A gun, if it hit, was guaranteed to do plenty of damage and you needed straight up plate to actually survive a shot from it. Sure, their rate of fire was below that of bows, but RoF means nothing if you don't actually do damage. So yes, once guns got through their growing pains and were well developed, they were definitely superior. And if you had something like a coat of plates plus all the mail and cloth beneath, or better something like Milanese plate? Not even a scratch on your body. Heck, at long range it wouldn't even do much. Beyond that if you had half-decent armor like mail + an aketon beneath, you wouldn't be uninjured but it wouldn't be a LOTR instant-death shot. But to really use a longbow at full firing rate - 18 arrows a minute I've heard - you need a lot of practice.Įven then, longbows were only lethal killing machines at close range - IE, 20 meters. A gun was basically a much more advanced crossbow that didn't need as much width to be used. A crossbow, sure, you could train someone relatively quickly, but that weapon was slow to fire. A bow takes a long time to become really proficient with. Like, the English Crown had mandatory archery practice every Sunday around the Hundred Years War to get so many good archers. I do believe that someone who was able to consistently fire a bombard had to take a pilgrimage to Rome because people thought he was possessed by ol' Nick)īut the problem is, archers like English Longbowmen took a lot of effort to train. The only time bows might have been superior to guns was around the time they were first introduced since early firearms were inaccurate as all fucking hell and took forever to load - even crossbows were quicker loaded! Plus, guns didn't always fire (I recall reading that if a musketeer fired all their rounds, they were considered touched by God or the Devil or something like that. I've not heard of anyone matching that with a muzzle loading musket. *I've seen reenactors fire 12 semi-aimed shots from a bow in a minute. You can train someone to use a rifle well in a day. To use a war bow well you need to train from a young age. The biggest downside of the bow vs the early gun was that a good archer needed a lifetime of training. Decent rate of fire*, better effective range than smooth bore muskets. The bow were arguable equal or even better to guns in some ways up to the 18th century. A man with a gun, especially a fairly modern rifle is far more versatile than a bowman in dense forests. At anything but very short range a bowman will need to arc their fire which is pretty much impossible in most forests as the arrow will get caught in the canopy. Arrows can be deflected by said undergrowth. Undergrowth will get tangled with the bow and in the arrow bag. I can tell you from personal experience that handling a longbow in a forest is not an easy thing. I've been involved in airsoft, reenactment and LARPing for years and I can tell you from experience that bows have a hell of a time in dense forest where as it's pretty easy to run around with a rifle. Even if they don't have machine guns.Ĭlick to shrink.Absolutely false. This is why the musket quickly became a fixture of every European army. You can use it to start fires, though that might destroy it too.Įase of Use - Guns by far. You can use it as an improvised fishing rod, although it'll probably destroy the string. Versatility - I think bows actually win in this department. However, an M14 has a quoted effective range of 500 yards without optics. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about this. Range - Longbows could fire out to 300 yards, but 100 yards seems to be considered long for a modern hunter. On the other hand, you can probably fix them with what you have on hand rather than needing an industrialized logistics train. They're also reliant on the condition of the operator to a greater degree than guns. Reliability - Believe it or not, bows need maintenance. However, after a certain point, it's cheaper to hand someone a gun than train them to use a bow and arrow. Cost - Bow and arrow can be produced by primitive civilizations and guys stuck in the woods with some skill and basic tools.
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