First of all, my apologies for bringing up the L word. I don't intend to reignite the arrow vs. armor debate.

What I am looking for is a good repository of tests that have been performed in the past, whether flawed or not.

You can read hundreds of pages of forum debate when it comes to longbows vs armor, but the links to actual test results invariably point to 404 errors. On the Sword Forum, for example, people successfully beat the dead horse to a pulp in 2003 and all the actual evidence has gone missing in the 15 years since. So the layman is left with nothing but vague references to 'Leeds proved this' and 'Wallace/Stratton demonstrated that.'

What communities like this really need is a single location to reliably host test results, whether that's the original PDFs or just written summaries of the data. Ideally, there would be room for 'peer review', explaining the limitations and shortcomings of a particular test.

It's not 2003 anymore. Most online file hosting services are going to stay around for a while. So it's time to build an Arrow vs. Armor site on Google Drive or Dropbox. All we need are the links.

Have at it! Atta boy! I'll be sure to read it!

Not to wax too sardonic but I have a backlog of my own interests going back about that long.

You are now in charge and responsible for properly indexing all relevant replies in this thread.

Good luck!

Cheers
GC

One-sided anecdotes will always be with us, because of the nature of anecdotal evidence. When a weapon lethally injures its target there is usually no report home other than the report of the fellow who launched the weapon - his victim is dead. When a weapon fails to kill, its intended victim has an entertaining tale to tell among his friends about the ineffectiveness of the missile (or his great luck). Each side downplays the effectiveness of the other side's weapons & brags about how effective its own weapon or defense was during combat. Losers rarely broadcast descriptions of the lethal effect of their enemies' weapons. Admitting to the defeat is usually done in the fewest words possible.

Swords, maces, crossbows, pistols, rifles, or grenades, all are described in the same one-sided terms by the participants, with different impressions being reported by each side and no reports made by the deceased. So it should not be hard to find plenty of tales told by armored knights about the ineffectiveness of arrows against armor and plenty of stories told by archers about how effective their arrows were against armored opponents.

If a head count of the stories shows a preponderance of reports by surviving armored combatants it will probably be because the knight's tale was more likely to be recorded than the archer's story, not because the total number of incidents was lopsided.