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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

That is the weight at maximum draw. It is more like pulling back a rubber band that gets progressively harder until you hit your max. It isn't like lifting a weight which is a steady force. Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up. A bow doesn't have inertia. You can pull it back as quick as you like, which makes it easier for a given max "weight" of pull.

(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)

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How modern? Not modern enough for writers and directors of photography to have gotten the wrong idea, right? This trope got in early and has never gone away.

After the 18th century, virtually nobody would have used a war bow. Other than recreationists, everyone's archery experience would be of target and hunting bows. Both have much lower draws.

When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.

I guess that’s true. And when you’re hunting a deer it’s better to not loose an arrow than to shoot it badly, so taking a beat to refine your aim would make sense.

I had a teacher that was a bow hunter. I believe he claimed it was the only arrangement fair to the deer. They had a sporting chance. I can’t imagine he fired more than a couple arrows in any hunting trip. Very different from shoot or die.

I don't think it's appropriate to call that "sporting chance" - for the deer this is not a sport, it's a very serious life or death situation, where they'd very much rather not be.

Yes-ish. But "sporting chance" may be a way for the hunter to say that wants his recreational pastime to be difficult enough to be interesting to him. Or that he is repelled by the idea of using really modern drone & firearms technology, and slaughter-at-scale.

That does not leave us any conversation to have that is appropriate to HN though.

They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.

If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.

Compound bows were invented after the mid 1900s. 1966 says wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow

Strength-training routines can exploit these characteristics, through the use of bands and chains.

Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.

Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.

(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)

>Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up.

Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).

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