You know what. I am a lot happier now. Literally. Happy. It is sad that so much martial arts knowledge was simply dumped, not thrown into garbage pile but in fact incinerated. A lot of modern "martial arts" are plagued by sports. Sports destroys any practicality, it usually emphasizes wrong things such as with hand to hand it emphasizes convincing judges of your hit, not actually knocking out your enemy. In archery it seems sports did the same thing as for competition shooting where people are in perfect conditions and aim for something like a minute per shot. How practical. In shooting they also use very low caliber weapons which are also highly impractical. Imagine going to war with .22 sniper rifle. Yeup. Did anyone else feel like buying a half decent bow and starting to practice that stuff?
Used to sometimes practice while holding one arrow, nowhere near that speed or on that level though. Scariest part is, he accurately does that speed shooting at long ranges also, like 60 yards and up.
Most of what he's doing is trick shooting, which doesn't have much of a martial practicality. His interpretation on using what appears to be a modified Mongolian draw along with arrows in the draw hand is interesting, though.
Don't know about you but catching incoming arrows and shooting them back or shooting incoming arrows has a lot of martial practicality unless you like getting hit by a arrow. Along with the ability to shoot and accurately hit targets as fast as he is.
Shooting fast and accurately, useful. Trying to shoot arrows out of the air with other arrows? Not useful and dangerous to train. Firing accurately at long distances? Useful. Jumping off a wall to shoot something at point-blank range? Not so useful. Hitting moving targets? Useful. Firing at stuff with your bow hooked over your foot? Not so useful. Firing accurately over close ranges while in motion yourself? Useful. Catching arrows out of the air? Not useful and dangerous to train.
So if you had a friend and archer was getting ready to lodge a arrow into his head and you had 3 ways to save him which were. A : push him out of the way and get hit by arrow. B : Shoot arrow out of the air C : grab arrow out of air and shoot the archer. D : or just let him die but you say..... Trying to shoot arrows out of the air with other arrows? Not useful and dangerous to train. Catching arrows out of the air? Not useful and dangerous to train. scenario b you jump over a low wall and as your mid way jump 3 raiders pop out of the bushes. A : do nothing, get capture and ass raped. B: Shoot them in the air as you come down. C : try to shoot them as you hit the ground pulling arrows out wasting time and you get a mourning star to the face. Jumping off a wall to shoot something at point-blank range? Not so useful.
Scenario C: Don gives no fucks, uses no arrows, and isn't the least bit concerned with being/ being shot by an archer in the 21st century. Don lives a long life with a pronounced absence of arrow-related injuries, being raped, or morning stars to the face.
Then to act categorically coherently you shouldn't give a fuck about things like ww2 either since there weren't any missiles and nuclear weapons weren't really a thing (it ended for good before they really became a thing). Also, not give no fucks about history, museums and such. For some sad fucks like me, history is very important and arguing thins that lost their meaning hundreds of years ago is all the rage. Kind of like, grabbing a hand grenade from your feet and tossing it back is dangerous. Or taking out a tank with AT weapon is dangerous, not to mention shoulder launched stuff - those guys aren't pretty much even expected to survive. At least if you eventually learned to catch arrows from air it had a practical use. I suppose your point is that you wouldn't be instating catching arrows or wall jumping as an official part of your archer force. That would be correct, done in mass scale could easily lead to tons of injuries and accidents. It's not like modern armies go about teaching special forces stuff to rank and file troops, some of the stuff is so rigorous that the ordinary guys could get severely injured. Would I pick guys that can catch arrows for personal life guard? Totally. And I would first toss out the guys that take 60+ seconds to aim and have to restart because they lost concentration. I'd rather have people who run out of arrows than people who die with quivers full.
Extend it so you can shoot incoming artillery shells from the air. Also shoot at rifle rounds coming at you. Real world Jedi.
Laser wins. You cannot block it and you cannot reflect it. It is absorbed by what it hits. Whatever secondary emission is caused by the increased energy stance of the absorbing material does not save it from increase in energy.
well that's not entirely true, it can both be blocked and reflected but whatever is used to block/reflect will still have to deal with any energy transference that it's unable to negate or reflect. However, defense against a laser would be far more efficient using diffusion techniques, even a fine mist with enough volume would inevitably rob the laser of it's damaging ability. Alternatively, making the majority components transparent, or creating some kind of diffractional skin might help, but would probably not be sufficient overall, without being able to take down the laser itself.
Seen a few of these long lost speed shooting technique videos, here's some well presented counterpoints to what actually went down in military applications:
How do you make a diffraction skin, when we're not talking about visible light but wavelengths that are instantly absorbed since laser weapons would not operate on visible wavelengths. The mist is actually a good defense and in space most spaceships would in any case want to surround them with charged plasma cloud which can be kept relatively in place around the ship and offers protection against cosmic rays(particles) and can be used to repel things like missiles. The main issue is that if it's dense and wide enough you could absorb a pretty powerful laser with it but on the other hand the plasma field around you would heat tremendously. You would be in a frying pan with heat seeping in from all sides. That's kind of the inherent issue with sitting in a cloud of plasma. Of course in atmosphere and if weapons must be handheld a laser is not a real threat, though I'd use a system of cameras sending visual to screens in front of my eyes just so I wouldn't get instantly blinded. But even then the cameras would get fried quite easily though at least they can be made more durable than eyes and you can have spares. I always laugh when people think that laser is like visible light and that they could somehow reflect most of it with a simple mirror or specular surface. Or when they think that having a black matte surface on a spaceship makes it harder to see.
