Images

Ballistics

Composite Bow

Prerequisites

Requires:

• Nothing

Statistics

Gives:

• Archer

Gameplay

Archery dates back to the Stone Age. The Archer is the first unit to employ a Ranged Attack in the game.

Historical

The bow and arrow is an ancient device. Archers are depicted on cave paintings dating back to 8000 BC, and the bow has been used as a tool for hunting virtually everywhere that game and suitable wood could be found. The Old and Middle Kingdom Egyptians and the first of the Mesopotamian Kingdoms (Sumeria, Babylon) used bowmen armed with a simple stave bow of wood. These were not very powerful, and the nucleus of their armies was always the warrior armed with spears and axes or swords and protected by a large shield. Sometime in the third millennium BC (since the materials are all perishable, there is very little hard archeological evidence for dating) a new weapon, the composite bow, appears in central and southern Asia. The composite bow takes advantage of the different properties of different materials to provide much more power than any single material can. Classically, a composite bow has bone, horn, and sinew glued to a thin stave that only acts as a skeleton for the other materials. The sinew is very elastic, the bone and horn very stiff, so that when they are compressed and stretched in turn, they store and release two to three times more energy than a single piece of wood. Composite bows require considerable skill to make and are more fragile than stout sticks of wood, but even the earliest bows used in Egypt in the 18th century BC could drive an arrow through "three fingers depth of copper", and later composite bows could shoot right through mail armor and wooden shields.