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Ken Speed





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PostPosted: Sun 06 Apr, 2008 11:59 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean,


I don't even want to think about "steam powered heavy artillery". I have to wonder who would be safer, the shooter or the shootee?


Ken
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M. Eversberg II




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PostPosted: Sun 06 Apr, 2008 1:33 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

From what I understand, early infantry tanks where slow not because of engine limitations, but mostly because of the doctrine; an infantry tank is literally supposed to be a moving support weapon. It's of little value supporting an infantry assault if it's faster than it's infantry support.

M.

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David Donovan




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PostPosted: Sun 06 Apr, 2008 2:52 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

On a somewhat related note, I remember once reading something set in the future where swords and spears were used when trying to capture or defend a space vessel, due to the danger of a hull breach from ballistic or energy weapons. Definitely an interesting and perhaps even somewhat plausible concept.
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M. Eversberg II




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PostPosted: Sun 06 Apr, 2008 4:04 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

There was also a Science Fantasy (sci fi / fantasy mix) novel I read a while back that had a modern world, but with magic / spirits inhabiting that world. For some odd reason, the guards posted along this wall dividing a "spirit region" and the region inhabited by humans (who had guns, buses, etc) decided that, since their firearms where ineffective against spirits, swords, spears, and maille would be.

M.

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Curt Cummins




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PostPosted: Mon 07 Apr, 2008 8:25 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

For those interested in this topic, I recommend the S.M. Stirling "Dies the Fire" series of books.

Curt

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Helge B.





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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 7:30 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I am currently working on a wargaming scenario with renaissance armies without gunpowder.

This is what I thought how a formation could look like. I would like to know if you think this could also work in a realistic scenario and what would be the weak spots.

The infantry:
4 rows of pikemen (hvy. armour) with 2 rows of crossbowmen behind (hvy. windlass crossbows). The pikemen knee down so the crossbows can shoot above their heads.

The formation is flanked by a mixed block of halberdiers/sword&buckler men. If the formation gets into contact with other infantry they swap around and attack the enemy from the flanks.

Mobile Ballistae are used as artillery on the flanks.

The cavalry:
The lancers are screened by mtd. crossbowmen, which are themselved screened by crossbowmen on foot. The mtd. crossbows can shoot above them since they are in an elevated position on their horses. If the lancers are to charge, the crossbow screen rushes to the back through gaps in the formation. The lancers themselves charge en haye and are set up in several waves.

Furthermore other units of mtd. crossbowmen are used as skirmishers fighting in a caracole style.


This combination tries to max out the use of missile power while still giving some protection against cavalry through the pike screen.

Would the pike be deep enough to withstand an enemy cavalry charge/pike block? The kneeing position would allow the crossbow to shoot till the very last moment (and therefore increasing the chance of armour penetration). I think this would work better than putting them in seperate sleeves allowing a more linear formation.
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Sean Manning




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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 8:54 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Four ranks is pretty thin for a pike block expected to face armoured cavalry. There are lots of cases of armoured cavalry breaking through lines and columns of pike or spear-and-shield infantry (see Northalleron, 1138 CE, or several of the sixteenth-century battles in Oman's Art of War in the Sixteenth Century.) Most of the time it didn't do much good, but the formations were a lot deeper so had more resilience. After all, crossbow bolts aren't nearly as frightening to the horses as stinky, noisy, fire-belching muskets.

Could mounted crossbowmen really shoot while moving? Southern European tactics aren't my srong point.
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Ken Speed





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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 3:50 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Helge,


How does one reload a crossbow while riding a horse? Is it possible? I would think you'd be better served if you had horse archers more or less Mongol style. Apparently the bows the Mongols used were very powerful, in some cases with a pull of 150 pounds.

Ken Speed
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Jean Thibodeau




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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 7:38 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Ken Speed wrote:
Helge,


How does one reload a crossbow while riding a horse? Is it possible? I would think you'd be better served if you had horse archers more or less Mongol style. Apparently the bows the Mongols used were very powerful, in some cases with a pull of 150 pounds.

Ken Speed


Reload on a horse of crossbow: Just guessing but by hand if the draw weight is low enough or with a goat's foot lever maybe.
Not something I would think one would do at a gallop though !?

Also, would one aim and shoot while moving or just load and shoot while not moving or use the horse crossbowmen more like dragoons who ride to the place they have to fight, but mostly fight on foot.

With a " fantasy " scenario the crossbow could have a cocking mechanism attached to the crossbow making reloading faster and also easier on horseback.

The only reason why crossbows would be preferred in a " Renaissance " scenario to bows, where gunpowder doesn't exist, is that the crossbows would have more power to pierce plate armour. ( Assuming that powerful enough crossbows would be the closest thing to firearms in effectiveness. Bows would be marginal at best even if they do have a rate of fire advantage ).

Helge: Your formation looks like it might work in some cases depending on the type of battle. It might be one of many formations a well trained army might use but against a heavy cavalry charge maybe changing to a deeper formation might be an option.

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M. Eversberg II




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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 11:29 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I found it interesting that crossbows didn't become the "standard issue". I wouldn't think it would take very long to train at all to use those well.

M.

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Helge B.





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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 11:49 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

The cranequin seem to have been the most common cocking device for the mounted crossbowmen. At least you see it on many pictures of that time. With the cranequin it should be possible to load a crossbow while riding (at least at a slow trot). I see no reason why mtd. crossbowmen cannot be trained to use their weapons while riding (in a caracole style maybe). I think I have read them beeing used in conjunction with lance-armed knights in a wedge formation. And there is also this picture from Talhofer showing a crossbowman performing something like a parthian shot.

There is something else I thought considering crossbows. Mostly they have seem to have been in single-rank only. However one could use several ranks of foot crossbowmen, if each rank knees down after releasing their bolts. With a windlass or cranequin it should be possible to reload a crossbow in a kneeing position. After the last row is finished the first stands up again. With this you should be able to keep up a continous "fire" overcoming the slow reloading speed of the crossbow. Together with a thin screen of pike in front you should even be able to stop a charge of heavy cavalry in a "thin red line" manner. With the pike staying knee down the crossbow could keep up the "fire" at the charging cavalry even at point-blank range without fearing to be overrun at once.

Surely this would need a lot of training and professionalism to perform such a tactic. But if I look at other pike&shot maneuvers it does seem possible for me. Especially since this takes place in a stationary formation. I wonder why this never seem to have been tried in reality.
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Thu 10 Apr, 2008 11:59 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Ken Speed wrote:
How does one reload a crossbow while riding a horse? Is it possible?


Taybugha al-Ashrafi--a medieval Syrian archer--shows a pair of hooks suspended from a shoulder harness, which his book says could be used to reload a crossbown on horseback, even on the move. Some scholars think that the style and content of the text in this section is inconsistent with the rest of Taybugha's work, however, and believe it to be an apocryphal addition from a later copyist or commentator. I'm quite skeptical myself about the practicality of the technique, especially in a medieval Syrian culture where it would have been more reasonable to find a good horse archer than to instruct an untrained man in the complexities of loading such a crossbow on horseback.


Quote:
I would think you'd be better served if you had horse archers more or less Mongol style.


Conversely, Helge seems to be speaking of a roughly Western European setting, and such a setting would probably have lacked the social institutions needed to produce and maintain sufficiently large numbers of horse archers to make a significant presence on the battlefield.


Quote:
Apparently the bows the Mongols used were very powerful, in some cases with a pull of 150 pounds.


Yes and no. I have no difficulty believing that the Mongols could have made bows as heavy as 150 or 160 pounds in draw weight, but such bows would only have been used on foot. Horse archers all over the world used much lighter bows than what their foot counterparts had, usually ranging between 50 and 80 pounds or so. Even 100 pounds would have been quite an exceptional weight for a horse bow.
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Helge B.





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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 12:26 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

One surely could employ eastern european tribes like the Magyars who could provide quite good horse archers. But against better armoured units which would be even more common in sine-gunpowder renaissance setting they would be only of limited use.

One would need missile weapons with more punch, which only the crossbow in all its variation could offer.

BTW: What about repeating crossbows like the polybolos? With the technology of that time it should be possible to create such a weapon with much heavier draw weights than the one used by the romans. Attached on a wheeled carriage it could serve as field artillery. From what I read 10-11 shots per minute were possible.
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 12:30 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Sean Manning wrote:
Four ranks is pretty thin for a pike block expected to face armoured cavalry. There are lots of cases of armoured cavalry breaking through lines and columns of pike or spear-and-shield infantry (see Northalleron, 1138 CE, or several of the sixteenth-century battles in Oman's Art of War in the Sixteenth Century.)


While at the same time we have instances of thin lines of spearmen successfully resisting cavalry charges, such as the battle of Bremule and possibly the battle of Bouvines. The formation, after all, was not supposed to stop the horses upon impact, but rather to scare them off with the appearance of an unbroken wall of shields and spear-points. It would seem that thin, long formations were the medieval norm for facing cavalry because it provided enough frontage to give some sense of safety against flanking maneuvers, whereas deeper formations (especially pike-armed ones) were meant to be offensive formations for use against infantry.


Quote:
After all, crossbow bolts aren't nearly as frightening to the horses as stinky, noisy, fire-belching muskets.


Quite true as long as the infantry could hold their volleys until the charge approached within effective range of their missiles. Otherwise, the smoke from a firearm volley fired at too long a distance might actually mask the infantry formation and allow the horsemen to delude the horses into thinking that they were just going to pass through a thick bank of smoke rather than crashing head-on into a solid formation!

(And remember that people soon found ways to accustom horses to the noise of gunpowder weapons--which wasn't all that different from accustoming them to just about any other sort of loud noise, bright flash, or thick smoke.)
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 12:43 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Helge B. wrote:
There is something else I thought considering crossbows. Mostly they have seem to have been in single-rank only. However one could use several ranks of foot crossbowmen, if each rank knees down after releasing their bolts. With a windlass or cranequin it should be possible to reload a crossbow in a kneeing position. After the last row is finished the first stands up again. With this you should be able to keep up a continous "fire" overcoming the slow reloading speed of the crossbow.


Well, you don't even need rank rotation in order to keep a continuous stream of missiles. I've talked in a blog post about how the Chinese rotated the crossbow between the stationary ranks instead, and a similar method used by the pavise-protected Italian crossbowmen.


Quote:
Together with a thin screen of pike in front you should even be able to stop a charge of heavy cavalry in a "thin red line" manner.


The thin screen of pike might or might not be necessary, depending on the doctrine used. A Chinese military writer of the Song dynasty mentioned that crossbows should be able to hold horsemen off all on their own--but of course such an idea would not have applied if the cultural milieu firmly believes that crossbowmen couldn't repel horsemen without the protection of close-combat fighters.


Quote:
Surely this would need a lot of training and professionalism to perform such a tactic. But if I look at other pike&shot maneuvers it does seem possible for me. Especially since this takes place in a stationary formation. I wonder why this never seem to have been tried in reality.


Because crossbows had a much lower penetrative power-to-weight ratio compared to firearms? A crossbow portable enough to keep a reasonably high level of fire would not have been powerful enough to pierce plate armor, while one strong enough to reliably pierce plate would have been so big that it would be more appropriately called a siege weapon rather than a personal missile weapon. In comparison, even a pistol had a fair chance of penetrating armor at short range; the arquebus was a much more profitable compromise between punch and portability than a heavy crossbow; and even the huge Spanish muskets were still more portable and more convenient to carry than the heaviest arbalests.
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 12:51 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Helge B. wrote:
BTW: What about repeating crossbows like the polybolos? With the technology of that time it should be possible to create such a weapon with much heavier draw weights than the one used by the romans. Attached on a wheeled carriage it could serve as field artillery. From what I read 10-11 shots per minute were possible.


Possible? Yes. But it would still have been a great deal more fragile and less versatile than gunpowder artillery--the first due to its greater number of moving parts, and the second because it certainly couldn't use as many kinds of ammunition as a gunpowder piece could have. I suspect it might have had a significant tactical impact in the absence of gunpowder, but not quite as significant as proper gunpowder artillery; remember that small breech-loaded gunpowder artillery pieces could also fire at a fairly high rate, not to mention with more power and the capability to use more kinds of ammunition than its mechanical counterpart.
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Helge B.





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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 1:31 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Quote:
Well, you don't even need rank rotation in order to keep a continuous stream of missiles. I've talked in a blog post about how the Chinese rotated the crossbow between the stationary ranks instead, and a similar method used by the pavise-protected Italian crossbowmen.


The formation I am thinking of would allow a higher frequency of shots since some time would be lost due to having to hand over the crossbow to the first rank. Also this would need more room allowing only a less dense formation.


Quote:
A crossbow portable enough to keep a reasonably high level of fire would not have been powerful enough to pierce plate armor, while one strong enough to reliably pierce plate would have been so big that it would be more appropriately called a siege weapon rather than a personal missile weapon.


I think there were crossbow with steel prods and windlasses which were strong enough to puncture "normal" plate at distances of maybe 50m and still beeing portable.



I am no specialist but from what I read a crossbow like this one could have draw weights up to 2000 lb.
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 1:42 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Helge B. wrote:
The infantry:
4 rows of pikemen (hvy. armour) with 2 rows of crossbowmen behind (hvy. windlass crossbows). The pikemen knee down so the crossbows can shoot above their heads.


Looks like too many pikemen and too few crossbows to me. You need many ranks of crossbows to overcome its slow rate of shooting, more so if you use the heavier sorts that are too heavy to be reloaded with just a foot stirrup and belt hook. I think I've discussed this before in my blog in an entry about mixed spear-and-bow/crossbow formations; most of the examples I summarized in there had more ranks of shooters than close-combat foot, and the Italian formation that would have been the closest model to your idea had only one rank of spearmen to protect two of crossbows.

That's if we're talking about what is basically a missile formation protected by close-combat troops. If your formation is more like the Spanish tercio instead, being fundamentally a close-combat pike formation protected by missile troops, it might make sense to have so many pikemen--but in that case it would be a good idea to break the crossbowmen up into smaller formations that can rove around the core of pikes in a more flexible manner.


Quote:
The formation is flanked by a mixed block of halberdiers/sword&buckler men. If the formation gets into contact with other infantry they swap around and attack the enemy from the flanks.


Why bother with swapping around? If the pikemen had sufficiently heavy armor, they might be able to last for a considerable time in hand-to-hand fighting, especially since the enemy would have suffered some attrition from the crossbow bolts. In this way the pike-and-crossbow core would be able to pin down the enemy while the swordsmen, halberdiers, and/or horsemen move around the enemy's flank.

BTW, I think having swordsmen and halberdiers in the same formation is a bit superfluous. Both serve the double role of mobile shock troops and rough-terrain troops, and if you have only halberdiers or sword-and-target men then you'd be able to have larger numbers of this troop type than if you had to split it between the two subtypes.


Quote:
The lancers are screened by mtd. crossbowmen, which are themselved screened by crossbowmen on foot. The mtd. crossbows can shoot above them since they are in an elevated position on their horses. If the lancers are to charge, the crossbow screen rushes to the back through gaps in the formation. The lancers themselves charge en haye and are set up in several waves.


Actually, this part confuses me a bit. As far as I recall, screens of mounted crossbowmen were used in conjunction with narrow, deep columns or wedges of shock cavalry, because an en haye formation would be such a broad line that the crossbowmen might have difficulties in riding up to effective range, shooting, and then hurrying off to clear the way for the charge.


Quote:
Furthermore other units of mtd. crossbowmen are used as skirmishers fighting in a caracole style.


This isn't a good idea either. Crossbows can be loaded on horseback, but I doubt it is possible to do so quickly enough to employ the mounted crossbowmen independently in a sustained skirmishing action. I believe they'd do much better by either loosing one shot and then joining the charge or dismounting and then shooting on foot.

Moreover, the caracole may not exactly be what we think it is--I'd like to refer you to this thread, where Daniel (Staberg) and Gordon (Frye) enlightened me about what it really was.


Quote:
This combination tries to max out the use of missile power while still giving some protection against cavalry through the pike screen.

Would the pike be deep enough to withstand an enemy cavalry charge/pike block? The kneeing position would allow the crossbow to shoot till the very last moment (and therefore increasing the chance of armour penetration). I think this would work better than putting them in seperate sleeves allowing a more linear formation.


Well...it depends. One factor we must not forget is that early 16th-century heavy cavalry formations were frequently equipped with horse armor for the front ranks, and this made them a great deal less vulnerable to spears and non-gunpowder missiles than their predecessors at, say, Crecy or Poitiers. A crossbowman would have needed a really huge crossbow indeed if he wanted to have any chance of hurting man or horse through all that armor; moreover, without the presence of firearms, there's the possibility that armor would never have grown so heavy as to motivate soldiers to discard them. So, honestly, I don't really think this formation would have performed quite as well as a similar formation that possessed gunpowder weapons.

BTW, why would you think that using separate sleeves of missile troops would not have allowed them to shoot at sufficiently close range? Remember that the pikes involved in these kinds of combined formations could get quite long--more than long enough that the crossbowmen would have been able to interleave themselves among the rows of leveled pikes if need be, like what arquebusiers and musketeers sometimes did in pike-and-shot formations, and shoot at the horsemen milling around the pike formation after having failed to penetrate it. In fact, this might be the most plausible method for employing crossbowmen in the formation because it could have given them the chance to shoot at the less well-protected rear ranks of the horsemen as they flowed around the pike square.
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Lafayette C Curtis




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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 2:03 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Helge B. wrote:
The formation I am thinking of would allow a higher frequency of shots since some time would be lost due to having to hand over the crossbow to the first rank. Also this would need more room allowing only a less dense formation.


Really? Kneeling and standing back up can take quite some time. This is why 18th-century European drill manuals eventually discarded the idea of having the men kneel when they were not shooting--it takes too long to be worthwhile, and the soldiers might become reluctant to get back up on their feet again. Remember, too, that having a very high rate of shooting might not really be necessary or even useful with the crossbow, since the range over which it could be shot accurately is shorter than that of a bow or a firearm. A volley or two at most, and then crash! the whole thing goes into hand-to-hand fighting.

And then, talking about room, remember that you can't pack crossbowmen all that tightly because the prods of their weapons would still need much more lateral room than a firearm's plain straight stick. More so if we're talking about really powerful crossbows whose prods couldn't be made shorter than a certain mechanical limit even when built in steel.


Quote:
I think there were crossbow with steel prods and windlasses which were strong enough to puncture "normal" plate at distances of maybe 50m and still beeing portable.

I am no specialist but from what I read a crossbow like this one could have draw weights up to 2000 lb.


Context, context. Read this thread on the very subject of crossbows: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=6838&start=0 and you'll find that crossbows going up to that range in draw weights were specialized siege weapons, not the personal weapons that would have been carried en masse by large formations of crossbowmen.
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Helge B.





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PostPosted: Fri 11 Apr, 2008 2:20 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Quote:
Looks like too many pikemen and too few crossbows to me. You need many ranks of crossbows to overcome its slow rate of shooting, more so if you use the heavier sorts that are too heavy to be reloaded with just a foot stirrup and belt hook.


Maybe 4 rows of crossbows using the rotation method I mentioned before. I try to keep the formation as linear as possible to get a maximum of frontage with minimal troops.

Quote:
BTW, I think having swordsmen and halberdiers in the same formation is a bit superfluous. Both serve the double role of mobile shock troops and rough-terrain troops, and if you have only halberdiers or sword-and-target men then you'd be able to have larger numbers of this troop type than if you had to split it between the two subtypes.


The mixture should give the formation some versatility. Sword&Buckler against enemy pike in close combat and halberdiers against cavalry which manage to break through.

Quote:
Actually, this part confuses me a bit. As far as I recall, screens of mounted crossbowmen were used in conjunction with narrow, deep columns or wedges of shock cavalry, because an en haye formation would be such a broad line that the crossbowmen might have difficulties in riding up to effective range, shooting, and then hurrying off to clear the way for the charge.


The two screens of crossbowmen (mtd. and foot) are to work in stationary position allowing a maximum of missiles to be shot at the same time. The en haye formation of the lancers should have several gaps allowing the crossbowmen to retreat.


Quote:
This isn't a good idea either. Crossbows can be loaded on horseback, but I doubt it is possible to do so quickly enough to employ the mounted crossbowmen independently in a sustained skirmishing action. I believe they'd do much better by either loosing one shot and then joining the charge or dismounting and then shooting on foot.


The mtd. crossbowmen used a skirmishers in caracole manner should lure/force the enemy to advance. The basic tactical idea is to geht the enemy into shooting range of the crossbows inflicting as much missile casualties as possible before getting into close combat.

Quote:
One factor we must not forget is that early 16th-century heavy cavalry formations were frequently equipped with horse armor for the front ranks, and this made them a great deal less vulnerable to spears and non-gunpowder missiles than their predecessors at, say, Crecy or Poitiers. A crossbowman would have needed a really huge crossbow indeed if he wanted to have any chance of hurting man or horse through all that armor; moreover, without the presence of firearms, there's the possibility that armor would never have grown so heavy as to motivate soldiers to discard them.


Still I think that at 50m or less heavy crossbows can inflict enough casualites even on barded horses causing the cavalry charge to loose its momentum so that it can be repelled by an even thin pike screen. Especially the neck of the horses were mostly only protected by mail, which could be pierced by heavy crossbow bolts most of the time.

Quote:
BTW, why would you think that using separate sleeves of missile troops would not have allowed them to shoot at sufficiently close range?


That is something which always wondered me about pike&shot formations. If the missile part is placed in a seperate sleeve it has to retreat earlier if charged by enemy cavarly as if it would have to when placed behind a pike screen. How can the pike protect them if they stand next to them and not in front?
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