shooting at distance. Surely the terminal velocity would be less than an arrow shot from 30 yards away. Or would the acceleration in descent equal or approach the same power?

 

[Malik]

The terminal velocity of a an indirect-fired arrow would in no way equal the out-of-the-gate energy of the same arrow fired inside duckable range. Not even close. There's a point on a parabola, I'd think a fairly shallow one, where the arrow is at its maximum energy; i.e. where drag and gravity haven't negated the initial burst of kinetic energy and the arrow is actually getting help from gravity. It's got to be shallow, though. As many arrows as I've shot, my gut says it's got to be pretty shallow.

If you shoot an arrow into the ground, and then you shoot it up in the air and let it hit the ground, the one you shoot at the ground is going to be buried far deeper. Any ten-year-old knows that.

Man, now I'm thinking about archery tropes.

Let's talk about the mythical long shot; the 100-yard, across-the-battlefield bullseye of elven legend and 1066 and the bow it takes to get there.

It's not going to happen except out of sheer stupid luck, for the same reason that you can't land a 15-yard bullseye on an animal with a brain the size of a baseball: flight time. An arrow is not a bullet.

You have seconds -- almost two -- between the time you release an arrow and the time it lands 100 yards away. (Figuring 160-170 fps + the arc you'd need to get it that far, which is substantial.) Your target will not be in the same place. It's pointless to shoot that far unless you're part of an artillery platoon and you're firing for effect. Otherwise, all your target has to do is look up and take a quick step to the left.

Which puts us in an interesting position with 100+ lb. longbows of yore. I'm winging it, here, but stick with me on this.

I'm physically strong. I'm 5'9" and 190 lbs., Army Airborne. I have a 17" neck and a 44" chest and I run a 5K in 22 minutes and change. I'm no Superman, but I'm strong and pretty fit. I've been shooting a bow since I was five. That's 37 years behind the riser with a few years off here and there, but I'd prefer it if you don't count.

I shoot a 55-lb. bow. Two hours of shooting destroys me. I'm sore for days, and at the end of a 2- or 3-hour competition I'm shooting like crap.

A friend at my archery club shoots a 70-lb. stickbow. I shot it once. Once. I shot it once because I could barely hold it at full draw. I can deadlift 300 pounds and I couldn't hold a 70-lb. stickbow at 28" long enough to get a sight picture that I liked.

The reason for this is that the muscles that you use to draw a bow are all relatively small: the anterior and posterior deltoid, the fingers, the rhomboids, and to some degree the biceps. Some guys push heavy bows with their pecs while they draw back on the string. You lock in your anchor with your lats but you don't use them to draw. There is a finite limit to the amount of muscle you can recruit to draw a bow. The difference in perceived draw weight between a 50- and 60-lb. bow is massive, and this is why.

My buddy who shoots the 70-lb. bow is a brick wall, one of these guys who looks like he could pull a bus with his teeth. Corn-fed, linebacker, no-neck, Bubba big. He makes me look lean and svelte by comparison.

Howard Hill -- the greatest archer who has perhaps ever lived, Google him if you're reading this and you don't know him -- preferred 80-90 lb. bows, or so legend has it. Legend also has it that he used a 170-lb. bow to drop an elephant. Having fired a 70-lb. stickbow, I'm in the camp that he didn't. I believe my exact words on the subject were, "The hell he did."

100-lb. longbows have been recovered. They exist. I won't argue that they didn't exist. But I will argue that not every archer pulled them back to full poundage.

I would bet that these bows were mass-produced at a certain weight (or as close as you could get to mass-produced back then). You drew the bow as far as you could and found an anchor point that you could hit consistently, and you learned to adjust your arc accordingly. Most of these guys were firing for effect, anyway. As I mentioned, at 100 yards your target isn't going to be there when your arrow lands, much less at 200 yards, so aiming (past the point of nailing down yardage) makes no sense until you're inside a range where your opponent can't just duck. That's about 40 yards. (EDIT: Even at 40 yards, if you knew it was coming, you could get out of the way.)

Inside 40 yards, you wouldn't need to go to full draw on a 100-lb. bow. Especially judging from the damage that a hunting bow half the weight can cause (and energy return vs. poundage is asymptotic; someone would have done the math on that by the time they developed longbows).

I'm betting -- and in my books, I'm writing -- that few archers went to full draw; the rare man who could pull a longbow to full draw was highly valued and revered. I promise you that not everyone could. Everybody probably said he did when he was chasing girls and telling war stories, but in reality, I don't see it.

I can't help but think of the 150-lb. longbow as something akin to the 25-lb. sword from days of fantasy yore, which was based on ceremonial Claymores but had no basis in martial reality.

I could be wrong; I have no knowledge one way or the other and the plural of anecdote is not data. Just more food for thought.

 

[Malik]

I just cruised through this whole thread again, and Caged Maiden pointed out on the very first page that her instructor told her that war bows weren't pulled back fully.

In fact, my archery instructor said they were mostly pulled to mid chest rather than fully, and loosed very rapidly. He's pretty well researched, but I cannot confirm whether that is true.

So . . . yeah. So there. Pulling back partially on a bow that big makes a hell of a lot more sense than the existence of a whole unit full of underfed guys who can pull and hold a 100-lb. bow.

I reiterate, though: the plural of anecdote is not data. If anybody has hard data on this, please post it.

 

[Malik]

Great post, Malik.

I have another question about arrow penetration. Is there a "safe" distance for a person to stay? Tell me if I wrong, but an arrow must gain some speed before hitting the target. If I stay in 1,5 meters/ 5 feet distance, will it be powerful enough to kill me?

The speed is imparted to the arrow as soon as the string is released and the potential energy in the bow limbs becomes kinetic energy. The arrow slows down before it leaves the shelf completely; drag from the shelf on the shaft and the fletchings slows it down a little once it leaves the string and before it clears the shelf.

I know a guy who had an arrow slip off the shelf and he shot it through his hand due to overdrawing so I'm gonna say no on this one. (He jokes that he was cleaning his bow when it suddenly went off.)

If you interrupted the arrow before the bow was completely released, with something that could withstand the force of the arrow, then you might . . . possibly . . . cause the string to snap or the bow to crack. Most likely, though, the arrow would just split from the nock and damage the string. And it would still probably deliver a heck of a wallop.

The only safe place from an arrow is behind the bow.

 

[Valentinator]

Awesome, I'm completely unable to use the knowledge of physics while thinking about archery.

Another question about shooting 2-3 arrows at the same time (common trick used in movies). It seems that 2 arrows must be twice less powerful according to the law of momentum conservation. How many arrows can I shoot at the same time without being completely ridiculous? The targets do not wear any armor.

 

[wordwalker]

Another question about shooting 2-3 arrows at the same time (common trick used in movies). It seems that 2 arrows must be twice less powerful according to the law of momentum conservation. How many arrows can I shoot at the same time without being completely ridiculous? The targets do not wear any armor.

Can we qualify this that we're talking about shooting fixed targets close together at close range, like maybe preparing for when a couple of invaders come through a wide door together? (The archer's "shotgun.") I've seen a double-shot (one arrow on each side of the bow) hit two stationary targets at once, so it's not completely impossible--

Under those circumstances. In a regular battle...

 

[Valentinator]

Can we qualify this that we're talking about shooting fixed targets close together at close range, like maybe preparing for when a couple of invaders come through a wide door together? (The archer's "shotgun.") I've seen a double-shot (one arrow on each side of the bow) hit two stationary targets at once, so it's not completely impossible--

Under those circumstances. In a regular battle...

Good point. That's more precise.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

In a real combat situation, shooting more than one arrow at the same time wouldn't be done, ever. It's a trick shot. Trick shots have no place when lives are on the line.

 

[Malik]

I've tried it. The arrows go everyplace. The problem is that only one of them rests on the shelf. If you hold the bow horizontally it works a little better but shot placement trumps speed. I'm sure it can be done, but like Smith says, above: you would never rely on a trick shot.

What does work, though, is the Saracen technique of holding several arrows in the draw hand and feeding them into the bow. This technique has recently been rediscovered and it makes the bow about as fast as a gun. There are stories of American Indians being able to shoot a bow as fast as a repeating rifle. I would imagine this is how they did it.

BTW, the comments section on this video makes me want to go on a crotch-punching spree. I'm actually hesitant to post this video because of all the neckbeard-sporting D&D'ers spouting comments that have been disproved in this very thread.

This guy is shooting a light bow, maybe 40 lbs., but as we've seen:

A.) 40 lbs. is plenty. I hunted with a 40-lb. longbow (the lightest bow allowed by law for big game in this state) after having shoulder surgery and took an enormously fat blacktail buck with a complete pass-through using an ash arrow with a steel Zwickey broadhead, which looks like this:

Spoiler: GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF TASTY ANIMAL

He was eating my wife's prize roses during hunting season. Don't judge me. He made his own choice.

B.) As we've discussed, English archers with their "longbows that could totally crush plate armor at 250 yards it says so in the rulebook and didn't you see Braveheart that totally happened" (insert masturbatory gesture here) most likely didn't hit full draw, anyway.

In a pinch, if you really had to get several shots off in a hurry, the technique illustrated in the above video is completely plausible. After watching it, I have to wonder if I've been doing it wrong all my life.

 

[Malik]

Awesome, I'm completely unable to use the knowledge of physics while thinking about archery.

I use my knowledge of physics when I'm making a sandwich. Physics and math are to the world around you what English and history are to your writing.

 

[Valentinator]

I understand it is a trick shot but can "an arrow shotgun" be technically feasible in terms of power? I mean, for an unskilled person even an ordinary one-arrow shot is a sort of a trick. For professional battle archers trick shots could be a second nature. IMO the goal of such technique could be not to hit the target but to suppress the enemy in general. Theoretically you can combine this with some high-speed shooting techniques and get "an automatic arrow shotgun" which seems quite awesome to me.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I understand it is a trick shot but can "an arrow shotgun" be technically feasible in terms of power? I mean, for an unskilled person even an ordinary one-arrow shot is a sort of a trick. For professional battle archers trick shots could be a second nature. IMO the goal of such technique could be not to hit the target but to suppress the enemy in general. Theoretically you can combine this with some high-speed shooting techniques and get "an automatic arrow shotgun" which seems quite awesome to me.

It's fantasy fiction. You can write whatever you wish but you need to have plausibility.

Is it realistically feasible? No.

Would power diminish? Yes

Professional archers of the day when archers were warriors were not trick shot artists. Their arrows were valuable, expensive, and time consuming to make. Any sort of suppressive fire was done en masse, with volleys. Not by a single trick shot artist. In general, the concept of suppressive fire, is a modern one. With arrows, the archer hoped to find the mark.

If you're aiming for any sort if realism to your fighting, I'd strongly urge against this idea. In my opinion, it sounds hokey.

Again though, write anything you want. Better make it plausible though or you'll lose readers.

 

[Valentinator]

If you're aiming for any sort if realism to your fighting, I'd strongly urge against this idea. In my opinion, it sounds hokey.

Again though, write anything you want. Better make it plausible though or you'll lose readers.

I just want the fighting scenes to be realistic in my universe. I'm not really aiming for historical realism, because the laws of my world are quite different from the laws of real world Middle Ages. I can afford something like unlimited cheap arrows or super-strength. I'm asking to find out which parameter I have to adjust and which one to leave intact.