Are there any credible tests with bows or crossbows tested against

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Do those shitty JRPG bows have any point to them?

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>>54149774
Like this I mean.

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>>54149774

Fantasy never cared about practicability.

>>54149762
I remember longbows' armor piercing quality being highly overstated. As in, it only pierced (and barely at that) the plate armor used at within the range of 10 feet or so.

>>54149798
Those shoulder spikes bug me so much more than the low-cut boob armor. The boob armor is designed to make her look hot; what the fuck do the spikes accomplish? And while the boob armor does compromise the defensive capabilities of the suit, it doesn't pose an active threat of, say, ripping her fucking ear off. So...

Reduce protection to look hot
--vs--
Rip your ear off for no reason

>>54149829
I'm skeptical of modern tests. I think there's a lot of things people can get wrong, and I don't trust the bows, arrows or armor to be authentic. I mean, maybe some people have it right, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell them apart from the stupid and clueless.

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"The Weapons that made Britain" does some testing in ep 2.

There's a bit of so-so testing, and discussion of it, to be found here: http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?79261-New-Warbow-testing-publication

Alan Williams also goes into the theoretical side of things in depth in the latter parts of "The Knight and the Blast Furnace". http://www.mediafire.com/file/2lw9w2stunb6zyt/The_Knight_and_the_Blast_Furnace.pdf

As some sort of rough summary, the plate armour of the time wouldn't render you impervious to longbows, but extremely resistant to them.

>>54149762
no, you can't fucking shoot through plate armor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej3qjUzUzQg

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Does this count?

http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.ca/2011/12/english-longbow-testing-against-various.html?m=1

>>54149854
That's Tylmarande from NWN. She's magic, don't worry about it.

>>54149829
It required a bodkin arrow, which is an arrow tipped with a specially hardened spike. It could pierce a breastplate and deliver a tiny puncture wound. The chances of doing lethal damage were slight, but bleedout was possible because it took a long time to remove the armor in order to treat the wound. Musket balls had stronger velocity and so could penetrate enough to deal a wound serious enough to make the opponent collapse outright, and then the armor made bleedout a certainty. That is why they stopped wearing plate once gunpowder became prevalent- death was almost certain, even if you were on a fast horse.

>>54152208
Didn't gunpowder predate plate? I thought armor coexisted with guns.

>>54152208
Gunpowder predated plate; and bodkins were intended for use against mail.

>>54152269
It did. The other anon actually has it pretty much backwards: Plate armor only came into significant popularity with the advent of gunpowder, because it was the only thing that COULD protect against early guns. It took a good several generations for guns to advance to the point that they'd reliably punch through plate at normal battlefield ranges.

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>>54152208
From what I can recall hearing most bodkins weren't hardened steel, but rather plain iron. The idea behind the thin, needle shape being not to pierce armour, but rather to use the minimum amount of metal. When you can use up hundred of thousands of arrows in a single battle, the unit cost becomes quite an issue.

If special arrowheads were made to pierce plate, a more robust design may have been chosen, a bit more work to punch through, but far less likely to simply bend or snap off upon impact.

That armour would make bleedout certain when it otherwise wouldn't is nothing I've ever heard before, and seems highly unlikely. Stripping armour off of someone shouldn't take much time, and it isn't like they'd generally be able to administer medical care in the front line.

Instead, guns helped push armour aside simply by being very good at piercing it. So to gain a significant increase in survivability when the battlefield had become saturated with firearms, you had to go for some punishingly heavy armour, which most of those who could choose eventually simply didn't find worth the bother.

>>54152269
First cannons would be 1320's, first handheld guns a decade or two later, with local larger scale adoption probably being around the early 15th century in some places, with the large overall shift towards gunpowder based war being in the 16th century I'd say.

Transitional plate armour (ie all the critical bits, plus a mail hauberk) is somewhere in th 14th century, maybe second quarter for the first. Proper full plate ca 1400.

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>>54152557
>Plate armor only came into significant popularity with the advent of gunpowder, because it was the only thing that COULD protect against early guns.

Guns would have been very limited in use when plate armour came into vogue, and probably of somewhat questionable terminal ballistics as well.

The introduction of transitional plate armour on the other hand, which then turned into proper full plate as people noticed that the full hauberk was mostly just excessive weight, does match up somewhat to the point where the furnaces start spitting out large enough chunks of metal to make an entire breastplate without having to start welding bits together. And that breastplate is also the last component of full plate to show up, and once you have it. This is also the time where the black plague has drastically increased labour costs.

Beating out alrge sheets of metal and turning those into armour is a lot of work, but should be less work hours than making armour from links or smaller plates, each shaped and fitted individually. At least as long as we don't have to do a lot of forge welding on the large plates. Thus the shift to plate armour in a time when the forge welding ceased to be necessary, and labour costs rose dramatically, may be largely due to economy.

>>54152569
>The idea behind the thin, needle shape being not to pierce armour, but rather to use the minimum amount of metal. When you can use up hundred of thousands of arrows in a single battle, the unit cost becomes quite an issue.
let's not forget that they are also good against chain,

>That armour would make bleedout certain when it otherwise wouldn't is nothing I've ever heard before, and seems highly unlikely.
Moreso that we have written sources that someone died after the battle when they took off the armour, until then it gave enough pressure so that the person didn't bleed out.


Also, funny thing to consider here about the armour and firearms coexisting is the first battlefield use of firearms in medieval europe predates at least a hundred years the first fighting codexes about armoured combat (that we currently know of)

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>>54152208
>That is why they stopped wearing plate once gunpowder became prevalent

Now this is bullshit.

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>>54149762
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxHYQW2Nio

https://youtu.be/q1WZLVZYBwQ

https://youtu.be/HMvz-z1SPLQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTpOmpL4tMI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEfCVujdfXU

http://l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/215909.html
>English longbowmen = big nasty men!