How effective were slingers?

they totally existed and rode goats

It’s like getting hit by a fucking bullet.

Literally copypasted this

Club, Axe or Greek sword : 2kg ; used two-handed ; 130 joules(96 foot lbs)
Club, Axe or Greek sword : 1 kg ; used single handed ; 65 joules(48 ft lbs)
javelin :0.8 kg ; thrown, with run-up ; 198 joules(146 ft lbs)
javelin :0.8 kg ; thrown, one pace only ; 111 joules(83 ft lbs)
javelin :0.8 kg ; thrown standing ; 60 joules(49 ft lbs)
javelin :0.8 kg ; thrown,one pace with loop ; 160 joules(118 ft lbs)
light spear or small sword/dagger :0.8 kg ; close combat ; 30 joules(24 ft lbs)
sarissa :8(?)kg ; two-hand thrust,pace fwd ; 160 joules(118 ft lbs)
spear-butt : various ; thrust down, coup-de-grace; 50 joules (40 ft lbs)

One can see from this that energies of the order of 30-60 joules (24-49 ft lbs) could be given generally to typical Greek Hand weapons, and armour would need to resist this type of thrust, as well as slashing blows up to 60 joules(49 ft lbs)

Missile weapons:
sling bullet :24 gm swung one handed ; 30-36 joules(22-27 ft lbs)
light bow 3-6 gm arrowhead ; 20 joules at 50 metres
15-20 gm incl shaft ; 15 joules at 100 metres
9 joules at 200 metres(sufficient to penetrate flesh)

heavy bow 30 joules at 50 metres
26 joules at 100 metres
20 joules at 200 metres

>Wooden shield
As opposed to what? Greeks only used wooden shields.

>But what's the point if all you can do is provide some mild inconvenience to your enemy?

Why dont we meet up and we put this to practice. I'll chuck some stones at you and you'll tell me how it felt?

Or better yet, I'll get a slingshot and chuck those stones at you at 70mph and you'll tell me how it felt?

I'd prefer it to you shooting arrows at me.

youtube.com/watch?v=nj4_3ynNj8o
2:40.

Now. A sling is something every soldier could have one them, making every soldier into a makeshift infantry/slingers.

Slings have been used in hunting since forever so they must do some serious damage.

Greeks used bronze-plated shields or leather-bound wicker shields, not wooden ones.

Say no more

Slings are substantially less accurate than bows. And while you /could/ give a sling to all your soldiers, without many hours of practice they would be more or less totally ineffective with them.

The sling bullets basically demolish armour and hurt an armoured man just as bad as being hit by a sledge hammer

See >as bad as being hit by a sledge hammer

Not even close.

It can break a skull at reasonable distance, it's pretty effective. Remember it was a hunting weapon, meant to kill things that move...

slings is something most kids played with back in the day. One could assume a person had years of experience with one. A sling is something everyone can make with a bit of thick string and a leather pad.

If you have 500 guys chucking rocks at you, who all have years of experience with it, it becomes quite a dangerous weapon.

It wouldnt stick around for thousand of years if it was ineffective.

Yeah, no. Slings are the weapon of shepherds, farming kids don't and didn't practice with slings, if they had experience with any weapon it would be the bow (for hunting).

And I'm not saying they were ineffective, just that they were pretty rare and pretty much only used by shepherds such as the Jews and the Balearic islanders. A sling is an ideal weapon for keeping wolves away from your sheep, and watching sheep is a perfect opportunity to practice with your sling.

>24 grams

Do you realise that:

>The size of the projectiles can vary dramatically, from pebbles massing no more than 50 grams (1.8 oz) to fist-sized stones massing 500 grams (18 oz) or more.

If I was to extrapolate from your figures then a 500 gram projectile is 600 joules

The Aspis often had a layer of bronze over the wood.

>The sling bullets basically demolish armour and hurt an armoured man just as bad as being hit by a sledge hammer

>using terminal velocity to describe an object moving laterally

I hit your mothers shitbox like a sledgehammer last night m8, pity I was too busy to record the joules

>all these nerds shitting on slings

You neckbeards really think you're smarter than the many, many generals who happily chose slingers over archers and won victories with them?

>How effective were slingers?
Depends. Slings are relatively short range missile weapons that requires a certain tactical setup to work well.
Highly trained slingers firing lead bullets were absolutely murderous. For example, Ventidius absolutely rekt the parthian cataphracts with a judicious use of slingers on higher ground. Of course they were highly specialized units with fairly high mainteinance (apparently the weight of lead bullets ruined the slings after a few shots plus lead wasn't exactly as common as pebbles) and not fieldable in great numbers.
Stone slingers were still good, but not really good enough to warrant using over archers in pretty much any situation.

>Why use these instead of bows?
concealable, simple to make/maintain.

>Thank heaven they did not come upon us in any great force, but were only a handful of men; so that the injury they did us was not large, as it might have been; and at least it has served to show us what we need. At present the enemy shoot and sling beyond our range, so that our Cretan archers are no match for them.

*breathes in*

>Slings are relatively short range
In the Anabasis, Xenophon describes slingers out-ranging bowmen.

>Why use these instead of bows
Bows quite frankly sucked when slingers were prevalent. There's actually a fair amount of engineering in a decent bow, and it was initially easier to get range and power from a sling.

As for damage, think less fastball and more subsonic bullet

I would say you can probably hit a target with a sling accurately at a longer range than with a bow, but bows are going to have longer effective range fired in volleys at ranges rather than specific targets

Where the fuck did you get those numbers, and is this experimental data? Also directly comparing slashing and thrusting weapons sounds a bit suspicious
And the numbers for your missile weapons are pretty fucking wrong m8, i mean 30 joules for a heavy bow at 50 meters is ridiculous

>Xenophon describes
Well yeah, he would. The kind of military bows that outrange slings didn't become widespread in Europe till the first century, which is way after his time.
Speaking of Xenophon, it's interesting to note how he too talked about the difference between lead and stone bullets, saying that a leaden one would go twice as far as a stone one and still hit harder on arrival.

Obviously an auto hood is a shitty analog for steel armor, but I thought this was interesting nonetheless.

youtube.com/watch?v=SLcI5PYYiFk

It's true, the density/surface area of lead compared to stone means it's better as a projectile.

This is painful to watch seriously, it's like a downie trying to resolve a Rubik's Cube. Can't you find a vid where the guy uses the sling properly?
youtube.com/watch?v=_1oeZQH4oEc

this, his form isn't that good

the lemon shape also makes them quite a bit more aerodynamic if they're stable

These guys know what's up. Didn't he also describe how the men from Rhodes could hit a man in the head with their sling pellets at a pretty decent distance?

>find some string
>make one
>go out of your basement and try it

It's really not that hard and you can see for yourself how fast and far you can shoot, how it damages different materials (if you manage to hit it) and whether you would like one of then in your face

For people who want an actual answer with citations

reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1toj2u/just_how_effective_and_were_slings_as_weapons_in/cea3vru

Feel free to >reddit if you don't like what you read.

>slings are relatively short range weapons

You are so full of shit. They were literally most effective at keep archers out of firing range. It wasn't until the english longbow they they finally had a projectile launching weapon that outranged them.

you're almost as retarded as the guy you're replying to

What a terrific counter argument. The sources you cited were exquisite.

op confirmed for never being hit by an aggresively thrown rock.

paracord works well enough, you can actually make very large slings if you're so inclined

i'm not the one making shit up

Slingers were extremely effective but expensive to train and supply.

>>A helmet and a shield renders them useless

>reddit

>tfw used to have stick and rock wars as a kid in the forest one day some kid got hit in the head with a piece of crumbled concrete and was screaming in pain while we tried not to laugh

Nothing like a good ol' rock fight

>Expensive to train and supply
??
What did user mean by this
Bows were much more expensive, and most were pretty ineffective outside of the english and mongols which were renowned for it. Crossbows being able to affect evenmoreso but multipled in cost incredibly so. Slingers were pretty cheap, you could recruit them from nomadic communities such as sheep herders and they would be quite decent. The thing was they were pretty short range, so as cavalry came to dominate the battlefield they became pretty worthless outside of a very defensive position. Massed arrows were also a reason to push them off the battlefield since they were usually really cheap press-ganged rural kids, they weren't very well outfitted or trained so im sure they had a tendency to break when casualties happened.

you are wrong about literally everything

Not a counter-argument.

Neither is posting uneducated garbage.

Still does not refute the point you turbo-virgin.

0.3kg lead balls going at 100+ km/h fucking hurt even if you're wearing armor. Even having it bash against your shield is going to be a significant shock to your arm. Not to mention most armor back then was a bronze breastplate, or layered linen that was designed to protect against cuts and stabs.

The range is certainly lower, but it's far easier to "craft" and find ammo for and a lot of shepards and farm boys would have practice using them.

I don't know why you're trying to shit on them when they were pretty effective in warfare for centuries.

there's a reason why maces and blunt weapons were a thing

kinetic impacts will hurt you even if they don't fully penetrate, in fact that's why a military helmet is very dangerous to wear while on a motorcycle.

Me and my younger brother made some slings and had a war with little pebbles. Things I learned:

>it's fucking impossible to aim
>the shape of the rock really matters, if they're not even they fuck up and curve or even get stuck to the pouch
>it's pretty much guaranteed you're gonna hit yourself at some point withe a rock (see: first point)
>and then my brother flukes a shot at my fucking head and literally split my ear in half I went crying to mom and needed around 25 stitches waa waa

Kind of reminds me of a slingshot, you know those ones with the ball bearing bullets and the wrist guard, where on first glance it seems like a kids toy but actually they'll kill rabbits pretty easily and could probably break your skull at a close range

It's not that it reaches terminal velocity, it's the fact that the air provides resistance to the stone and slows it down

I mean, Greeks had some shitty archers.

They were "okay" for unarmored + medium range (around 10 meter range) + protected/hidden behind another force + bronze-age tier defense/offense scenario.

Its utterly ineffective against anything in China since Qin. Greeks/Romans might still be using tthose for a while.

that actually makes me think why weren't slingshots like that developed earlier, they combine the ease of aim of a bow with the logistics of a simple sling

slingshots require elastic cords.
And if you make a design where you're using the prongs to provide the spring, then you just have a full retard bow.

related: primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/sling/

>Cheap
>Small
>Light
>Easy to carry
>Plenty of ammo

Not the best main weapon, but a great auxiliary one to harass enemies

getting hit right in the helmet would probably hurt like hell, rattle your brain and at the very least make you dizzy. blunt impacts can actually be the perfect weapon against heavy armor since it has that rattling effect. without armor the force is distributed and has somewhere to go, when youre in armor it has nowhere to go. You could break an arm or leg, hit someone in the eye, missile weapons werent necessarily finishing blows they were mostly meant to hinder the enemy before they reached your lines or to force a stationary enemy to attack. Its not just one rock, its hundreds of rocks thrown in a volley, a literal hailstorm of pain. Good slingers were world-renown and prized mercenaries all across europe.

>I would say you can probably hit a target with a sling accurately at a longer range than with a bow

An Olympic archer can put 6 shots in a group the size of a CD at 70M I doubt a slinger can do that.

military archers were not olympic athletes, and didn't have olympic quality flawless modern compound bows or flawlessly balanced carbon fibre arrows, you dolt

Are you really saying that you would just walk off broken bones and crush-wounds?
Also, the more 'equipped' slingers used lead 'bullets' which were even nastiee than stone.
You should also keep in mind that they were utilised in a period were most troops didn't wore that much protection, if any, besides a helmet and shield.

Designated slingers were often recruited shepherds IIRC. These faggots pretty much played with their slings all day while watching their herds. The slings were used as both a weapon against predators and an instrument of directing the sheeps.
According to Strabo, the inhabitants of the Balaeric isles '[...] their training in the use of slings used to be such, from childhood up, that they would not so much as give bread to their children unless they first hit it with the sling'.

>and they would be quite decent.
As we've already established in this thread slingers were pretty great and not just decent.

>The thing was they were pretty short range
They outranged contemporary bows.

>cavalry came to dominate the battlefield they became pretty worthless outside of a very defensive position.
Just speculation on my part but wouldn't slingshots be tremendously effective against cavalry? A large and often unarmoured target that spooks easily seems like the ideal thing to sling bullets at. If you read the reddit thread that some kind user linked they mentioned that some slingshots even had the capacity to kill a horse with one bullet.

>
Massed arrows were also a reason to push them off the battlefield
Seeing as slingers could outrange archers I see no reason why they would even be able to get close enough to pose a threat.

>since they were usually really cheap press-ganged rural kids, they weren't very well outfitted or trained so im sure they had a tendency to break when casualties happened.
Most slingers I'm aware of were professional or atleast semi-professional and thus had plenty of experience and knowledge of warfare. Calling them pres-ganged is not acurate at all. They had also trained since early childhood how to use the sling as it was a fundamental instrument in their way of life.
You're also confusing the purpose of skirmishers, they are not meant to hold the ground, but rather to harass the enemy.

Oh and by slingshot I meant a shot by a sling.

All he wanted to do was test whether or not it could embed in flesh, and that's all he did.
pls no bully
He reminds me of my dad.

Indeed. Without a lifetime of dedicated practice, slingers are not very effective. So while they have some advantages over archers (such as range), the supply was always strictly limited and you mostly find them in tribal levies, and in the armies of sheep-rearing peoples such as the Jews. An Egyptian general might /want/ slingers for whatever reason, but chances are all he will find available are archers.

>>Massed arrows were also a reason to push them off the battlefield
>Seeing as slingers could outrange archers I see no reason why they would even be able to get close enough to pose a threat.

Outrange =/= outfire. For one thing even the best slinger is less accurate than a good archer. For another, slings take more space to use, so you can't use the dense volley fire that makes archers so valuable. For yet another, an archer can easily carry 20 arrows, a slinger might have only a dozen lead bullets before he's reduced to scavenging for stones, and archers by virtue of fighting in formation at the heart of the army can be resupplied far more easily than slingers, who fight as skirmishers away from the main force.

It's also easier for archers to scavenge arrows after battle.

This is hilarious. I do archery and I could train someone who had never show a bow before to hit the same target he's trying to hit in 30 minutes.

You fucking retarded nigger, do you realize that slings are capable of throwing a stone at 98 meters a second, right?

If you got hit with a sling it would embed the rock three inches in your soft flesh, or get it stuck halfway through your fucking skull.

If you get grazed by a sling's projectile, it will shear the top layer of skin off where it hit you.

If you are wearing a helmet you now have a dent in the side of it, and more importantly your ears are ringing endlessly.

>Plebbit

I willl >reddit regardless of my opinion of what I read
>reddit

This. What has happened to the youth of today, that they didn't grow up throwing rocks at each other?

>a fucking rock travelling at 300mph isnt going to hurt my body
Lets try OP

This post is erroneous.

>Bows were much more expensive
Not that much
>and most were pretty ineffective outside of the english and mongols which were renowned for it.
Effective across hundreds of cultures and places
>The thing was they were pretty short range
Slingers were the longest ranged 1 man weapons until guns
>so as cavalry came to dominate the battlefield they became pretty worthless outside of a very defensive position.
No, slings lost favour as people began to wear more armour, and it declined in use for shepherds do to agricultural advances
>Massed arrows were also a reason to push them off the battlefield since they were usually really cheap press-ganged rural kids,
Well thats bullshit, they were adults
>they weren't very well outfitted or trained so im sure they had a tendency to break when casualties happened.
Probably

>For another, slings take more space to use, so you can't use the dense volley fire that makes archers so valuable.

you don't need to be standing close together to shoot into the same general direction

>For yet another, an archer can easily carry 20 arrows, a slinger might have only a dozen lead bullets before he's reduced to scavenging for stones

and still effective, an archer without arrows can't fire AT ALL

>and archers by virtue of fighting in formation at the heart of the army can be resupplied far more easily than slingers, who fight as skirmishers away from the main force

archers have never once been depicted as doing indirect fire like the movies do(firing up in the air and hitting targets beyond their own lines) in contemporary depictions, they operated just like any other skirmisher force by getting into position and harassing, the kind of range you'd need for "artillery" archers was only possible in the middle ages and even then the arrow would bleed a lot of energy and be less effective.

The main problem with slings was that while they were a devastating weapon and very cheap to make, the skill level needed to used them was very high which makes for huge training costs. So overall they were an expensive, but powerful unit.

But given the very long development time frame it was hard to mobilize them for conflicts as the war could likely end before they completed basic training. Bows and arrows could be issued to common folk with halfway decent results in a relative short period, allowing for a much larger army.

warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/ancient-weapons-the-sling/

Very effective, to the point mercenary slingers were imported from other lands for wars and paid some of the highest rates.

Wrong, there is a lot that goes into how damage is dealt. It not as simple as only head shots kill.

You be dead wrong in many cases.

Simple, lethality.

The main problem with slings was that while they were a devastating weapon and very cheap to make, the skill level needed to used them was very high which makes for huge training costs. So overall they were an expensive, but powerful unit.

But given the very long development time frame it was hard to mobilize them for conflicts as the war would likely end before they completed basic training. Bows and arrows could be issued to common folk with halfway decent results in a relative short period, allowing for a much larger army.

warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/ancient-weapons-the-sling/

new to Veeky Forums?

If someone hurled a rock almost as big as your fist at you at gods knows what speed and hit you clean in the arm then you'd be in a lot of fucking pain, a helmet won't magically take away the pain. As for why it's much easier to build and maintain a sling than a bow and arrow, plus it takes less practice to master, less effort to use, and you don't have to keep making arrows, you can just keep i king up rocks from the floor

>plus it takes less practice to master
I agree with the rest but this is not true. A sling is way harder to master than a bow.

Not really, ~4 years , but I got control x and control c mixed up.

I use to try to add good proper discussion, citing sources and helping to answer questions. But I either got no response or a blast of insults for ruining the board with walls of text, despite the useful detailed answers I gave. Over time I cared less and less, I stopped taking time to edit my posts, as I usually always revise my work at least three times because I have trouble with writing. Now I just lurk and rarely post. It kind of sad really. But given how I work nights at a dead end job and all my friends have left this is the closet I have to humane interaction. Here is hoping I can get a better job that actually uses my talents.

that is sad

we'll always be your /b/ro senpai

I appreciated your post user. I've just been lurking since I only have interest in the subject but nothing to add.

you know how people can get serious injury from getting hit by a baseball pitch? Now think about getting hit with a sharpened stone, at 120 mph instead of 80 mph.

>warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/ancient-weapons-the-sling/
That's a really informative article. Thanks, user!