This is kind of in the spirit of Going Medieval so I figured I'd put this here instead of a new thread. If anyone of you have been following the Arrows v Armour or Warbow Effectiveness threads on MyArmoury you'll see a lot of going back and forth with some heavy hitters weighing in on the subject. Basically it's a lot of arguing one way or the other as to whether or not warbows could reliably defeat plate armor (i.e. penetrate the plate).
I noticed in 'Going Medieval,' Mike Loades took a kind of middle-ground position and demonstrated through some impact force testing that the blunt force trauma from an arrow impacting armor, regardless of whether or not it penetrates, could disable or at least stun the man wearing the harness. I found this quite interesting, and particularly so that in his test the energy transferred to the force meter was roughly equivalent to that of a .44 magnum bullet. When you think about this, it makes sense, as a bullet travels a lot faster than the fastest arrow, but the force is impacting through a much larger surface area. An arrow's tip, be it a compact broadhead or bodkin is tiny compared to the tip of a bullet, so comparable forces can be achieved at much lower velocities, since pressure = force / area. So it would follow that being hit by an arrow in plate armor would be much like getting shot with a bullet proof vest on. Yeah, the bullet won't penetrate, but a lot of people suffer broken ribs, serious bruising, and potentially incapacitation or even death if your particularly unlucky.
Anyway, I decided to try to contact Mike Loades' people directly and see if they could point me to the data they got from that experiment. I emailed them through his website yesterday. Today I came home from work and was pleasantly surprised and excited to find a personal email response from Mike Loades himself! He said he's actually pursuing this particular area of interest in greater depth and he plans to publish results based on it soon, so he didn't give me any actual data, but I thought it was pretty darn cool that he took the time to email me back and let me know about his work.
Here's a copy of the email:
Ian
Thanks for your e-mail and kind comments.
I have plans to write up more of what we did for the longbow tests in Going Medieval, so you will forgive me if I don't share information until after i've published. I share your belief about the effectiveness of good quality armour and that is why i set up these tests to begin to explore the blunt trauma effects of massed archers. I think modern studies have been too obsessed with notions of penetration and have been missing this point about the effects of repeated blunt trauma from arrow strikes. It not only makes sense of massed archers, it also makes sense of short range shooting and heavy bows.
best wishes
mike
Anyway, I thought you guys might get a kick out of that! I've always been a fan of Mike's and he just went up a few notches in my book for being accessible to fans like me!
