A faster arrow does not make any difference in accuracy if ypu are doing plunging fire. It's debatable if it matters even in direct fire, while it is true the arrow will drop less there is still going to be a drop at any kind of range. The best arguement for fast arrows and accuracy is that the target will have moved less by the time the arrow reaches them.

What extreme range does is magnify any slight problem with form or aim, millimeters of deviation from true at the point of fire will turn into feet or yards at target. A bow that is less sustible to errors in form will start make a big difference.

Also not sure that horse bows shot faster arrows then longbows, while the composite design is more efficient (unless the weather is wet) the poundage of the bows in my understanding was significantly less then the Mary Rose stuff. Though I understand there is some debate on that...

There is actually a huge amount of debate in the modern archery community around whether lighter/faster arrows are better then heavier/slower arrows for hunting. The modern archery industry has been pushing speed improvements for awhile as a way to sell new bows

http://www.archerytalk.com/vb/showthread.php?t=1501207

However most of the people having that debate are having it around modern compound bows where even a light arrow from a 50# bow has more then enough punch to kill anything

The Karpowiz tests that I am familiar with (link below) are interesting but misleadong in several ways. Firstly he does not spine match for the weight of the bow on a majority of the tests, secondly he is mostly using arrows that are so incredibly light for the bow poundage they would actually be extremely dangerous to shoot with a high likelihood of exploding. Thirdly he uses a machine with a mechanical release which is well known to add fps. He then compares to unstated modern recurve based on "private comminicstion" where modern recurves are typically never made at higher then around 70# and also can easily shoot 250fps with unsafe light arrows. I am also pretty unclear what arrows he even used. It looks like modern carbon arrows in the picture and its difficult to imagine wooden arrows of the weights he is claiming being used in anything other then flight contest

You have to look at the heavy end of his test to get a realistic feel for what would actually be shot.

http://www.atarn.org/islamic/akarpowicz/turkish_bow_tests.htm

"Better" as in "more accurate". If you read the thread I posted there are many people on it that think that heavier arrows are more accurate. You have a lot of experienced archers that do not believe that faster arrows are more accurate arrows. You also do not see archery tournaments being won by people shooting extremely light arrows.

In general the arrow needs to be matched with the bow. It's not enough to say "they used light arrows" but did they use them with really heavy bows or did they use the, with lighter bows? In general a bad spine to weight combination is going to make accuracy problematic, it's a good bet arrows and bows were not paired like that, so how fast a never used combination is, is only interesting in an extremely academic way.

I don't think the type of draw has anything to do with archers paradox and arrow flex, that seems contrary to physics to me.fps sure, a less efficient release is going to waste a bit of energy

Also a 20g carbon arrow is going to perform very differently from a 20g wooden one, for one thing it might not explode when shot put of a 100lb bow .

Hmm. We do see people winning archery tournaments with extremely light arrows. Some use down to 5gpp. I'd call under 20 grams a light arrow. Given the drop in bow efficiency as the arrow weight goes down, one doesn't get much improvement in speed past a certain point, but will get the problems with lighter arrows. So light enough to get the benefit in speed, but not lighter. What the optimum weight is depends on the weight of the bow limbs. For the classic Central Asian composite bow, a good all-purpose weight is about 30g; one then sees light fast arrows of 20g and heavy arrows of 40g (see the increase in arrow energies in Karpowicz's tests in this weight range).

Since you appear to be skeptical of the historical use of 20-40g arrows from such bows, see A. Karpowicz, “Ottoman bows — an assessment of draw weight, performance and tactical use,” Antiquity, vol. 81, pp. 675–685, (2007) or P. E. Klopsteg, Turkish Archery for weights of historical Ottoman arrows, and G. N. Pant, Indian Archery for Indian arrow weights, and S. Selby, Chinese Archery for Ming and earlier Chinese arrow weights.

Side-to-side flexing on release is caused by sideways motion of the string on release. Supposedly, the thumb ring gives a release with less sideways motion, so less flexing of the arrow. Suitable mechanical release gives even less.

What, in particular, do you think is misleading about Karpowicz's results? The variation in speed and energy with arrow weight is as expected; the efficiencies are plausible. What is misleading?

The English didn't match spine with bow either. They had hundreds of thousands of arrows that were all made to a general standard and every archer was expected to shoot the same arrows regardless of what bow they had.

"Better" does not mean "more accurate" for English tactics. They needed long range and stopping power. As I said, if they used the same arrows that the Turks used against Joinville's horse, they would have been slaughtered in the first cavalry charge.

no army could precisely max spine with arrows. they did seem to have a degree of standardization between bow and arrow. Also being overspinned is less of a big deal, especially at longer ranges

What I hae heard is most male archers in Olypic field are shooting around 6-8 gpp which fo a 50# bow would result in a 300-400grain arrow which is 20-30g. But that is with a 50# bow

The general rule of thumb is 5-10gpp, most modern bows are not warrented under 5

when you are saying 20g you mean 20g right not 20gpp? Like 8 pennies? he only thing i could see using that for is flight shooting

I think you are incorrect on the reason arrows felx side to side do you have any links for that it is caused by the force of the of the shot itself. Using a mechncial release, which is way better thena thumb ring, does not alleviate it at all


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archers_paradox

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGNslUNBrEM

http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~byron/bhca/d...wswork.pdf

I think the arrow in that reconstruction was 1/2" thick at the head and tapered to 3/8" at the nock, which is the thickness I keep seeing given for the Mary Rose arrows. (Though I'm sure there was variation)
The second poster here also seems to also think that 1/2" to 3/8" is accurate
http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=4239.0

I think there might actually be a safety rule against lighter then 5gpp for Oly archery. Still , the reality is that tournament shooters could be shooting lighter and don't, which is counter to the claim "lighter is always more accurate"

They may use high draw weights for target but the draw weights in general are still really low, many shoot < #50. This allows them less issue with form and since they don't have real penetration requirements there is no real downside

it's not so much destruction of the bow that they worry about, though that can happen, as destruction of the arrow and through that destruction of the archer. An arrow that is underspined can break on release which can often injure the archer, sometimes quite seriously which will ruin your Olympic chances or battlefield performance. If you image search "exploding arrow" you will see some nasty pictures. And those are arrows made of modern materials which are quite a bit stronger then natural ones

Thanks those links are helpful with regards to paradox, it makes sense that the thumb ring counter rotation would in theory cancel out to some degree the paradox.

I'm not sure to what degree that is going to cancel out oscillation, stress and risk of fracture on the arrow though, this does not seem to happen with mechanical releases on compound bows, even with heavier properly spined arrows, and at least the conventional wisdom is that shooting really light arrows out of heavy bows even with a mechanical release is a good way to kill accuracy and end up in the hospital.

Would make an interesting experiment to see if to what degree it actually happens, does not seem that anyone has done it

Timo Nieminen wrote:

Guy Bayes wrote: What I hae heard is most male archers in Olypic field are shooting around 6-8 gpp which fo a 50# bow would result in a 300-400grain arrow which is 20-30g. But that is with a 50# bow The general rule of thumb is 5-10gpp, most modern bows are not warrented under 5 Sure. Potential destruction of the bow as the efficiency goes down (meaning the bow has to dissipate that energy) also limits practical minimum arrow weight. Olympic archers accept a higher chance of breakage of limbs in exchange for a higher chance of winning. Note also that Olympic archers use quite high draw weights for target archery. The benefit they get from this is speed (and they can get that speed with heavier arrows, reducing the problems one gets with light arrows). The downside is that they need more strength. At least some Olympic archers shoot 5gpp. I haven't heard of any shooting lighter than that. Many are reluctant to give details. Guy Bayes wrote: when you are saying 20g you mean 20g right not 20gpp? Like 8 pennies? he only thing i could see using that for is flight shooting 20 grams. That's at the light end of the range, so presumably for long range shooting, but this weight seem to include long range military, rather than sporting flight arrows alone. One sees arrows as light as 15g, which are perhaps sport flight arrows. Guy Bayes wrote: I think you are incorrect on the reason arrows felx side to side do you have any links for that it is caused by the force of the of the shot itself. Using a mechncial release, which is way better thena thumb ring, does not alleviate it at all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archers_paradox From your first link: "Flexing of the arrow when shot from a modern 'centre shot' bow is still present and is caused by a variety of factors, mainly the way the string is deflected from the fingers as the arrow is loosed." Which is why, if using thumb release, you shoot off the other side of the bow (right side, if right handed). For reduced flexing, and thus reduced sensitivity to arrow spine, when shooting thumb ring: http://www.africanarcher.com/thumbring2.html http://www.tirendaz.com/en/?page_id=580 and googling for "thumb ring paradox" will find more. I thought it was well-known that mechanical release aids can reduce the effects of archer's paradox. At least with a centre-shot bow. Is there something reliable saying otherwise? (AFAIK, the thumb ring makes the difference, not the thumb draw itself. One could compare shooting with a thumb ring with Japanese kyudo, where a thumb pad in the glove is used.)

A thought "Henry Barrett in 1562, for example, assigned light armors or none to archers. Smythe thought eyelet-holed doublets able to resist the thrust of a sword decent armor for archers."

Would a garment that can repel a sword thrust not also repel an arrow?