Another piece of the armor vs. arrow puzzle

[JeanryChandler]

I'm sure this won't settle anything, but it's definately interesting.

A 1200 lb (416 kg) draw crossbow is tried out against a 3mm steel breastplate.

This page is in German but the two links on the bottom of the page are to the videos of this experiment in action. Nice slow motion shots.

From my friend Richard, who sent me this:

"The page also gives info on the equipment used and states that only the hardened triangular bolt entered the plate about two millimeters before the tip broke off. Wow. Obviously, this isn't a statistically significant thing, as there were only two shots made, but still interesting."

http://www.plattnerwerkstatt.de/beschuss.html

Jeanry

[s_taillebois]

The vex is, getting an equivalent to the very variant medieval steels (sort of steels).
And anyway, given the number of anecdotes which imply the fondness the English longbowmen had for shooting into the bowels of the French...I'd wonder if the arbalest/longbow contingent had some means of aiming along the plane of the saddles, somehow and getting the bolts, arrows, through the breach area of armored opponent. Pure conjecture there, as don't recall anybody showing from some old battle field post mortem evidence of that...or even sure if it might leave any...
Anyway, killing or wrecking the horse, as so many have noted, would seem to work about as well. And the armour plated aristocracy seemed to hate the arbalest/longbow contingent more than just the obsessive class heirarchy of the period indicated-so somehow these weapons had to have been effective.

[Mike Cartier]

Interesting....

[JeanryChandler]

Very true Mr. Tallebois. I'm guessing this would have been eqivalent to a later Renaissance tempered steel breastplate. They list the rockwell hardness at 50? Does that qualify as tempered steel? I don't know. The thickness was unusual too. I think the backing is also an issue, in the second shot with the flat plate it looks like the plate is on concrete.

I sure would like to have that 400 kg crossbow to play around with and run some of my own experiments...

JR

[s_taillebois]

Likely close to the Renn. steels. The 18th century seems to be the period they got closest to a modern concept of steel.
On the arbalests, unlikely they could hit the same point with another bolt. But given that these (and longbows) were usually employed en masse, I'd wonder about the effect if several archers aimed at the same general area...repeated hits might fracture the plate, drive it inwards etc. Usually modern tests seem to be one shot situations. Might be interesting to subject a armoured dummy to en-masse hits within a few seconds.