I'm going slightly off-topic, but one of my pet peeves in movies is how instantly everyone dies:
Touch by a sword? Death is instantaneous.
Pierced by an arrow? You're dead before you hit the ground.
Wearing armor? It won't help. At all. One touch and you're done for.
In real life, death usually takes longer. And battlefields (especially ancient battle fields) are filled with screaming as people slowly die.
The show, “Connections” in 1979 touched on this. (James Burke)
Talking about ancient battles, He hung up a side of beef on a rope, took a nice sharp broadsword and started hacking away at it. He then said that that is what it does to a human being. It was gruesome.
He then, describing some famous battle a thousand or so years ago, said, each side, “Started doing this to one another as hard as they could”. He said, as you pointed out, most of those guys died a day or a week later.
And Louis l’amour discusses this regarding the old west and gun battles. He mentions that most of the time gunshot wounds were fatal only after serious infection set in. And he discussed on gunfight he “just missed” around the turn of the 20th century where a Texas Ranger and a drug dealer emptied each others guns into one another. Both died, but not right away.
This also gets into the concept of bullets as “man killer vs man stopper”.
But yeah, It cracks me up when they get shot and drop to a knee and say, “Ya GOT ME!” and die.
Phasers set to kill are way different, though.