| > Equipping 10,000 soldiers with any sort of kit will be a major undertaking. Difficulty of that kit is the real question. Slingers would need 20 lead bullets, one of the lowest melting point substances in the world. If lead were unavailable, slingers would make due with stone, or even clay bullets. In contrast, equipping 20 arrows to 10,000 archers would be an incredibly more complicated undertaking. You need arrowheads, those arrowheads need to fit shafts. Even without fletching, building an arrowhead design that fits different width sticks of wood is an incredibly complicated undertaking. Especially if you only have access to tools from ancient-times. To accurately launch the arrow, you must consistently make the same arrow (or extremely similar arrows). That's just how it works. Its far easier to make 20x lead bullets (or 20x clay bullets, or 20x stone bullets) that are all consistent... than it is to make 20x arrows that are all consistent. -------- It was a real innovation to standardize stick sizes, standardize goose feathers, and standardize arrowheads to equip the British Longbowman. There's a reason why that strategy only really took place in the Medieval period, the ancient world didn't have the tools or inventions needed to support mass-archer strategies. |
Sorry, not agreeing. Arrows had been regularly made for tens of thousands of years.