Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "Warfare Experts Rate 12 'Game Of Thrones' Scenes For Realism | How Real Is It | Insider" video.

  1. ​ @Nerdiness1985  from about 50-70 meters it's actually not that hard to dodge an arrow. By moving in a predictable path you are making it way easier to get hit. So running in an unpredictable pattern is hugely helpful against a weapon that needs to anticipate where the target is going to be. It's completely different from super sonic ammunition that on relatively short ranges like these are essentially laser points (relatively speaking, there's some drop and time down range, but were talking centimetres and milliseconds compared to meters and tenths of seconds with a bow). A medieval longbow arrow only goes about 100m/s (and that's a fairly high estimate. It heavily depends on the arrow and the bow). So it actually takes at least half a second to go 50m down range. So as soon as you are about 30-40m away, you'd definitely want to move erratically, it makes it practically impossible to hit, since you actually need to lead the shot quite a bit. Like throwing a ball at someone that's running, you need to throw where they are going to be, not where they are. With guns it's a very different story, since the bullets go over 10x as fast, so you don't need to lead even remotely as much, and dodging a bullet is practically impossible. Either you are way too close to dodge it, or you can't see the bullet's trajectory (when talking about kilometre long shots). Although the scene is about a kid and an absolute psychopath. So it's not unrealistic that the kid is just running in a straight line when that level of terror is happening, but it's not the smart thing to do.
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  2. ​ @giftzwerg7345  sorry but that's just incorrect. Pitched battles were fairly uncommon. The vast majority of military actions were either raids or skirmishes, or sieges. The hundred years war to give just one example had many many sieges, while only a hand full of field battles happened. For a field battle both sides need to think they have the upper hard, since otherwise you can just run away (unless you get cornered against a river or something like that, but that doesn't happen a lot). Sieges happen at strategic positions and are usually where wars are really won. They are just far more time-consuming, and often take months to succeed. Field battles just catch the imagination a lot more, so they are a lot more discussed, and in movies even more, since they can be very cinematic. But fortifications are definitely good, and you don't run away from them just because you can't attack as well through fortifications. Definitely not when you are on the defensive anyway like in these cases. If you have technological and numerical superiority and are on the attack, yeah a battle in an open field is exactly what you want, the opponent is unlikely to oblige though.
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