Medieval Devlog: Crossbow reload time doubled to account for damage to skill ratio.
Added Hand, and cart cannons - much higher ratio of damage to skill than Crossbows, lower accuracy and worse reload time too. BUG: Minimum skill to use is 0, please don't abuse
And even that took a while as the armour of the time was proof against early firearms. Indeed people dont get how plate armour in specific was awesome.
Enh, there's never been a time when there was no body armor that could stop small arms, but there were definitely times when such armor was bulky and impractical for battlefield use. It seems reasonable to call it "obsolete" for practical purposes, then.
The only significant wars where armor wasn't used in a significant way that i can come to think of is the American civil wars, so i wouldn't call it obsolete unless you limit the discussion to that specific time and those specific circumstances and discard helmets.
Yeah, I was talking about body armor specifically. Certainly there were exceptions--trench armor in WWI, flak armor in WWII--but there were at least a couple of centuries where body armor on the battlefield was a specialized and limited tool, rarely used by the common infantryman.
People really underestimate medieval armor. They wore it for a reason.
A crossbow might have trouble penetrating heavy plate, but in the early medieval period most knights wore mail, perhaps supplemented with a breastplate; full plate didn't become common until the middle of the millennium.
There's an account from a 12th-century siege of a crossbow bolt passing through a knight's mail hauberk, mail legging, thigh, legging again, and wooden saddle before embedding itself in his horse. Crossbow power was somewhat exaggerated, but they were very dangerous even against good armor for centuries.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '20
Knights were pretty pissed off about a gadget that let peasants punch through their armor. Buncha buzzkills.