]Not really. As skirmishers, the Mongols would force an enemy to set their position to fight back. This let the Mongols ride past at range firing volleys until the enemy broke or was severely reduced. This is why the typical Mongol horse archer carried a complement of 60-90 arrows. Then they'd ride past at very close range for aimed shots. For fleeing targets, they'd use their horses to match direction and velocity, reducing the relative movement as much as possible before firing. A target moving across their engagement range would still be extremely hard to hit.
Mongols were very good at firing while moving, but they had the same issues as everyone else at hitting moving targets.Mongols beat Chinese foot armies that vastly outnumbered them and unified all of China. They conquered the Middle East and accidentally stopped Constantinople from being overrun by Muslims much earlier. The age of expedition was launched and Columbus tried to find a faster route to China because the Mongols opened up trade. Their horse archers were vastly superior to both foot soldiers and western knights mounted on horseback. Also Native American planes men on horseback and mounted samurai had no problems hitting moving targets at range. Its called leading your target with your shots and its not hard to do.
Sure, so are arrows, slings, rocks, fireworks, rubber bands, and Nerf guns. It's the hitting that's still really hard.
Let's all agree that a modern military issue firearm is superior in all ways to a crossbow. That stipulated, the best method to avoid being hit aside from full cover is to move, at speed, laterally to the shooter, varying your step as unpredictably as possible. Why is that? Because hitting a moving target is hard.
No, its because hitting a target standing still is incredibly easy. Its simply worst, bad, better best. Worst = standing still, bad = running, better = cover/being prone Best = avoiding situation entirely (snipping while hidden)
Well, no. Just because there are more words to describe defeating a melee attack (parried isn't often used for defeating a ranged attack) doesn't mean it's easier. Heavy armor was proof against most ranged attacks, up to and including ball musket firearms (read up on late plate armor still being highly effective defensively even after units of musketeers were in common usage). With arrows and other muscle powered weapons, armor was fantastic. It's why, historically, you didn't commit your archers at heavy infantry or cavalry but instead at skirmishers or light infantry. And even light infantry was a hard target for archers if they could raise shields.
What are you talking about? By the time the longbow came into common use in England, English armies were made up mostly of archers. Football (soccer in US) had laws passed against it because it was become so popular that peasants were playing it instead of training in longbows & the English Crown felt it was a security risk as archers comprised large portions of their army. The main problem with longbow is the extraordinary amount of time it took to train them. Benjamin Franklin proposed training longbow men for the American Revolution because you get off far more shots with a bow than a musket. His proposal was shot down because it was deemed to expensive and time consuming to train them.
Missile fire wasn't a huge component of medieval and ancient warfare because, at the end of the day, it was the heavy infantry that ruled the day. This changed only once manufacturing processes became capable of creating ranged weapons that weren't strength powered. Even the famed English longbow only had a brief window of importance before being replaced with cranked crossbows and firearms. The necessary strength and training to operate the massive yew longbow wasn't sustainable (and archers had short service careers and generally crippling complications from being archers). The advent of non-strength powered missile weapons allowed for untrained massed fire that could punch through light and medium armors. As a force multiplier, it was fantastic. But, even then, melee troops were still the ruler of the battlefield until firearms became so ubiquitous that all troops could be issued a firearm that doubled as a melee weapon (the reason bayonets and bayonet drills were a core part of all military training through WWI). You'd shoot, reload, shoot, and, if the enemy advance wasn't broken, then it was into melee. Cannon was really the death of melee troops on the battlefield, not personal ranged weaponry.
1) Missile fire didn't carry the day in ancient battlefields due to mass numbers and costs. Not because melee was superior. But it was very effective and most of the successful armies such as the Romans, Normans & Greeks used missile troops quite often in their ranks. . The only examples of heavy infantry ruling the day were Macedonian Phalanxes & Roman Legions. Heck, after the fall of the Roman Empire, there wouldn't be a professional standing army in Europe until the Ottoman Empire in 1354. Egyptian armies had chariots with archers that were the scourge on the battlefield in ancient times
2)The reason for bayonets is simple. Single shot rifles and smooth bore rifles. From what enthusiasts have posted to answers.com a casual reload for a 17th century musket could take 15 seconds & you could rush it with a chance of a misfire in about 8 second reload time. So yeah, you needed a bayonete. Even during the US Civil War bayonet charges were big failures due to rifled muskets improving accuracy and bayonet drills were carried into WW1 & WW2 because of tradition even though they were mostly worthless thanks to rifles and machine guns capable of firing multiple rounds. Tanks were invented BECAUSE infantry even in mass charges could not break through machine gun lines. Rifles capable of multiple shots, not the cannon, made melee weapons besides the multipurpose field knife obsolete.
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