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
Critically “accuracy” as far as the pinpoint thing we think of with rifleman or bow hunters didn’t really matter. Penetraring power is kind of the same thing, it matters less than you think because the vast majority of troops on any given field didn’t have the kind of equipment that would protect them from arrows or balls.
In a battle, you massed your ranged units up and fired them and your opponents massed units. It didn’t really matter if you hit the guy you were aiming at or the the guy two places over in line, the point was to get a wall of flying death moving in the general direction of a block of dudes. This is true with bows or guns. Ideally you get successive waves like this, which muskets did very well with the adoption of volley fire.
You’re also probably also underestimating the labor and maintenance cost of a war-grade bow or the amount of consistent training it takes to pull a heavy draw bow. The ammunition for muskets is also cheaper to make and easier to carry in mass quantities.
It was cheap, cheaper than you think, was easy to train on and did the whole “wall of death” thing roughly as well as bows could. Better once you account for the number of them you could field.
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