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| Why did we start to use muskets?? |
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| CIAagent11 |
 Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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I'm sorry if this was said before as I didn't read the thread in its entirety.
Longbows are very hard to use. It took a life of training to use right and a you can quickly teach a large amount of soldiers to use muskets.
One of the reasons the english lost the hundred years war was that the longbowmen they lost, they could not replace. And so they ran out of them.
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| kojax |
| Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 12:18 am Post subject: Re: Why did we start to use muskets?? |
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| Kukhri wrote: |
| kojax wrote: |
The only thing I think that article neglects is the nastier wounds factor.
Like I was saying before, an arrow penetrating your arm is like a very clean hit from a musket. You pull that arrow out, and you might be good to keep on fighting. A musket ball on the other hand has a few problems.
1) - You typically need someone very skilled to get it out.
2) - The lead often disperses, which can lead to serious infection or gengrene. I've heard that prosthetics were a major expense in some US states after the Civil War, primarily because of all the battlefield amputations that would happen.
3) - The high velocity impact creates certain kinds of shock to the human system. This is true even today, using encased bullets.
So basically, if you're dealing with a weapon where almost all wounds are grievous wounds, you have to use different tactics trying to defend against it than when you're using a weapon that routinely just nicks people.
I think a lot of the statistics on the penetrating ability of bows and X bows focuses only on what happens if the arrow/bolt hits the target straight on, as opposed to if it hits with a glancing blow, or at a slight angle. The mere fact that the lead ball isn't depending on a sharp point to bore into you, should make glancing, and other hits involving less than perfect contact, much more dangerous. |
You're not going to just yank an arrow out of your body. You'll be pulling entrails and tissue out along with it. Existing examples of tools carried by battlefield medics were something like forceps that reached into the wound channel to guide the arrow out. |
Yeah, I guess it's true that arrow head designers liked to focus on creating arrow heads that would inflict the maximum trauma possible, at least on unarmored opponents (for armored opponents you need to focus all or most of your design on just piercing their armor).
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There is nothing "clean" about an arrow wound and it can hardly be said that they "routinely nick people." Bodies exhumed from ancient battlefields show fragmented bones and deep wounds as a result of arrows. The 15 lb. children's bows you see today are very different from serious war bows firing heavy weight, properly tipped arrows. |
Well, it depends on what you mean. Since we began to use encased lead in our bullets, lot of bullet wounds like in Vietnam and WWII would be said to be clean wounds. Ie. the bullet enters on one side, leaves on the other, and you don't really need a medic to remove anything.
If an arrow hits you that way, you just break the shaft and pull it out from both sides. (Of course, a barbed arrow head will prevent such clean shots from ever happening, or at least if it does happen, it will be because all the flesh was torn off)
I guess a lot of it just depends on what kind of arrow head they're using. A barbed arrow head probably isn't going to penetrate plate, and might not even penetrate lesser armors like chain mail or leather.
As far as breaking bones, well, I don't disagree. If you hit a bone with a long bow, it probably will shatter it. A musket is probably *less* likely to do that, because it has a harder time making through all of your flesh without losing speed, or dispersing the lead, except when fired from very close range.
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I wouldn't say that a musket would produce a less grievious wound than an arrow, it's a very different type of trauma. High velocity impacts do not create shock. Loss of blood and thus blood pressure does.
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True, but high velocity impacts bleed more than low velocity impacts. (It depends on sharpness too). If you get cut by a dull knife, it will bleed less than if you get cut by a sharp knife. Higher velocity has a similar effect to sharpness. If a dull knife is very slowly used to cut you, it will bleed less than if it were used very fast, or with greater force.
The ideal way to impale someone in the middle ages, if you wanted them to live long and suffer, was to use a dull spike, and ram it through them very slowly. |
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| Kukhri |
| Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2009 9:42 am Post subject: |
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Not to be contradictory, but I must say that these are all very generalized and incorrect comments on trauma. You can't compare a dull vs. sharp knife wound to a high velocity bullet. Likewise, it's difficult to compare a low velocity, heavy missile like an arrow to a bullet. It's apples and oranges. What makes a bullet devestating (cavitation, fragmentation, ect) is completely different from an arrow's effect.
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| Since we began to use encased lead in our bullets, lot of bullet wounds like in Vietnam and WWII would be said to be clean wounds. Ie. the bullet enters on one side, leaves on the other, and you don't really need a medic to remove anything. |
That's exactly what bullets are designed not to do. Lead is malleable, thus "mushrooming" and fragmenting on impact. Only bullets with poor ballistics like the 7.62x39 tend to simply enter and exit. And the small arms commonly utilized in the American/Vietnam war are the same seen on modern battlefields.
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| kojax |
| Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 7:32 am Post subject: |
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I have a feeling that we keep discussing specialty munitions as though they represented fundamental traits of each weapon.
Barbed arrow heads are hard to remove, but they don't pierce armor very well, or at least not as well as an arrow head that simply comes to a point.
Mushrooming bullets are a probably more expensive to produce than simple lead encased bullets.
It seems any design trait you try to imbue to a bullet or arrow will involve an equal and opposite sacrifice in some other area (even if it's only cost) . This complicates a discussion about the virtues of bows vs. muskets, because, as far as I know, muskets only fired a few different kinds of rounds.
A plain lead ball, or someone mentioned scattershot. Were there any other kinds of variation on musket ammunition? |
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| Kukhri |
| Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:48 am Post subject: |
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| I have a feeling that we keep discussing specialty munitions as though they represented fundamental traits of each weapon. |
Nope.
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| Mushrooming bullets are a probably more expensive to produce than simple lead encased bullets. |
Not really.
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| A plain lead ball, or someone mentioned scattershot. Were there any other kinds of variation on musket ammunition? |
Lead balls, sometimes hand-made by the user in a mould and sized to the weapon were most common. Bore size varied considerably and ammunition captured from the enemy was unusable. Lead shot recovered from bodies shows the deformity I spoke of earlier, this is a common trait of all bullets to varying degrees depending on design and of course newer designs have come a long way ballistically.
Basic modern ballistics primer: A bullet enters the body creates a temporary cavity, much larger than the bullet's girth. That cavity rebounds and shrinks to the "permanent cavity" size, still larger than the bullet. Ideally, a bullet will yaw or spin inside the body, sometimes expanding and fragmenting. I've heard stories of 5.56's entering the thigh and ending up in 5 different places inside the abdomen. Some bullets are designed to penetrate armor, bone or whatever might impede it's path while still maintaining maximum ability to damage (Full Metal Jacketed) while others merely do maximum damage to soft tissue (Hollow Point).
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| kojax |
| Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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| Kukhri wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Mushrooming bullets are a probably more expensive to produce than simple lead encased bullets. |
Not really.
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Well, "cheap" probably doesn't capture the issue, at least not in the modern industrial setting. Once you've got the infrastructure in place to manufacture a certain kind of bullet, it probably becomes just as cheap to manufacture a well designed one as it is to manufacture a poorly designed one.
I'm thinking in Vietnam, we were basically up against a less developed nation who, despite receiving aid from powers like Russia and China, probably had to manufacture a lot of their own ammunition as well.
The explanation that their AK-47 rounds were less lethal because Russian designers are stupid, just.... doesn't seem to fit. It would make more sense if they were less lethal because the primary goal of the designer was to make them easy to manufacture.
Un-encased lead mushrooms better, but encased lead seems to be more suitable for the amount of powder being used, and range, of an assault rifle.
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| A plain lead ball, or someone mentioned scattershot. Were there any other kinds of variation on musket ammunition? |
Lead balls, sometimes hand-made by the user in a mould and sized to the weapon were most common. Bore size varied considerably and ammunition captured from the enemy was unusable. Lead shot recovered from bodies shows the deformity I spoke of earlier, this is a common trait of all bullets to varying degrees depending on design and of course newer designs have come a long way ballistically.
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Yeah, you couldn't use their ammunition outright, but lead has that wonderfully low melting point, so it's not hard to make shot of the right size if you melt it down. I remember making our own shot at scout camp one year. It was fun.
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Basic modern ballistics primer: A bullet enters the body creates a temporary cavity, much larger than the bullet's girth. That cavity rebounds and shrinks to the "permanent cavity" size, still larger than the bullet. Ideally, a bullet will yaw or spin inside the body, sometimes expanding and fragmenting. I've heard stories of 5.56's entering the thigh and ending up in 5 different places inside the abdomen. Some bullets are designed to penetrate armor, bone or whatever might impede it's path while still maintaining maximum ability to damage (Full Metal Jacketed) while others merely do maximum damage to soft tissue (Hollow Point). |
Yeah. From what I've been told. The ammunition used by the US Military today is designed to do all kinds of crazy stuff once it enters the body. Probably a lot of injuries resulting from those rounds that would be categorized as mere "flesh wounds", unless it honestly only grazed you. |
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| Kukhri |
| Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 6:38 am Post subject: |
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| I'm thinking in Vietnam, we were basically up against a less developed nation who, despite receiving aid from powers like Russia and China, probably had to manufacture a lot of their own ammunition as well. |
Weapons and ammunition were largely imported. Anyways, the round we're now discussing was not limited to use in the Vietnam war. It's the most commonly used cartridge in the world.
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| The explanation that their AK-47 rounds were less lethal because Russian designers are stupid, just.... doesn't seem to fit. |
No one said that. In his later years, General Kalashnikov spoke of redisigning the 7.62x39 for better ballistics.
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| Un-encased lead mushrooms better, but encased lead seems to be more suitable for the amount of powder being used, and range, of an assault rifle. |
What?
Don't use phrases like "I'm thinking" or "probably". Research, don't speculate.
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| kojax |
| Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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Well, I'm starting to see that you're the person to ask about this stuff. Would the natural tendency of un-encased lead to spread out lead to greater trauma on the part of those who got hit by muskets, than those who got hit by x-bows or long bows?
I've been told that there were so many amputations in the Civil War that some states spent over half their budgets on prosthetics for returning soldiers. I've also heard that, for many purposes, wounding your enemy is tactically better than killing them, because they have to expend resources tending to the wounded soldiers, who aren't going to be able to go on fighting.
If you've got a weapon that frequently causes amputations, even when it doesn't kill, that would seem to make it very effective. I can say for sure that I'd hate to get wounded by one. |
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| Kukhri |
| Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 12:32 am Post subject: |
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Exactly. A bullet should deform and deliver all it's energy into the target, rather than remain intact and overpenetrate. The bullet that entered JFK's right shoulder, continued on to Connally's back, passed through his right wrist and fragments ended up in his thigh. Not ideal.
And tactically yes, when you kill, you take one out of the fight. Grievous wounds tend to remove two or three combatants from the battlefield. Without the use of modern antibiotics and aseptic technique, prolonged convalescence was almost guaranteed with serious penetration wounds.
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| icewendigo |
| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 7:08 am Post subject: |
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"when you kill, you take one out of the fight"
I know of one country which switched its assault rifles from a powerfull model to a less powerful type because (so I was told) its previous model was too deadly. |
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| skeptic |
| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 4:42 pm Post subject: |
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There was a history channel TV documentary relevent to this topic. They showed the evolution of armour and the eventual discarding of basic steel armour. Scale and chain mail could stop a sword blow, but not a steel tipped arrow from a long bow. However, plate armour stopped the arrow very nicely - and the documentary actually showed arrows from a long bow piercing chain mail but bouncing off plate.
However, even quite primitive firearms could send a ball straight through plate armour. As an armour destroying weapon, guns beat bows hands down. After the invention of firearms, plate armour got used less and less and was eventually not used at all. Moving quickly was a much better defense!
Even though early guns took a long time to reload, this was not always a serious problem. Battles do not always consist of rapid charges on horseback. Often it involved sieges and even trench warfare, and the greater range, accuracy, and penetrating ability of a gun made it much more useful than even a big longbow in the hands of a skilled archer. |
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| Kukhri |
| Posted: Tue May 05, 2009 4:45 am Post subject: |
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Plate armour that was designed to resist firearms was available in Europe and Asia. The term "bullet proof" came about from the practice of armament manufacturers "prooving" a piece of armour by shooting it at close range. If one were looking to purchase a breastplate, you would note it's quality by a dent, or the "bullet proof." Plate armour was even seen as late as world war I. German stormtroopers early on, crawled across the battlefield in the prone pushing a large shield ahead of them. American soldiers wrote home complaining about the shields, inspiring African big game hunters to send large-bore rifles which penetrated and rendered the shields obsolescent.
| skeptic wrote: |
| Even though early guns took a long time to reload, this was not always a serious problem. |
Yes, well coordinated "fire by line" and platoon "ripping fire" kept up a continual barrage when neccessary.
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