Armor penetration

Hi I played game War of the Roses (medieval multiplayer game), try to look at that game they is also some good things what can you use.

this is a very interesting topic =)
I have a question (I think a very stupid one, please forgive me XD)
were english longbow effective against armored knight? I mean during a battle =)
 or is just a false belief that english longbowmen effectively opposed cavalry? thx =)

If in plate and sword on sword, use your sword like a lever, you want to get the other guy on his arse or back so you can easily dispatch him.

Well, it’s not that easy to answer. Modern recreations of English longbows seem to prove that their arrows probably weren’t able to penetrate the breat plate of a full suit of plate armour. Some historians think that the effect of the longbow wasn’t its high killing rate but the terror and fear it spreaded among the cavalry. And of course horses were quite vulnerable to longbow arrows. It’s also not easy to kill a horse with an arrow but again you can spread fear and chaos by wounding them. In medieval combat much can be reached with discipline. English longbowmen were known as one of the few infantry units of the time who held the line against cavalry attacks. French and German cavalry tactics usually were built on the first rush with the lance since the crusades and before. Medieval (and ancient) fighting was much about the “who flees first?” question and not about who killls everyone else first.

If you just wear mail armour you’re very vulnerable to arrows. It’s likely that not everyone wore full plate armour at the beginning of the 100 years war. That was only true for the nobility and the knights who could afford a full suit of custom made plate armour. Their servants and men-at-arms were quite possibly less well protected.

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Even if all 8000 or some knights at Agincourt wore plate armor there could still be a lot of variation in quality, things like metal purity (I.E slag), carbon content, hardening procedures and naturally occurring alloys. So while one breastplate might make it bounce of the other might not stop an arrow. And there are weak spots in most early forms of plate armour, not something you would specifically aim for in battle but something the large volleys or arrows might hit by chance.

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Often the penetrating damage is incorporated in the ignore armor percentage. Most heavy weapons still do damage no matter what the enemy is wearing for armor. Blunt damage is just not the best way to describe the ‘blunt’ weapons category, as you correctly say. :smile:
Getting hit full on by a mace or hammer in the dome will shake your head up pretty badly if not half deafen you as well. With enough force you can even cave in the armor/helmets thus effectively negating it but with a bit less damage when you would hit there without armor.

In Agincourt led some factors to the victory of the Englishmen.
The longbows are only so deadly efective with a very long trained archer. Only them could fire 10 arrows a minute without soon fatigue. It was not the accurate shot, but the balistic shooting of thousands of arrows. The longbow was a very English weapon fore some reasons. In the rest of western-europe, the bow was not very often used in war, but crossbows. So it was widely unknown how to fight against them. Years ago, the french learned how to defeat them.
Another point was, that the terrain was very bad for a cavalry attack. The ground was muddy, too and the archers stands behind some palisades and barricardes. So they had much more time than usual to fire one by one volley at them.
One more point: The french knights were very eager to fight and so they probably didnt’t show the needed discipline and carefulness for proper planning and strategy.

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And the most experienced commander who was the head of the commander could not even order the crossbowmen to load their crossbow because he was 7 ranks down in the nobility pecking order.

I believe they said that in a documentary but I will try to source it for you.

I would recommend everyone to watch this series. It is very informative on this subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqoh0okQ6Ho (Weapons that made Britain)

Ahh DUSHIN.
If the melee weapon attack kinetic energy was just as easy to count out, like that of the arrow, bolt or bullet.
If you have such values you got to ask yourself how they did arrived to this.
First question is did they measured this values, by a apparatus from some humans or did they counted them out in a different way.
If it was measured, then you got to ask, how and on whom. Was this measured on athlets with similar movement or normal street people and etc, how long was their arms, how long was their weapons and the weight and ect. ect.
If it was counted out, then you got to ask yourself ‘how’, and that is more interesting.
Did they counted out the energy, from the center mass point like it is often done, or the hitting tip? Both can result to very different values.
Did they counted in the movement, weight of a person and or their arms or just the weapon?
Did they simplified it (like i did) or have they used the correct torque?
This thing aren’t that easy like E=1/2mv^2.

To the longbow: The same series that Scandinavia has recomended but the episode about the Longbow despite it is also about Crécy, which is 70 years before Agincourt:

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