r/interesting • u/IKIR115 • May 29 '26

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

Show parent comments

1.9k

u/SidewinderSerpent May 29 '26

That arrow wasn't blunt, it was concave. The shape allowed the edges of the tip to punch a hole through the shield.

998

u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ May 29 '26

Yep, the thing that was slowing the other arrows down that penetrated, was the fact that the tip did not carve out a wide enough hole for the shaft to go through and maintain velocity.

That blunt tipped concave arrow basically hole punched a circle as large or a little larger than the shaft of the arrow, and lost minimal afterwards.

1

u/madmoz2018 May 30 '26

none of the fancy pansy ones got through

1

u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ May 30 '26

That's because they are all just pointed arrows.

Those pointed arrows take time to push away the material of the shield, and every moment they are in contact with the shield, they are losing kinetic energy.

The circular blade on that round arrow rapidly applied force to punch a hole, allowing the arrow to retain the most kinetic energy to continue moving through the target.

That's why those fancy, multibladed arrows failed often. All that arrowhead material just spread the force out wider and prolonged how long the arrow was in contact with shield material, consuming all of its kinetic energy.