A lot of it makes a ton of sense. But draw weight of the bow and weight of the arrows make a huge difference. Would be really interesting to see him do this even half as effectively using and 80-100lb warbow with heavy war arrows. Weaker stuff will not punch through even the worst armour at any kind of decent range. Also I wonder if this works with light flight arrows used to harass enemy at range and kill horses.
His technique does show how bad it was for the horses and why Mongols needed to bring as many remounts as they did. Battle between two horse archer armies must have been a real horse slaughter.
Also that mail shot, I bet cash that is a crap butted mail. Try same with riveted mail covered with gambeson and see what happens(nothing, this arrows will bounce like it was a wall)
On a castle tour in the UK there was a discussion about the advantage the longbow gave the English. Something that I had not considered was that shooting an arrow up at an angle, allowed it to accelerate due to gravity on the way down, and that was a large component of its velocity at impact. In this way the amount of energy it lost due to air resistance was minimized. Much more complex than I expected.
I very much doubt that the arrow will gain any velocity going down that it didn't have when shot upwards. Remember that the arrow needs initial vertical velocity to reach any height.
With heavy war arrows you can easily shoot through riveted mail and layers of gambeson. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ32VnjOQ28) you can see a war arrow going right through rived mail and 8 layers of gambeson.
This Guy is bowyer and historian, and will be presenting research about this very subject at a medieval studies conference this spring.
Have not checked HN in couple days, hope you notice this. I misspoke in my original comment I was referring to a jack not gambeson as arrow protection oops. And even bigger problem is that mail he uses is bad quality you can see from ring density and thickness. here is a great set of tests http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131&postdays...
His technique does show how bad it was for the horses and why Mongols needed to bring as many remounts as they did. Battle between two horse archer armies must have been a real horse slaughter.
Also that mail shot, I bet cash that is a crap butted mail. Try same with riveted mail covered with gambeson and see what happens(nothing, this arrows will bounce like it was a wall)