Why didn’t Sadeas train his bridgemen?

[king of nowhere]

3 hours ago, Pathfinder said:

As mentioned later, the parshendi are intelligent, and adaptive during battle conditions. Apparently I used the incorrect terminology, but when Kaladin and his squad are running towards the enemy lines at the beginning of Way of Kings, the enemy archers shot arrows in a high arc so the arrows would come down in the most concentrated portion of the oncoming forces. For informational purposes, what type of bow did they use then?

 

there are many, many kinds of bows, but that's irrelevant. the reason to launch at an angle has to do with the laws of ballistics. If you shoot directly, gravity still affects your arrow, so it will fall down. you shoot directly over short distances, where the falling down of the arrow is negligible. if you are shooting at a target far away, you aim above your target, to compensate for the fact that your arrow will fall down a bit due to gravity. the more distant the target, the higher you have to aim; you get the greater distance by aiming 45 degrees over the horizon; if you keep raising your trajectory over that angle, you lose range again, because you lose too much forward speed.

so, the reason in some scenes they are firing directly and in some scenes they are firing high has nothing to do with strategy and depends only on the distance of the target. when the alethi armies charged each other, they were far away, and the archers were aiming far to hit the distant army. when the parshendi shoot at the bridgmen, the bridgemen were very close, so they would shoot directly. and once kaladin used the side carry to protect his team, the parshendi again shoot high to hit the army, which was farther off.

[Pathfinder]

9 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

there are many, many kinds of bows, but that's irrelevant. the reason to launch at an angle has to do with the laws of ballistics. If you shoot directly, gravity still affects your arrow, so it will fall down. you shoot directly over short distances, where the falling down of the arrow is negligible. if you are shooting at a target far away, you aim above your target, to compensate for the fact that your arrow will fall down a bit due to gravity. the more distant the target, the higher you have to aim; you get the greater distance by aiming 45 degrees over the horizon; if you keep raising your trajectory over that angle, you lose range again, because you lose too much forward speed.

so, the reason in some scenes they are firing directly and in some scenes they are firing high has nothing to do with strategy and depends only on the distance of the target. when the alethi armies charged each other, they were far away, and the archers were aiming far to hit the distant army. when the parshendi shoot at the bridgmen, the bridgemen were very close, so they would shoot directly. and once kaladin used the side carry to protect his team, the parshendi again shoot high to hit the army, which was farther off.

Originally on bridge runs, the bridge crew would run with the bridge up on their shoulders. It wouldn't make sense to shoot up in an arc as it would hit the bridge and accomplish nothing. However the bridge crews are far enough away for the arc shot, because Sadeas's archers pepper the Parshendi archers in turn to keep pressure off the bridge crews. It is mentioned part of the failure of the side carry, is because the parshendi began focus firing on other crews that were trying the side carry they didn't prepare for, that Sadeas's archers didn't know where to target to help, because all of the bridge crews were under attack. So the parshendi to me could definitely fire on the bridge crews from above or from directly on. Just since firing directly on, they employed short bows.

 

edit: also keep in mind the parshendi would have an advantage that you would not normally have. The chasms. They do not have to worry about infantry charging them while firing the arrows over their heads, and directly at them, because they have to get the bridges down first. The whole purpose of running the bridges is to get as many down as possible, to send the cavalry over to make a beach head long enough for the infantry to cross. Prior to that, the only danger to the parsh is enemy archers. 

Edited March 3, 2020 by Pathfinder

[Wander89]

summed up: he's a b*****d!