[chonny]

http://www.pistolwimp.com/media/51208/

This is astounding, especially the arrow into the arrow. Sorry if this was posted previously.

[Sharpdogs]

Those are some amazing shots. I could not accomplish that with a rifle. Thanks for the link.

[p35]

Isn't archery something of a Korean national sport? Those guys are amazing.

[hexidismal]

I hadn't seen that before. Pretty neat , thanks for the post.

[Sistema1927]

Wow! Just Wow!

Interesting the slow-mo shots to see how much "wobble" there is on the arrows and still be able to achieve that level of accuracy.

[idahoemt]

Wow. It's especially amazing after watching all of the slow-motion shots leading up to it. You really get a good look at the way an arrow moves in flight. The oscillations they go through make a shot like that seem impossible. Very cool.

[Q-Lock]

Good Lord! I wonder how many years of practice it took to achieve that level of accuracy. Simply amazing. Thanks for the link.

['Card]

Isn't archery something of a Korean national sport?
Yup. The inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula are more-or-less the direct descendants of the Mongol hordes that swept across Asia, the Middle East, and a big chunk of Europe back in the day, kicking everybody's ass in the process. Since horse archery was one of the things the Mongols excelled at, it just makes sense that modern-day South Koreans would dig it.

[ID_shooting]

Since private firearm ownership is not allowed in the ROK, it makes sence that archery is practiced.

Amazing work by these shooters, certainly WORLD CLASS!

[tellner]

And that is why the horse nomads with their bows were feared like devils out of Hell from Japan to Rome for almost two thousand years.

[AJ Dual]

I was somewhat incredulous when I heard "arrow with an arrow", But when I saw they were shooting a sub-caliber(?) arrow into a larger one with the nock removed from the tail, it made sense.

I'm just thinking of all the effort they put into trying to split arrows from point blank range and from mechanical rests in Mythbusters and never getting a clean split. It's simply that splitting arrows is nearly impossible, because even with perfect accuracy the fllexibility of the arrows and the wood grain is never perfect.

Not that it deminishes the Korean's achievement one bit. That is definitely the level of accuracy required to split an arrow. :eek:

[Steve Wynn]

The local archery club up here has a couple of arrows in an arrow...shot by accident though. When both arrows are aluminum or carbon, they don't go in too far though. I think the Korean archers where shooting carbon arrows into aluminum arrows. Those men are fantastic!

Steve

[p35]

There's a bunch of those on display at my local archery range- if you shoot thousands of arrows at the same point it's going to happen just by the law of averages. Doing it at will, though, is amazing.

[JohnKSa]

Since private firearm ownership is not allowed in the ROK, it makes sence that archery is practiced.Exactly what I was thinking.

[LAK]

Just goes to show that technology is not the last word in weapons.

------------------------------------

http://ussliberty.org
http://ssunitedstaes.org

[RyanM]

That is crazy accuracy. Though I coulda sworn that private ownership of certain longarms was permitted in S. Korea, though no handguns.

[wheelgunslinger]

The Koreans have an insane training program that involves lots of practice and lots of mental and psych training on top of that.

They are currently the best Olympic/competitive team on the planet. We Americans can't lay a glove on them.

I've done robin hoods on arrows myself. Even have carbon fiber arrows that are robin hooded.
Most competitive archers will do this once in their careers.

[Wesker]

Interesting. I'd like to see it done with some classy wooden recurve bows. Yes, the shots are very good, but those bows are the equivilent to a modern carbon fiber rifle with photoscopic scopes with a bipod, flash suppressor, etc.. If you look, the bows had long counterweights on them which did all the balancing for the archer, the arrow rested on an arrow rest (for lack of the proper term). Pretty much all the shooter had to do was line his fiber optic sight and loose.

Not that I'm downplaying it or anything...

Isn't archery something of a Korean national sport? Those guys are amazing.


Starcraft could be considered the national passtime over there :P

[tellner]

It's amazing what good archers can do with an old-style composite double-recurve, the traditional bow from Korea to Hungary for a couple thousand years.

[p35]

Interesting comment, Todd- I understand that Korean is the language closest to Hungarian, which resembles no other European language. Those horse archers sure got around.

[tellner]

p35, the Magyars were like the Bulgars, Scythians, the Seljuk Turks, the Tuvans, some of the ancestors of modern Koreans, the Mongols and others - horse nomads from the Sea of Grass who were pushed out during the great migrations or went conquering for other reasons. It's not surprising that a lot of them have similar languages.

I've been reading a lot about them lately. They were absolutely fascinating. Their style of warfare was pretty much unbeatable on their ground until the advent of firearms. Mounted archery, unchristly toughness and discipline, superior tactics, and ugly, hardy little horses ridden by ugly, hardy men swept pretty much everything before them. Their great defeats were almost always at the hands of people who had adopted their methods or natural forces - hoof rot and heat exhaustion in Indonesia, the kami kaze in Japan and the death of the Great Khan that took the armies back from Europe. They did it all with a horde that never numbered above 100,000.

I've got a Magyar-style bow. It's very much like the Mongol but doesn't jar as much on the release and is more efficient than the Scythian bow. Otherwise they are almost identical. The lack of an arrow rest, putting the arrow on the "wrong" side of the bow and the use of the thumb ring take some getting used to. It's amazing just how much weight you can get out of such a short weapon.

[El Tejon]

The three perfections of Mongolia: horsemanship, wrestling and archery.

FWIW, the Chinese character for "barbarian" is composed of a large man with a bow.

[tellner]

It's also the character for "Female Sexual Anxiety", "Run Away", "Code Brown" and "Why Did We Spend All That Money On A Damned Wall".

[CWL]

The inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula are more-or-less the direct descendants of the Mongol hordes that swept across Asia, the Middle East, and a big chunk of Europe back in the day, kicking everybody's ass in the process. Since horse archery was one of the things the Mongols excelled at, it just makes sense that modern-day South Koreans would dig it.

'Card, unfortunately your history is incorrect. Koreans are Korean, Mongols are Mongols. FYI, original Mongols were of Turkic ancestry (the Huns were ancestor tribesmen). I think that you would have to fight your way out of every bar in Korea if you made this claim there.

Archery and the mastery of the composite bow was the major form of military martial art for every nation of mainland Asia thru, India, Middle East & parts of E. Europe. Composite bow technology was not limited by any national or ethnic barriers. Warriors of every one of these nations excelled at archery well past the introduction of firearms.

[tellner]

I'd be interested to see know how the composite bow stacked up against the flintlock for accuracy, lethality and rate of fire.

[CWL]

OK Tellner, let's do the math. 1000 musketeers v. 1000 archers.

Say this was a battle >1630s after introduction of volley-fire tactics & flint (snaphance) muskets:
Musketeers fought in ranks of 5-10 (let's say 5 ranks of 200 men each) with 2ranks able to fire each volley 2X200 = 400 musketballs per volley. Firing by introduction or reduction, all ranks would be able to fire in about 1 minute (only very highly trained soldiers, say the Swedes). Total musketballs first minute = 1000. Each musketeer typically carried 13 measured rounds of ball+ammo on his bandolier. So maximum available firepower per battle = 13,000 musketballs.

Archers fought in ranks of 5-10 and every rank would fire using overhead fire. Asiatic archers carried up to 4 quivers into battle of ~20 arrows per quiver. Each volley =1000 arrows. Rate of fire using unaimed overhead fire ~ 10-20/minute. Total loosed arrows in one minute ~10,000-20,000. Total arrows launched per battle: 20-40,000 arrows.

Lead musketballs were more debilitating & could penetrate ranks, but sheer numbers of arrows would make a difference.

As for accuracy, aimed bowfire was by far more accurate than smoothbore muskets of the 1500-1850's. In terms of range, Imperial battle bows of China had draws of over 220lbs. The farthest recorded travel distance of composite bow arrows were over 800-yards in Turkey.

This is why Asiatic armies were late to adopt firearms.

The real advantage of muskets v. archers is that a good archer took a lifetime to create & maintain. They had to be trained from childhood, and any stoppage would destroy a lifetimes worth of training. During a campaign, the efficiency of archers would drop drastically due to tiredness, sickness, bad food, etc. Bows were also expensive.

Musketeers were cheap, draft any peasant, drill him for 2 weeks and he had rudimentary musketry skills for life. His skills could actually improve over the course of a campaign. Besides, muskets were cheap to manufacture.

It was a matter of economics that firearms superceded bowcraft.

[tellner]

So the horse nomad lifestyle, where every boy used a bow as soon as he could lift both ends off the ground, reduced the cost enough to make mounted archery a worthwhile style of warfare. Interesting.

[Shanghai McCoy]

We had a history demonstration type rondyvoo at Lecompton KS last weekend and I did a show and tell on Native American archery.Part of my demo is showing the kids how fast an archer can shoot and reload compared to the fellow with the muzzle loader.30 seconds between shots if on foot and loading from the horn is a good average for a muzzleloader and I could get 6 arrows off and,usually,into the target while explaining this to the schoolkids in 30 seconds.And,as I told them,I'm not even that good at it....

[Geronimo45]

Very good shooting there. Now that I think of it, a bow of some kind might be a viable home defense weapon in places like DC - and about the only legal kind of ranged weapon.

[RyanM]

Very good shooting there. Now that I think of it, a bow of some kind might be a viable home defense weapon in places like DC - and about the only legal kind of ranged weapon.

Better off with a spear. Longer range than almost any swung weapon, can be used in a hallway or other tight space where you have no swinging room, can be used to "push" someone away as well as stab them (as long as it's a design with a "hilt" type of thing that I forget the name of), and there's no chance of it going through a wall and hitting someone on the other side. Plus it can be thrown if necessary.

[Steve499]

tellner, I read somewhere that Ben Franklin proposed organising a group of archers during the American Revolution. I have no doubt they would have been formidible if there had been a manpower pool already accustomed to archery from which the group could have been assembled. Archery equipment is easily produced, requiring little technology but takes a substantial investment of time to master. Firearms require considerable technology to produce but little practice to use to the military standard of the day.

If it were possible to pit an egual number of archers of the caliber of those Henry V commanded against troops armed with flintlock muskets, I believe I'd put my money on the archers.

Steve

[Spiggy]

I'm surprised no one linked the zhuge nu bow yet!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow

Crossbow meets M1 Carbine!

[asparwhite]

I am Korean. Koreans are not Mongols, lol :). Here is a wiki with some info about Korea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea

Korea is number 1 in Archery. I had the privilige of learning alot from the head Korean Olympic Archery Team coach last year here at Texas A&M (Frank Thomas who was the coach for the US team is also here). I took an extended break from practicing after I disconnected my shoulder a while ago. I need to get back into practice with the Archery team now that I've healed up.

#1 thing to getting good with a bow or anything is commiting yourself to it and spending alot of time on the range.

[wuchak]

Wow!

[pokynojoe]

The Koreans are masterful archers, they are not however Mongols. They're former Olympic coach Kim Sik Li(sic), coached the Australians to Gold in the Sydney Olympics, and is now the U.S. Coach, I believe. He does travel expounding the virtues of his BEST system. I would very much like to take one his seminars someday.

As to the Mongol battle tactics. They were unbeatable until they entered the forrests of Europe, and the open seas. Thousands died trying to invade Japan. And they were defeated when they reached the Mediterranean. Hitler was a student of Mongol tactics and patterned his Blitzkrieg after them.

[wheelgunslinger]

As tellner posted, using the thumbring and shooting from the wrong side of the bow made their brand of archery extremely efficient and deadly. It took away the paradox of the arrow trying to get around the shelf and used that energy more efficiently.
Mongol style Horsebows are awesome pieces of equipment and underscore the genius of their makers.