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All original material is Copyright © John Hodson 2011-2012. If anyone wants to add any material to my Exalted section I''ll include their with name and copyright in the post notes unless they want to contribute anonymously.

The first section is basically my take on Exalted. Right now I'm just copying up my notes so everything's very raw while I put down my ideas. I'll work on editing everything and making it more coherent later. As a result things will contradict the in game canon and even be self contradictory especially since not all my notes are copied in chronological order. They've been typed up without editing to remain as close as possible to my original vision.

Friday, 14 October 2011

The Longbow: Premature Death of Britain's Greatest Weapon

    What killed off the longbow? The gun? No. That only replaced it.
   This is an article I've wanted to write for some time. Saul David once performed a rather spurious test proclaiming "The longbow was dead" after comparing the point blank effectiveness of a musket against a .45ACP round from a pistol against metal armour. Just what that test proved about the longbow and it's effectiveness vis a vis the gun is lost to me. Not that musket existed at the time the longbow fell out of fashion. It would take several centuries for firearms to get that bad.
   It had long been a curiosity of mine why did such a successful weapon fall out of favour and never recover? One reason is the dramatic rise in cost of yew to make bows imported from abroad. But much more important are the historically obscure facts that agriculture changed at that time from harvesting crops to animal herding, which was a far less physically demanding occupation; and more dramatically that a third of the adult working population died of hunger. Not only were bows more expensive to make but the population for levying soldiers had been decimated and over time those who served weren't in condition to use such a weapon.
    Still it is a wonder why nobody thought of resurrecting it. Perhaps it had simply become such an anachronism in the miracle age of gunpowder that anybody who gave serious thought to the idea would have been too embarrassed to see it through. Shortly after the gun's ascendancy, one man claimed he could out-shoot a group of bowmen using a pistol at a hundred and twenty yards. I sorely wished when I read that than someone took him up on his offer and illustrated how incorrect he was.
   Being made of iron the gun would be a relatively expensive weapon to produce. It burned powder, which was also expensive. Muskets were notoriously unreliable, both under ordinary firing conditions and especially in bad weather. Furthermore they produced copious amounts of smoke that rendered their users blind if there was a still wind.
   These are trifles compared to the more serious and damning failings of the gun. The one that stands out by far the most is it's rate of fire. Troops could fire as low as two rounds a minute, with the best trained men managing only four. Accurate range was also pitiful. The chances of hitting an individual man at even fifty paces were low. At short range it had decent hitting power but this quickly wore off, with one source saying "It was an unlucky man who got injured by a musket ball at two hundred yards." Altogether, this reduced the firepower of infantry to the point where while their predecessors had stood in line to face French cavalry charges a few centuries earlier, charges by men in full plate armour, the British soldier of the Napoleonic era had to form square to defend himself against much less well armoured cavalry of his day. Sure historical proof of the dramatic decline of the efficiency of their weapon.
   It does make one wonder what history would have been like if far from dying out centuries before it became obsolete, the longbow, having proved itself time and again during the Hundred Years' War, caught on and spread throughout the armies of Europe. An unlikely idea, but if anybody possessed an eye for military efficiency above maintaining the status quo (and it hadn't led to the overthrow of the nobility by the peasantry in England) then they might have considered it.
   The place where gunpowder truly created a revolution in the way open battles were fought (rather than sieges) wasn't on land at all. Although firepower at sea was nothing new (the English used it during the first encounter during the Aginourt campaign, where the French had followed the established tactic of chaining their boats together to form a platform for hand to hand combat and were subsequently out-shot.)
   Only in 1849 did gunpowder firing small arms truly start to outclass bows (although in this case the crossbow.) It wasn't till breach loading weapons were introduced did gunpowder weapons finally supercede the bow with their high rate of fire combined with ease of shooting.
   If you had to go to battle where one side had muskets and the other had longbows, which side would you want to be on?