Instant Legolas: A Medieval Superweapon?

This is the Instant Robin Hood, so incredibly well engineered for me by that Holy Roman Empire genius Jörg Sprava. Thank you very much, the Slingshot channel is still making lots of versions of this. This is actually now quite an old one, I think there's quite a few more variations on this that Jörg has come up with. This is obviously a fairly early prototype. Now the first video I did, it was literally an unboxing and using for the first time, so I was unfamiliar with it as a weapon, but that was deliberate because I wanted to see what it was like straight away, my first impressions. I've had a few weeks to play with this a bit more and I wanted to come back and explain a few thoughts that I've had about it. Before I go any further, let me just address one of the comments. Let me show you its features. I want to answer a few of the questions that have come in on the comments section, and they're very interesting. A lot of people agree with me that this could have changed history had it been invented in medieval times. A lot of people disagree and they have a number of different comments. First of all, is it just a crossbow? Well the answer is it kind of resembles a crossbow if you do that. It's on its back now. It sort of looks like a crossbow with extraordinarily long limbs and the shaft there, the barrel of the crossbow if you like, but it isn't a crossbow, or rather it's partly the way to a crossbow, because a crossbow stores mechanical energy and you release it with a trigger. This version does not store mechanical energy. If I want to hold a shot, I've got to use muscle power and just hold it there and then loose. So the device itself is not under any strain whatsoever. There is no tension in this device. The device has tension in the bow limbs, but there's nothing apart from holding the arrows in place that happens to this piece of wood. So there would be no test of this should this be a warweight bow. A couple of people have talked about whether the arrows would be as effective against armour or be able to have as much impact as anything else. Well, remember kinetic energy is about mass times velocity squared, half mv squared. So if you can shoot faster, you can actually get more kinetic energy. The light arrows obviously go further. With everything else the same, a light arrow will travel further than a heavy one. And as we know for world record attempts at the longest shot, they use incredibly light arrows and they use devices that are designed to shoot short arrows with a very, very long draw, because the longer draw you've got, the more energy, the more of a power stroke you've got going into the arrow, which is what it's all about. And obviously penetrating power of an arrow depends on all sorts of different factors, what you're hitting, what the head of the arrow is like and all sorts of other things. It's a bit of a complex topic. Needless to say, if these are shot from the same bow, these will have the same amount of kinetic energy as a heavier arrow. Quite flatteringly, me using this device has been compared unfavourably to Lars Andersen and other master archers who can shoot incredibly quickly and are very, very skillful. Now, that's quite frankly a bit silly because you're comparing me, who's a complete novice at using longbows, to somebody who spent many, many years perfecting their skill. Now, the simple fact that this device puts me in a broadly similar category of speed shooter to somebody who's possibly as good as anybody's ever been on the planet at shooting a bow quickly means this device has done its job because this device is not designed to beat the best archers in the world. This device is all about making bad archers into very good archers or making people that can't do archery into effective missile troops. It's been known back in ancient times that money is an important component of winning wars. There was a famous Roman Marcus Tellius Cicero back in around 100, 150 BC, so a long, long time ago, 2,000 years ago, and he said gold is the sinews of war and what he meant by that was the person with the more money typically wins the war simply because it costs a lot of money to fight wars. It was the same in the ancient times, it's exactly the same today. The key thing about this device is that you could hire cheap soldiers relatively easily, give them this device and make them very effective archers, so you weren't paying for your expert archers who could be better than this bow, but you were paying for cheap soldiers and lots of them, you pay for this device and lots of them, and you can shoot more arrows down range than the enemy can, and that is a battle-winning strategy that can win wars. So the purpose of this device isn't to turn people into master archers or expert archers overnight, the purpose of this device would be, had it been deployed in European medieval warfare, would be to turn cheap soldiers into effective missile troops. You can gather together the sweepings of the local tavern, give them this and make an effective arrow storm very, very cheaply. So that was my point, not that this can compete with a master archer, but this can make a rubbish archer into a very good one. One of the other points that's been talked about was would this work with a warweight bow, well I think it would because as I said before this doesn't have any tension in it at all. If you can use a warweight bow you can pull it back, you can take the arrows and send the arrows down range, so yes I think it would work with a warweight bow. One of the major criticisms of this device was once you've shot your six bolts or arrows down range, what do you do then? Well you reload it and a few people have said yeah but it'll take you ages to reload, it doesn't take you ages to reload and arguably if you've shot six arrows and they've shot one, theoretically you've done a lot more damage to them anyway before you even need to reload, but one of the things I want to show you is reloading and shooting five or six of these arrows to show you how long it takes, so I'm going to time it and demonstrate how it can be done. You can rush the loading of this if you're not careful and the arrows don't really kind of go in properly and it doesn't work, so you do need to take a little bit of care in what you're doing, but it doesn't take very long. So just to recap what this is is an English longbow, this is about a 35 pound weight self bow, it's a longbow because it's a single piece of wood and it's just over six foot and it works through the whole of its length, so it's not a war bow because that's a certain weight draw weight, it is about 35 pounds, it's quite a light bow but it's something I'm very comfortable with and we have this plywood shaft that the arrows will then sit into, these are arrows or maybe they're bolts because maybe they're not long enough to be arrows, but these are obviously a lot shorter than you would typically want to shoot from a longbow because the arrows are guided by a central barrel really, this is like the barrel of a gun, so the arrows come out here, so there is no archer's paradox on this device at all because the arrows are completely guided by the arm or the handle or whatever you want to call it of the device by the magazine itself and there's a rail that goes all the way there to shoot out that end. You put the bolts in this way and they are two fletched bolts so they go in there but I'm going to, how many have I got, I've got six here, probably going to use five for the experiment and have one for a spare because I'm always losing arrows. The arrows are held down by this lever which goes to press them in so that they can be shot, so what I'm going to do now is a worst case scenario, my equipment is on the ground here, I'm going to time it, the time it takes me to pick this up, load it and loose all five, maybe six arrows if I want to get them in there, in fact I'll do five just because it's the manufacturer's recommended number. So let's go, start, the enemy's coming, reload, one, two, three, four, five and then one, two, three, missed, that's it, stop. 40 seconds to pick the device up, load it and loose five shots, that's not too bad and I'm not particularly well practiced and the environment's a little bit damp as well so the device itself wood is slightly swollen actually so it's not completely perfectly smooth as it was when it was completely dry. It's an incredibly damp day today so that's possibly why, which is an interesting point because missile weapons and rain and dampness, they don't work as well, same for this, I think I just clipped the side there but that's not a bad grouping, oh that went all the way through into the wood, that's why I've got six, I'll go and get the other one. So in summary, could this have changed medieval history? I think it possibly could have done if it was used in the right way and in the right circumstances. Of course, the enemy would have captured one of these and quickly reverse engineered it but medieval manufacturing being what it was, it's going to take them weeks or months to have enough of them ready to fight back against you, so you've still got a window of opportunity with this medieval super weapon to actually win the war. But who knows, speculation on what might have happened in history is a fun topic and I guess there's no right or wrong answer.