Iron Harvest: When Farming Becomes Conquest

Roman had Vic manufacture a hundred individual longbows.

Longbow archers were a ranged unit, serving a suppressive function.

They were not very effective against heavy armor units but could hold a significant advantage against less disciplined troops.

However, their training was exceedingly difficult, even for a professional army detached from all other duties, it took half a year of training to be considered qualified, and the logistical challenge was enormous.

Arrowheads and arrow feathers were the least of the concerns; the former were easily cast, and economies of scale meant that producing tens of thousands of iron arrowheads at once could meet their needs for several months.

There wasn’t much difficulty producing arrow feathers either, as this land was abundant with birds.

It was the production of arrow shafts that was particularly challenging; a carpenter’s apprentice could manage to make only twenty to thirty shafts a day, even with a full set of planes, chisels, saws, and especially after Roman invented the human-powered lathe.

Roman’s specially manufactured foot-powered lathe increased the efficiency of the carpenters’ work by several times over.

The times were barbaric, technology backward, and tools primitive.

Outside of Sige Town, making ten arrow shafts a day was considered the mark of a competent carpenter—lacking proper tools, they had to rely solely on filing by hand.