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How to employ bodies of slingers in battle (Read 35418 times)
slingbadger
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #30 - May 8th, 2009 at 4:19pm
 
Aussie wrote on May 8th, 2009 at 6:38am:
slingbadger wrote on May 7th, 2009 at 9:17pm:
How fast would that thing have to travel to melt? One reference in the Aeneid refers to a glande melting in mid air. I would pay serious money to see a person do that.


Even solid lead bullets fired from rifles at close to supersonic speed don't melt athough there is some degree of distortion of the bullet's base within the barrel from the heat of the powder burning. The notion of a lead sling projectile melting or burning in the way that meteorites do is pretty much an impossibility.



Doing a sonic boom while slinging would be a cool way to scare the you know what out the enemy, though.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #31 - May 8th, 2009 at 8:00pm
 
Thearos wrote on May 8th, 2009 at 4:06pm:
Two questions:

do hand slung things go at that speed ?

WHy does pointiness not matter ? Sorry-- I would have thought that a pointed projectile would go faster (and hence have better change of penetration) and that the shape would help a little ?


Pointiness can help with speed and penetration. All im saying is that you dont need a pointed sling projectile to penetrate into or through somones body. So pointiness is optional. And yes absolutely, sling projectiles do reach speeds of up to 250+ mph.
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Thearos
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #32 - May 9th, 2009 at 4:14am
 
Thanks, got it.
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Aussie
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #33 - May 10th, 2009 at 9:38am
 
I don't wish to belabour the issue and I also readily admit that I have no experimental evidence to back my points but I would like to make a couple of suggestions:-

1. The fact that tongs and instructions for using them to extract lead glandes have been found fairly much excludes the possibility of hyperbole or errors in translation, ie. lead bullets did penetrate into the bodies of victims. (Perhaps references to the 'molten lead' refers not to glandes melting in flight but to the fact that they were cast.) Of course it is a possibility that these were discharged from bullet shooting crossbows, catapults and the like as well as from slings.

2. Speeds of 250 mph (110m/s) are quoted by Chris Harrison in his introduction on the home page. I don't know his source but such speeds would be maximum, attained by only the absolute best slingers and probably only with smallish projectiles. Techstuf in his demonstration where he penetrates a 'Goliath' cutout made of thick, strong, plywood with a fairly large stone, calculated his stone speed at somewhere around 40 m/s. Speeds of 50 m/s are fairly readily obtained, so whereas even rounded projectiles travelling in excess of 100 m/s would pentrate flesh, such high speeds would not be inevitably required. Bear in mind that kinetic energy varies as the square of the speed, so a projectile moving at 50 m/s has 56% more energy than one of similar mass moving at 40 m/s, and at 100 m/s this goes up by 625%.

3. Lead glandes actually do not leave the pouch any faster than equivalent weight stones but they do retain their velocity better due to their higher density and also their high sectional density, (which is their mass divided by their cross sectional area). They were not truly aerodynamic in the modern aeronautical sense of the word, but they did fly better than stones or shaped clay projectiles. Their high mass concentrated over a small area would create higher local pressure on impact. It is this actual pressure and not the energy itself that causes penetration.

4. Their pointiness or sharpness would probably have been of no consequence when striking something like a heavy shield of bronze or some other dense metal object, but even the relative "sharpness" of pointed lead would aid in penetrating soft substances, ie. human flesh, in the same way as a sharp knife cuts more easily than a dull one.

5. Lastly, it very unlikely to be as simple as, "lead glandes inevitably cause penetrative wounds whilst stones cause only contusions". Quite possibly stones would sometimes penetrate flesh and lead projectiles fail to do so. There a many variables; speed, distance, the place on the body and angle at which the projectile struck, etc. etc.

Regards,

Aussie
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Thearos
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #34 - May 10th, 2009 at 10:19am
 
Thanks for that. Just a note: the ancient sources (including, I seem to remember, e.g. ARistotle on physics) really did believe that the lead melted in flight.

I take Mrboss means that round proj. can very well penetrate, if going fast enough; you say that the pointiness does help in penetration (energy applied on smaller area, which makes sense to me, actually)
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #35 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 2:22am
 
I'm "guessing"that slingers were deployed like muzzle-loading infantry; b/c they can't shoot too well over friendlies. The first line would fire, then retire, then so on.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #36 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 5:45am
 
Of course, if you want "ethno-archaeology" of a sorts, you can watch videos of Palestinian shebab protesting the West bank wall-- with slings, against Israeli border police. One firing line, and a loose gaggle behind feeding the line. (Unlike black powder warfare, sling fighting does not require the shooter to withdraw to reload)
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #37 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 7:48am
 
http://www.calculateme.com/Speed/MetersperSecond/ToKilometersperHour.htm

there ya go aussie.

I count on average 5 seconds for a 120 metre shot (or pretty close to it). of course the speed would vary over it's course especially as I use less than perfect shot  but it comes out on that link to something like 108kph. I would describe myself as "intermediate" in skill and "athletic" in build and approach.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #38 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 7:50am
 
Would be interesting to see other people's speeds over the distance (you just have to wait for the thump), even working with rough guesstimates like mine. The range I am sure of but the count is of course one human error from start to finish  Tongue

The speed on the frontpage I think would apply more at short than long ranges and beyond a certain distance would be nothing like the actual speed. 250mph/402.32kph means sending a stone from A to B 150m away (ish) and hearing a thunk around two seconds later.

That's FAST.Really very fast.

Maybe it'd doable. But I don't think the average user will be doing that. The original number may have been reached by guesstimating speeds over 80 yards and then playing around with conversions and extrapolations and bla bla bla.

I could digest that figure more readily with the rider of "250mph under 50m" or similar because the further it goes, the longer it takes to get there, and then some.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #39 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 9:38am
 
Jabames wrote on Jan 3rd, 2010 at 2:22am:
I'm "guessing"that slingers were deployed like muzzle-loading infantry; b/c they can't shoot too well over friendlies.



Of course they can, imo. Shoot over persons, shoot over walls, shoot over almost anything.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #40 - Jan 3rd, 2010 at 7:05pm
 
I have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the velocity argument, but I can provide a reasonable explanation for "molten lead."

When a metallic projectile impacts at high speed it will deform in peculiar ways. Like mushroomed bullets. Very hard impacts between two metallic objects at subsonic speeds produces 'waves' on the projectile which look like ripples on a pond. I'm sure that someone who has cast lead missiles can corroborate this. These deformations in a supposedly hard metal object that you're digging out of your shield would look like it had melted before impact.

Forgive me if I'm just restating an old argument,because that was the first thing that went through my head when I read about the "molten lead" for the first time.
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Pikåru wrote on Nov 19th, 2013 at 6:59pm:
Massi - WTF? It's called a sling. You use it to throw rocks farther and faster than you could otherwise. That's all. 
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #41 - Jan 4th, 2010 at 3:32pm
 
hybrid_throwback wrote on Jan 3rd, 2010 at 7:48am:
http://www.calculateme.com/Speed/MetersperSecond/ToKilometersperHour.htm

there ya go aussie.

I count on average 5 seconds for a 120 metre shot (or pretty close to it). of course the speed would vary over it's course especially as I use less than perfect shot  but it comes out on that link to something like 108kph. I would describe myself as "intermediate" in skill and "athletic" in build and approach.


120m in 5 seconds comes out as 24 m/s or 86.4 km/h (53.7 mph) Of course that's oly an average velocity, not a 'muzzle velocity. Even so I'm sure you sling a lot faster than that.

Trouble is that guesstimating time of flight is horribly inaccurate. To get anywhere meaningful figures you need to measure time with a high degree of certainty, ie your reaction time won't be good enough to 'snap' it with a stopwatch and with any distance long enough for you to count the drop in projectile velocity is so great that your figures will be little more than a ballpark estimate.

Ther are only two velocity measuring methods that I know of that don't require particularly sophisticated equipment.

1. Get a good side-on video of yourself slinging against a nice plain bacground, something like a picket fence is good. Review the video frame by frame and you should be able to see how far the projectile has travelled each time aginst the measured background. If you know the frame rate of the camera you can readily calculate the velocity.

2. Even better and to my mind easier is the recorded sound method. Most laptops have an inbuilt microphone with which you can record the sound of your sling. You should be able to hear the swish of the release followed by the whack as the projectile hits the target. The target needs only be a few metres away and can be as large as you like (garage wall in my case) so hitting it is easy. Now review the recorded soundwave with "Audacity" or some similar program where yo get a visual representation as well as the sound. This enable you to measure the time interval down to the nearest 1/100th of a second so your speed calculations will be very precise.

Have a look at FAQ. There's a thread where this is discussed more fully.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #42 - Feb 14th, 2010 at 7:11am
 
You cannot stick light troops out in front of a main body unsupported. Cavalry will tear them apart.
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slingbadger
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #43 - Feb 15th, 2010 at 6:11am
 
Slingers were considered disposable troops. if they were run down or destroyed, it made no difference. As long as the armored fighters were protected, that was OK.
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Re: How to employ bodies of slingers in battle
Reply #44 - Feb 15th, 2010 at 8:24am
 

It depends how far forward the slingers are. You can see a cavalry charge coming 40 seconds away (Mike Loades, recreating the French charge at Crecy) This is plenty of time for the light troops to scarper between the ranks of the heavy infantry and leave the cavalry facing a forest of spears.

But yes, if they are unsupported the they will get minced every time.
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