The film industry produces many films about the Middle Ages, featuring knights, sword battles, beautiful princesses, brave heroes, storming fortresses, and so on. Video games in this genre are also very popular. But do the authors correctly show everything that happened at that time? In this material, we will not touch on the topic of magical creatures and fictional magical abilities, but only consider the most common mistakes of directors and developers of video games from the point of view of the laws of physics.

The concept of “Middle Ages” was used in a very generalized way, so let’s touch on the older eras as well. All the given facts of authors’ illiteracy do not make movies and games worse. They would probably look a lot more boring. If everything was very realistic, then some viewers and gamers would become uninterested in half an hour.

Wooden artillery

Catapults are very popular in movies. There they are the main siege devices. Their power is exaggerated tenfold. Most game developers and directors have no idea how these ancient artillery systems worked.

In the movie “Kingdom of Heaven”, Arab trebuchets fire huge fireballs at a distance of half a kilometer. Even with modern technologies, it is impossible to create a throwing mechanism of such power. A trebuchet uses a counterweight to launch stones. The counterweight must be hundreds of times greater for effective projectile launch.

It is enough to complete an 8th grade school physics course to understand the absurdity of the trebuchet scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. They launched projectiles proportional to the size of the counterweight. It’s like Pippin throwing a 50-kilogram stone at a distance of 200-300 meters. The level of realism is the same.

The situation is even worse with video games. Most catapult strategies are a dominant type of weapon. Rarely do game designers engage in detailed unit balancing. Wooden siege machines are always relevant among professional players in popular Real Time strategies.

This medieval technique in fairy tales destroys the powerful walls of cities and fortresses like cardboard houses. A few shots and the thick tower is destroyed. And there will be those who will accept it as historically reliable information.

Catapults in Stronghold are like nuclear weapons in the real world. They are invincible and everyone fears them. It doesn’t matter how many there are, 5, 50 or 500 – they destroy everything in their path, leaving a surface cleared of buildings and enemies.

The same applies to other throwing devices. Mangonels, trebuchets, catapults, onagers, ballistae – there are many varieties, but they are depicted unrealistically in almost all films and games.

Modern prototypes of medieval artillery systems look very boring and simple. We suggest watching a few videos with them to understand the scale of mockery of physics in the cinema and gaming industry.

Real castle sieges

In fact, the shovel was the best way to deal with the walls. Before the advent of powerful gunpowder weapons, it was difficult to fight with strongholds. It was almost impossible to break through the walls with catapults and trebuchets. Only in the dreams of video game and movie developers did they work effectively. In fact, trenches under the walls often gave the best result.

It was not necessary to destroy the walls and towers. Rams, siege towers and ordinary ladders were often used. But when it was not possible to take the castle by storm, then shovels went to the “battle”. Undermining the walls destroyed many more fortresses than any wooden types of artillery of the medieval era.

Catapults have had their place, but their effectiveness on the battlefield is greatly exaggerated on television and computer screens. These are cumbersome and slow mechanisms that require special maintenance.

Projectiles launched by them could cause significant damage to enemy infantry, pierce the roofs of buildings, damage the least fortified places (for example, windows), etc. They were sometimes used to dump dead and infected animals in the middle of the city. Plague and other diseases of the time were more serious threats than arrows and swords, so it was a perfectly working method.

Fantastic bows

The Mongol ruler Genghis Khan created the largest empire in human history. He conquered more lands than anyone else. It’s all thanks to horses and arrows. Let’s not underestimate the importance of bows in world history. They have been a key weapon in many conflicts. But let’s touch on how they are shown in movies and video games.

The film “Robin Hood” is painful for historians and physicists to watch. The director tried to make a film about special forces, in whose hands are not modern firearms, but wooden bows. They easily punch through well-armored sections like paper origami.

We see bows on the screens as accurate and deadly weapons that work according to the one shot – one kill method. It has nothing to do with reality. Unrealistic bow physics are found in fantasy and historical films.

What about games? It is very convenient when a character in an RPG toy can switch from a sword to a bow and is ready to shoot. It is not possible to wear onions in a stretched form. They were always assembled during the transfer and prepared right before the battle. In most games, archers have 100% chance to hit and infinite ammo.

It’s fun to watch how professional players find unbalanced units and easily beat the game on maximum difficulty. Suffice it to mention the corrupted archers in Mount and Blade: Bannerlord.

They are snipers who shoot fast and armored enemies like standing rabbits on a hunt. The power of arrows and the accuracy of shooters in movies and games are overrated. In fact, they are only effective against weakly defended targets in large clusters.

Cardboard armor

And we smoothly move on to armor. The way armor interacts with weapons deserves a separate chapter. It’s amazing to see how wooden arrows shatter a well-protected warrior. Like swords, they cut through metal mail and full plates with hacking blows. This is all a primitive imagination of science fiction writers, video game developers, and film directors.

It is almost impossible to pierce medieval battlements with a wooden arrow. It is not an iron tip, but a wooden base. The tree is not able to transmit a sufficient amount of energy. The arrow ricochets off the chest of a warrior in armor like an AK47 bullet from a modern body armor of the highest level.

Modern block bows, with their superior design and much better energy output, cannot always penetrate full patches at very close range. From a distance of 50-100 meters, only scratches will be left.

Only the use of modern metal arrows and Olympic-style block bows can penetrate armor. Ancient bows had much worse characteristics than modern ones, including shooting at championships, and the arrows then were only wooden.

But this does not prevent the heroes of movies and video games from destroying opponents with arrows, as if it were an AW 50 BMG (a modern rifle with super-powerful armor-piercing cartridges of 50 caliber).

Iron bolts were used in crossbows. They were indeed effective and often inflicted serious wounds even on well-protected opponents.

Swords couldn’t handle full armor either. Only stabbing blows and sharp lunges gave a chance to inflict serious damage. Wearing medieval armor in movies and video games has nothing to do with reality in most scenarios. Another mockery of the laws of physics.

In fact, most wounds suffered by well-protected medieval warriors were similar to those found in modern warfare. That is, the limbs, neck, places that are difficult to protect with thick armor suffered mainly.

Heavy weapons

Many ignorant amateurs spread information on the Internet that ancient warriors carried swords weighing 10, 20 or 30 kilograms. Powerful Vikings killed enemies with heavy 20-30 kilogram axes. This is all absolute nonsense that only children (or grown children) can believe.

Even thousands of years ago, people understood the elementary laws of physics, although they did not know how to describe them using a mathematical method. The fact is that mass has less effect on the final energy than the speed of the object. Let’s recall the school formula that describes the law of kinetic energy:

E is energy

m is mass

V is speed

E=0.5*m*V²

Energy is directly proportional to mass, but quadratically proportional to velocity. We increase the mass from 2 kg to 4 kg and the energy increases by 2 times. We increase the speed from 2 m/s to 4 m/s and the kinetic energy increases 4 times! Giving acceleration to a light object is much easier.

It is irrational to use heavy swords, axes and hammers. Such a “warrior” would be slaughtered in the first minutes of the battle like a domestic pig. No carrier of such heavy objects is capable of worthily fighting an enemy who uses light weapons.

Only a real idiot would carry a sword that is difficult to accelerate to a good speed. Real European one-handed and two-handed swords weighed within 1 kg. The impact force of such a weapon will be many times greater than swinging a huge piece of iron. Later, swords were replaced by thin swords, which were indeed capable of piercing strong armor.

In the Ukrainian fairy tale about Kotygoroshka, we have the same situation. The boy took a heavy mace and defeated the dragon. The level of realism of the tale “Kotyhoroshko” is no less than in the vast majority of modern films and video games about ancient times, the Middle Ages, magic, etc. Large melee weapons in TVs and monitors are a child’s fantasy.

Conclusions

The film industry works to interest and surprise the viewer. Boring and realistic movies would not get so many views. It is especially important to interest the children and teenage audience, and when using historically reliable and true facts, the film can lose most of the income.

Most directors do not bother and add powerful 500-meter trebuchets, mercilessly accurate and powerful bows. The main characters pierce the armor of enemies like cardboard.

Video games are even further removed from reality. It is difficult to find a project where everything is balanced and well executed. In one game, deadly catapults destroy entire armies and cities in a few shots, in another archers never miss with endless arrows, in yet another we play as a 50-kilogram girl who carries a three-meter sword behind her back.

Realism and the realm of entertainment often diverge, but that doesn’t stop us from taking a positive critical look at what filmmakers and video game developers have to offer. And they offer a fairy tale to a greater extent