Armor Penetration and Armor resistance.

[geala]

Dan, I have heard you say a few times that javelins have better armour penetration than arrows or spear thrusts. Why do you think this? It sounds reasonable, but I don't recall seeing any evidence other than the surprisingly high figures for energy Paulus presents. It seems to me that spear throwers who could take a run up (skirmishers or a howling warband of Franks, say) would be much more effective than those who could not (Romans receiving a charge, or a Germanic shield wall).

I have figures for one-handed and two-handed thrusts wirth various weapons. I have figures for various types of bows. I had no real data on thrown javelins. I relied on Paulus' figures for that. IIRC there were some figures posted on RAT about the Roman pilum. Of course I can't find them now I need them I agree with Paulus that the primary concern of any archer or slinger was range not armour penetration. However, the missile still needed to inflict some damage at the end of its arc. For example, there is no point using flight arrows on the battlefield.

M. Junkelmann gives some data in his book "Die Reiter Roms" part III from 1992, p. 166ff. I think it is known to the most? The performances for the thrown weapons are much worse than that Paul quoted. Unfortunately I cannot get out how the data was aquired. I presume a velocity measure tool for bullet velocities was used.

For example the used hasta of 0,8 kg reached a velocity of (just) 12 m/sec if thrown standing still but (also: just) 17 m/sec with a short running up, resulting in 58 J versus 116 J, quite a big difference. They also made short tests of penetration power against flat steel panels and mail (not riveted) and a performance test against a material called "soap" used for testing of temporary wound profiles from bullets. Maybe that is partly wrong as ballistical soap was normally used to show the final wound profiles; but that's not important because the both wound profiles of low energy weapons like arrows, javelins, swords etc. are mostly the same.

The arrows from the used bow performed better against armour than javelins. That is no surprise because the energy in relation to the surface of an arrow is much higher than that of a javelin (it's Querschnittsbelastung in German, I don't know the English word), resulting in much better penetration power relatively to the energy of the projectile. Pila or similar javelins are something special however.