From a layman’s point-of-view it seems like the Bow & Arrow would be better for war since they, shoot much more efficiently, are cheaper to make and in even some cases significantly stronger.
I know that learning to shoot a bow is no easy task so would that be the main reason muskets became so popular?
In my simple man’s brain I’m wondering why you don’t see or hear anything about bows being used during something like the American Revolutionary war. Could it be that by then muskets had reached a certain level of design that made it more useful than a bow?
In: Engineering
* Ease of use. It took two weeks to train a musketman to the point where he could participate in battle. It took a lot more time to train a crossbowman and years to train a longbow archer. The favored tactics of the late 16th and early 17th century, the Pike&Shot, was mostly adopted because how fast you could train large armies. Pike drill and musket drill were very simple compared to how difficult it was to train a decent archer or swordsman.
* Armor penetration. There wasn’t a lot of armor that could resist a musket bullet. The cuirassier remained in armies for quite a while, but the cuirassiers armor was mainly there to resist the bullets from cavalry pistols (giving them an advantage in fighting other cavalry), not those of a full-length musket.
* Gunpowder and lead balls were cheaper. It was expensive to manufacture arrows and bolts (and they required specialized craftsmen, both arrowsmiths and fletchers and sourcing feathers for fletching was a project in itself). Meanwhile gunpowder could be manufactured on an industrial scale and lead balls were so simple to make that anyone could do it with the proper molds (and hundreds of them could be made in a single hour). Lead was also plentiful and a byproduct of many types of mining (silver mines for example tended to produce a lot of lead).
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