Archery

I have a strange fascination with bows and arrows in recent months.

There's something very Zen about the whole thing. I think it's because it requires both practice and focus. Otherwise your shot will go way off target, you'll fumble the arrow and drop it to the floor, release the string too early and watch as your arrow only flies 5 feet, etc.

'course, the fact that a certain sneaky fellow from a certain steampunk metropolis was such a stylishly versatile user of bow and many, many sorts of arrows may have had something to do with the fascination.

Also, crossbows are meh but ballistae are awesome. Because they're GIANT crossbows.

edited 10th Jan '12 11:46:12 PM by CharpocalypseNowRedux

First person to mention arrows in the knee gets FUS RO DAHed.

On-topic, I think the very concept of the magnetic arrow rest is awesome.

edited 11th Jan '12 11:33:04 PM by feotakahari

Can't see the pic, probably due to proxy. But if that's what I think it is, I think my dad has one on his bow.

Arrows are pretty cool.
To bad rifling made them obsolete.
The sniper rifle could be the new archery though
...
Knee.

-uses machine gun-

Good thing PE has an Archery unit at my school.

I used to be an Archer, then I took an arro-Is FUS RO DAH'd through a window-

edited 12th Jan '12 8:05:06 AM by Galeros

Hello Galeros.

/Figure out how to replace the string with magnetic fields and we got ourselves a railbow.

Then remove the "net" from magnetic and call it a magic bow.

*Slow clap*

Well played sir, well played.

Ah, the bow and arrow.

The prime choice of cowards and villains on battlefields everywhere. Was there ever a weapon so ignoble?

Fun fact about weapons comparisons. The major disadvantage a bow has against a gun is rate of fire these days. Back yonder in ye olde days, bows and crossbows were considered superior weapons for their accuracy and power — indeed, I believe a longbow still delivers more power than a standard rifle. The difference? You can teach a soldier to fire any kind of standard gun in a very short amount of time. A bow takes months to get the hang of.

If you're replacing losses on the battlefield, what's the better option? Guns will simply allow you to replace troops at a greater pace, and in greater numbers. Essentially, the logistics of the gun became a force multiplier, and that's why guns continued to be developed and eventually became dominant battlefield weapons. After all, it's the soldier and context of battle that really matters — the weapon in their hands is secondary to that, as long as they've got one. Skills, tactics, strategies and logistics have always overcome pure technological might, but having technology doesn't exclude the others.

Bows are marvelous and artful things, in my opinion.

No. A bow doesn't have more penetration than a rifle.

It depends on the bow, the type of arrow, and the type of target, as well as the caliber and weight of the bullet, the powder load, and the type of gun which one will have more penetration power.

Simply saying "A bow and arrow has more penetration power than a gun" is about as nonsensical as saying "Canines are bigger than felines." It's true if you're talking about an adult wolf and a Domestic Shorthaired Cat, but false if you're talking about a dachshund and a lion.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:07:10 AM by Madrugada

I'm not exactly sure what the draw force of a standard longbow is, nor the precise amount of kinetic energy a 5.56mm round imparts on impact.

That said, penetration isn't equivalent to how hard the hit is. There's a number of elements to take into account, such as the cylindrical shape of a bullet against the flat shape of an arrowhead. A harsher taper is going to hit with more force over a smaller area, which is exactly why modern bullets do just that.

Keep in mind that a proper historical wartime arrow is near 1000 grains in weight, whereas a modern bullet is scarcely over 50. A gun has a much higher fps, but I'm not sure if that overcomes the grain meeting the 150-185 lb. draw weight of an English longbow.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:41:04 AM by MadassAlex

There is no "standard longbow". The draw weight of a longbow can vary from around 25 pounds to upwards of 70. And not all arrowheads are flat or leaf-shaped. Bodkin points are just as tapered and cylindrical as a rifle bullet, but the the point is sharp. They can penetrate metal. A blunt is just that — blunt — it won't penetrate for crap, unless your target is Jello.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:24:13 AM by Madrugada

I had a bow for awhile when I was a teen, and it's pretty damn cool when you start getting the fundamental down and can send an arrow zipping into the target. It can be surprisingly hard to hit a target even at relatively short range though, even with practice, and shooting beyond a couple of yards or so can take more strength than you'd think.

I have nothing but respect for the people who practice it seriously and can use an old fashioned bow to hit the target time after time.

^^ Edited.

^ Actually, I don't think there's a single person alive today who can use a historical wartime bow. Those things had insane draw weights and their practitioners were incredibly strong — probably much stronger than any warrior who took to the fight with sword in hand.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:42:45 AM by MadassAlex

To add to Madrugada's point about arrowheads, there are also hunting points with a three-sided cross-section like the old musket bayonets that leave very unpleasant triangular holes in whatever they hit. They would be effective in war as well, since like bayonet wounds they would be hard to sew up.

The medieval archers used bows with draw-weights upwards of 100 pounds. They didn't aim so much as stand in a very large group and arc their arrows to land in the back ranks of the enemy, c.f. the Battle of Agincourt. When Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose was discovered, they found longbows and also a few skeletons of the archers themselves. They all had deformities in their upper backs from the weight of the bows.

edited 23rd Feb '12 8:01:15 AM by thelinguist

I know I would get stoned for this, but...

...

...

...Can you kill a person by....shooting him/her in the knee?

...I am so sorry.

...let's find out. (aims for your knee.)

Probably not, though if you hit a major blood vessel going through it, you could succeed in making them slowly bleed to death. The back of the knee is more vulnerable than the front, though you could likely still cripple the person and thus put an end to their adventuring.

I teach an archery class over the summer to Cub Scouts. It horrifies me just how many ways they find to nearly kill themselves. Half of each lesson has to be defining what not to do.

Strangest, most challenging, yet oddly most fun class I ever had when when I had to teach archery to a tour group of fifty Chinese students. Most of them were college age, and only a few of them spoke English. I was given little warning that I would be teaching them. But it was quite unique in the end.

edited 2nd May '13 1:46:02 AM by Tuckerscreator

Well, there's potential blood loss from hitting a major vein or artery, potential for infection, or doing it to someone out in the middle of nowhere and leaving them to die there because they're unable to get medical care. (Or get eaten by a predator or something in the right environment for that.)

And all of that is still putting issues like shock (of either the medical or psychological kind) aside for the moment.

A lot of these issues are very much diminished by the process of modern medicine, (so things like sterilizing wounds is universally practiced, blood transfusions are known about and understood, and no one from the medical field is going to do something like amputate a limb with rusty hacksaw that's just been used on someone else, etc.) so that's certainly a nice factor in favor of survival, but someone in a position where they can't reach a place to be treated properly or set a story in a region/era where that kind of medical knowledge didn't exist, and you absolutely could kill someone that way.

One of the classic archery demonstrations is to place a glass behind a sandbag, attempt to break the glass w/ a fired rifle bullet and fail, then break the glass w/ an arrow from a bow.

Is this thread still alive?

It used to be a thriving thread, like any other, but then it took an arrow in the knee.

Can anyone discuss hand positions for the bow and the draw hands, the position of the arrow (left or right) relative to the bow and such?

I'm not an archer, but, whenever I shoot a few arrows I have, I draw them with my right hand, with the arrow being put to the right. Am I doing wrong?