Sources for Weapons and Fighting Styles

I didn't get farther than the bow Q before going OOOO OOOO!!!!!

The Ranger's apprentice series by John Flannagan. Lots of well written fights, much of it with bows and short knives, including the in-universe version of mongol bow. The protagonist seems about the age of yours. It describes movements, what it feels like, the method behind it and what training it takes. As a perk, it's entertaining and at times hilarious, as well as being well written. There is some early installment weirdness in the form of monsters, but it's not too out there.

Allow me to say... There is no effing way a 14 year old without super strength could use a mongolian bow.

There's a saying, "If you want an archer, start with his grandfather." And it's kind of true. We tend to think of bows as, "Finesse" weapons, but it takes a pretty dang good amount of strength to use a bow effectively. The most the kid would probably be able to use safely and effectively is, I'm guessing, about 25 lbs. Good for target shooting, but unless they're really close, it's probably not going to take someone out.

The GOOD thing about, "Archer's muscles" is that they gain strength quickly, even though not many people work them, so even a slender-looking person can have excellent strength in those groups.

edited 29th May '14 12:47:32 AM by Poisonarrow

The thing about bows is, the stronger the person is, the more range and power they will get out of the bow, everything else being equal. Your 14 year old archer wont last long against adult bowmen.

By "backhand" do you mean a position similar to when you are first drawing the sword, or do I misunderstand?

'scuse me, but "Mongolian" is a type of bow, not a draw-weight. I own an actual for-real Mongolian horsebow with a 35-pound draw. And it's not a kids' toy, either. You don't think that the Mongols started kids out with fifty- or sixty-pound draw weights, do you?

I also know 14-year-olds who routinely and effectively shoot 55-pounders. They started with a 15- or 20-pound pull when they were less than ten, and have practiced consistently for years. When they get their full adult muscle growth, they'll be able to use an 80- or 85-pound bow; one I probably couldn't even string without using a stringer.

And the whole thing about "if you want to make an archer, start with his grandfather" isn't about physical ability — muscles don't work under Lamarckian genetics, after all. It's about the culture and attitude that needs to exist around the people learning. I can go to the gun range alone, once a week, put 100 rounds downrange, and consistently improve. If I develop a problem, I can send a picture of my targets to a friend on the other side of the country, and he can give me a good idea of what I'm doing wrong, just by comparing my shot placements with what I was getting two weeks ago. I can't do that with archery. Half-an-hour worth of practice in solitude once a week isn't going to do much.

edited 30th May '14 6:35:14 AM by Madrugada

Take this lightly, but I thought the combat in Assassins Creed II (the only one in the series I played) was fairly realistic enough. Of course there's way too much blocking involved and the enemies tend to wait their turn while surrounding you, but there's notable physics there. The daggers and one-handed swords are appropriately swift and deadly, and the maces and two-handed weapons like axes were appropriately brutal. No shields though, so you'll have to look somewhere else.

I'm not sure, but the Dark Souls games have a reputation for having very realistic video game-to-real life combat. I've not played it so I'm hoping someone else can confirm this.

It feels more realistic, but looking too closely will turn up problems. The enemies will gang up on you and they won't wait turns, but they also don't have friendly fire, so most of the early game enemies will just rush you.

Appropriate enough, since, with exception to the demons and the animals, all of them are insane.

Shields are realistic enough against the human-sized enemies, but I've taken zero damage from things that smashed through stone pillars, just because my shield was up.

But yes, you can get a good feel of how a weapon works based on its moveset, so watching someone use a weapon on youtube or whatever is something that I'd advise.

I've recently watched a video on that(by someone who uses swords);

Hrm... I'm seeing two problems here; first, if this kid started his swordfighting 'career' playfighting with his buddy, why in the seven hells would he develop the habit of holding his sword at an awkward and unnatural angle? Unless the setting is one that has anime or something, or he lives in an area where curved blades are the norm and Eastern-style martial arts are sufficiently prevalent to include some of the more esoteric styles, he's not too likely to even have been exposed to the idea. Well, unless he saw a skilled knife-fighter who used the style and got it locked in his tiny munchkin brain (as kids sometimes do) that it was awesome, and that he needed to use it right away, I guess. From the quick research I did, it's essentially an infighting technique for use in restricted spaces. Tremendously valuable to know for those times when you are in tight quarters, but trying to use it on a regular basis would get you killed quite promptly.

Secondly, and this is more minor, no matter how rough he and his buddy were playing, he isn't likely to have picked up any really useful dirty fighting techniques, since the average roughhousing session doesn't end up with one of the kids incapacitated for significant lengths of time and/or crippled, which is kind of the point of dirty fighting.

Holy super thread necro Batman. The last post from the OP was back in 2010. Doesn't AHR go by a different handle now?

I want to comment on the bows but this quite the necroed thread.

edited 5th Jun '14 7:40:35 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Holy super thread necro Batman. The last post from the OP was back in 2010. Doesn't AHR go by a different handle now?

What the heck I am bored and this thread won't likely go anywhere.

Part of the commentary on the Mongolian bow has to do with the average draw weight of Mongolian Warriors bow which is over 100lbs. They are commonly believed to average around 130-160lb draw weight depending on size and construction. The bows could be strung on foot with a knee or the Mongolians also used drawing racks to store the bows when not in use in camp. The racks helped them to rapidly string the bows to ready them for use. During the winter months they are known to have used dried dung fires to warm the bows so they could string them without damaging them.

The Mongolian bow is a composite recurve. When unstrung the arms bend completely forward and curl at the tips. That is what gives the bow its very impressive draw weight and shot power.

A young warriors bow is very unlikely to be as powerful as the full sized bow. Generally when people refer to the Mongolian bow they are referring to the full sized bow carried by the Mongolian Warriors which is noted as one of the most powerful bows.

"Start with his grandfather" is very much about physical capability as it takes a fair bit of strength to draw back a full sized war bow and endurance to hold it to aim it. That physical ability is built up by that consistent practice. That is where the culture part comes in. They spend a lot of time training the young archer to not only be a skilled shot, but also building up their physical capability. It is the same as practicing martial arts consistently everyday. You become strong and develop endurance from the practice. The accuracy, fire rate, and draw strength of an archer and their bows is very reliant on physical abilities. Learning the foibles and methods of an arrow is fairly easy but it is very reliant on physical ability.

When you draw back the bow you need the strength to draw it back and the endurance to hold it for up 30 seconds to aim it. When you are talking about drawing back over 100lbs of bow that requires a fair bit of physical ability to do that.

As for draw weights the rough consensus on ideal draw weights for hunting and war is somewhere between 65 to 80lbs at the low end. While lower power bows can be lethal they have less range and power then the more advanced and more powerful designs. Bows like Mongolian War Bow, Japanese Yumi, and English Longbow are all famed for their power and range and requiring a large amount of training to use them to their max effectiveness.

If the youth in question had been training with the Mongolian bow like most archery cultures did, by the time they were 14 or 15 they should be able to draw back bows roughly 80-110lb range at a minimum and be reasonably skilled hunters and archers on foot. If they trained like Mongolians they would also be reasonably adept horseman and horse archer.

There is basically no way to make a heaver draw bow easier to draw until someone figures out how to attach pulleys to them.

Or you develop the strength to pull the bow. The more powerful the bow the harder it gets. Even a compound bow can have a initially high draw weight but it usually easier to hold.

The shape of a bow does affect how easy it is to draw the same weight. The extreme back curve Teuffel mentioned in the Mongolian bow (and the Hungarian and Scythian bows as well) means that those bows do something called "stacking"; there's a point in the draw where the amount of effort it takes to draw it further drops off sharply. It's something to do with vectors and angular momentum, which I don't understand, but have experienced first hand. It's also how they can be easier to hold at full draw than a longbow or a milder recurve bow of the same draw weight.

And the longer you can hold it the more time you have to aim your shots. That period of conditioning really shows through in both the initial draw and the hold. That conditioning allows the archer to fire arrow after arrow including those aimed shots without becoming exhausted too quickly.

The Mongols didn't just use their bows for war but also for hunting and even contests, but that is true for any culture that had a heavy emphasis on archery. More interesting is that the Mongols carried a few varieties of arrows with them. They had their war arrows typically meant for use against enemies wearing anything short of plate, hunting arrows the traditional generic broad head, a type of fire arrow for fire attacks and signaling, a type of flight arrow for small/light game and shooting contests, and a whistling arrow used to warn and signal.