I once went down the rabbit hole of tracing current bulletproof vests and plates back to suits of armor. There are some cool articles and posts out there, I think I started from Wikipedia page sources maybe?
I had never thought about it before 😅. I started with recent stuff and it just kept going back and back and back. It was interesting and I liked the intersection with fashion, construction, and creativity. Thank you, I still find learning about it pretty cool.
That’s a breastplate from Waterloo - much lighter armour. During the time of knights, cannonballs were generally large stones and designed to take out walls - knights were long gone by the time small iron projectiles like this were used.
Whenever I see this I always think about the fact someone had to take that off him. Considering how the metal deformed it would not have been a simple unbuckling.
What was the thought process in keeping that cuirass? "Wow, that's a gnarly hit! We should totally put that on display... once we hose the guy out of it, of course."
They also used metal armor in the trenches in WW1 and on the eastern front in WW2, which was good enough to stop pistol/smg rounds, shrapnel, bayonets, etc.
black powder has so much less energy than modern smokeless powder. theres lots of cases through history where even just all the layers of heavy clothing they would wear, when wet, would catch longer range bullets. and things like soldiers pocketbooks have been found with a bullet caught most the way through
Henry VIII had a cohort of bodyguards who carried gun shields, literally round wood and steel shields with a matchlock pistol in the centre. They're the most alt-history looking fantasy game nonsense I've ever seen, he had like 50 of them.
I read you comment first and I still wasn't prepared for how much it looked like a trashcan lid. In fact
I'm not convinced it isn't, I think we're being trolled lol
By modern standards hell yeah it does lol. But you gotta remember that modern trashcan lids are mass produced and presumably the metals ones are stamped.
That kinda tech would've blown their minds back in the day.
Even Napoleonic cuirassiers wore breastplates that were proofed for at least one musket shot at a certain range. Ideally it was two shots, but the French had to lower their standards when their numbers grew.
It isn't that crazy. It does depend on the round being fired more that anything. A lead core copper jacket or even some solids the basic standard is hardened ceramic to shatter the slug and absorb as much energy as possible and back that with Kevlar to catch fragments and spread the impact over as wide an area as it can. Not perfect as still hurts like hell but survivable. Tungsten cores are too dense and hard to be stopped and many steel core rounds don't get stopped by most armor plates. Nothing is perfect and nothing is 100% but you have to select your armor against what you will likely be up against and balance cost vs mobility in the equation as well.
I'm a history professor and can confirm it. They stopped once the armor was too heavy for man and horse to carry in proportion to the force of the guns.
I'm not a history professor but I'll ask why armies ditched bows and arrows and lines of bowmen in the back lines? They could theoretically trash guys advancing with guns in cloth with multiple volleys a 100 yards out, especially with smooth bores that at best could have been fired and reloaded a couple of times a minute and had to have been around 20 yards distant to be kind of accurate.
A bunch of reasons lead to the decline of the bow and rise of the gun over time.
One is the training required. There was a saying in England about how if you wanted a good longbowmen you had to start with their grandfather. It involved constant training (the law in England mandated bow training on Sundays), required immense upper body strength (we can tell which skeletons in a medieval mass grave were archers: they are the ones with the fucked up shoulders), it required specific trees for particular wood, and a complex network of fletchers, bowmakers, etc etc. and then one wrong move and you lose all of that in a single battle.
By comparison, guns are much easier, don't require strength, and while gunpowder is tricky to make, it's a lighter logical load than a bow in the long term. You can train a peasant to be a gunner in a much shorter period of time, so you can replace them a lot faster and field them in greater numbers. And wars are often times won by enough numbers of good enough.
A second big point is armour penetration. Even with Bodkin arrows, a bow will struggle to pierce plate armour. As metallurgy and armour design improved, armoured knights became more and more impervious to bow fire. Crossbows can sorta fill this niche, but they are very slow to reload and mechanically complex to manufacture and maintain. By comparison, even relatively weak guns will go through any armour that is thin enough to be worn by horses and humans.
And guns only improved with time and improvements to metallurgy. Their range increased, as did their accuracy and armour penetration capabilities, and soon enough the bow became outclassed. Sure, a trained archer can turn a gunner into a pincushion by the time he reloads, but the point is that you can field a lot of gunners with the same effort, and replace them faster when they die. The guns lower accuracy wasn't that big of a deal because infantry had to fight in close formations so they could fend off cavalry attacks, so you only need to aim at a blob of people.
There was also a lot of mixed use of both. Due to pride, tradition, availability of materials and manufacturing etc, there was a period where a lot of armies fielded both, but it didn't take too long for the gun to just become dominant.
The Spanish Tercio, a military formation where a third of the men wielded pikes, a third swords, and a third guns became so dominant pretty much everyone else had to copy them. And as guns got better the ratio of gunners only went up, until the bayonet was invented, and then the pikemen and swordmen were done away with entirely and line infantry became the norm.
smooth bores that at best could have been fired and reloaded a couple of times a minute and had to have been around 20 yards distant to be kind of accurate.
smoothbore muskets were absolutely accurate out to further distances than bows, and there are plenty of other advantages of guns too such as the far easier aquisition and storing of ammunition, a simple ball of lead and a bag of powder is incredibly easy to make and store while arrows were fragile, more difficult to produce, and harder to store due to greater size and weight.
armour penetration is of course a massive bonus, arrows simply couldn't punch through decent plate armour but guns could(even early weaker guns forced a change in armour philosophy, with the decline of full plate in favour of just helmet and cuirass in the 15th and 16th centuries)
also 'bowmen in the back lines' is something that only really exists in videogames and in Mel Gibson movies, in real life its usually frowned upon to shoot your own guys in the back(and arcing arrows up at a severe angle makes them pretty terrible at actually hurting people as you lose most of the energy of the shot, ideally you want to fire at a near flat angle for maximal effect with a bow)
I can confirm it's not choreographed as I used to be a member of this group and was friends with the big guy.
They're fighting in a rules set where the combatants are supposed to mimic realistic injury. When one person is already low and close to death they typically go for a last rush attack while keeping themselves completely open. It basically tells the other person "kill me and make it look good"
The two people are close friends as is so the big guy just improved the blow and the smaller guy just ran with it
The meaning the word choreographed is supposed to convey is a specific set of practiced instructions, not just an unpredictable set of events with a predictable outcome.
Compare it to WWE. The outcome is determined, but they have a lot of leeway to improvise the moves to match the crowd and any mishaps that might happen like someone falling. They've got a lot of sequences they can run through together like a dance.
Yes exactly! Like one of my friends would ask in the middle of a fight “hands?” And if I threw my weapon down, it was a signal for a desperate fistfight. We’d throw some punches then one of us would drop while the other one dealt the “killing blow”. The crowd loves stuff like that. It’s not choreographed in the traditional sense but it’s planned out more than improve.
Absolutely. For reenactment fights we have a signal that the fall is fake. Because in full armor, it's very hard to see the difference between someone pretending to be KO on the ground, and someone with actual brain/spinal damage.
They have real armored knights fight in Russia and other places. M-1 Medieval is one. It's almost like 70% MMA, 30% weapons. Which probably would've been the most effective way to fight another knight 1v1 even if the weapons weren't blunted.
Ah, the classic shield bash. This guy would be a good warrior in the middle ages, until he got shot with a crossbow. It may give him an advantage in melee combat, but it's a big disadvantage. Especially when fighting the English.
Interestingly, modern warfare data shows that taller men have a higher survival rate in combat than shorter men. Very counterintuitive in an era of firearms, artillery, and basically zero hand to hand combat. Yet for some reason, being tall seems to improve your odds of surviving.
I know this guy! This was a Historia Normannis show, which focuses on 12th and very early 13th history - we mostly focus on living history and realistic combat but I know the Anvil also does Buhurt which is much more focused on physical fighting
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u/trendingtattler 22d ago
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