[Peter G.]

Sorry to say-but anybody who claims an aimed kill at ranges above 200m with a smoothbore musket is dreaming.
After testing rifles/"brown bess"muskets Col George Hanger-expert marksman stated in 1814 :

"A soldiers musket, ... will strike the figure of a man at 80y, it MAY even at 100, but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150y, provided his antagonist aims at him. And as to firing at a man at 200y you may as well fire at the moon and have the same hope of hitting your target. I do maintain and will prove..that NO man was ever killed at 200y by a common musket by the the person who aimed at him"

In 1841 the British army tested the brown bess: the range was between 100 and 700y(acc to elevation)-at EVERY elevation there was between 100 and 300y variance.

Shootingtest at a target representing a LINE of cavalry(slightly taller then a single human):

100y : 53%hits(trained men) 40%(ordinary soldiers)
200y. 30% """ 18% """
300y : 23% """ 15% """

we a talking of a target about 3y high and 75-100y wide under best conditions--no fog of war, no ennemies shooting at you, no haste in reloading...

quote after "weapons and equipement of the napoleonic wars" by Philip Haythornthwaite[/b]

[Jack W. Englund]

[Jack W. Englund]

I appologize for this post, but I have posted this in reply to an email that requested it.
The quivers are Fox & wicker copied from surviving examples
The arrow is a (primative style" (dyed goose featers. note- the field tip is required @ most compititions, but I do have both obsidian & steel ("trade tips") & use them when allowed.
the top bow is a copy of a Shawnee bow, made by a local bow maker. Ithe wood is osage orange & the pull is 45#s ( this was a prize won @ a regional match) (just got lucky that day)
the other bow is the bow I reg. use. This bow was made for me by a close friend & well respected bow maker in MT. the wood is osage orange with a 45# pull

The bottom picture shows this type of bow being used @ a recent meet @ my black powder/muzzle loading clubs "trail walk" range. The target was a 3D deer, in the brush, about 30 yds away. "kill shot was 8" in diamiter.
jack

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

Yes, different Amerindian groups used different kinds of bows. However, I'm tired of people dismissing Amerindian bows as weak and inferior. Your overview misses an important part of the picture. From the Spanish account I mentioned, it's obvious the Amerindians of Florida used bows every bit as powerful as English bows. According to de la Vega, two English-trained archers even fought against these Amerindians. De la Vega made no distinction between English and Amerindian weapons. He considered both deadly. They weren't identical, of course, but they served the same purpose.

[Dan Howard]

I agree with Benjamin. Those bows that were intended for warfare were every bit as heavy as those in England. Colin Taylor reckons that there is a marked decline in the strength and quality of AmerIndian bows around the same time that firearms are introduced.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

By the way, de la Vega also noted that the natives of Florida used bows as tall as the men that carried them. They used an armlet of feathers to protect the arm from the string's slap. Their bows weren't made of yew, (de la Vega mentioned oak) but otherwise they sound very similar to the English weapon.

[Jack W. Englund]

Ok, Obviously I am a "glutton for punishment", but I am again going to poat some of MY PERSONAL observations.for concideration

Peter's post on the accurcy is, as far as I can tell, is accuate as to the "Bess's" General performance. But does it truley reflect the the POSSABLE accurcy of the "Bess" ????
Here are some thoughts, you draw your own conclutions.
1. Pattern of "bess" used ?? ("Short Land Pattern (42" bbl.), but most likely it was the "Indian Pattern" ( 39" bbl.))
2. condion of guns (how long in service) ??
3. Ammo used ( standard issue paper cartridges or hand loaded patced round balls etc)
4. Test preameters ( combat rate of fire etc.???)

Can we test the accurcy of the original (1800 - 40s or earlier) ?? Has this been done using original guns in good or excelent condition ??? If so, then we may to have a more accurate base to opperate from.

Here is an example of the accurcy of a modern reproduction.
Here in the PNW,almost all our "rendezvous events, there is a "trade gun" event ( the def. of a "trade gun" for this type of event is that firearm used, must a pattern in existance prior to 1840. A flint lock & have no rear sights. ( most of the guns used are "trade guns" or fowlers ( such as my Mortimer 12ga - .72 cal) but "Besss" often are entered.
This example is of a resent region match, in which a Bess ( long Pattern) not only competed, but was in the fnal "shoot off)
NO, I was not in this select group, in fact I was eliminated early on.
First the course of fire - rnd.1 = 8" steel target @ 50 yd, 3 shots - 2nd rnd.= 10" steel target @ 75 yd , 3 shots - 3rd rnd = 12" steel target @ 100 yd., 3 shots - 4th rnd. = 18" steel target @ 100 yd., 3 shots. 5th rnd + 24" @ 150 yd, 3 shots, - 6th rnd = same target @ 200 yd. 3 shots - Shoot off = Ox cyl. ( appox. 8" diam. x 5' tall @ 300 yd, 3 shots then those who had the top # of his shot until they missed.. Did the "bess hit the target, YES, 1 0ut of 3
NOTE - guns were loaded "rifle style" patched round ball, powder load measured. Guns were alowed to be cleaned between rounds ( in the "shoot out" you could clean between each shot ) BTW, the winner, used a custom made fowler, sim. to mine & "nailed it 6Xs, if memory serves me correct. Also note, most these men (&women, 2 made it into the 6th rnd) shoot smooth bores reg. & a couple of the men shoot them exclusively.
So there it is. You draw you own conclusions
respectively, Jack

[Shayan G]

An article on the Brown Bess recently appeared in RifleShooter Magazine, including a brief history and modern testing of an antique.
http://www.rifleshootermag.com/featured_rifle...index.html

Here is the relevant portion

[Peter G.]

@Jack:
as is stated-the test was perfomed by 2 groups of soldiers.trained and ordinary with standart Brown Bess muskets-the pattern is not mentioned.

As you stated-the reproductions where loaded with patched balls eliminating the windage (about 1/20" in the original gun), where cleaned between the shoots AND where used by trained people.
The original guns where mostly not very well made-the indian pattern inferior to the short land pattern, there was no patch, there was no aiming device AND the soldiers had usually no shooting training at all prior to battles!
In the british army the line infantry received 30 round balls/man/year and 70blanks/man/year, the last ones for loading practice-the austrian army allowed 6 (six!) per man per year.
Aiming was not taught at all-you just pointed the gun in the general direction of the ennemy and fired.

Shooting tests by other armies came out with similar results:
in 1800 french trained soldiers fired at a target 1.75x3m : at 75m 60%hits, at 150m 40% hits, at 225m 25%
Prussian tests with the "new prusian musket" indicated that a target 6feetx100feet was hit by 66% at 100 paces and 50% at 200 paces.

All these tests where performed under ideal conditions without enemy fire, without fear, without hate in reloading.
In battle, the results where much worse, in these days, the guess was that you need double the bodyweight in lead to kill a soldier.

I haven´t seen any shooting tests of 14c arcebuses but i wonder if they where much better-in a fight between trained bowmen and trained 18c soldiers i would bet on the bowmen-mostly because of the much higher rate of fire..

In my opinion, the cause why the musket replaced the bow is mostly a question of nr and training-it takes years of training till you hit anything with a bow-and till you are strong enough to use it for more then 5-10 shoots-it takes about 2 days to train everybody to load and shoot with a musket-and not much physikal strength.

[Jack W. Englund]

[Jack W. Englund]

Here are some pics you might enjoy. These were sent to me by a researcher @ Vancouver & are from a museum collection.
The info I was sent stated that they were taken in the 1880s. of 2 "remote, reclusive "tribal" groups (note as late as 1900, there still were remote pockets of native Amer.s that "clung" entirely to the "old ways ( see yshi indians). If these 2 individuals are actually wearing & carrying the gear they, or their fathers carried in the early 1800s, then we have a glimpse of what the early white explorers may have encountered in some regions, in the late 1700s- early 1800s (1st contact ???)
Left hand pic -Geo. area - Mt. Shasta ( N.CA ) note "armour. Plus bow style & arrows. Rt. hand pic, - Geo. area - high Mtn.s of SW ID. reported to be from a small group of Shoshone. refered to as "big horn sheep eaters. note different bow style.

Jack

[Stephen Hand]

[Jean Thibodeau]

[Dakao Do]

Hi, all.

I just came across this lengthy thread, and apologize if I missed something that came earlier.

I don't see any citations or references to:

Williams, Alan. The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armor in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Brill, 2002.

It's a hard book to find (and pricey at $270), but pp. 918-949 discuss the effectiveness of various attacks on various kinds of armor.

A number of tests and sources were used, which I won't describe in depth here. If you have bones to pick with the data, please find it in a library or ask for further info (i.e. check / compare your facts and sources). I don't care to retype 31 pages without cause. Dr. Williams should be familiar to many forumites as an expert on armor, and while he is not infallible, he has certainly done more research than the average forum poster.

On p. 945, you will find a table describing typical energy offered by various attacks:

Ax, sword 60 - 130 J

12c longbow 80 J

13c crossbow bolt 100-200 J

14c handgun 250 J
(serpentine powder)

15c Hussite handguns 500 - 1000 J
(serpentine powder)

16c arquebus 1300 J
(serpentine powder)

(corned powder) 1750 J

1525+ musket 2300 J
(serpentine powder)

(corned powder 3000 J

Bear in mind that:

1) power drops off as an inverse (square?) function of distance traveled. Williams cites Krenn's experiment as demonstrating that a musketball loses 5% of its velocity within 8 m of the barrel.

2) the cross-sectional area of impact hugely affects penetration. (duh!) An arrow requires far less energy than a crossbow bolt, which in turn requires less energy than a blunt musket ball to penetrate armor.

The data on armor and penetration spreads across half a dozen tables. Some highlights:

Modern impact tests (energy required to defeat the armor):

[Due to my crappy formatting, the categories are for blade, lance, arrowhead, bullet)

Modern mail >200 J >200 J 120 J 400 J
15th century mail 170 J 140 J 120 J -
buff leather 70 J - 30 J -
horn 120 J - 50 J -
cuir-bouilli 90 J 30 J - -
"padding" 80 J 50 J - -
jack 200 J - see mail -

The mail was backed with the jack. The jack material consisted of at least 27 layers of linen. It's fully described in section 8, apparently, but I couldn't find it on a quick pass.

The padding (to simulate that under plate armor) was 16 layers of linen.

For plate steel of thicknesses 1mm, 2mm, 3mm, 4mm:

Arrows 55 J 175 J 300 J 475 J
Bullets 450 J 750 J 1700 J 3400 J

Incidence angle of 30 degrees increased energy requirement by 20%, 45 degrees by 40%.

All these numbers are rough -- in discussion, Williams hypothesizes that an exceptional archer could achieve 120 J, or a strong man a two-handed strike of 200 J (i.e. soldiers or weapons in the top 5% of their field have a shot at doubling the average power). Otherwise, you can play with the numbers above in historical configurations of armor and pit them against various types of weapons. e.g. a man-at-arms of the War of the Roses in jack, chainmail, and brigandine would have a torso target fairly impervious to normal bows / crossbows (and swords). Handguns and heavy arbalests might have an even chance of barely penetrating.

Other discussions of high vs. low training requirements for archers vs. crossbowmen / hangunners, and etc. have been touched upon.

Hope this sheds a little light on the subject.[/i]

[Randall Moffett]

Dakao,

Good post. I think Williams work is an invaluable resource for armour and early hand guns. That said, the reason I think no one posted his chart's info as regards to traditional missile weapons is that for crossbows and bows is way off. If you look at the Springalds and great crossbows by Liebel the lowest joules offered by a simple crossbow for war are about twice the ones Williams used as his upper end figures at 392 joules (compared to 100-200 that is a big difference), his two foot crossbow being 981 joules. He also seems ot have used a pretty weak bow (the footnote mentions 70 pounds-whihc is this is the case is entirely unacceptable as a variable in this type of test.). Joules for a warbow style bow start around 111-134 in the Great Warbow, a 31-54 joule increase which I assume would make a huge difference as well. I have little doubt that his gun measurements are closer to where they should be. I just do not think he spent enough time trying to get decent results with a crossbow. His armour values might be done well but somewhat unrealistic as well. A jack of 27 layers of linen is NOT under armour but stand alone armour. A under armour should be about 10 layers, whihc I believe his under armour was about twice that in thickness. I think in general his testing was helpful as it provided some variables to examine but then the question comes about are the variables all correct... I highly doubt that his assumptions in the end are correct because the very weak crossbow and bow he chose for values.

I wish he would have gotten more thicknesses of medieval armour but he did a great job just in looking at the metal of armour iteself whihc made and makes the book totally worthwhile to me still.



RPM

[Dakao Do]

Thanks for the perspective, Randall!

Ever since I got this book, I've wondered about other comparisons / tests.

This is still somewhat relevant to muskets vs. bows, but I may be wandering a bit far afield / off-topic.

Upon further checking, I agree with you re: armor. You'll note that, on p. 928, Williams states that the plate steel results are extrapolated from a test with a 2.5 mm thick plate of mild steel with hardness 152 VPH.

For reference, Williams earlier states (pp. 17-18) that:

pure iron has ~80 VPH
medieval iron (with slag and impurities) 100-180 VPH
steel 180-260 VPH
slack-quenched (partially air-cooled or oil-quenched) steel ~300-400 VPH
Full-quenched (water-quenched) steel 800+ VPH
Tempered full-quenched steel 400-500 VPH

Note that the harder the metal, the more brittle. From personal experience, I can say that untempered full-quenched bits of steel can snap like crackers (an expression I learned from David Wise, an SCA armorer in Houston).

OK, back to Randall's post... we've raised the concern that Willams' energy figures for bows of all types are low -- actual war weapons are estimated to be more powerful by 100% - 500%.

And I've shown above that Williams himself shows that medieval plate armor was 2-3 times harder than the steel plate tested. I don't know the first thing about metallurgy, and will not speculate that there's a directly correlating increase in energy absorbed. But the reader can do the math for himself as a rule-of-thumb (we might say for now that the two upward revisions even each other out).

Most medieval plate armor was 1-2 mm thick, and a little thicker on breastplates and helms. Over time, moving into the 16th century, I remember Williams stating that the hardness of armor declined as armorers cranked out more lower-quality breastplates to equip larger armies. They discovered empirically that using thicker steel increases protection more cheaply than hardening it. And what does a government contractor care about the burden of an individual soldier, who's not paying for the armor? So Renaissance breastplates were often unhardened, or little better than iron, and were much heavier to compensate. I have no idea what pages that's on.

Soldiers, being who they were, quickly abandoned the uncomfortable breastplates on long marches. This contributed to the events described in previous posts, wherein buff leather and finally mere uniforms became the standard for protection.

So I guess to more directly address the question of muskets vs. bows:

Plate armor seems to be 4-8 times more effective against blunt bullets than against pointy arrows / bolts, for a given amount of energy transmitted by the projectile (a function of mass times velocity or whatever).

Therefore, guns had to develop to the point where they exceeded the energy of arrows / bolts by *more* than 4-8 times. If we take my previous post's info combined with Randall's info on bow power, that means this didn't happen until well into the 16th century. History would seem to bear this out.

This only applies to simple penetrative power. Rates of fire, training time required, etc. have already been discussed by others more thoroughly than I can.

So pre-1500s, bows > guns. Thereafter, the logistics of guns took over. However, it wasn't until the 1800s that gun rates of fire and accuracy (due to rifling) made them superior to bows in every way. As with many such arguments (knights vs. samurai, pirates vs. ninjas, etc.), a serious answer comes down to "It depends."

Is that a fair summary of the bows vs. guns argument?

(As it so happens, Williams talks about this effect, wherein the bow technology curve matured earlier at a lower technology level, and peaked in the 1400s. The gun technology curve began in the 1300s, began challenging bow tech in the 1500s, and only continued to grow, outlasting the Renaissance.

I'd say it hit a black-powder peak by the 1800s. The overall gun tech curve only began to level out in the late 1900s, though, no?)

I particularly liked the part about how European warfare returned to a point in the 1700s where bows were theoretically superior to guns again (in terms of RoF, range, and required lethality), but were impractical for reasons of training and logistics.

Great discussion, and I hope I've helped more than I hurt.

[Peter G.]

[Lafayette C Curtis]

[Peter G.]

[Daniel Staberg]

Those quotes only apply to the Brittish army, they have no value what so ever as far as the other European armies are concerned. Infact by the early 19th Century there were numerous military academies in Europe such as the French Ecole Militaire or the Swedish War Academy located at Karlberg Castle. But even before such academies were established noble and non-noble officers were schooled in the art of war by various means. Commonly young men were apprenticed to the leading armies of the day in order to gain military experience.

Add to this the numerous military manuals or 'war books' produced from the 15th Century onward which taught tactics, siege craft, logistics and military law.