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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dracorat" data-source="post: 3094391" data-attributes="member: 40170">I used to go to the archery range on a regular basis with my dad when I was growing up. I even owned my own longbow and compound bow. (Kind of the same as a composite)An arrow has a weight at the front - the arrowhead. When fired, it drags the rest of the arrow behind it. That rest of arrow would be extremely wobbly if not for the fletching (feathers at the back). The Fletching forces the arrow to spin while in air.It also does cause the arrow to slow down in its forward momentum.Now, as for gravity causing an arrow to slow down or speed up, the only part that makes any difference is if you (the firing party) are at a different elevation than your target. If you are at the same elevation, gravity pays an almost zero sum difference to the final speed of your arrow and thus its firing range.The only reason I admit that it pays some difference is that the further from your target you are, you have to fire at a higher initial firing arc, which means the measured flight path gets slightly and slighty longer, the farther out you go, over the already straight-line measured path. But the difference is again, negligable.The larger factors of arrow flight are crosswind, fletching type, arrow tip type and overall weight (with heavier being BETTER, not worse, due to the rules of inertia).So, to shorten this up as much as I can, arrow firing arc and the factor of gravity pays almost NO difference to the final speed of the arrow. The factors are really how far back you can pull the bow (in the case of a longbow - for compound, it is the weight class of the draw section), whether the arrow can be fully released and how far away your target is.In a melee situation, the ONLY time an arrow would not have full effect is if for some reason, the arrow were knocked out of the bow or entered its target - before the full release. And from experience, I can tell you that is quite unlikely to happen. An arrow released from a bow releases at such velocity that you would not have time to even blink before it impacted, much less attempt to deflect it.</blockquote>

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