Fordorsia wrote:Puzikas wrote:I read in a book (The Transition of Bows to Firearms in the English Armies, I think was the name) that testing with modern "warbows" (80lb+ draw) allowed armour to be penetrated at moderate range, but I do not remember what the range was not what kind of arrow they were using or anything of the sort. Is this not the case? Because the book in question is of academic nature as, IIRC, it was a publisher of the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst.
The problem with testing arrows against plate is that we just don't know how most arrows were heat treated. If they were hardened all the way through, they would have been optimized for getting through plate. But they weren't. iirc the most they ever seem to have been hardened is on the edges, and their points weren't even all that pointy, they were pretty snubby, so they were more breaking through the armour than cutting through it. And then it's not just about the poundage, you also have to take into account what kind of arrow head it is, and how thick the plate or how fine the mail is. You can get results for one set up, but the results for a different set up can be completely different. Which makes sense, because results would have been all over the palce back then too.
Then on top of that lack on info, you just had people early on using either arrows and armour made purely with modern methods, or some kind of arrows on what is essentially costume armour, or just flat steel plates. The results are unreliable and all over the place, and over the decades have seeped into any kind of testing and messing everything up. Myths ruin everything and just don't die.
Compounding this we have to ask what kind of armor. In the middle ages the quality of armor plates could and did vary significantly from master crafted relatively homogenous well hardened and heat treated steel plates to garbage that's essentially carbonless iron. And it's virtually impossible to say what the average quality was. And that's if you take a cross section at any given time.
