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Sean Manning
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 Posted: Tue 16 Mar, 2021 1:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Pieter B. wrote: | | I always thought they were known for being one of the first mass produced items. Standardized design and stacked sand moulds so that you could make a dozen per casting. |
You can mass-produce castings from stone or hard metal moulds, but you need a shop full of skilled founders to do it. There are many crossbows that anyone can learn to make with a knife and an axe, but not these cast-bronze locks.
www.bookandsword.com
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Jonathan Dean
Location: Australia Joined: 16 Feb 2019
Posts: 81
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| Posted: Tue 16 Mar, 2021 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Andrew Gill wrote: | | On the subject of historical sources: They are probably not all wrong, but all people (even modern scientists designing and conducting experiments) are biased, and their biases do matter (and seem to lead to particularly skewed accounts regarding weapons and warfare - consider some of the more far-fetched accounts made about english longbows in the hundred years war). Every source of information (historical or modern, scientific or anecdotal) has to be rigorously examined and understood in context and for potential inaccuracies. Throwing away all of modern metallurgy or all of the historical accounts would be a grave mistake in my opinion. We need both to find the truth (which is ultimately what we all want, though none of us know what it is with any certainty, I think). To my shame, I'd not read Galloway before, so I'm rectifying this now. It is immediately apparent to me that he is to some degree reacting to the legends built up around longbows. |
One point I want to raise is that the "far-fetched accounts" people make about longbows during the HYW are very much not based on the historical sources and would, if subjected to the testimony of medieval and Early Modern authors, be found wanting. From Christine de Pizan to John Smythe we know that the maximum military range of the longbow was 220 yards under the best conditions - Henry VIII even acknowledges this in allowing the use of flight arrows beyond this distance - and even Smythe admits that often archers can't shoot beyond 160 yards when he gives the effective range as between 8 and 12 scores. As for penetration, the fact that archers are very rarely said to penetrate armour by the more reliable or eyewitness chroniclers - and these often speak of the ineffectiveness of the archery at actually causing major casualties - should certainly give anyone who believes myths about longbows shooting through armour pause.
What Jean has been doing, in drawing on accounts from primary sources and experiments carried out with original artifacts (as Payne-Gallwey's famous shot was), is nothing like the mythmaking around the longbow.
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 8:02 am Post subject: |
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| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: | | Sean Manning wrote: | | crossbowmakers tell me that the trigger pull can be stiff and unpleasant, especially once you get into higher draw weights. |
Based on experiences with replicas or antiques  ? |
My understanding is that in the 16th and 17th century, we see Dutch and German hunting and target bows with more complicated locks. The main advantage which these seem to offer in exchange for greater complexity is a gentler trigger pull, and this matches the experience with replica crossbows with the older simpler lock. The earlier locks are a lever of iron with one end stuck in an iron-reinforced notch in a disc of antler which the whole force of the spanned bow is trying to turn. There just isn't much room to refine that design without adding parts!
Edit: the other issue is that to release a strong bow, the lever has to be long, so it eats up a lot of stock length and can't go inside a trigger guard like the Han Dynasty triggers.
I am sure that there are many little ways that modern steel crossbows could be improved, but the same goes for wooden bows and horn bows. I'm really doubtful that they could overcome the basic physics and materials science of a short-powerstroke steel bow.
It looks like the balestrino uses the very old screw-press principle, but makes it much smaller and in steel. Earlier in the middle ages there are crossbows and springalds spanned by a vice which is probably the wooden screw-press we see in some late medieval paintings of springalds and great crossbows.
www.bookandsword.com
Last edited by Sean Manning on Wed 17 Mar, 2021 9:25 am; edited 1 time in total
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Jeremy V. Krause
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 8:22 am Post subject: |
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I think the type of small crossbow discussed here was meant as a gentleman’s “toy”.
A cool device but not meant for martial use.
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 9:18 am Post subject: |
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| Sean Manning wrote: |
"Based on experiences with replicas or antiques "
My understanding is that in the 16th and 17th century, we see Dutch and German hunting and target bows with more complicated locks. The main advantage which these seem to offer in exchange for greater complexity is a gentler trigger pull, and this matches the experience with replica crossbows with the older simpler lock. The earlier locks are a lever of iron with one end stuck in an iron-reinforced notch in a disc of antler which the whole force of the spanned bow is trying to turn. There just isn't much room to refine that design without adding parts! |
My point with that question was, we shouldn't assume that characteristics of a modern replica (like an 'unpleasant trigger pull') are necessarily also characteristics of of the actual antiques. Think of the difference between the best replica armor you could get in say, 1990, vs. 2021.
That said, I also think a heavier trigger pull makes sense in a military context, same as the .45 they issued me in the Army. The first time I held a really nice match pistol of the same exact make (M 1911) it was hard to believe it was the same gun. But you don't necessarily want hair triggers in a military context, IMO.
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I am sure that there are many little ways that modern steel crossbows could be improved, but the same goes for wooden bows and horn bows. I'm really doubtful that they could overcome the basic physics and materials science of a short-powerstroke steel bow. |
I certainly never suggested that anyone anywhere could defy the laws of physics. I pointed out that modern metallurgy doesn't yet fully understand the physics or fabrication processes involved in some pre-industrial weapons, such as wootz steel swords. And I noted that there are often aspects to these kinds of things which are not immediately apparent. There is a difference.
Vis a vis crossbows, I think Pieter made a good point with regard to horn and tendon weapons, if you go into it in a very glib manner and ignore the nuances before you scratch out your proof on the back of an envelope, it can appear that a composite recurve bow couldn't be as efficient as a wood bow. I'm suggesting that similarly, it's worth taking a closer look to make sure we understand the apparent discrepancy with crossbows before we find our solution. Modern engineering is very powerful, but only if it starts with the right parameters.
The habit for the last two centuries has been, whenever we find something we don't immediately understand from the pre-industrial world, we assume it was stupid / superstitious / just for fashion / just to make noise etc. Ignoring and devaluing the written words of the people in these eras has led us astray many times. I suspect this is another one of those.
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 12:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: | | The habit for the last two centuries has been, whenever we find something we don't immediately understand from the pre-industrial world, we assume it was stupid / superstitious / just for fashion / just to make noise etc. Ignoring and devaluing the written words of the people in these eras has led us astray many times. I suspect this is another one of those. |
Who is arguing that? The most common position among experts is that steel prods are less efficient than most other materials, and probably could not be given a very long powerstroke at an acceptable length, so achieved good performance by having a heavier draw weight than many wood or horn crossbows. This matches the evidence from the 15th century, where there are still many horn crossbows in central Europe.
And on the balestrino, Tod's specific position is that the ones he has seen are not powerful enough to be effective against humans, even allowing for the old crossbowmakers knowing things he does not. Draw weight, powerstroke, and bolt weight are just too much lower than on crossbows for war or big game, so if the little ones were better than the ones he can make, so were the big ones in proportion. If we assume that balestrini were mostly novelties, that makes sense.
www.bookandsword.com
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 2:28 pm Post subject: |
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| Sean Manning wrote: |
Who is arguing that? The most common position among experts |
Which experts would that be? Historians? Engineers? Who exactly?
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is that steel prods are less efficient than most other materials, and probably could not be given a very long powerstroke at an acceptable length, so achieved good performance by having a heavier draw weight than many wood or horn crossbows. |
Do you have any data indicating that steel prod crossbows had a higher draw weight than horn / composite prod?
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This matches the evidence from the 15th century, |
What evidence would that be?
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'd really like to know. If you know something I don't, then I'd like to add it to my archive.
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 5:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: |
What evidence would that be?
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'd really like to know. If you know something I don't, then I'd like to add it to my archive. |
That sounds like it might be a good subject for a blog post around (looks at the schedule) May or June. IIRC, some good places to start on the mechanics of steel bows are the technical appendices to Robert Hardy's Longbow (1992), some books and articles by Egon Harmuth like "Zur Leistung der mittelalterlichen Armbrust," Paterson's The Crossbow, and the work of Douglas Cole who has a doctorate in engineering and played around with the physics as part of his tabletop gaming hobby. Crossbowmakers like Iolo / David R. Watson who have worked with homogeneous steel, aluminum, fibreglass and wood bows tend to agree with the academics and the antiquarians that steel is not as efficient as the alternatives.
I already pointed to an archive where steel crossbows first become common in the 1440s. (Edit: note well: "became common" is not the same as "were first invented," but the "one arbalest of steel gilt" in a list of goods stolen from Countess Matilda of Artois in 1316 [Hardy and Strickland, The Great Warbow, p. 122] is not the kind of thing which affects battles)
Any collection of mid to late 15th century Central European art will show plenty of crossbows with the rounded, colourful prods which are probably horn and quite a few horn bows from that period survive. They will also see many more rotary spanning mechanisms than artists show in earlier periods, and rotary mechanisms are good for spanning a bow which is too heavy to span with a hook. One of the Arab manuals describes how to span a crossbow with a belt hook from horseback, so mounted crossbowmen can use belt hooks (and Latin and Arabic texts mention small crossbows spanned with rotary mechanisms back to the 12th century, but we don't see them as often in fight scenes before the 15th).
Sven Ekdahl's "Horses and Crossbows" also finds that the Teutonic Knights had mostly horn crossbows in 1409.
One steel bow I saw shot was a few years old and might have weakened from being left strung. The person who made it believed the string had stretched. I am prone to confirmation bias just like anyone else. But everything I have read by experts on the engineering or experts on making crossbows says that steel crossbows don't have the best efficiency, and all those small windlasses and cranequins in paintings sure imply that western European crossbows were getting heavier over the course of 15th century.
Anything further I say on crossbows will be on my site not this thread. I had to leave most of my crossbow books when I left the country suddenly for my health.
www.bookandsword.com
Last edited by Sean Manning on Wed 17 Mar, 2021 7:07 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Wed 17 Mar, 2021 6:29 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah no offense Sean, but that ain't gonna cut it.. You are referring to an "expert opinion" on something which precious few people around today, you and me included, are actually experts, and a handful of old books from the 90s aren't likely to be the last word on any of this.
Steel prod crossbows appeared much earlier than than 1440, as I've already pointed out. If you are familiar with the work of Sven Ekdahl on the Teutonic Order, you should know that they decided to stick with the composite prod weapons because, as I've also already pointed out, they worked better in the extreme cold. As in, around Malbork or Riga or Vilnius in February.
That is one of the actual differences between steel and composite or horn prod crossbows mentioned in period records. What I haven't seen is any historical sources mentioning inferior performance of steel prods.
I get that you are busy and don't have time to dump resources into a forum thread, I'm in the same boat. But I think you are projecting a level of certainty here that isn't warranted.
J
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Andrew Gill
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 4:09 am Post subject: |
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Ok, I was writing a long reply with mixed conscessions where I had made mistakes and rebuttals where I felt others had, when I suddenly realised that I'd forgotten the original question! 
So going all the way back to the beginning, these where the two statements that seemed to have spawned the whole thing:
| Jean Henri-Chandler wrote: | | So I think it is possible that a ballestrino made in Venice in the 15th or 16th Century might have been a bit more powerful and / or accurate. |
| Leo Todeschini wrote: |
Then it comes to the question of how differently efficient mine is. The steel is EN45 0.7% spring steel with a double tapered bow, albeit a bit different in profile to the RA one and drawing a comparable weight. I very much doubt my bows perform as well as the originals and would never have the arrogance or naivety to think they do; so much has been lost. So I will admit they are different; but how different?
Not different enough to transform 6J into 30J for something with some real grunt, or indeed the 18J of a nice pistol crossbow now, if for no other reason than the bolt weight is just not likely to be there.
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For me, as someone trained as an engineer, the fact that Tod put numbers to his statements counts for a lot. He did some experiments and calculations (not very rigorous, by his own admission), and based on that these bows were 3-5 times less powerful than is sometimes claimed. In engineering terms, that is a huge difference, which would be difficult to account for by a small change of material properties or geometry. He might, of course, be wrong, but that should be provable by engineering methods. If the historical sources clearly and unambiguously show that his conclusions are false, then it should be possible to confirm this with experimentation and numerical modelling. We can speculate endlessly on ways that he might have been inaccurate, but until someone puts some numbers behind it showing how or better yet why he is wrong, it will remain speculation, and if we are to be honest researchers, we need to bear in mind that there could be errors in either the calculations or underlying assumptions (entirely possible), or the historical accounts (perhaps less likely, I'll grant you), or the modern interpretation of historical accounts are wrong (which I'll stick my neck out and suggest is roughly as likely as the modern engineers getting things wrong).
By the way: there's a lot of fascinating literature on using finite element analysis to model bow performance. Numerical tools like this allow us to test thousands of possible combinations of geometry and materials (real or hypothetical) - so we really can move through the millions of iterations of bow-design that the craftsmen of the renaissance did in just a few days. Mechanical engineers don't work with absolute certainty - they have to take into account potential errors in their data, in their assumptions and variability in materials and machining. Even better, it is directly based on the mathematics and physics discoveries of people like Newton and Hooke - geniuses of the 1600s, who in turn drew on the knowledge of earlier investigators and practical workers (perhaps even including some of the craftsmen making crossbows in the 1400s). Not all knowledge from that time has been lost; much of it has been retained and built on to get us where we are today. No engineer, who uses Newtons' laws and Hooke's laws on a daily basis, will claim that the experts of the renaissance, the "Giants" on whose shoulders Newton claimed to have stood, were superstitious fools who used bad designs through ignorance! And I don't think anyone on this thread has, either. Certainly, I have not.
In fact, I think I should go and do some FEA on crossbow prods myself. And read a lot more of the historical sources myself, of course! If anyone can suggest sources of information on detailed dimensions of historical crossbows, that would be very useful!
To be honest, I don't know for certain, and I don't mind whether renaissance bows are far superior to what modern researchers suggest or not, but I find it fascinating to try to find the truth of it either way.
Andrew
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Michael Zimmermann
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 5:37 am Post subject: |
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That sounds very much like a worthwhile thing to do!
With FEM would it be possible to define a model derived from the historical parameters (like those referred to by Jean) and find out what kind of structural properties a hypothetical prod would have to possess in the scenario to achieve the kind of performance, which is suggested by the sources?
- Michael
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 7:38 am Post subject: |
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| Andrew Gill wrote: | By the way: there's a lot of fascinating literature on using finite element analysis to model bow performance. Numerical tools like this allow us to test thousands of possible combinations of geometry and materials (real or hypothetical) - so we really can move through the millions of iterations of bow-design that the craftsmen of the renaissance did in just a few days. Mechanical engineers don't work with absolute certainty - they have to take into account potential errors in their data, in their assumptions and variability in materials and machining.\
Andrew |
Doug Cole, who I linked above took a Dutch PhD thesis on the mechanics of the bow and arrow by Kooi and created a 'good enough for tabletop gaming' approximation which can be handled in a spreadsheet, He might be interested in geeking out.
When he did the model of the Mary Rose bows for Hardy and Strickland, Kooi inserted a disclaimer that the model is only as good as the inputs and that he relies on archaeologists to interpret 450 year old waterlogged wood and give him those numbers. OTOH, modern engineering is really good at modelling the mechanics of steel.
www.bookandsword.com
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Andrew Gill
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 9:11 am Post subject: |
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Michael, yes its definitely possible to work backwards and work out possible properties and geometries - though it takes a little effort and iteration. There are even ways of automating the process using numerical optimization. Even by just doing a range of calculations with different values of young's modulus (for instance) will give a pretty good idea, and will tell us a lot.
Sean, I can well believe that your friend's spreadsheet would give pretty good accuracy. The mechanics of bending cantilever beams are actually pretty simple (they predate computers by several centuries), and are also a fairly good first-approximation for a bow. In this case, the main advantages of using something like FEA is that you can have arbitrary complexity of bow shape, materials and so on, with quite a bit more accuracy and also make it easier to determine the dynamic response of the prod/lath when the string is released. Modelling organic materials is usually a challenge because they are highly variable, both between different samples and depending on the direction of the stress relative to the grain of the material, but even then, there are methods developed to modern composite materials, which have similar properties in some respects (I'm not going to attempt anything that fancy - it is quite a specialized field, and as Kooi correctly said, its easy to get it wrong if your inputs are bad.)
Todd actually did a pretty good video explaining the maths and physics behind different types of bows back in 2017 I think - I came across it earlier.
Andrew
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 9:36 am Post subject: |
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I would say if you want to figure out anything about an historical artifact, you should take a very close look at example(s) of said historical artifact, meaning measurements, tests etc., and also the records about it's use.
Otherwise it's a bit like a romance involving only one person.
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Chad Arnow
myArmoury Team
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 9:44 am Post subject: |
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| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: | I would say if you want to figure out anything about an historical artifact, you should take a very close look at example(s) of said historical artifact, meaning measurements, tests etc., and also the records about it's use.
Otherwise it's a bit like a romance involving only one person. |
I totally agree conceptually, but the practicality of some of this is hard. Measurements and records are not horribly difficult to obtain, but tests would be a tall order. I doubt many museums or private collectors are going to let people string some of these 500 year old crossbows and shoot them. To be able to build the most accurate replica, someone would have to understand the components of a composite via materials analyses that could be at least invasive if not slightly destructive to the artifact. They'd then have to figure out what age and storage conditions have done to the materials so they could simulate them in a modern build.
This doesn't mean people should give up on the idea, though. It would be fascinating to see this kind of stuff done and would really enhance the knowledge base. Until those kind of things are done, we're left with varying levels of educated guesses that spawn lengthy forum debates. 
ChadA
http://chadarnow.com/
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Thu 18 Mar, 2021 9:57 am Post subject: |
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I'd say get as much data as you can before you start crunching numbers, otherwise it's kind of pointless.
I'd be surprised if you couldn't find some institution or private collectors somewhere willing to try that sort of thing. People have allowed Allan Williams to do electron microscope scans and some potentially damaging testing on hundreds of pieces of armor, they actually shot some antique armor in Graz in the 80s, they have done some incisions in crossbow prods and pavise shields in some tests I know of.
There are some groups, notably right now I think in Denmark, who are doing some very serious scholarly testing with some antique firearms from this era.
Ballestrino are pretty rare so it might not be possible to find an owner willing to allow somebody to test one, but we should be able to learn a great deal just from precise measurements of say, two or three that are in museums. Medieval type crossbows, both steel and composite prod, are not nearly as rare and many examples exist. Composite prods aren't going to be viable but some steel prods might be. Some of the images of weapons I posted were from a private collection of one guy who had 25+ antique (as in centuries old) crossbows and 20+ spanners, among many other weapons. I have seen them in dozens of museums, castles, and antique stores with my own eyes. Many of these people who collect such weapons are as curious as the rest of us about performance. They were still making weapons like this for hunting as late as the 18th Century.
This kind of thing has to be rigorous. A string for example would certainly be remade and that alone would require a very close look. But I think we would learn a lot more than just making (and repeating, and broadcasting) assumptions based on our assumptions...
J
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Leo Todeschini
Industry Professional
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| Posted: Wed 24 Mar, 2021 12:29 am Post subject: |
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Quite an extraordinary discussion and a reminder why this site is so amazing.
Jean Henri; do not worry I not offended by your questions g of what I am doing we all learn baby exactly as you have said, not just rolling out the old assumptions. I cannot pretend to have read this whole thread, but have picked up the gist of it, so thanks to both yourself and Michael P Smith for pushing this.
This is my position and it is conflicted.
From Jean Henris side, I would agree that my bows do not perform as the records seem to indicate they should and this has always bothered me and I do strive to try and work out why this may be the case, but I am a commercial enterprise and crossbows form only one part of that, so I am limited to the amount of time I can put in and full on academic level research cannot be done by me. I strongly suspect there are several factors that I have overlooked about how to improve efficiency so there will almost certainly be improvements to be made. As you pointed out early in the thread there is certainly nothing I could teach makers from back then so we have to assume their bows performed better than mine and that I believe is a given.
From Michael P Smiths side. Steel is steel. Was then, is now. Performance differences can be achieved, but a modern optimised spring steel will perform as well or better than anything they had then for the role of being a spring. Mass is the same. There was no magic number set for bow profiles and that is clear. Some bows were mono-curved, some reflexed, some deflexed and reflexed, some very, very deep, some shallow. Most were rectangular in section, some chamfered on the rear, but all tapered. However the taper was different on every bow. As a rule of thumb, the section at the tip ranges between 0.5 and 0.65 of the section at the centre. So there was definitely not a standard for this.
Liebel calculated that distances for a steel bow would be around 260m and although I am wary of calculations in this kind of situation it does chime with my experience. Payne-Gallwey famously shot 440yds and this is a mammoth distance and I suspect a little massaged to get this number. Who knows, but the Menai Straits are tidal, so perhaps it was shot at low tide and he gave the high tide width because it sounds better? Authors of this period are not renowned for their truthful accuracy but unfortunately this has become the standard benchmark and we will never know the truth of his test, however if other bows can replicate this or come close then likely it should stand, but until then I remain a skeptic of this.
So this leaves me in the position that I believe my bows do not perform as well as the originals, but by how much? There will be aspects that they are missing in a few areas that reduce efficiency, but that the combined effects of this are likely a few percent not 45% as PG's results would suggest.
Back to the ballestrino; I think a doubling or even tripling of the power would still leave this wanting as an assassination weapon, plus the other factors of easy traceability means that to me it simply seems to not be the tool for the job. Lawn Darts. Dangerous and frequently annoying enough to warrant it prickling the authorities.
As regards why would you use a weapon that is inferior, i.e. why use a steel bow that performs worse than a comparable composite? Well it is true now that not always the 'best' weapon is chosen, factors like cost, reliability, simplicity of use, simplicity of repair, weight of ammunition, weight of weapon all come into the equation and absolute performance is only one aspect and that was true then.
A composite bow must be strung and unstrung, it is expensive to make, slow to make, prone to breaking (in comparison to a tested steel bow I assume), potentially damaged by moisture, harder to look after, requires logistical stringing operations and equipment either side of an engagement, subject to technical damage. Steel bows are subject to none of this and so even if they did shoot at a shorter range, once the calculations of everything are put in the mix maybe the shorter range is not such a problem.
Regards
Tod
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Wed 24 Mar, 2021 8:06 am Post subject: |
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The thing I keep returning to, is I just don't see this discrepancy of range in the historical records between steel and composite or horn prod weapons. If there was such a wide discrepancy as that in terms of performance, and given the rather enormous volume of records and manuscript data surviving from say, the 14th-16th centuries, and the importance of crossbows both as weapons of war and tools for hunting in that period, doesn't it seem likely that someone would have noticed and commented on this? Given the strict legal guidelines in the shooting contests, which as I have pointed out in a post upthread you may have missed, on several well-documented (and some famous) occasions discrepancies in the shooting contest invitations (which stipulate the target size and range to the target) have led to lawsuits, feuding, and bloodshed, wouldn't they mention different grades (as in, steel vs. horn) for the shooting competition? All I have ever seen is different ranges for crossbows and handguns, or (more rarely) for 'large' and 'small' crossbows.
So far as I know, the only data supporting the idea that horn or composite prod crossbows of the late European (i.e. short powerstroke) type would perform better than steel prod, is based on a very small number of modern replicas, and informal discussions like this one in this thread.
My understanding about Payne-Gallwey's shot is that it was one of the very large 'wall crossbow' type weapons. One of the fundamental issues with trying to make sense of crossbows is that there are dozens of different specific types of weapons from all across the world which fall into that very broad category but we tend to conflate them all together and talk about them by borrowing data points from across 5,000 miles and 2,000 years ... which ultimately makes any sensible analysis all but impossible.
If you will forgive my making a suggestion, while I fully appreciate that you make a wide variety of artifacts in your workshop and have to run a business, you have also obviously gained some traction and begun to spend a bit more time with your youtube videos. You have done several videos on crossbow performance and at the risk of presuming too much, it seems to me that you have begun to have a genuine interest in this very tricky puzzle of sussing out that particular not-very-well-understood piece of kit.
I think you might gain further success as well as enjoy some other knock-on benefits if you found and partnered with some academics for research on actual performance benchmarks and historical fabrication techniques. Things like prod shape and composition, bolt or quarrel shape, composition and weight, composition of the string, etc., as well as historical data such as I have been alluding to in the thread - how far and how fast they historically were able to shoot.
I would make specific suggestions in this regard but I'm sure you have better connections and know more people than I do. I think we both know some people at the Royal Armouries at Leeds for example, and there are obviously several other institutions around the UK, and even more on the European Continent, where you might be able to form some sort of collaboration to mutual benefit. Many of these places of course have antiques that can be closely examined - as I am sure you have done to some extent - but it could be done much more systematically. And they have manuscripts and books which can be searched through for literary data. One or two grad students could aggregate a lot of useful data for you.
When it comes to analysis I'd also recommend focusing on a specific time and place. If you compare 12th century military weapons from Central Europe with 18th century hunting weapons from Italy or France, again, the signal to noise ratio may diminish. If you examined say, weapons from Italy or Central Europe across a 200 year span of time, you might find a little bit more of a consistent pattern to their construction.
As for this comment "Performance differences can be achieved, but a modern optimised spring steel will perform as well or better than anything they had then for the role of being a spring. Mass is the same. " ... which you and several other people have brought up repeatedly in the thread, I think Pieter B. made a really useful point, which you might have missed since you said you skimmed the thread. There doesn't seem to be a way to link a specific post here so I'll just quote the most relevant passage:
| Quote: | Modern people have this tendency to look at an old design and find "problems" with it which often rest on misunderstandings.
For example people a priori assume firearms were worse weapons than bows and crossbows and invent all kinds of reasons why the former displaced the latter rather than questioning their initial assumption. People look at the design of old bombards and deride their comically short barrels and extreme bores but these design issues becomes a feature of good design when one takes into account the quantity and quality of powder that existed then; given those parameters they are actually better than later designs.
I can do the same with composite bows/crossbows and invent a problem which would require some explanation.
Horn sinew composite is a bad material compared to wood
It has a lower stiffness and a higher density than something like yew or hickory meaning you'd end up with a spring that has worse performance. It's only advantage is that it has a higher ultimate yield strength.
Thus we would expect a 'sensible' design to only use horn sinew composite for bows or prods with a higher poundage than wood can handle. Yet we do see composite bows and prods manufactured at draw strengths that were within the range of wood.
Why then do we see this bad design? Did the Mongols manufacture composite bows because they had no access to yew? Did the Genoese use composite crossbow prods because they were cheaper than wood?
The truth however is that the higher ultimate yield strength and the fact that it is a man-made material are strengths which allow it to outperform a wooden bow for a given poundage. Its very nature allows it to be shaped to form factors which wood cannot handle, you can add a reflex or deflex to the design or shift the mass of certain parts which you cannot when shaping a wooden prod. |
The modern engineering mindset is very good at solving problems, but only if the right data goes into the calculations. It's not at all unusual for us to miss something in the all important early stage which affects the outcome, especially if we have already reached firm conclusions about what is likely. If we find some indication that this doesn't match other data points that is when it's a good idea to go back to the sources for data, and on this and many other similar matters, the sources are antique weapons and historical records.
Books and games on Medieval Europe Codex Integrum
Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic Now available in print
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