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Comment by ksaxena | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: Yes

I was expecting - in this post-Randall Monroe world - a much more thorough accounting of the amount of sunlight blocked by 5000 in-flight arrows.

I went in with a similar expectation actually. Would be interesting to have an idea of how much light'd fall on you if you were standing under the storm.

I imagine you wouldn't really enjoy the sight whilst being under it though!

Sounds like a great candidate for a What If submission.

Speaking of, we haven't had a new What If in nearly a year now.

Here is my speculation: you cannot fit enough archers in the relatively small area from where they can still shoot at the same target and cover a significant portion of the sky with their arrows.

Unless the flight paths converge at the end.

When the arrow hits your face, you can no longer see the sun. Therefore one archer is sufficient to blot out the sun.

2 arrows.

In case you didn't read it, the "What if?" book has a couple pages dedicated to this exact question (not 5000, but "how many would it take to block the sun?")

Theoretically yes, the author just says it’s possible, but doesn’t present any evidence for it. There could be other factors that prevented this from actually happening in reality, eg the supply of arrows, the positioning of the archers, the strategy of attack etc.

Perhaps in reality what happened was that there, at certain moments, was one obvious target, and all archers pointed their arrows at that target. This created the illusion, from the p.o.v. of the target of an arrow storm.

A significant portion of the English economy was devoted to arrow production and archer training. They made millions of the things and reused many. Quotas were assigned for production of both.

There may be issues with some of the details of the stories. But many of those issues are more about our modern perception of what is being said. Interpreting the "darkening of the sky" as an eclipse like event is a perception problem. Nobody questions would question a contemporary account of German flak in WW2 feeling like a darkening of the sky from the perspective of a bomber crewman.

The end results speak for themselves -- you can correlate the order of battle of the English from multiple areas and the outcome of major engagements and wars are known. If the arrows were less effective than described, the French heavy infantry and cavalry would have been considerably more successful.

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