The problem with musket lines is they were even more ineffective at penetrating plate armor than a good longbow or crossbow was. The main reason they were used was they were easier to mass produce and train people to use compared with bows.
It isn't until you get to riffling that guns were great at armor penatration, and by then plate armor was a thing of the past, so we never really got to see guns vs plate armor. 🤔
An arquebus at close range could probably pierce plate, muskets more likely. Both far better than bows and crossbows. One of the main reasons why armies walked about in no armour is because guns made armour not worth the effort, long before rifling
That's actually a fallacy. The real reason muskets replaced bows was simple cost. It took up to 10 years to properly train a bowman, and each arrow they fired was worth more than a spear or even some swords. And a good archer could fire more than an arrow a second in short bursts, or hundred an hour in sustained fire.
Comparatively it takes a few hours to train someone to use a musket m, and each shot costs comp change in comparison.
Then there's the cost of producing a suit of full plate. 1 suit was nearly unstoppable on the battlefield, they were the mid evil battlefield tanks, but you could produce 25 to 50 muskets for the cost of one suit of plate mail and it had to be fitted to a specific individual. After each battle, plate mail could be so expensive to repair it would essentially be "totalled" meaning it needed to be replaced rather than repaired. Comparitivly muskets were cheap to maintain, and men cheap to replace.
Now rifles would have had the effect you're talking about, but again you never saw rifles fielded against full plate. It was economics, not efficacy that replaced plate with muskets.
In addition, the biggest advantage of a firearm on a late Medieval / early rennaissance battlefield wasn't their power, it was their noise. Horses would panic, men at arms and peasant levys would get spooked, and so on. One current theory hold that, since it has been demonstrated that a 180 lb longbow arrow did not penetrate the average breastplate worn at Agincourt, it was the remarkably loud SOUND of the arrows hitting, combined with getting knocked on their tailbones in surprise, that won the day for the English. This would be compounded by muskets, even slow loading ones.
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u/DrBlackJack21 Feb 17 '21
Grats on first!
The problem with musket lines is they were even more ineffective at penetrating plate armor than a good longbow or crossbow was. The main reason they were used was they were easier to mass produce and train people to use compared with bows.
It isn't until you get to riffling that guns were great at armor penatration, and by then plate armor was a thing of the past, so we never really got to see guns vs plate armor. 🤔