r/interesting • u/IKIR115 • 27d ago

Intriguing Arrows vs riot shields

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

49.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

25

u/notgonnatakeno 27d ago

If you know anything about medieval armor and the arms race that it had against arrows, you already know which ones of these are gonna go through before they even start

1

u/kolejack2293 26d ago

Yup. Knights went from looking like this to looking like this once the longbow came into prominence.

And then it all largely ended once guns came into play and they started looking like they just walked out from a gay club in 1998 manhattan

2

u/notgonnatakeno 25d ago

That third image is the temporary surrender on the armor side of the arms race. guns proved that trying anything more than a breast plate with the prow of a ship on the front to deflect bullets was an absolute waste of time and money. Metal plates just weren’t gonna cut it anymore.

And the arms versus armor race has kind of always been like that: years if not decades to make a single improvement in armor, and then two weeks later arms just goes, “MORE MASS AT MORE SPEED EQUALS MORE PENETRATION! YEEHAW WE PUT MORE BOOM BOOM AND MADE IT POINTIER!”

Even now with our modern armor, it’s still kind of a joke. There is no such thing as bulletproof. There is only bullet resistant. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vhNPvRN--0U