LEGION3000 said:
Wow people have been watching way too much "movie" history.
Bows were NOT effective against full plate armor. The French knights at Agincourt were primarily wearing MAIL armor with select metal pieces, which is rather useless against any kind of piercing weapon, Arrow, Bolt, spear, etc.. The other factors were the weather, mud and heavy horses turning the field into a quagmire. Once you shot the big horses out the knight was running in quiksand wearing metal armor while a bunch of peasents with spears were able to run around and gank them. Bows are effective ONLY en masse on the battlefield. If you take a person with no training in bow or musket, they will shoot with about the same accuracy or possibly worse with a bow. The famed accuracy of a bow comes purely from hollywood and a few highly trained modern people.
Against popular belief it was not because of the piercing quality of black powder weapons that heavy armor fell out of use. It was the expense of making and keeping armor over the relative ease of cannon and musket production. And also the move of armies away from feudal obligation to standing military was a huge factor in in the loss of armor. Armor was supplied by the soldier not the state. When nobles stopped becoming soldier in favor of idustrial persuits, so too went the knight. Now we are left with a bunch of peasent armies that need to be outfitted by the state and trained. They are not going to issue expensive armor so they give them all cheap and easy muskets with fabric uniforms. If you look back at the commanders, who were often nobles, they usually continued to wear their armor into battle even into WW1. After a while even the nobility jumped off the military bandwagon and generals would come up through the ranks, that is when nearly all armor stopped being worn as seen in the American Civil War. The simple fact is that money, not protection, was the factor that killed armor.
Flatline, you have pretty much everything backwards. Swords became lighter because of the reduction of heavy armor. And the single shot stopping power of a musket ball is much much higher than a 9mm. Most people shot with a musket ball, even if it goes straight through possibly an arm or some such will have massive trauma and blood loss from the weight of impact from a single shot. A person taking the same wound from a 9mm will probably not be knocked off their feet and possibly if sufficiently hyped on adreanaline or drugs, not even know they were hit. The benefit of 9mm vs. say .44 is the high rate of fire and reduced user training and hand strain.
LEGION3000 said:
Flatline, you have pretty much everything backwards. Swords became lighter because of the reduction of heavy armor. And the single shot stopping power of a musket ball is much much higher than a 9mm. Most people shot with a musket ball, even if it goes straight through possibly an arm or some such will have massive trauma and blood loss from the weight of impact from a single shot. A person taking the same wound from a 9mm will probably not be knocked off their feet and possibly if sufficiently hyped on adreanaline or drugs, not even know they were hit. The benefit of 9mm vs. say .44 is the high rate of fire and reduced user training and hand strain.
I'll stand corrected on the swords. I wrote that at 3am and my memory was groggy and you're right, I got it perfectly backwards. My apologies.
That being said, I've personally seen an arrow pierce plate armor. It wasn't pretty, and with the right tempering/thickness of the armor, and the right craftsmanship, it would probably deflect. But I've seen it with my own eyes. To say that arrows can't penetrate plate simply isn't true.
However, I was basing my statements of a musket ball passing through a person's body from actual medical reports from the era. Imagining that a musket ball would knock someone off of their feet is a hollywood myth as well. What you have to remember is that surface area of the round, inertia, and velocity all will have an effect on trauma suffered by a bullet. While musket balls have a relatively large surface area, they have a greater amount of inertia (or a tendancy to carry through the target) and a slower velocity.
Modern bullets such as the round originally designed for the M-16 are such lethal bullets because they can tumble, fragment, and come to a stop inside a person's body, transferring all of their kinetic energy into the target. A 9mm FMJ round is designed to pass cleanly through a target, which if memory serves was international law regarding war or something like that (I may be wrong here). However, with something such as a hollowpoint 9mm, the bullet mushrooms open and will more likely come to a stop inside the body, or at least impart most of it's kinetic energy into the victim, causing more trauma. A musket ball would have a higher tendancy to travel through a body due to it's inertia and relatively stable trajectory through a medium such as a human body, unless of course it strikes bone.
Still, I stand firmly by my belief that a musket ball, while potentially warranting maybe a point of damage increase over what it is now, should not have the tearing quality. The lethality of a musket ball wound came not from the immediate wound, but from medicine's inability to deal with the long term effects of wounds. If you want to reflect the massive, blunt trauma of a musket ball, give muskets something like the shocking quality to stun someone. I still say that taking away the primative quality, giving the weapon tearing, and even potentially upping the damage makes the gun far more appealing than some other modern weapons.
This also strikes me as a particularly silly argument ultimately, since I find it highly unlikely that anyone will run a primarily primitive-era setting in Dark Heresy for the main focus of a protracted story/campaign. At that point, pick up GURPS, or D&D, or some other mideval system that is more suited to those rules, and simply say "yeah, you're acolytes of the emperor, but you're stuck here. Go you!". My suggestions thus far have been not to accurately replicate a detailed combat engine around blackpowder, but moreso to use some real-world information to suggest in-game ways that you can quickly illustrate the difference between primative guns, modern guns, and archery, so that a GM could get back to telling the story.
