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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 8294773" data-attributes="member: 21169">In a section of The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003), Alan Williams considers some claims made by Humphrey Barwick in his "A brief discourse concerning the force and effect of all manual weapons of fire" (1590). (Barwick is also a reference for Rogers in my previous post.) Barwick makes four claims… "Arrows cannot kill a man in pistol-proof armour at 120 yards". Assuming that this meant defeating a 3 mm thick keeled breastplate made of *** steel, then an arrow would have required 470 J, unobtainable from any crossbow. So his claim is correct. A bullet, on the other hand, would require 2500 J, within the capability of a musket (but not a pistol) as discussed above in case 4. So his second claim is correct. "Muskets could kill a man in proof armour at 100 yards, in common armour at 400 yards, and without armour at 600 yards". The third and fourth claims are more difficult to assess. For common armour, we may assume a similar breastplate made of * steel, which would require 1150 J to defeat it. But there is little evidence of shooting muskets at such extreme ranges. Charles V seemed to have taken his opponents by surprise at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547 by having his musketeers fire across the River Elbe, 200 yards wide at that point. Barwick probably did not intend any precise measurement of distance, but if the velocity of the musket ball has fallen by half, then its kinetic energy has fallen by a quarter, to 750 J, which might just be resisted by a "common" breastplate. A man without armour would probably be killed or disabled by 100-200 J. A blow of between 25 and 40 J to the head in a car crash may be fatal. Giving Barwick the benefit of the doubt over range, his other claims are probably valid.The stars * in the above passage refer to quality of armour. One star represents the lowest quality, and four stars the highest.[ATTACH=full]137846[/ATTACH]The two following excerpts from Williams present information about the energy delivered by various weapons.[ATTACH=full]137847[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]137848[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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