Rocket Powered Medieval Arrows vs Armour!

That was just amazing. Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to look at rocket powered arrows. Now I have to make this completely clear from the beginning. There is no evidence that I know about that this was ever done in western Europe, but they did do it out in the east and the thing is I'm going to do it for two absolutely compelling reasons. The first is it's going to be fun. The second and probably more realistic is human nature hasn't changed. You put rocket motors which they had in western Europe and you put arrows in the same place at the same time somebody would have tried it. Let's make it live again. A few months ago I made a film about 15th century fire arrows. If you are interested in medieval technology and the technology of weapons, go and watch that film because it takes the original books, the original manuscripts, it looks at their recipes, their construction methods and I go and make them and this is the original work that they had. Whilst I was going through the books I found out about all sorts of fascinating things like fireballs and stink bombs and wildfires, but I also found out about rockets and Birringuccio specifically talks about shooting bundles of rockets out of cannons that then fly forth and seek out the stores of gunpowder, presumably by skitting around all over the ground. So we know that they had all of these things in the 15th century, arrows, rockets and crossbows, all things that I love messing about with. How can I possibly resist doing this? In the eastern medieval world they certainly made big use of rockets, both the Chinese and the Indians did them, but so did the Koreans and they took it one step further. So what they did was they strapped rockets onto arrows, put them in a multiple launch system, shot them as volleys. They called it the huacha, an amazing thing. Just check this clip out. Looking at that clip what is completely clear is that it must have been a vastly expensive weapon and I can't overstate that, but also really slow to reload, technically probably unreliable, definitely inaccurate and ultimately it's going to be really impressive to see, really intimidating to see. The noise must have been extraordinary and the sight of them coming in and all of that, but ultimately the result was probably not very big and that's why the weapon didn't spread and it's never going to be beaten by 20 archers with bows. Now I've made the assertion that these were incredibly inaccurate and the reason for that is it's basically a stick rocket, rocket, stick and we all know from fireworks they drift off and they've known this for a long time. So if we look at 19th century artillery rockets like the Congreve rocket that the British army used, absolutely notorious for going anywhere except where you wanted and that was true for me as well. Look at this clip of a reproduction I made a decade or so ago, didn't quite go to plan. These rockets weren't very accurate in their day. Before we go on though I have to explain the rocket motors and the fuse, because in the UK you need licenses to make both of those things which I do not have. So I've got bought-in components, that's what I'm using for today and actually making rocket motors it's not particularly difficult, so just pretend for the sake of today I made them. So I'm doing this for fun and for education, but why would medieval people have been interested in this? Well three simple things, curiosity, range and damage. All good reasons to have a good look at this, so we're going to shoot another. I have to be honest and I'm nervous about this, so I've used a modern crossbow for ease, but one which I've tuned up to perform in a similar way to a powerful medieval crossbow. I've got my arrow here which is tethered onto a line, if this was not tethered there would be no way to do this safely. 60 meters out there at the end of the line is a breastplate and it's as simple as lighting up and shooting down. I've got blast screens, I've got gloves, I've got goggles and I've got a pounding heart. No more excuses, let's do it. I cannot, I cannot express this enough, do not try this at home. Right, lighter up. That was so amazingly cool. Heart stopping, I can tell you that. Timing split, but let's go and have a look what's happened. That was just amazing, absolutely brilliant. So the timing is absolutely critical because you've got to leave it to the last possible moment because you want it to light up while it's in launch early on, but you don't want to leave it too late because then it goes off on the bow and it leaves the bow and then the bow dry fires and everything's ugly. Anyway, it came hurtling down, we can see that the motor was still burning because of this gaping hole in the foam here. How much has it done is a different question, we'll put it through chronos and things, but it's definitely done something. So we're going to go back, we're going to talk about curiosity, we're going to talk about range, we're going to talk about damage and then we're going to put a bigger motor on it. So let's look at the reasons that they might have done it and the first has got to be curiosity. You put bored people with time to kill in the same place as the technology which they had available to them, people are going to try things and then of course since the dawn of time, beer has been responsible for all sorts of things that people shouldn't have but they did anyway and I can tell you now that given this whole packet of stuff, I would have tried it. The next reason that you might want to try it is range. A medieval crossbow will shoot out to 260 meters, a bit more and it carries about 80 percent of the launch velocity with it at the time it impacts. Still plenty to cause damage, but what if your enemy is 350 meters away or 400 meters away? So an extended range, an extended flight would be vastly useful and a rocket motor, well it might give you that and the last reason they may want to try this is damage. Now I've done loads of films with the arrows versus armor series where the arrows are delivering about 130 joules. Now a heavy crossbow might deliver a little bit more than that, but the arrows were nowhere near going through the breastplate, it was impenetrable. To add speed and therefore energy and momentum onto this arrow using a rocket could be could be vastly useful for penetrating that breastplate. So what was once invincible might not be invincible anymore. Whether it goes through is a different question, but it will stand a better chance of going through and that is plenty of reason to want to try this. However, you're also going to take some things away from this weapon. I mean look at this clip of Joe Gibbs at 130 yards, supremely accurate. That's gone because this is now a stick rocket, it's going to kind of go anywhere and then of course you have the mass of the rocket itself. Now the thrust gives you extra speed and extra distance one hopes, but the mass of the rocket is going to slow it down. Where's that balance point? Is it a price worth paying? I don't know yet. Breastplate itself is based on the Cherbourg 14 and it's the same type as we use in arrows versus armor, the same kind of construction, variable thickness, two and a half mil, one and a half mil at the edges. Out in the field we have our knight, 60 meters away, with the wire coming back. That passes through this blast screen here with the polycarb window. Then you've got the line coming back to a pulley and a weight here, all dangling off my very handy trebuchet. Now clearly the added mass of the motor will take away from the speed of the arrow, as I said before, but the thing is does it give more than it takes away? Now you could work that out on paper, I can't, other people can, but that's not fun is it? I like the empirical method, I like to see it, I like to do it. Let's do it again. That was a thing! Bigger motor, I did promise. Oh that was, that was just fantastic. I left it a little bit later this time on launch, which is an accident, but anyway it all worked out nicely. Came down here at the rate of rocket, came down here like a rocket. Slightly bigger motor on here, actually penetrated a hole in the brass plate, two and a half mil right in the center with the archery bow. Now the thing is, we're never going to get a decent set of data off this because of the drag of the line, but what we can do is put it through a chronograph at the start and finish. We'll get some indication of what's going on and then find out if we, our opinion is it's worth it or not. Right next stage. Hi, I've just interrupted today's film for another Todd Cutler related interesting fact and today English and Italian baselot. Really strangely, very popular in Italy, very popular in England, not so much really in between. I don't know what's going on there. Anyway this and loads of similar items available on toddcutler.com. Anyway back to the film. So in an attempt to get some data, I've got a rocket motor on here that I'm not going to light and about two meters there is a chronograph, so we'll get a speed on launch. I'm going to repeat the test again with the chronograph just short of our man, so we'll get a start speed and a finish speed. Shooting and that is 106 feet per second, which is about 32 meters per second. Now that's slow, can't deny that, but it's slow because you've got the weight of the motor on it as well. 127 grams the arrow is weighing in. So let's put the chronograph at the other end and we'll see what the finish speed is with an unpowered rocket. Love it. So I'm going for another live shot now where we're going to fire the rocket up and the chronograph is just this end of the cable. That is just awesomely good, it is fantastic. Right the start speed was a bit down this time, 96 feet per second, about 30 meters per second. That hit the armor, there's no foam now so we're going to go up there and we're going to have a look and see what happened and again that was just absolutely fantastic. So it left with only 95 or 96 feet per second, so about 30 meters per second. The hole it made is not a 30 meter per second hole, so here's the head that we recovered fits perfectly in, but it's also it's dished it right in and this is two and a half millimeter thick steel, so there were plenty of breastplates out there that weren't as good as this one. Well I think we're going to try and get chrono reading now at this end of it and see what speed it actually does hit with. Oh again I can't express how much joy that gives me. Goodness I love my job. Wow that that is just a thing, so it's gone through. So for the first time ever in any of my tests with the medieval arrow, we have put it through a properly constructed breastplate, two and a half mil thick, it's gone through round about 30 millimeters into the quarter, something like that, probably not really putting the guy in danger, but there were weaker breastplates than this, but the point is we did it and it is a massive difference to the unrocket powered arrow and the speed was 244 feet per second, 74 meters per second, massive increase on the unpowered version. So did it work? Well you saw it, hell yeah it worked, it really did. I've penetrated this breastplate twice now during this test, never done it before. So could they have done it? Well absolutely they could, the manuscript said they had the rocket technology, I did it in exactly the way that they would have done it, except for the line. It worked, it absolutely worked, but the question is would they have done it? So the first question would be range and there's a lot of numbers here, so I'm going to get my cheat sheet out. So at 60 meters, which is where we are now, that was traveling at 74 meters per second, way faster than a crossbow bolt will do, but remember this had loads of drag on it because of the wire. So although it's doing 74 meters per second, perhaps it would be doing 95 meters per second before the acceleration of the rocket stopped, before the thrust stopped and those numbers are absolutely stunning and when I put that into a ballistics calculator, I got rough estimates, but it would give with this setup we've got here at 74 meters per second, about 490 meters of distance, 490 meters. Context, a longbow at the very limit will do about 300, but then if I'm right with my estimates and it would actually carry on accelerating to about 95 meters per second, that gives you a whopping 750 meter range, just game-changing, just extraordinary numbers and then what about the damage? Well it penetrated the breastplate twice, so clearly that's quite extraordinary, but the energy that it's delivering is about seven times the launch energy of the arrow as you would expect it without a rocket motor on it, seven times the energy it was getting on impact, again stunning and if you extrapolate those numbers out again to a speed of 95 meters per second, which I think it could have done, that is a whopping 11 times the energy, about 550 joules. So in numbers like that, with results like that, clearly they would have done it, right? I stand by my belief that people would have tried this, human beings, human nature, stupid enough to give this a go, even without safety gear and the thing is the results were vastly dramatic, you know the increase of penetration huge, the increase in range huge, you'd think they want to do it, but it comes with a massive, massive list of downsides. So first of all you've got to find somebody who's actually prepared to do it and then you've got the logistics problem, the technical complexity of it, the absolute cost of it, which is going to be huge because they're sophisticated, difficult weapons to construct and then what do you actually get from it? If you can get over all of that, you have a weapon that is intimidating, it's scary, people haven't seen it before, it makes lots of noise, but it will go anywhere. The supreme accuracy of a crossbow, everything that a crossbow is about has gone. All you've got, better range, better penetration, if you can hit the target and there's absolutely one million percent chance almost all of them will miss. So on balance, no, a complete waste of resources, the rocket powered arrow dead in the water and that of course is why we never see them in the history books, because they were never here. I still think that people tried it, but really all it's going to do is divert time, resources, money away from the men and the equipment you need to win that battle. So no, rocket powered arrows, thumbs down, but it has been absolutely great fun doing it. Who said history was boring? But if you want to see more of this kind of stuff, come and support me on Patreon, subscribe to the channel, visit the website, support me that way. But anyway, it's been great, goodbye and thank you very much.