Archery Competitions?

I'm an archer. I shoot traditional Turkish/Mongolian style with a thumb ring draw. Most of my practice, however, is on a western field archery course - the roving type.

In answer to your specific questions, yes, men and women shoot separately. This is usually because men tend to pull higher draw weight bows, and higher draw weight bows have a flatter trajectory. However, that doesn't mean that women can't be competitive when shooting against men, and there's no reason they couldn't - especially in a fantasy context. As to shooting at moving targets, I find stationary targets to be more than challenging enough, but many primitive/field archery shoots will have targets set up for fun that have a twist to them. I've seen moving targets like at a shooting gallery, I've seen competitions that require you to shoot a bow from a moving canoe in a stream, etc. There are a lot of fun things you can do to make the game more challenging.

As to sabotaging someone, it depends on what sort of archery gear they use. For a fantasy world, I would imagine you wouldn't get a lot of olympic style archers shooting with complicated sighting mechanisms. If you had that, simply changing the marked range to the target would really mess them up. For primitive shooters, who just shoot by feel, it's harder to mess up the actual process of aiming, because it's all internal. However, I can think of a few ways to do it. If you want to have magic involved, a person could cast an enchantment on the bow, making it a lighter or heavier draw weight. This could seriously affect the shooter, but he might think he's just feeling very weak or strong that day. Another possibility would be to change the cast on a bow or the string follow. That can be changed by messing with the thickness of the limbs or the weight at the tips of the limbs. Again, magic could accomplish that fairly easily.

Without magic, you could sabotage someone by replacing his arrows with some that have a much lighter spine. When you shoot a bow, the arrows have to be of an appropriate strength to the bow you're firing, or it can cause huge problems. Mostly the arrows will veer off course because of the archer's paradox, but in extreme cases the arrows can explode (usually in the case of wood. Aluminum can be less dramatic). So, if the person is clever, he could trade in one archer's arrows with identical-looking ones with a lighter spine. That might not be readily noticeable but it would really sabotage the other person, and unless an arrow exploded it wouldn't be noticeable.

Another thing, if you're shooting with primitive bows, might be to intentionally weaken an opponent's bow so that it breaks when it's being fired. This wouldn't be obvious sabotage, as primitive style wood bows, especially unbacked ones, tend to break fairly regularly. It's really considered an eventuality amongst primitive shooters. This would force the person to pick up a secondary bow that he's less familiar with, and that could hurt his chances because he wouldn't be as accustomed to it. Without modern machining and sights, having to use a bow you're less familiar with is a huge handicap.

Anyway, I hope those ideas help.

Basically, when you shoot an arrow, it bends around the handle of the bow, and continues to oscillate in flight, like a wave pattern. Depending on the style of draw you use, you have to put the arrow on one side of the bow or the other. For a right-handed person (holding the bow in the left hand with the right hand drawing the bow) the arrow goes on the left side of the bow. This is because when you draw the bow with three fingers, the string rolls a bit, causing the arrow to push to the right. If the arrow is on the right side of the bow, and you draw it, then it will pull away to the right, flop off your hand, and hang there uselessly. However, when using a thumb ring, you put pressure on the arrow in the other direction, meaning the arrow has to go on the right side of the bow. That's why Kyudo (Japanese archery) has the arrow on the "wrong" side of the bow.

This is important because how much the arrow twists around the handle partially determines how accurate you are with it. An arrow that is too light in spine will bend around the handle too much, causing you to miss. However, an arrow that is too heavy won't conform to the handle enough, and will be more likely to miss as well. It's one of those tricky things.

The draw weight is a factor because it determines how much energy you're giving to the arrow. Generally speaking, the heavier the draw weight, the more energy you're giving to the arrow, so the faster it goes, and the flatter the trajectory. (However, this isn't always the case, as progressively heavier bows need progressively heavier arrows, and other parts of the bow's efficiency come into play).

Another factor is the mass of the bow's limbs. Heavy limbs will be slower to snap back into place. So, a bow with too much weight out in the limbs will tend to shoot an arrow more slowly than it otherwise might. So, if you make the limbs artificially heavy, then they will shoot the arrow more slowly. A slower arrow means that it's not as flat a trajectory.

The thing to remember is that an arrow flies in an arc. So, if you want to hit a target very far away, you have to angle the bow progressively higher to compensate for the amount it's falling due to gravity. If you have a bow that shoots arrows more slowly, you will have to compensate more by raising the bow higher than you would otherwise. Remember that an arrow, like any projectile, will fall at the same speed it would if you simply dropped it from the height of the bow. So the faster it is traveling, the more distance it covers before it hits the ground. So, if you mess with the draw weight, the cast, or any of the factors that affect the speed of the arrow, then the archer will have to compensate, sometimes drastically, to get the arrow to follow the right path to hit the target.

As an expert I'd have to say...

Yeah, what Selimthegrim said.

TheIT said:

So, lots of factors to play with, eh? This could be fun.

The person the saboteur is trying to blame is telekinetic. If the arrow gets nudged mid-flight, I could see that it would miss its intended target.

They'll have something in place to prevent magical interference, or would they? Hmmm... this tournament is meant to be in honor of the king's silver jubilee. The best competitors will compete in front of the king. Stakes are high, but honor is also in play. Anyone caught cheating would be committing a severe breach of etiquette. So maybe they don't have anything to prevent magical interference, but instead to detect magic.

In competitions, do the archers shoot simultaneously or one at a time?

Click to expand...

Depends on the competition and the set up. You could theoretically do it either way. If the course is roving, you could have it be like a game of golf - that's the way I think of field archery anyway, golf for cool people That way you could have one team or person start, then a few minutes later let the other team go. Both would be on the course, but several targets apart. Or, you could do it a gazillion other ways. I find with my own fantasy I like to find out exactly how something works in reality, and then totally not do that.

For me, and I'm no robin hood, shooting uphill and downhill are totally different. Uphill is much, much harder for me. Downhill is easier for me than a flat range. Since I shoot in southern california, which is pretty mountainous, I get mostly uphill and downhill ranges. I guess the reason downhill is easier is that you can just point the arrow at the target. The drop on the arrow doesn't matter much, because the course drops too. On uphill though, especially steep uphill, you have to aim high enough that even with gravity the arrow ends up higher than where it started. I always flub it. So, imho, uphill makes things a bunch harder.

As far as distance, you would probably need about 100 yards total for experienced archers, with ranges from 10 yards all the way out to 100. And yes, probably best to put the grandstand out of the line of fire.

Hi TheIt - I don't know if you've ever watched the movie Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. If you haven't, you should. The archery competition in it is pretty interesting and might give you some ideas. Puma

I would recommend attending a traditional archery competition near you. The archers are generally very helpful, and you could get a first hand look at how they do it, and what they do, the forms they use. I'm sure the archers would answer any questions you had.

Yeah that's a good suggestion. I can give you directions to archery ranges in both Pasadena and Simi Valley if those are near you, theIt. I might be able to find some others too if I look.

Selimthegrim said:

Depends on the competition and the set up. You could theoretically do it either way. If the course is roving, you could have it be like a game of golf - that's the way I think of field archery anyway, golf for cool people

Click to expand...

Er...if I remember correctly, roving marks was the original precursor to golf.

I hadn't heard that, but it could very well be the case.

I'm with Selim. Your best bet is to switch the arrows. They'd have to be GOOD forgeries, but if the markings, etc., were right it would work.
<br> <br>
And the beauty of it is, the fakes would themselves be good arrows! All you have to do is give him some with different spines. They'd work just fine for someone else, with a different bow or different drawing style. They just don't work well for the victim.
<br> <br>
And it wouldn't be at all obvious what had happened. We didn't figure out the significance of arrow "spine" until relatively recently. The typical archer of the far past would just shoot a bunch of different arrows and keep the ones that worked for him. He would know some worked and some didn't--but he wouldn't know why...

Though he'd still know enough to pick the most consistent bunch...

To say the truth, I matched none of my best arrows' spine to the bow. I just chose the largest bunch with the same deflection (slightly to the left in this case) and decided to use them all together when I'm in particular need of accuracy.

TheIT said:

Would shaving or sanding wood off the center of an arrow affect its flight?

How often can a wooden arrow be reused? How easily do arrows break?

Click to expand...

It just depends. I've actually bent aluminum arrows accidentally, just from missing the target and hitting the ground. On the other hand, I've driven aluminum arrows through a target and into a tree and had them be perfectly fine. My wooden arrows tend to be a bit more fragile when it comes to harsh treatment. However, the most common way to break an arrow that I've found is to hit something really hard with it - like a rock. As far as how often it can be reused. It can be reused till it breaks.

"How easily do arrows break?" is a question that can't be answered easily. Just to take an example, I have a set of six bamboo arrows, two of which had been broken and repaired in the past. The remaining four had never been broken at all although they've experienced quite as much abuse as the other two.

My older set of arrows were all wooden, and they were somewhat more prone to breaking--but it's difficult to judge how much because part of it must have been due to the fact that I wasn't as skilled (both in archery and in repairing broken arrows) then as I am now. And I take much better care of my current sets of arrows than I ever did with the previous ones.

Howard Hill? Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes. Get any and all information you can find about him. He's a modern and not a medieval archer, but much of his experience can be very instructive for a writer seeking to write just about any kind of archery competition short of mounted archery.

As for finding competitions, my first recommendation would be http://www.usarchery.org/

If you need more info, you might want to contact your local/nearest SCA chapter (that's Society for Creative Anchronism). Archery is pretty big with them. They organize a lot of medieval archery contests and they are a fountain of information regarding medieval archery, bow-making, arrows.

I dated one of these guys for a while who lived off making bows and arrows. The level of research they do to get this stuff right rivals any scholar's. They are also very happy to talk about it to anyone who asks

Hi TheIt - I'm not your best reference source, but - when I was a kid we had wooden bows and arrows and a soft leather quiver to carry the arrows in. One of the problems with the old fashioned wooden arrows was that the "feathers" were actually pieces of bird feather glued onto the shaft. Once in a while they'd come off, or, somehow some of them got trimmed down which changed the way they flew (I sort of suspect my brother may have been responsible for some of the trimming). And, sometimes bowstrings would break when they were pulled too taut.

I can't remember your time period, but the leather quiver with a shoulder strap would be fine for transporting arrows on horseback. Tampering with the "feathers" - trimming or even cutting them down at an angle would cause problems. Making a small cut in a bowstring so it would snap when pulled would also be good sabotage. And now I'll let some more knowledgeable folks respond. Puma

Here's the deal, and I'm having a heck of a time with this problem in real life right now.

Each arrow has what's called a "spine" or the amount of flex in the arrow. People who draw stiffer bows need arrows with more spine. Also, arrows are made in different weights, nowadays we call it grains.

Here's the confusing part, the spine is often times spoken of in terms of "pounds" which really means what draw weight is good for those arrows.

Depending on the tree, where in the tree the arrow shaft was taken, the type of wood, the thickness of the shaft and the length of the arrow, your spine for each shaft will be a little different.

Arrowmakers have to sort each shaft both by weight and spine before they make the shafts into arrows.

Now, the longer the arrow, the weaker the spine becomes (it's a little like a lever in this respect). It bends too much and becomes too floppy. If it's too stiff, it doesn't bend enough.

For a really good discussion of this stuff, go to a website called bowjackson.com and he'll explain the stuff pretty good. Also, Easton arrows used to have a pdf arrow tuning guide, which also explained what happened when your arrows were too long or too short, or when they were too stiff or too floppy.

I will tell you that your accuracy sufers dramatically if your arrows aren't properly spined for your bow and your draw length.

Oh, there's a nother term. Draw length. Each person has a draw length, the average is around 28 inches. Generally, you make your arrows one inch longer than your draw length. Now if you have a really big guy (like me) with a 31 inch draw length, he'll need 32 inch arrows. FYI, another rule of thumb is that each inch is about equal to 5 pounds of spine. At any rate, some other smarty will jump in here and tell you the rest.