>guns quickly dominated over bows because...

>guns quickly dominated over bows because... they were easy to train plebs on!
This is such a load of bullshit. Look at how complex and involved this process is compared to pulling a string to your cheek (see 5:20 - 7:00)

>fire
>remove match
>grab primer
>prime pan
>close plan
>move to load position
>grab paper cartridge
>seat in barrel
>pull out ramrod
>ram down bore
>replace ramrod
>return to shoulder
>maintain match
>mount match
>open pan
>fire

All that in 30 seconds? A bow is clearly easier.

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  1. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    You also need more discipline. A single accidental arrow is nothing but a gunshot can make ruin an entire section into prefiring

  2. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns are more lethal and have much higher ranges. A volley of gunfire was absolutely devastating over bowmen. You're right in that firearms were more complex than bows before the middle of the 19th century, which is why they remained in the hands of specialized units before the metallic cartridge was invented in 1845

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Are you drunk, or just stupid? Well before 1845, firearms were the main weapon of soldiers in European armies.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >drunk and stupid
        I'm not that anon but I'm both and also own lots of guns, cool story eh?

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Guns are more lethal
      If you factor in armor, ok
      >and have much higher range
      No, bows outranged the vast majority of handheld firearms until the minie ball made massed use of rifles viable.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >bows outranged the vast majority of handheld firearms
        lol. lmao even
        even early guns fired projectiles at transonic speeds. that's nearly an order of magnitude higher than an arrow of the time

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >If you factor in armor, ok
        >A 1/3rd inch diameter arrow shaft with a slightly wider head penetrating maybe 2 inches into your body does more damage than a .75 caliber ball punching through your entire body
        LOL LMAO

        >No, bows outranged the vast majority of handheld firearms until the minie ball made massed use of rifles viable.
        Not in the slightest. The confusion often comes from the often recorded short ranges muskets were used at, especially during the era of linear warfare, but this ignores that the method of warfare was designed for combating other musket armed infantry and that often archers and other soldiers armed with older ranged weapons would engage much closer than their maximum range for the sake of preserving the lethality of their weapons. Sure an arrow from a longbow might be able to kill a man at 200 yards, but not a man wearing a gambeson, much less mail or plate armour. By firing at your maximum range all you're doing is wasting ammo. In reality archers would fire at about the same distances as musketeers.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          >LOL LMAO
          They both kill you equally dead, moron. "Lethality" is not and never was a factor. Armor penetration was.
          >archers would fire at
          [citation needed]

          Rifles and cannon outranged bows. But they weren't used by front line infantry.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >They both kill you equally dead, moron. "Lethality" is not and never was a factor. Armor penetration was.
            Guns have always had better penetration. Also no, they don't kill you equally dead, Harold Godwinson took and arrow to the eye and only died when Norman knights overran him.

            >Rifles and cannon outranged bows. But they weren't used by front line infantry.
            Rifles have a shorter range than muskets as the rifling slows down the projectile. The only thing you're considering is accurate range in which case bows have a much much much much worse range than muskets. Later high velocity breech loading rifles often included outdated volley sights allowing them a theoretical engagement range of well over a kilometer even if the odds of hitting a specific person at that range was zero. In pre-modern warfare you aren't aiming for a head or even a person, you're aiming for one of numerous blocks of people hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet deep.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            A gun creates an open "flower" after exiting the target hence why recruits are trained to plug the exit wound with a bandage then wrap it securely for their AFA. A corned powder gun isn't pressurised as much as a modern gun so it tends to tumble which creates a disaster once inside the body. Sometimes it fractures, which makes it incredibly hard to treat afterwards.

            Here's an English example from the Kett's rebellion:

            it is reported also, that some having the arrowes sticking fast in their bodies (a thing fearefull to tell) drawing them out of the greene wounds, with their owne hands, gave them (as they were dropping with bloud) to the Rebels that were about them, whereby yet at the least, they might bee turned upon us againe

            >european guns caught up with the recurving bows of steppe nomads only around 1750.
            You pulled this out of your ass you insufferable high school teen.
            1) a bow's range and power is primarily determined by draw weight. a heavy draw longbow will outrange a light draw recurve bow and vice versa, it was always a design decision by the bowmaker
            2) cannons outranged bows pretty much as soon as they appeared. You need to specify what guns you mean and what you mean by range. Handheld rifles existed as early as the 1500s and those always outranged bows, they just weren't used by front line troops due to slow reload.

            Literally nothing of note happened in 1750. The muskets used in 1820 were less powerful than the ones used in 1620 if anything. The big range-related breakthrough was the introduction of the minie ball and needle action rifles in the 1840s, which finally made mass issue of rifles to front line infantry viable.

            > a bow's range and power is primarily determined by draw weight. a heavy draw longbow
            That's only one factor of the equation. The efficiency of the bow heavily alters what fps an arrow can achieve. A lighter composite can actually match the speed of a heavier longbow with the same arrow.

            An Example from Manchuarchery

            "At 82 pounds its draw weight started to outperform the disadvantage of the weight of its ears, results were impressive. The 82# Manchu bow, made by Wen Chieh, outperformed a well-made 128# yew longbow, shooting the same 1230 grains (80g) military weight arrow a stunning 190fps against 170fps for the longbow."

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >If you factor in armor, ok
        Arrows didn't leave grapefruit-sized wounds with heavily-expanded projectiles.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Guns are more lethal and have much higher ranges
      european guns caught up with the recurving bows of steppe nomads only around 1750.

      https://i.imgur.com/rIGLINN.jpg

      >guns quickly dominated over bows because... they were easy to train plebs on!
      This is such a load of bullshit. Look at how complex and involved this process is compared to pulling a string to your cheek (see 5:20 - 7:00)

      >fire
      >remove match
      >grab primer
      >prime pan
      >close plan
      >move to load position
      >grab paper cartridge
      >seat in barrel
      >pull out ramrod
      >ram down bore
      >replace ramrod
      >return to shoulder
      >maintain match
      >mount match
      >open pan
      >fire

      All that in 30 seconds? A bow is clearly easier.

      >Look at how complex and involved this process is
      it does not matter, as it is so much easier to aim a gun that it offsets all the complexity. archery skill lies in aiming and an amateur can't aim worth shit. It takes at least a decade to train an archer to the point where he is competitive with a gunman who has a training of three months. for instance england had a law, fully repealed only in the 1960's when almost everyone was already ignoring it, which stipulated that every free man between 16 and 40 years old must practice archery on a daily basis.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >european guns caught up with the recurving bows of steppe nomads only around 1750.
        You pulled this out of your ass you insufferable high school teen.
        1) a bow's range and power is primarily determined by draw weight. a heavy draw longbow will outrange a light draw recurve bow and vice versa, it was always a design decision by the bowmaker
        2) cannons outranged bows pretty much as soon as they appeared. You need to specify what guns you mean and what you mean by range. Handheld rifles existed as early as the 1500s and those always outranged bows, they just weren't used by front line troops due to slow reload.

        Literally nothing of note happened in 1750. The muskets used in 1820 were less powerful than the ones used in 1620 if anything. The big range-related breakthrough was the introduction of the minie ball and needle action rifles in the 1840s, which finally made mass issue of rifles to front line infantry viable.

  3. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    they were less tiresome to use, u get fatigued alot using a bow for long time. Most fights are decided on fatigue and who gives up first. This factor more than anything has dictated trajectory of weapon adoption

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      How many times could a longbowmen of typical strength fire before being too fatigued for combat?

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Its more like you have to train generations of people from birth to use it effectively as opposed to a gun.

  4. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    It takes upper body strength to use a bow

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Sshh, OP doesn't know what that is, thinks you press RT to pull a bowstring

  5. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    It’s still harder to train properly for bows because you need serious strength to pull a bow effectively. It’s not the kind of normal strength you have from farm work or something either. You need to work specifically on pulling back a bowstring. Hence why the English literally had training holidays to keep the longbowmen in shape

    Plus firing in formation is a lot more effective than the bow equivalent of firing in formation. You need a lot more bowmen to hope to hit a general area of people. Guns, even back then. Were accurate enough in lines of firing that you’d generally hit as long as you had a straight line to an enemy line

  6. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns became dominant because they are genuinely extremely deadly weapons.
    An arquebus ball is far more likely to cause casualties than an arrow, especially when facing European soldiers in plate armor, although even in west Africa were armor was never very heavy to begin with, everyone agreed that the arquebus is a far better weapon than bow and arrow.

  7. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I forgot the fricking video and none of you pointed it out

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      That's... really not that difficult to get the hang of? Medieval peasants were uneducated but they weren't stupid, they had the same mental capacity as we do. The average person could get the hang of that after a couple of day's practice.

      Also, bows are not actually easier to shoot than guns (especially high poundage bows). In theory they are, but in practice they require much more physical effort. The bones of medieval archers were even deformed by the process of regularly shooting them. A gun takes longer to reload, but it's ultimately less physically strenuous.

  8. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's not just about the ease of training plebs on them or that their projectiles penetrate plate armor. There's also a psychological component.
    There's the loud, deafening EXPLOSION that has an effect on the morale of the enemy. The BANG of the weapons have something in it that makes your lizard brain scream "RUN AWAY".
    Especially if you're just some pleb farmer that was just given a spear two weeks ago and never heard it before.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      It wasn't just plebs that were terrified of it but nobility as well. IIRC there is an account of a French knight who survived the battle of Pavia during which the French armored cavalry was completely massacred by infantry carrying firearms. He said he never felt such a fear in his life and that he wished such a terrible weapon was never invented.

  9. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    You can make ammo much more easily and you still need less training

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Easier to make ammo than arrows, but harder to make guns than bows

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Is it? You need a shitty piece of wood and an iron tube, it doesn't sound that hard

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          A bow is just a stick and some strong. Ammo is just gunpowder and some projectile which can be literally anything, and a gun, like you said at the very least needs an iron tube, which requires at least some knowledge of metalworking.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >strong
            *string, whatever you know what I mean

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            I mean, you could make a bow fit for killing rabbits out of any old tree branch, but warbows with 90+ lbs draw weights that are expected to shoot thousands of arrows across several battles and retain strength in inclement weather? You need proper craftsman, high quality materials, and a long curing time for those.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            You need very specific wood for a bow, you can't just pick up a few sticks

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          The barrel is easy enough to make but the threading of the end is the hard part. Especially if it is larger caliber you need a proper block and depending on the charge the reinforcements need to be specifically tailored.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Comanches with bows on horseback have given US settlers and mexicans a pretty hard time until well into the 19th century. A good archer is just a lot faster until you get to the point of lever or bolt action rifles and revolvers.
          Guns scale better though. A gunpowder volley has a much bigger shock effect.

          that iron tube is a forge welded steel barrel. you have any idea how long it takes to make one by hand? you also need a pretty skilled blacksmith for that, especially if you want it to hit what you are aiming at and not to blow up in your face.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >Comanches with bows
            comanches adopted firearms rather early.

  10. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's because they could pierce armor. I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned this.

  11. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Dumbass. A child can kill you with a gun. He could never harm you with a bow, he doesn't have the strength. Not even taking armor into account, which a gunshot punches right through but an arrow does nothing. Its killing force is significantly higher even for the strongest bowman, but if you take an untrained weakling or woman then it's unimaginably higher. A crippled old peasant could murder an armored knight with an arquebus, that would never happen with a bow. Get it?

  12. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >easier to train
    You seem to forget that the training in shooting bows involves getting swole and enduring enough to shoot a longbow for the duration of an entire battle. Aiming and shooting a bow isn't too hard compared to a musket, it's the strength aspect that makes the difference

  13. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns had better range and penetration than bows

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Bows are silent meaning archers can use concealment
      That’s why Rambo used a bow

  14. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns killed the knights in full plate armor of the early 16th century, while bows didn't.
    Simple as.
    Look up the Italian Wars.

  15. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Yes. Still cheaper than training people half of their entire lives to draw warbows properly. There's reason why crossbows were so popular despite their apparent long loading time disadvantages.

  16. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Its easier to use harder to make. The crossbow is much more complex than a bow but it's obviously easier to use which is why its invention allowed for mass conscript armies to use them instead of dedicated archers who trained their whole life.

  17. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    you clearly dont understand how much strength and technique is needed to use a bow properly

  18. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns were easier to use because you didn't need a lot of upper body strength to use it or training to aim right. And anyway, most europeans didn't have the ability to use a normal bow (they used crossbows mostly which were honestly awful as they had far less range and accuracy than a normal bow).

    Sure composite/long bows had far greater range and accuracy than guns initially but guns were a straight up upgrade to crossbows and could reliably punch through plate while bows and crossbows couldn't do so reliably even at close ranges (though both could reliably punch through mail and other types of armor).

    The ability for guns to outrange and out accuracy bows came after a couple centuries of a frantic, life or death arms race between the european states, which is why china didn't develop better firearm technology (big fish in the pond and their threats were horse nomads which couldn't be dealt with using early firearms)

  19. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Using pic rel to lift an barbell loaded with 500lbs is much more complicated than simply picking it up by hand. Yet you can train someone to do it much faster. Why is that?

  20. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns are scary

  21. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Protip: a medieval war bow is not the same as the dinky little Robin Hood playset you had when you were 7.

  22. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    except for the fact bows require a lot more strength to be used effectively, and you still need to train bowmen how to effectively use said bow even if they have the stregnth for it

  23. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I remember reading about a british general in the 18th century who tested if his troops could use the english longbow as a replacement for rifles

    The experiment was a failure because the archers from the past trained from childhood as hunters their bone structure was even different from a normal knight/man at arms

  24. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    illiterate peasant morons managed to be experts at doing this for like 500 years its not actually that hard

  25. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >skip the months/years it takes to build the muscles to pull a high pull bow
    a little dinky bow that everyone can tension is good for hunting rabbits but will do jack shit in battle

  26. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I do flintlock, not matchlock, but it becomes very muscle memory, once you've spent an afternoon in drill, which is better than you can say for strength training for a bow, especially since aiming is rather intuitive
    You're loading your pan, you're dumping and ramming powder and bullet, and then you're shooting; people make "19 steps to reload" sound difficult, where half of those are things like tear cartridge, cast about, and return rammers, things that you practically do automatically once you start the motions.
    You might not be the most accurate of marksmen, but that's why you're trained en masse, the same as crossbowmen, since the mass of fire was more important than the individual accuracy

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      But people allways say this 'crossbowmen' thing, when in reality crossbowmen were elite, mostly mercenary, troops

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        because crossbows were expensive and in use before the eras where the army would buy you weapons

  27. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Guns are chemical strength while bows still require your shitty human shoulder muscles

  28. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Bows are really fricking hard to aim.
    Don't know what the excuse is for not using a crossbow though.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Bows are really fricking hard to aim.

      No they're not.

      Back in the summer of 1979, my buddy and I both got 25lb fiberglass bows from Woolworths and in a few days of (admittedly constant) shooting, we were accurate as frick with them.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        oh yeah, just 44 years ago, remember it like yesterday

        *sip*

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Well yes, I do remember and the fact is, learning to accurately shoot a bow is very easy.

  29. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >A bow is clearly easier.

    Indeed, but a gun is lethal vs armor while a bow is not.

  30. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    You forgot to mention that firearms are fricking TERRIFYING.
    Just imagine
    >squaring up with your archerbros, then suddenly in an instant, a thunderous boom you've never heard in your life, the enemy is completely hidden by a plume of white smoke, half your friends are dead or screaming in agony, 1 second later you heard the sounds of thousands of men roaring and charging with bayonets through the smoke

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