Why is the English longbow such a meme?

On top of
You can arc the arrows in a way that could fall downwards upon a knight, which had a better chance of finding its way in a crack in the armor, which would not likely be lethal but would be painful and debilitating for a combat situation.

Wouldnt it just hit the helm and glance of to the side, armor is sloped to prevent that kind of thing. And once it hit the helm or should pad it would lose a lot of energy so even if it magically got under the arm pit it would not pierce the gambeson.

Im sure a lot of people did die to archer fire, but if archers were the be all end all of warfare the Persian empire would have beat Alexander the Great.

Just like in Robin Hood: Men in Tights?

Depends across time, earlier armours were much more loose and susceptible to arrow arcing compared to later armors, which had few gaps for arrows to land in. As with all things historical, a timeframe is required for specifics.

Also, the Greeks had the phalanx and a more well trained army.

>Im sure a lot of people did die to archer fire
Really not that much. Look how laughably were the causalities in era of line infantry, and firearms are far more deadly. Even in modern times for one dead man you need shitload of used ammunition.
That's why for major part of history(it changed in like, 20thC) battles were concluded in melee.

I would have thought phalanx probably had more gaps than a full plate armor, and i doubt it was common for an English longbow to be able to penetrate through plate armor enough to kill someone.

I know what you mean, but its a bit silly thinking a longbow could snipe through plate at 900 meters, not through gaps but through actual metal and padding to kill someone.

It wouldn't be about sniping as much as a literal rain of arrows. Plus a good phalanx had shields overlaying each other, which didn't leave for many gaps to exploit, although sustained fire could easily tire out individuals in the phalanx.

I'm really interested in the way you portray armour. You are talking about arrow penetrating gaps in armor, when fired in arc. What gaps? And now you said
>had shields overlaying each other, which didn't leave for many gaps to exploit
How in the hell bunch of shields have less gaps than (chain)mail or gambeson? The armour is the reason why people stopped using shields, it protects better a larger area of body.

900 fucking meters, i dont even think a longbow can reach half that distance.

Points of articulation, visors, ect would all have gaps. This is plate armor, which would be fairly common for most armored opponents.
Oh lord no, the effective range is like 400 yards.

The important thing he mentioned is that they're firing massed volleys of arrows at you. It's a numbers game. Maybe only 1 in 25 hits something and has an effect, but if you're firing hundreds and thousands of arrows at them in a short span of time...

And as far as Agincourt etc. is concerned, the matter was not decided by longbow fire. That just broke the momentum of the charge and put the French into disarray, so they could be cut up in melee, same as every other battle. Fire is going to do some damage, but the greater effect is going to be the disarray and nullification of the charge. The real killing will be done with polearms, up close.

If an arrow managed to kill a man in full armour then it would have been a lucky shot. Nevertheless don't forget that not every man on the battlefield would have been head-to-toe in metal.

>the effective range is like 400 yards.
>effective

IF a longbow could reach that far, it would only be using special light flight arrows, not an arrow designed to actually kill.

They are weaker, but not entirely unprotected. And shooting in an arc to try hit visor is quite bad idea -> knights didn't look up to the sky to catch arrows.

If every 25th arrow actually hit and wounded someone, that would be hella of the success. 1 in a 1000 would be still great.
> Fire is going to do some damage, but the greater effect is going to be the disarray and nullification of the charge
Exactly this.

Longbow is welsh

Ah! but was that man in full plate a Frenchman?

This is important!

...which is why they'd just roll over them on foot.

what cracks, exactly, do you think exist at the top of armor? It is literally the least vulnerable angle. Nor is that why arrows are lofted at that angle, this done purely for range, and armor has nothing to do with it, nor did it ever.

>Im sure a lot of people did die to archer fire
Not in the western world, no.

Not really. Testing has shown that even simple mail and padding is an excellent defense against arrows, and mail is ancient. Literally.

>Points of articulation, visors, ect would all have gaps.
Not wide enough for an arrow head, and articulation point will either be designed to overlap, or have mail under them.

The only common unarmored portions of a man in armor are the palm of the hand, the eye if you can get close enough, the groin if you can get under whatever crotch defense he uses, and the bottom of the foot. Back of the knees in some armors, but arrows won't be hitting that.

>knights didn't look up to the sky to catch arrows.
Case in point, we have a Frenchman disparaging longbows by stating that they can just lower their faces and be utterly impervious.

So welsh, it got popularized by English, most of the longbows to ever exist were made by the English, it became a military meme because of the English, and the english were the primary users of it.

And it was found outside of wales before all of that.

It's about as welsh as the shit I took this morning.

The Welsh are English.

You wish!

'no'

*fucks sheep*

I have been an archer for forty years, mainly Trad longbows.
Max range with my 120# yew longbow is three hundred paces, area targets only.
Pin point targets, six inches across, I can hit at a hundred most of the time.

Penetration varies, to shoot to three hundred, you need light arrows. These are called pight arrows, they are slimmer and have a lighter point than livery arrows. They have bigger all penetration against steel plate.
At one hundred I use livery arrows, thirty six inches long, half an inch in diameter at the point tapering to three inches at the nock. The feathers are seven inches long and an inch and a half tall to give the heavy arrow stability.
These arrows when fitted with a steel pointed short bodkin can penitrate modern twelve gauge steel plate.
With arrows that weigh a quarter pound each with a velocity at a hundred paces of one hundred and eighty feet per second, do the math and you will see that the force they can impact with is in the .40 cal pistol range.

If you want to find a crack in armour, go from the bottom to the top, not the other way around like you are suggesting.Shoulder pieces overlap from top to bottom, so any gaps in the shoulders are mostly seen from below, not from above.

Isn't it an extreme variable? That's like saying a rifle can shoot through plate armor.

That depends on ammo type. Hollowpoint ain't gonna do shit. AP will do just fine.

I'd imagine arrows have a lot of factors to deal with this. Distance, speed drop off, trajectory, wind-interferance, angle of contact, point of contact, speed of projectile in relation to speed of target, movement of target, power behind arrow, construction of arrow, construction of arrowhead, material of arrowhead, shape of arrowhead, etc etc etc.

I imagine that the Longbow could allow more power to punch through armor at a similar distance other bows could reach the target, but it's still purely luck on where they hit.
But I don't know jack shit about any of that.

>I got into an argument with someone trying to tell that the longbow could kill a man in full plate armor up to 900 meters away, and that plate armor could not even defend from a sword thrust.

Anyone who claims this is possible is a full blown retard LARPer that shouldn't be taken seriously.

A bit of Trevor Royle's (Douglas faced a difficult predicament. The opposition blocked his route back into Scotland, and, knowing that he had no option but to give battle, he deployed his slightly larger army on the steep slopes of nearby Homildon Hill.
>With their densely packed schiltrons of bristling spears the Scots seemed to have the advantage and, indeed, had Northumberland heeded the urgings of his son, who recommended and immediate frontal attack, they might have won the day.
>Instead, taking March's advice, Northumberland placed the bulk of his archers on Harehope Hill, to the north-west, while the rest of his army faced the Scots from the north.
>Because Harehope was at the same elevation as Homildon it allowed the English archers to shoot their much-feared weapons with some hope of hitting their targets while preventing any counter-attack by the Scottish cavalry.
>In the end it was the weight and accuracy of fire of the English archers that won the battle.
>As March had forecast, the English bowmen caused havoc as they poured their fire into the dense ranks if the enemy.
>Not only did the barrage kill hundreds of Scots but it ecouraged the survivors to try to end their misery by rushing down the hill to attack their tormentors.
>In the Scotichronicon there is a bitter response to the English arrow storm when the Scottish knight Sir John Swinton angrily berates his fellow Scots for meekly accepting their fate like fallow deer instead of attacking their enemies 'in the Lord's name, either to save our own lives in doing so or at least to fall as knights with honour.'

Morale dmg > physical dmg.

Longbows can't penetrate shit, here's a demonstration on Lindymeme's channel of all places

youtu.be/Ej3qjUzUzQg?t=56s

cont. from the same chapter in reverence of based Swinton's courage & chivalry, it'd be a crime to leave this bit out.
>Swinton's words prompted a band of his fellow knights to join him in a suicidal attack; among them was his great rival Adam de Gordon, who knelt before Swinton and declared him to be the braves knight in the Scottish army.
>Douglas, too, joined the fray, seizing a lance and leading a troop of horsemen into the attack.
;_;7

Anyhow, on topic of the thread, he actually goes a little into the longbow vs armour meme, the madman.
>For a short time it seemed that the English bowmen had been unnerved by the assault but, as Walsingham pointed out, Douglas' outdated armour was no protection against a weapon which was the battle-winner of its day:
>>Despite the elaborate armour the earl of Douglas received five deep wounds.
>>The rest of the Scots, who had not come down the hill, turned tail and fled from the arrows.
>>But flight did not avail them, for our archers followed them, so that the Scots were forced to give themselves up for fear of the deadly arrows.
>>The earl of Douglas was captured, as were many of those who fled, but many were drowned in the River Tweed because they did not know the fording places.
>>It was said that the waters devoured five hundred men.
>>In this battle no lord or knight dealt a blow to the enemy; but God gave miraculous victory to the English archers alone, and the magnates and men-at-arms remained idle spectators of the battle.
That last bit ofcourse was English chronicler Thomas Walsingham, so do take it with a grain of salt.

>the longbow could kill a man in full plate armor up to 900 meters away
Not even a fucking musket could penetrate a breastplate at this distance.

Thank you for posting this.

Even the meme-man himself got blown out by superior european steel hammered 10,000 times.

youtube.com/watch?v=D3997HZuWjk

notice anything about these tests?

They're testing their bow against the strongest part of the armour, the breastplate. Most of the so called 'tests' done by historians are done against the strongest part of the armour, and the armour used is the kind of quality that only a minority of the men on the field would have had (because historians are not scientists). What chroniclers of the time would record is that the limbs and the head were the parts vulnerable to arrow fire, and as says when historians actually bother to test a wider range of scenarios this is exactly what they find.

And this still doesn't get close to replicating actual battlefield conditions - there's always the chance that a lucky shot will find a gap in the armour, or a piece of armour that's been improperly forged, or the same piece will just be struck so many times that it loses its integrity.

I am so tired of this 'longbows weren't actually very dangerous' meme. Of course longbows were fucking deadly - otherwise the English wouldn't have kept using them and the rest of Europe wouldn't have got their panties in a twist over them. It wasn't just the morale effect - what, you think that because a few arrows started bouncing off their impenetrable armour hardened medieval knights got scared and ran away? If the longbows effected morale it was because they caused hundreds of casualties, as it says here . Nor is it that longbows were effective against a charging horse - the English won plenty of infantry battles with the longbow (most notably agincourt)

>we have a Frenchman disparaging longbows by stating that they can just lower their faces and be utterly impervious.
>disparage
except that at the French chroniclers of Agincourt listed this as one of the reasons it was so fucking hard to fight the English longbow, because you couldn't fucking see anything while you were walking looking straight down.

>the English won plenty of infantry battles with the longbow (most notably agincourt)
Mud and chokepoints won the battle of Agincourt.

All chronicles talk about the fact the longbowmen start melee'ing the fuck out of the french instead of fighting with their bows.

> instead of fighting with their bows.

For those of you still wondering just what level of bullshit this is, what the chroniclers of the time actually describe is a storm of arrows wreaking havoc on the advancing French knights. When the French reached the English lines, instead of rushing into the melee the archers (positioned at the sides of the English line) continued to fire point blank into the French. It was only when they finally ran out of arrows that they joined the melee combat against the exhausted, demoralised French.

Man why are people so fucking retarded.

This argument hinges on one single point - the knight wearing the armor has the best armor available. It totally disregards the fact that mos knights inherit land, titles and fucking OLD ARMOUR MADE IN A TIME WHEN SMITING WASN'T PERFECTED.

It's almost as if Longbows would pierce the armor of lesser quality armor, but not the newer quality. Gee whizz, it's almost like not every one on the battlefield had full plate armor, and not everyone wearing full plate had THE BEST OF THE FUCKING BEST.

You are all literal morons.

this guys and everyone else:
IM RIGHT
NO YOURE WRONG
READ BOOKS LMAO

Y'all need to realize that from time to time science is the answer to your pathetic debates.
It depends on the arrow, its weigh, on the bow, the distance, the composition of the armor, the trajectory, the angle, the wind, the movement of the knight at the moment of impact, what wood is the arrow made of, what metal and what quality of metal for the tip of the arrow.
But then again, this is Veeky Forums. arrows PENETRATE ARMORS, or NO THEY DONT. Don't you think i'm going to take the time to speak a proper english for you.
Get off this board.

Even if your armor is godlike impenetrable and it protects everything but your eyes, you'd still be shitting your pants thinking one lucky arrow out of the thousands of arrows being shot might get in your fucking eye.

>Bulk of armies are lucky to have their lighter armor supplemented with steel plates.
>Literal rain of arrows weighing > 1lb falling all around you at high speeds

Everyone always talks about knights encased in steel and whether or not Longbows would punch through their armor (the answer is "maybe if they got unlucky btw). The REAL answer is arrows would fuck with them enough to make them less effective, fuck with their horses to make them more skittish (people always seem to forget that horses are 1000lb, often-temperamental animals) or hopefully even kill/cripple the horses, severely limiting the combat effectiveness of knights.

If your horse takes a wound or dies underneath you, particularly while charging in formation, you're gonna be remarkably lucky to still be in fighting shape, and if you are, you're suddenly a lot less dangerous.

....the french on horseback at agincourt were throwing their arms out and baring their chest in mockery of the archers as they rode, user.

You need to understand something very simple:
EVERY single time the English broke a charge with longbows, they had advantageous terrain to hamper the charge and a lot of men at arms to absorb it and fight in hand to hand.

They didn't have that at patay. It was a straight up clash between archers and cavalry.

The archers got fucking slaughtered.

>BU BU DEY WAS SURPRISED
Vernuil. Archers couldn't get their stakes in, archers got rolled the fuck over.

given how useless the bows were at flodden, I'm taking him with more than a grain of salt.

Oh look a same post that accounts for everything.

And everyone's ignoring it.

Weird.

*sane

Flodden was over a hundred years after Homildon.

Island nations are prone to wanking over their shitty traditional weapons, see Japan and katana for another example of this.

Thing is even if they don't penetrate armor the arrow is still delivering close to a hundred pounds of force on one small point of their target. Even if, say, 5 arrows hit you and don't penetrate you're still going to feel the punch. That sort of stuff may not kill people but it saps their stamina and morale and that's what makes it deadly against armored opponents.

900m?

An English longbow can pierce the armour of a tank from a mile away.

At 500 those things could put a serious dent in a castle m8.

The idea of a poor knight going off to battle or a tournament in his dad's handed down armour us certainly a romantic image, but does it have any basis in reality?

Do we have any accounts of knights or other professional soldiers going to war in outdated equipment in the middle ages?

English archers were very effective in the middle ages, even according to the testimony of foreign commanders. Not so much when they had to go up against artillery and musketry. As another user pointed out, all of the great victories of the longbow have a two things in common: they always adopted a defensive position and always had the numerical advantage in ranged troops. Once bringing long-ranged artillery to the field became commonplace that tactic didn't work anymore, since any defensive position the archers took up could simply be bombarded from out of bowshot.

Don't know about accounts, but simply considering how a expensive a full suit of state of the art armor was at any time in history, it's to be expected that poorer knights and men-at-arms would simply use whatever armor they could get their hands on, and simply modify it with new improvements (and so it could fit their body better obviously) whenever they could afford it.

If you didn't have the required gear your simply weren't serving as a knight/men-at-arms.

It's also important to realize armor is not indestructible, I know of accounts of a German Knight who wore his armor out in two years of intensive campaigning.

Wear, tear and battle damage will take their toll.

As for outdated gear do you consider 20 year old stuff outdated?

PS, The Irish typically wore armour of a style that had been abandoned on the continent and England for centuries but this does not mean the pieces themselves were that old.

Poor Knight is something of a contradiction, just like a broke millionaire.

Not really, while any noble could become a knight, the bulk of them were made out of the lowest and poorest fraction of the aristocracy, often having little more than a parch of land in terms of wealth.

High or Late Medieval?

I did some calculations on that and in terms of wealth those blokes we call gentry in the late middle ages still belonged to the richest 1% of the country. Easily ten times as rich as a well to do peasant. The poorest income at which one could became a knight was twice that much.

>those blokes we call gentry in the late middle ages still belonged to the richest 1% of the country
That's to be expected for the time when you consider that before the industrial revolution you had around 90% of any given population working on food production.

I'm thinking of it as being armour that is in itself old. Not a brand new helmet made to an old design, but specifically an old helmet or weapon. Like say, a modern US Marine going into battle with a M1 Garand and a doughboy helmet.

Specifically, his grandfather's M1 and his great-grandfather's helmet that they both used in their respective wars.

Well pieces of mail can be recycled for quite a while. Besides being easy to repair you can "knit" pieces together to form new ones or cut up larger pieces. We have evidence of these repairs and modifications.

For gentry the price of armor is not so prohibitive. Horses were generally as expensive as armor and these did not have spectacular lifespans. The chance of going to battle on your fathers warhorse is quite small and if you could afford a new horse you sure as hell could afford new up to date armor. Besides that plate armor changed by the decade. Walking around in a suit of armor 20 years or even 30 years old might not raise an eyebrow but wearing something 50 years old would mean your armor is seriously out of date. Aside from aforementioned wear and tear the style itself is most likely less protective than current models too.

I read a paper on the subject of land ownership of the Norfolk Gentry and what their income was, then I compared it to armor prices.

Without loads of fancy decoration a full set of (fitted) plate armor represented roughly 50-75% of their annual income. In terms of expense, that is to say the fraction of annual income, this does not look to dissimilar to buying a car.

Looking at rank and file infantry might present a very different picture though.

>why is there so much Anglo propaganda when they controlled the entire world for more than a hundred years???

Gee, I wonder OP.

>Longbow
>Fire
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I hate this meme. Everyone knows exactly what it means. It's only fucking spastics who get triggered by it.

the romantic image is that of beautiful, complete sets of the finest armor.

>Sail a truck
>Fire a longbow

Same thing user

it can pierce armor
and it can fire up to 900 meters away

but it can't do both (doesn't matter really)

Brits only ever controlled the third world
They had very little influence in Europe

Most of the current overrating of British history is the work of American mass media
When they don't overrate Brits to glory themselves (in the case of their Revolutionary War) they do it because they see them as their ancestors (overrating of English role in the Crusades, use of the irrelevant War of Roses to serve as setting for some popular fantasy books....etc)

Who the fuck sails a truck???

>it can pierce armour
youtube.com/watch?v=CULmGfvYlso
A longbow even struggles against gambeson, which usually is also combined with chainmail

>and it can fire up to 900 meters away
No it fucking can't. The absolute maximum is like 300-350 meter and at that range your arrow does basically nothing

>calling someone a sailor even if he's only worked on propellar driven ships
>firing a longbow
it's almost as if the usage of old words is adapted to keep up with the times, to preserve the general meaning rather than specific action.

>Even if, say, 5 arrows hit you and don't penetrate you're still going to feel the punch.
No you won't.

and it can fire up to 900 meters away
lol no

criminally underrated post

>close to a hundred pounds of force on a small area
Lmao no.
A lightweight arrow glancing off your armor is unlikely to bother someone (psychically) much at all. If the guy in question starts shitting himself because an arrow bounced off his plate then he probably wasn't going to do very well once he got face to face with a foe anyway.

It was the Bren of it's time

I love that as soon as someone who knows what they're talking about comes along everyone ignores him and carries on shitposting

/thread

Have you ever been hit by flying logs?
Shit hurts.
You can scare infantry/peasants in melee combat, causing them to not fight effectively but if you throw some stakes up and get a commander walking up and down the line making sure thomas and robert are plucking their bows and not wanking it to maidens every archer will be a totally effective fighting force.

Especially since archery was the only form of sport, and was all those peasants knew for fun.

You are a stupid cunt.

>Have you ever been hit by flying logs?
No, and neither was anybody being shot at by longbows.
>You can scare infantry/peasants in melee combat,
>Weapon is famous solely because of battles where it shot at knights.
>Defining moment was it being shot at knights on foot.
>Comments
>still believes in peasant infantry myth

>Especially since archery was the only form of sport,
No it wasn't.
and was all those peasants knew for fun.
No.

>get a commander walking up and down the line making sure thomas and robert are plucking their bows and not wanking it to maidens every archer will be a totally effective fighting force.
Except they weren't unless handed extremely advantageous conditions. Which is why nobody else bothered with them. English archers were effective because of their tendency towards wearing good armor, carrying good weapons, and being willing to rush into close combat. Something they had to do almost every single time they were used in pitched battle because they COULD NOT stop a charge of infantry or cavalry by shooting at them.

>These arrows when fitted with a steel pointed short bodkin can penitrate modern twelve gauge steel plate
Yeah but armor is designed to deflect attacks. Not doubting it can punch through a sheet of steel, but plate isn't just sheets of metal, it's shaped with curves to turn away blades and arrows, it almost never has to take the full impact of whatever hits it because you'd have to hit it at a perfect angle to not get deflected. As for mail, it's designed to absorb impacts like arrows but those beastly arrow heads you describe sound like they'd be able to punch through it.

Read this man
Except the English longbows being used were approaching the 200lb range.
They were essentially shooting deadly flying logs. Even if they did not penetrate and kill you, you were being pummeled to death by the force of impact alone.

They were famous for the battle of Agincourt etc like you mentioned BECAUSE they were effective enough to stop knights. Knights had ruled medieval battles, with mercenary companies with peasants playing second fiddle. With english longbow peasant levies, it was a sign of battles changing. Most of Europe would ignore the heed, but places like Hungary/Bohemia would adopt more ranged weapons and professionalize them as a mainstay in their battle force and would be highly effective in battle with them.

The English put up stakes, the Black Army used the wagon and shot tactics pioneered by the bohemians. Even before agincourt, English laborers were being fined if did not keep a bow and did not practice with it enough.

Most European powers did not fuck with making archery a mainstay of their army because their archers were shit. England has always had an archery tradition, and they were using weapons of war.
So, while the mercenaries and peasants dick around in pitched melee combat, trying not to run away from each other and the horsemen are pinning forces down and running down the deserters the English bowmen were just pelting forces to the brink of exhaustion and the more lightly armored were being felled indescriminately. Horses could not be protected enough to not die by arrows so any slowed charges by hill or unfavorable terrain would mean a lot of dismounted and useless knights as they had to be hoisted to be on those horses.

>They were famous for the battle of Agincourt etc like you mentioned BECAUSE they were effective enough to stop knights
Except they fucking didn't, you stupid bastard.

Hence the cavalry reaching them.
Hence the infantry reaching them.
Hence them being force into hand to hand.
Hence the longbows failing utterly at patay.
Hence the longbows being run over at vernuil.
Doing nothing at all at flodden.

>England has always had an archery tradition
No it fucking didn't. The anglo-saxons made no serious use of archers, and neither did the romans before them, the normans after, or any of the non-welsh celts.

>English laborers were being fined if did not keep a bow
And before that it was helmets, spears, shields, and mail dependent on social station.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms_of_1181#Text_of_the_Assize_of_Arms
This isn't even slightly remarkable.
>BUT MUH BOWS
Bowmen were paid a lower wage than men at arms and england was a relative backwater.

>it was a sign of battles changing.
Except they didn't and it wasn't. The major changes brought on by the hundred years war were centralization and the resurgence of large bodies of well armored infantry. Mostly knights.

>Even if they did not penetrate and kill you, you were being pummeled to death by the force of impact alone.
Post a source or fuck yourself with an arrow. This LITERALLY never happened. Ever.

>Horses could not be protected enough to not die by arrows
Except they could be. The idea was fucking millennia old. And sure enough, the Compagnie d'ordonnance fielded centrally organized and paid standing units or armored men on armored horses who didn't give half a shit about archers.

>Except the English longbows being used were approaching the 200lb range.
PROVE. IT.
We have no definitive source on draw weight at any given time, and if you knew a single fucking thing about the subject, you're know that the number you're qouting is from a later, renaissance era find that gives us bows RANGING from 100lb to 180lb draws. when you actually draw them to the distance that the arrows found with them allow, you get 150-160pb draws. Not 180.

Estimates for medieval bows-which have precisely no examples of-start at 90lbs. Not 180. 90. Half of the idiocy you're claiming.

also
>levies
Exactly none of the longbowmen fighting in Europe were levied. They were paid and had to compete for the chance to go.

Thatsabullshit.jpg
At last part of it.
>These arrows when fitted with a steel pointed short bodkin can penitrate modern twelve gauge steel plate.
I used this
>unc.edu/~rowlett/units/scales/sheetmetal.html
So if i get it right, that would be 2.656mm thick. You are telling me, that a longbow can penetrate over 2 fucking mm of modern steel?
>do the math and you will see that the force they can impact with is in the .40 cal pistol range.
I will not do a math, because i don't need to, and you probably don't have idea what you are talking about. Long time ago I was interested in how hard was to penetrate WW1 era helmet, and 9mm guns couldn't do it, even point blank. Helmets tested were 1,4mm iirc, so quite a difference between them and your 2,6mm modern steel plate. So, it shouldn't be problem to find some youtube "tests".
And here we have one
youtube.com/watch?v=-8iG81KQBAE
Slightly bigger calliber against 1/8inch (3,17mm) "steel" plate. Ammo used was .45 ACP.
Geee, I wonder why they stopped using bows, when they could pierce even 16-17thC plate armours, and most of firearms had quite the problem with it.
youtube.com/watch?v=aGj0M-NJDGA

>would mean a lot of dismounted and useless knights as they had to be hoisted to be on those horses.
WEW LAD

>ITT: We pretend that we are victorian medievalists

>retards like this browse Veeky Forums

It can penetrate your mum