Longbows are no good

[pike master]

i havnt read this thread before because its been dicussed so much on .com but i will dispell one myth. arquebuses and muskets were not cheap to make the were complex machines while it may have been labor intensive to make a longbow after reading an article on or someone telling me how i could make one.

it required a lot of labor, no how and more forged iron or steel than what you would need to make a great sword or any other large metal weapon. the barrel must be trued to be well aligned. the matchlock mechanism required forging, shaping and fitting the stock even if crude still had to be carved out for the barrel channel, trigger slot and so forth.

a soldier using a firearm although not having to develop the strength to use the longbow had to be more technically trained so he didnt shoot himself or his comrades. it required some training and skill to use even a primitive firearm as easy as guns are to use today they still require training and discipline to use properly. to me if i was given a matchlock musket or arquebus i would be flabbergasted by all the things you would have to keep in mind when loading and firing it wasnt as easy to use as a percussion muzzleloader or flintlock you had a constantly adjust the burning match that you had to keep adjusted by loosening and tightening a clamp screw.

plus you would have to make sure you didnt set the thing off while you were loading because you constantly had a flame burning near to the powder.

if firearms were so complex to make and so complex to operate then if they replaced the longbow on the battlefield it must have been because they caused more dread and death than what people give them credit for.

longbows were simply not more expensive to make then a firearm period. and firearms actually took a specialist of technical expertise and metal working skill to make. gunsmiths at one time were some of the highest paid professionals around.

[JCoyote]

longbows were simply not more expensive to make then a firearm period. and firearms actually took a specialist of technical expertise and metal working skill to make. gunsmiths at one time were some of the highest paid professionals around.

The bows were not more expensive, the economics of maintaining the users was. How many ways do we need to describe that?

There was some talent in using firearms. Even today people will tell you that. But it's of a different nature than archery. We're talking about an athletic talent vs a technical skill.

Not only does a longbowman take years to train, they had to maintain that training. This is almost an identical situation to a professional athlete these days. And just taking a break for a few months and training back up wasn't much of an option for these guys. It's not just skill and talent, it's musculature and fitness. For a short career. Imagine if for defense we needed to take all of our high school athletes in football and basketball across the country... and start training them at 7. Then, we had to keep them in training at that competitive level until they are 30. We have to pay not just for equipment, but for the coaches and pay for the athletes themselves and maintenance of training facilities for them to use the 3 days a week each spends in training. It really adds up. Now, using today's economics, it would easily become economically competitive to train them once for a few months to use a $100,000 dollar weapon instead, even if the result wasn't quite as good.

Compare with even an early firearm. Complicated? To a degree, but it's very linear as far as skills go even so. And let's say it takes months to learn to use... (really, I could easily have any of you shooting one well enough within a day or two, if not very fast) it's a matter of a rote assembly line procedure. Once you have learned it, it takes very little time or effort to maintain. Once someone learns to use a firearm, the skill sticks very easy, unlike an athlete who if he trains and exercises none for a year will have lost the large part of his ability. You've played TW, you know it's the maintenance costs that eat you alive.

Gunsmiths were very highly paid. And they were able to make large numbers of guns and maintain large numbers. Not really much different from a bowyer, though a bowyer had to season his products a long time... though that doesn't really figure into production as much. The thing is, the biggest expense in firearms is the initial infrastructure... once that gets in, production gains figure in much easier. The upfront costs of industry required to make the things is the hardest part, but after that guns were pretty smooth in the making.

And it did not require more forging than a sword. A decent sword took a LOT of very precise metalwork and careful heat treatment. Many firearms were made from much lower grades of steel or iron, and neither hardness nor resilience were significant in a firearm like they are in an edged weapon. The quantity of metal was the issue, but metal was becoming much more common anyway; hence the very presence of armor these things were handier at punching through.

[dopp]

I'm impressed by your conviction, but I really think I'd rather believe the historians on the 1337 5ki115 of the BEF, especially since even the most patriotic of them accepts that 12-15 rounds is already phenomenally fast. You have provided no reason so far to doubt them on a simple technical observation, as opposed to something complicated like how many people died.

I hope you're not suggesting that archery is more elite than say mounted cavalry skills. Heavy cavalry survived into the 20th century. Longbows did not. Heavy cavalry was an even more exclusive club than archery, at a 10:1 ratio or more. These were the fellows for which an entire social and economic structure was maintained to support, who trained their whole lives for war and whose entire existence depended upon their battle prowess. I think they might qualify better than longbowmen for your 'athletic warriors'. The new guns rendered them obsolete, because a fresh recruit could now kill someone many times his superior in melee combat, yet cavalry persisted despite the cost, which would have been vastly greater than that of a longbow corps. Horse, armor, weapons; just the man-at-arms alone would have been enormously more expensive to maintain than any archer. I'm not sure how anyone could claim otherwise when he had the equivalent of an entire farming district just for his support.

Yes, urbanization in the 16th century. Metropolitan London eating up all the land already, huh? No more space for the 600-yard archery ranges, everybody just has to practice indoors with muskets. When they talk about a revival of town life in the Early Modern period, they don't mean instant New York City, they just mean you start getting cities larger than five extended families again. I don't think you could consider the Roman Empire excessively urbanized in the modern sense, and the reviving cities of Early Modern Europe had quite a ways to go before they could even equal Rome at its height. Don't confuse the 19th-20th century urbanization with the 16th.

Interestingly, English nobles raising armies for the Civil War (the one that gets Charles I beheaded) reported that a significant number of their yeomen were still reporting for duty with longbows. Due to a general shortage of matchlocks (so much for the joys of mass production), many of them had to serve with the older weapon for a while. They don't seem to have been particularly effective. They weren't the professional soldiers of two hundred years before, but they could use their weapons. Given the massive advantages that some people claim the longbow had over the musket, and given also that their targets were much less armored than before (average was padded, with the cavalry in half-plate), you would have expected a better showing from them.

[pike master]

well if you are looking for something easy to learn to use, cheap to manufacture and accurate the crossbow and arbalest were there and the arbalest was more powerful and more accurate than a bow and quicker to reload than a firearm so why go through all the trouble and expense to make a gun.

and remember assembly lines werent developed until the industrial revolution each part was hand fabricated you couldnt just crank out a bunch of parts and expect them to all match up each parts had to made and fitted for that specific gun.

i think some are kinda thrown off because of stw where the samurai * felt any technology greater than the disciplines of traditional combat was lowly for a warrior to embrace so they let the peasants use the guns. but in europe arquebusiers were a step up from lowly peasants and admired for having a complex weapon that took a brain to use. the three musketeers story (not sure when it was written suggest they were people of middle class or merchant class standing.)well trained in the use of firearm and sword.

[Stlaind]

I think anyone concerned that retinue longbowmen are underpowered needs to set them up behind some spikes with skirmish off and watch them route a unit of gothic knights.

[Lord_hazard]

I think anyone concerned that retinue longbowmen are underpowered needs to set them up behind some spikes with skirmish off and watch them route a unit of gothic knights.

Think it has already been said that, that is not what makes a missile unit a good missile unit.

[AussieGiant]

@ mad cat mech and to most in general on this thread:

My comments are only designed around the flintlock muskets.

mad cat mech comment;

"it required a lot of labor, no how and more forged iron or steel than what you would need to make a great sword or any other large metal weapon. the barrel must be trued to be well aligned. the matchlock mechanism required forging, shaping and fitting the stock even if crude still had to be carved out for the barrel channel, trigger slot and so forth.

a soldier using a firearm although not having to develop the strength to use the longbow had to be more technically trained so he didnt shoot himself or his comrades. it required some training and skill to use even a primitive firearm as easy as guns are to use today they still require training and discipline to use properly. to me if i was given a matchlock musket or arquebus i would be flabbergasted by all the things you would have to keep in mind when loading and firing it wasnt as easy to use as a percussion muzzleloader or flintlock you had a constantly adjust the burning match that you had to keep adjusted by loosening and tightening a clamp screw.

plus you would have to make sure you didnt set the thing off while you were loading because you constantly had a flame burning near to the powder.

if firearms were so complex to make and so complex to operate then if they replaced the longbow on the battlefield it must have been because they caused more dread and death than what people give them credit for.

longbows were simply not more expensive to make then a firearm period. and firearms actually took a specialist of technical expertise and metal working skill to make. gunsmiths at one time were some of the highest paid professionals around"

Matchlock and early firearms in the late 1500, 1600's and early 1700's are what I term the transition period. It was in fact a transition period because of the all the things mad cat mech mentioned above. Cost, training, skill requirements were no where near as complete. Hence the continued existance of pikes, swords, plate armour and halberds.

I would however argue strongly that by the mid 1700's these characteristics are all resolved in favour of the musket. I mean we are really talking about 200 years of transition.

From about 1550 to 1750 range weaponry went from Bows to muskets and from swords to bayonets. As dopp mentions, once the social structure for producing archers waned they became obsolete. Equally the social structure for "knights" remained as was still seen in the Napoleonic wars. Heavy Cavalry was still around because the "Landed Gentry" and Aristocracy was still in place to pursue there preferred method of fighting. The only difference between 1550 cavalry and 1750 to 1850 cavalry was armour.

Funny hey. I won’t even go into the paper rock scissor war far of Napoleon. Cavalry still played an important part.

[Stlaind]

Think it has already been said that, that is not what makes a missile unit a good missile unit.

One might think so.... However all this thread is really talking about is the pros and cons of one missile weapon compared to another. To consider any bow/crossbow/firearm with out it being in the context of an actual combat is quite the fallacy.

Really, what makes a missile unit worth having around is whether or not it can do the job effectively. The longbowmen are quite capable of putting some pretty severe hurt on just about anything, and realistically an english army would be swarming with them.

If you really truely think longbows are underpowered, put some modding where your mouth is.