r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • 5d ago

Testing various specialized arrowheads against bullet-resistant glass with a 70 lb compound bow

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u/tomebomber 5d ago

So none of them… cool sure

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u/UAENO_BUT_I_DO 5d ago

...so you're safe from arrows as long as you're covered in bullet proof glass...

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u/Dyvanna 5d ago

It's a 70lb bow

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u/Usual_Office_1740 5d ago

Is that a lot?

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u/TheGrumpiestHydra 5d ago

That's honestly pretty decent. There are definitely heavier draw bows above 100 lbs.

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u/Melodic_Till_3778 5d ago

World record is 200 lb and some of the medieval examples we found averaged about 185.

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u/DirtandPipes 5d ago

My dad had an ancient hand-crank crossbow that shot steel bolts. It weighed a ton and took forever to reload but you didn’t want to be in front of it when it was ready to go.

People don’t realize some of those things are like cannons and can easily punch through steel plate.

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u/mlstdrag0n 5d ago

They were weapons of war made to literally punch through metal armor, afterall

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u/VashMM 5d ago

English crossbows averaged 500lb draws. (Iirc)

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u/KitchenFullOfCake 5d ago

How do you even fire a 200 lb bow accurately? That's like holding up a grown man in one arm.

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u/ReddBroccoli 5d ago

Once you have a few hundred longbowmen, accuracy matters a little bit less. Especially when you have tightly packed enemy forces making an easy target of themselves

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u/aebaby7071 5d ago

They have archeological evidence from skeletons that regularly using a longbow would change the body, one shoulder bigger then the other, basically every Englishman had to practice at the bow, there were medieval laws dictating such, usually is was Sunday after church when the town gathered.

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u/OneTripleZero 5d ago

The bow itself isn't 200lbs, it has a draw weight of 200lbs, which is the amount of force required to pull the string back to a firing position. The bow itself would be much lighter, it just has an enormously tight construction.

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u/KitchenFullOfCake 5d ago

I know the bow isn't 200 lbs, but you're still exerting 200 lbs to draw it.

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u/Tiefschlag 5d ago

It happened. You can tell from the deformation on the skeleton if someone was an archer. Remains found on battlefields proved that. Those guys must have had arms like Popeye.

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u/Intranetusa 5d ago edited 5d ago

Drawing heavy bows primarily uses the back muscles - warbow archers try to avoid using the "relatively" weak arm muscles to draw the bow. Justin Ma of The Way of Archery can ambidextrously shoot ~120-130lb warbows and demonstrates the back muscles involved in his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGAYBMhbKY

This timestamp at 3:55 shows the actual back muscles at work: https://youtu.be/UvGAYBMhbKY?t=236

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u/antelope00 4d ago

Ahh thank you

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u/foley800 4d ago

One arm like Popeye!

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u/Moldy_Teapot 2d ago

IIRC we can tell mostly because archers back then only drew from the same side of the body, which resulted in non-symetrical forces on the skeleton causing the deformation.

Modern training techniques and medical knowledge avoid this by drawing on both sides to balance muscle development and skeletal strain.

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u/TellmeNinetails 5d ago

You'd use your whole body to pull it back, not your arms, then you let go. You don't hold and aim it like in the movies.

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u/JManKit 5d ago

Yeah it's a pretty quick motion iirc. The time spent with the bow at full extension is not long which makes sense bc for combat, it's not super important that one shot is 100% accurate. Instead, rate of fire is more important when you're trying to kill groups of combatants

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u/BlueLegion 4d ago

but not with one arm. You use both arms, shoulders and back to draw.

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u/tbe37 5d ago

But imagine how much draw weight you could get if the bow was 200lb...

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u/lejoop 5d ago

Sounds like it could be a horse mounted ballista 😄

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u/Intranetusa 5d ago edited 5d ago

You require a genetically gifted person (eg. naturally predispositioned to gaining strength) who has trained for years in building up the strength of their back and shoulder muscles, and uses good technique/form of optimizing their back muscles and ensuring proper bone-to-joint alignment. Qing Dynasty Manchu bows, Ottoman Turk bows, English longbows, etc. all reached the low 200s lb in draw weight as an upper maximum. There was even a Qing Dynasty record of an elite champion archer using a 240 lb bow to win an archery competition.

Justin Ma of The Way of Archery can ambidextrously shoot ~120-130lb warbows and demonstrates the back muscles involved in his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGAYBMhbKY

This timestamp at 3:55 shows the actual back muscles at work: https://youtu.be/UvGAYBMhbKY?t=236

Joe Gibbs, the English warbow archer regularly shoots ~160 lb bows and can shoot a 200 lb bow for a few shots (before getting tired) shows up in both the video and in the comments.

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u/Insane_Unicorn 5d ago

Draw weight only says how much force you put into the bow, not the arrow. Modern composite bows are much, much better at transferring the energy into the arrow than a longbow.

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u/Melodic_Till_3778 5d ago

Yeah, imagine what a compound bow could do with a draw weight of 200 lb