To Use a Bow

Sat Jul 28, 2012 8:31 pm

Umtari’s new pride and joy worked and it worked well. Now he just needed to learn how to use it. He could hit a stationary target at close range, he had already proved that in the academy training grounds. Now he needed to learn how to hit distant moving targets, ideally in poor conditions. But Umtari was no fool, he would have to work his way up to that slowly. First he decided to tackle range. With the permission of his instructors he took several small, mundane items, such as logs, old plates and the like out to an old field that lay just outside the village walls. Here Umtari set the obstacles up at varying known distances from the point he would eventually fire from. This done he stalked over to the firing position and readied himself. The nearest obstacle was simple to hit, simply place the cross hairs of the overlay on the target and pull the trigger. This was the same for a great man of the targets, it was only when Umtari started shooting at targets beyond the half way mark that drop was becoming a noticeable problem. The bolts were not hitting with any less force, the friction of the air was near negligible. It was simply that there was no force buoying them up so they would hit the ground at the same time they would if Umtari just dropped a bolt from his hand.

Firing a bolt at one of the further targets Umtari used the adjustable zoom on his scope to see where the bolt had landed, then returning to the original setting he noted that point on his vertical axis and placed it, not the centre of the scope, over the target. Pulling the trigger again the bolt hurtled silently through the air and embedded deep into its target. Making a mental note of the distance between him and the target and the amount the bolt had dropped in that distance Umtari then quickly worked out drop per meter. Knowing how far away the next target was he then shifted his aim up slightly to allow for the extra drop. The exact point on the cross hairs sat somewhere between the mills points so Umtari was having to use a little bit of dead reckoning but still it was a lot better than nothing. Pulling the trigger again Umtari then used the zoom to see just where the bolt had landed. It had hit the target but only just, it had lodged into the very bottom of the plank he had been aiming at. Were that a person Umtari would have shot them in the foot. Using this knowledge however, Umtari was able to correct his dead reckoning aim and put the second shot square in the wood’s imaginary torso. Things were going well. Umtari kept this up, always reaching for further and further targets. At extreme ranges wind and other environmental factors were becoming a factor. Umtari discovered he could hit targets up to a range of roughly 200 feet before accuracy began to wane. He was determined to improve this but that would have to wait for later.

For now though, he was satisfied with his work and retired for the day. The next time he would come to this field he would work on moving targets. However, this was not as easy to achieve as it may first sound since he needed moving targets to hit. He did not yet feel ready to hit birds or other such creatures, ne needed a more controlled environment. So, he had to build the moving targets himself. It was a simple enough task but a time consuming one. He built rails for each of the targets to slide along. The targets themselves would have strings attached which could be pulled by men well off to the side of the field, safely out of harm’s way. It took a few days for him to construct the pieces of wood and beg, bully or bribe local boys into pulling the targets along for him. But eventually he got it all constructed and all placed in the same field. Umtari again knew the ranges, so adjusting his aim vertically was no real challenge. The difficulty came in leading the target. The boys would pull the various targets at random speeds, sometimes they walked, sometimes they barely moved and other times the sprinted. No matter what their speed though Umtari needed little to no lead at closer ranges. However, at roughly the same point he needed to start correcting for drop he also needed to put a more noticeable lead on a target. This was harder than adjusting for range because the both range and speed affected the size of the lead. At medium ranges putting the target just a little off the cross hairs before adjusting for elevation seemed to work reliably, no matter the opponent’s speed. At Longer ranges though this became much more difficult. Umtari was using trial and error for the moment in order to identify patterns in what he was hitting and not hitting. After about twenty minutes and a lot of bolts Umtari hit upon one pattern, if the target was barely moving he could readily hit it by putting a quarter of his elevation correction the lead. Umtari then started putting that proportion of correction on every one of his shots at all ranges and his hit rate went up dramatically, this seemed to be a reliable approach. Then he just had to start correcting for speed.

Targets that were barely moving warranted a negligible correction for speed. Shifting his attention to the walking speed targets Umtari started to systematically work through the possible corrections, starting at no further correction and gradually building up though roughly one tenth of a mil dot at a time. It took a while but eventually he found the sweet spot, shifting his attention to further away walking targets Umtari swiftly learned that the speed correction was an absolute whilst the distance correction was proportional, adding the two together to come up with the final lead should result in reliable hits. With this knowledge in hand Umtari at last shifted his attention to running speed targets. He started by doubling the walking speed lead only to find that he was regularly falling behind target. It took a few moments for Umtari to twig that average running speed was more than double walking speed. Turning his attention to two targets which were roughly in front of one another and one of which walked whilst the other ran he observed how long it took them to move between a tree and a boulder in the background. After some observation he determined that running speed was more akin to four times walking speed so he simply had to give four times the lead. Once this was done his shots were landing on target much more reliably.

The boys, noticing this, started demanding to go home, saying they were tired and that Umtari had done what he came here to do. But Umtari was having none of this, he kept the boys working, kept them pulling targets until it started to get dark. Umtari wanted to be able to make the necessary observations and calculation fast, turn them into something more akin to reflex than a conscious thought process. After all, in the hard nasty world of the ninja he might not have time to think. What was more was that he kept on making the boys come back, day after day. Umtari did not care if they were bored or miserable, such concerns did not trouble him. Umtari just wanted to get these shots down to reflex speeds. It was weeks until Umtari was happy and by that point the boys were extraordinarily grumpy and when he let them go they seemed even more disappointed that they were not getting some sort of extra reward. It was a life lesson they had to learn, often you have to work hard only for no thanks.

With his work on the range done Umtari decided to shift his attention to more organic targets. Birds were the first thought that came to mind. They were plentiful and Umtari could eat them afterwards, maybe even earn a few ryo by flogging off the ones he did not eat. Flushing them out was not difficult. All he would have to do was head out into the forest, climb a tree and sit up in the top and then, after waiting a while, throw a branch and make a big noise. A gaggle of the creatures was bound to go up after that. This Umtari did and low the birds did fly. Bracing the bow against the shoulder he took aim at a small group flying and pulled the trigger three times, two birds went down. His practice on the range was paying off, he could do fast adjustments and could guess ranges in his head now quite well. But whilst two out of three may not be bad it was not good enough. He sat and wondered why he had missed, the wind was not high, the birds were not taking erratic flight paths. It was a while before Umtari realised that the flight paths were the problem. There were moving diagonally away from him and until now he had only been practicing on back and forth and left to right. Once he knew this though he instinctively realised how to correct for it. Scaring up another gaggle of birds, which also flew diagonally away, Umtari just had to add a little more lead and increase the range adjustment by a fraction and as a result he hit them all. That could have been a fluke however, so coming down from his tree Umtari collected the bird corpses, moved to another area and repeated the process. He again hit the birds at an impressive rate, missing occasionally but always improving slightly. He repeated this pattern over and over again, over several evenings until Umtari was satisfied.

But still, this was not an end to his training. Umtari had the wind to contend with now. At anything less than 200 feet the wind was as nothing, it was only past that distance that it became a problem. Umtari had to find a way to correct for it. He knew his accuracy would never be perfect in high winds, gusts and surges were near impossible to account for and in storms the wind could move one way then the next in an instant. Umtari was already cooking up some interesting chakra based solutions to those problems in his head but for now he was concentrating purely on the more mundane solutions.

Setting up a target at 250 feet Umtari prepared to fire, he looked around for indicators of wind speed and direction. Swaying trees were a god indicator of strength but not of direction during intermittent winds. The direction the grass was leaning in however, was. At first Umtari had to pick an arbitrary value to correct by so he picked one mil dot. He then pulled the trigger and used the zoom to see where the bolt fell, it seemed Umtari had corrected a little too much. Adjusting for this he fired again and hit the target. Despite his success Umtari was still not satisfied, this was just one wind condition and he needed to fire in as many as possible before he went out into the wider world. He took a few more practice shots to ensure this hit was not a fluke and then retired for the day. He would then wait for the wind to change, sometimes it would change a few times in a day, other times it would stay the same for weeks. But every time it did change, rain or shine, Umtari would be out on his little homemade range, practicing adjusting for hind and always pushing the targets back. But because of the very nature of wind his accuracy could be good but not reliable at extreme range without outside help. But that was a problem for another day.

((Please note these events took place in the recent past.))

Sat Jul 28, 2012 9:47 pm

WC:2,038. Bow training approved.

To Use a Bow

To Use a Bow

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