Arrows Vs Armour 2 - Can Arrows Knock You Over?

Eggs. What does that tell us? Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop here and I'm back with another Arrows vs Armour 2 film. So one of the spin-off films that just does a deep dive into some little area that well you want to know about really. Now the thing is you make comments on our videos, you do it, we read them. We really do and we pay attention and we like to try and weave your ideas your thoughts back into what we do and one of the recurring themes of comments that come along is about the force of the arrows. Now of course we do accurately know how much energy the arrow is carrying and how much momentum when it strikes and the longbow simulator and Joe Gibbs's bow produce about 135-138 joules with these arrows. Something like that. But the gist of the comments that you guys are making out there is what does that actually do? And you see it again and again written it'll knock people off their horse, it'll knock them off their feet, it'll stop them walking forward. Well does it? Does it? If there is anything about Arrows vs Armour it is let's go find out. That's at the core interest of all of us. There are some things that we can look at, there's some things that we can do. But first of all I'm going to shoot a piece of wood over there with an arrow from the simulator. So that is what 135 joules in the shape of an arrow looks like. Now sorry about this but it's going to get complicated and we need to go back to school a little bit. So this arrow has mass, it's moving through the air so it has velocity. Now that means that it's carrying energy with it. Now that energy is given up when it strikes the target. Now some of the energy was given into the target, it broke it apart. Some of the energy carried on with the arrow and went into the target. But if we make the assumption that when it strikes all of the energy goes into the night and it doesn't bounce away in broken arrow bits it makes life easier. So we're going to say 135 joules strikes the night. Great but that's not the whole story it's not just the energy because when it comes to projectiles there's lots of things in play. How sharp it is, how fast it's moving, the weight of it, all sorts of other things. But that also creates something called momentum. Now momentum is very much related to how well something sticks in. So this is 135 joules and it has momentum when it strikes. This block here is 10 kilos. If I drop it from 1.4 meters high it has 135 joules when it lands. But the two things are very very different. So this arrow doesn't have very much momentum. This block it's got loads of it. So the thing is when you want to push something over like a man in armour or a man seated on a horse, the more momentum you've got, the bigger the push you can give for the longer and the harder that push, the more likely you are to push them over. Nobody falls over from a poke in the chest. They do fall over from big hard shove. That's what you need. So we know that an arrow carries enough energy and enough momentum to really injure people. But the question is when the guy is wearing full armour, does an arrow carry enough momentum in that instance to push the man over? I have two torso simulations here. One in ballistic gel, one in archery foam. That weighs 35 kilos. This only weighs one or two, something like that, without the weights in it. Neither is fixed down. Both are free to move. Both will stop the arrow completely within themselves. So all of the available energy, all of the available momentum will get stuck in that target. So if it's going to knock a knight over, which is going to be what, 100 kilos, 110 kilos? Will it knock this 35 kilo gel torso over? Will it knock this foam torso over? Let's find out. Well that went flying off. Well how about that? Now sure we saw him wobble, but he didn't fall over. He stayed on his feet so to speak and he's not a human being. He doesn't have that ability to steady yourself, to brace, to not stumble. He has none of that, yet here he stays. Now just check this clip out from YouTube. I want to balance at one foot. Okay, I'll shoot right here. Nothing to it, just a lot of fluff. As you can see, this guy is shot by an assault rifle into a saran plate jacket, I assume. 20, 30, 40 times the energy of this arrow. He's not knocked over, he just stands there. So for me, would arrows knock a knight off their feet? No. Would they knock him out the saddle? No. Would it stop you walking forward? No. But then that leaves the next big question, blunt force trauma. Blunt force trauma in this context is an idea that keeps coming up again and again in the comment sections. You see it everywhere if you look for it. And what happens is the arrow strikes the armour, doesn't penetrate, but there's enough energy somehow transferred onto the body within that it causes damage and possibly even death. That's the idea behind it. So I'd really like to find out if this is correct. I mean in a simple term, it's correct for smaller items like a finger scale as an example. You can obviously see that if you hit that with an arrow, arrow doesn't penetrate perhaps, but the finger scale is going to break your finger in a way. The whole thing is being pushed in. Blunt force trauma. So what we're going to do is we're going to cut some holes in his chest here. We're going to embed some eggs just below the skin surface. This one I've actually pre-broken a little bit already. Some people might think an egg is a bit tough, but if you look carefully you can see that there's a bit of cracking in the surface. So it's deliberately done to make it as weak as I can. Right, now we're going to dress him up and shoot him. But the keen eyed of you will notice that this is a different breastplate. So this was made for a different TV job by a friend of mine, Ash. Great breastplate, variable thickness, brilliant proxy for this one, but not the Arrows vs Armour breastplate. That was given to one of the super sponsors as a reward. Let's go shoot it. We'll carefully take him apart, have a look at our eggs, and there we have it. Just to prove the point, eggs. Well what does that tell us? I don't find the result that the eggs didn't break surprising really. Now I cannot tell you categorically that I am correct because I'm not going to stand there in a suit of armour and observe the results, but what I can say is Do knights get shot out of saddles? Do they get thrown back when they're standing there? Does it stop them walking forward? No, arrow shots don't do that. And then the last one, really blunt force trauma. I don't find it surprising that those eggs were still intact. Partly because I don't understand what the mechanism of energy transfer could be through the breastplate, but the other is that these things don't carry that much energy at all. Enough to kill, definitely enough to kill. You know, we know that and they'll go through mail and everything else, but they don't seem to penetrate plate armour particularly well. It's not remotely as much as a bullet. And then look at this. Any energy that does land here is spread over a really big area, all over the chest. So individually, any area has just not got much energy on it at all. Is it going to stop their organs working? Is it going to turn them to jelly or make them cease to function in some way? No, it's not. If they don't penetrate the armour, the guy will be fine. Anyway, loads more Arrows vs Armour 2 films. Go check them out. See you again sometime.