I bet this dude plays a mean lute!
Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#32A lot of it makes a ton of sense. But draw weight of the bow and weight of the arrows make a huge difference. Would be really interesting to see him do this even half as effectively using and 80-100lb warbow with heavy war arrows. Weaker stuff will not punch through even the worst armour at any kind of decent range. Also I wonder if this works with light flight arrows used to harass enemy at range and kill horses.
His technique does show how bad it was for the horses and why Mongols needed to bring as many remounts as they did. Battle between two horse archer armies must have been a real horse slaughter.
Also that mail shot, I bet cash that is a crap butted mail. Try same with riveted mail covered with gambeson and see what happens(nothing, this arrows will bounce like it was a wall)
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#33None of these are forgotten archery techniques. Some of them are acrobatic, some are silly, some are unreliable. (Some fall into more than one of those categories.) Modern Olympic archers are all about accuracy, with no points for speed other than an overall time limit. If you want to learn archery with both speed and accuracy, you could do worse than to find your local SCA group. A Royal Round is a set of six arrows…
I'm not an archer of any rank. But my take on this is that he's trying to represent or reproduce the skill of archery when archery was essential to war and hunting. Great skill in an Olympic competition is certainly an impressive achievement but it may be worthless outside the clearly defined rules of competition.
Between your 120 bowman and this guy, which one wins in battle and which one brings home fresh meat for dinner. I think I'd rather have this guy on my side.
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#34That video was neat, but it looks entirely like underpowered archery. Was it really guns that made people not care about this kind of thing (fast archery on the run)? Or was it simply more powerful longbows that meant archers would shoot from further off?
On a related note, in this video he catches an arrow out of the air. But that air must have been moving relatively slowly. There was a Mythbusters years ago where they investigated the myth of ninjas catching arrows, and determined it was impossible based on the time it took for a martial arts master to close his hand (measured with a high-speed camera) vs the time it took for an arrow to pass through the air. But this was assuming longbows fired from a castle wall. Those arrows will be going significantly faster than the ones seen in this video.
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#35None of these are forgotten archery techniques. Some of them are acrobatic, some are silly, some are unreliable. (Some fall into more than one of those categories.) Modern Olympic archers are all about accuracy, with no points for speed other than an overall time limit. If you want to learn archery with both speed and accuracy, you could do worse than to find your local SCA group. A Royal Round is a set of six arrows…
I'm not an archer of any rank. But my take on this is that he's trying to represent or reproduce the skill of archery when archery was essential to war and hunting. Great skill in an Olympic competition is certainly an impressive achievement but it may be worthless outside the clearly defined rules of competition. Between your 120 bowman and this guy, which one wins in battle and which one brings home fresh meat for…
When archery was essential to war, it was still only "stand and loose" - foot archers typically planted stakes in front to ward off cavalry, or would be on hills or in front of woods. Basically stand still, shoot the buggers, run and hide if anyone charged.
As for hunting, that is extreme slowness, and perfect accuracy because you won't get a second shot, and if you move at all before loosing the animal moves too. Hunters wait.
So apart from firing in the saddle, archery was and is about stillness, accuracy and yes, in war, speed.
The guys able to put 30 arrows into the attacking targets at 50 paces will win the war, and the guys setting snares will fill the pot ;-)
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#36The use of ancient paintings as "proof" that the archers used the right-side of the bow made me think of this: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/nobody-kno... Just because it's in a lot of pictures, doesn't mean it's really what happened.
Sure, but he specifically mentioned studying historical sources. If he's into something like, say, what ARMA folks do with fencing manuals, we're not talking about looking at a bunch of sketches and having random ideas. Historical manuals have annotations explaining what is being pictured, with motions described and what not. Sure you'll have botched icons but if text contradicts what you see, you'll test all variations and draw conclusions based on what's effective. Just because this poor video picked the flashiest imagery he had at hand doesn't mean this is what he's using as a reference.
WRT several adjacent threads here it's important to keep in mind that arms and armor changed over time. It's easy to say "meh, quality chainmail wouldn't have been pierced using this bow and this arrow" but it's quite likely that these techniques were rarely used by the time regular army had access to proper protective gear. He mentioned firearms in his video and noted that fast archery declined because of it. Could be but firearms were result of "we need more power to penetrate that armor" which in turn was caused by "we need better protection from these heavy swords" which were response to armor, and so on. I bet folks who were into art of war some hundreds of years ago had their own version of Moore's law. ;]
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#37I'd love to know the draw weights of the bows he's using. One of the differences between the sort of archery he's doing and the standard recurve competition shooting you'll see is that the latter is much slower, more relaxed, with very defined, conscious aiming. The idea is to do precisely the same thing, with your whole body, over and over and over again. His aiming is completely instinctual. Because of the way the…
So you want to compare sports archery vs combat archery and expect the results to be anything less than obvious? Your comment does make me consider, though, whether longbowmen use a technique more similar to the modern sports technique than to Andersen's here. Kind of like how sniping is more similar to target practice than urban combat.
Maybe, maybe not. :-)
Accuracy vs. volume of fire is not an easy question to settle, given that they can't be compared directly, but require very different tactics and training.
Check this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHGUExSGH8 (and for background, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XomJdLZGyCM ).
Most of the depictions of longbowmen in battle that I've seen make me suspect that they're going down the volume-of-fire route.
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#38I wonder how many takes he had to do before getting the video of splitting an arrow in flight. It's pretty damn impressive either way, but I still have a hard time believing he can do that reliably.
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#39A lot of it makes a ton of sense. But draw weight of the bow and weight of the arrows make a huge difference. Would be really interesting to see him do this even half as effectively using and 80-100lb warbow with heavy war arrows. Weaker stuff will not punch through even the worst armour at any kind of decent range. Also I wonder if this works with light flight arrows used to harass enemy at range and kill horses. Hi…
On a castle tour in the UK there was a discussion about the advantage the longbow gave the English. Something that I had not considered was that shooting an arrow up at an angle, allowed it to accelerate due to gravity on the way down, and that was a large component of its velocity at impact. In this way the amount of energy it lost due to air resistance was minimized. Much more complex than I expected.
Re: Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]
#40None of these are forgotten archery techniques. Some of them are acrobatic, some are silly, some are unreliable. (Some fall into more than one of those categories.) Modern Olympic archers are all about accuracy, with no points for speed other than an overall time limit. If you want to learn archery with both speed and accuracy, you could do worse than to find your local SCA group. A Royal Round is a set of six arrows…
Could you or anyone share some youtube videos of such events, possibly? I've managed to find only some crossbow one, it didn't look very fast in comparison, but also crossbow is inherently slower. I'd be very interested in seeing the examples of what you're talking about.
Also, I'm confused by the explanation you provide for the score counting. Is it 90pts max over 3 rounds, + 30 seconds extra? Is the bullseye during the 30s also counted for 5 points? If so, then score 120 means 30 points over 30 seconds, means 5 seconds per arrow on average, yes? If so, then the show by Lars Andersen is much faster. If not, then can you please explain it more clearly to me?
Also, can you explicitly say which techniques are silly, which are unreliable, which are "acrobatic"? It's hard to discuss (either disagree or agree) when you're so vague. For example, as to handling the bow, in some video about "ancient Japanese archery" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egiXLXwhvzs#t=10m45s) they seem to be also keeping the arrow on the same side of the bow as Lars, and keeping more than 1 arrow between fingers; while some random SCA bowmen guys I've googled up on youtube seemed to be handling it "on the inside".