Quote Originally Posted by Mecha Pope View Post
Well, one can only say that western bows sucked untill the eastern bow was exported west, in which case western archery suffered only because of the lack of a strong archery tradition in that part of the world.

In general, untill the development of the bodkin arrow, a person wearing chain was fairly safe from arrow fire. (I said fairly, not completly, and if you had a brain, you'd carry a shield for insurance) I've seen some demonstrations of a eastern style steppe comopound bow punch straight through chain and LS with my own two eyes, however, so these supierier bows can be used to bridge the armor gap as well. (Allthough one has to be careful about demonstrations, as the demonstrater can arrange a "test" to provide the results he wants. There was a special on the history channel once where an "expert" "proved" that an english longbow could punch straight through a steel breastplate by holding the bow a whole six inches from the blasted thing)
I really hate the history channel sometimes. They did two documentaries on Agincourt - in one result, they said the longbow COULD penetrate through 15th cent plate. In the other, they said the longbow could NOT penetrate through 15th cent plate. ...wtf

And whenever they show Romans, they show them in shiny LS...even during the freking Punic Wars.
And they even did a retarded test when they fired a scorpion bolt at a LS made of modern high quality steel (LS back then were made of iron of varying quality)...obviously the bolt didn't penetrate and the ppl started swooning over the LS. bleh!!!