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Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
This week we’re looking at a specific visual motif common in TV and film: the arrow volley. You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then…
From Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and here I’m not going to try to count the falling extras, but it is quite a lot of them, a few entire ranks at least.We can start with ‘modeling,’ thinking through the question as a thought experiment (since we haven’t the expensive computer hardware and expertise to actually simulate it). And of course in this estimation, we’ve been treating our soldiers like they are large rectangular prisms (our army of gelatinous cubes will be very effective), but of course actual humans aren’t going to physical occupy a lot of the space we’re even giving them here (note the silhouettes below). It isn’t that the longbows killed them all, but that they injured, exhausted, confused and disconcerted the advancing infantry, so that by the time the French reached the fresh, close-ordered and prepared ranks of the English, they were at a substantial disadvantage in the close combat.
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