Crossbow vs Gun what if question

[XT]

I was recently re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (in the vain hope that by re-reading the series it will somehow mystically spark the author to actually get moving on writing the next book...hope springs eternal). In the latest book, Knife of Dreams, one of the main characters is describing a new crossbow crank that has revolutionized warfare by allowing the soldier to spin a crank 3 times and fully cock the crossbow. This allows a rate of fire unheard of before...something on the order of 6-7 shots per minute according to the story. Probably unreasonable...but I could see how such a crank might get you 5 shots per minute...better than anything before the cap lock rifle I think.

I can see how you COULD make such a crank...though I'm unsure if such a thing WOULD have been made in sufficient numbers using pre-gunpowder technology. For debate though, lets assume that there is a way it could be done before gunpowder firearms came widely into use in Europe.

Assuming you could get 5-6 shots off of a heavy crossbow per minute would personal gunpowder firearms have ever even been developed? I would think the advantages of a rapid firing crossbow would have relegated gunpowder firearms to obscurity and stifled their development...at least until someone figured out how to rifle the barrels and maybe breach loading to get similar rates of fire.

-XT

[athelas]

The Chu-ko-nu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow):This weapon was extremely easy to manufacture and use, and, in the hands of a trained soldier, could easily launch ten bolts in fifteen seconds. In comparison, a standard arbalest could barely shoot one in that time. The chu-ko-nu, however, had neither the power nor the accuracy of a common crossbow. . Gunpowder still has the advantage of range, and of course cannon are much more useful against fortifications than crossbows, regardless of the rate of fire.

[matt]

Trouble with that is, spinning the crank just 3 times to cock the bow makes it twice as hard to crank as one that requires 6 spins. Or ten times as hard to crank as one that requires 30 spins.

The cranking mechanism for a crossbow will be designed to accomodate the difference between the strength of the bow and the strength of its operator. To crank faster, you need a weaker bow or a stronger operator. The Hulk could just heave the string back without a crank and get a hell of a rate of fire, but there's no magic mechanism to allow an ordinary person to do this.

One way or another, you're turning muscle power into projectile energy. There's a limit to the work rate a human can provide. Fire more often, less energy per projectile.

[Alessan]

I doubt it.

First of all, even the most powerful crossbow wouldn't have the armor piercing ability of a basic arquebus.

Second of all, even if gunpowder small arms weren't invented, the development heavy weaponry - cannons, mortars etc. - would go on unabated. Eventually, someone would have invented the percussion cap and the brass casing, and 20 minutes later would have had the idea to make a very very small version of the cannon for personal use.

Third of all, Robert Jordan is full of shit.

[lokij]

I believe that crossbows such as you describe were available and surpassed early firearms in rate of fire and effective range. They used a variety of ratchet, windlass and lever systems. This wasn't enough to keep them in use, however. Crossbows are complicated mechanical devices, with many moving parts (things to break) and are expensive to manufacture and maintain. Early guns by contrast were little more than a bored out metal tube with a touch-hole and a wood stock. Other than a slightly higher rate of fire, why would you choose the more expensive and fragile option when you're passing out weapons to the tercios, even if it were feasible? Until Gustavus Adolphus the bulk of the work was ususally done by pikemen anyways. :>

[Boozahol Squid, P.I.]

Another aspect may be the psychological effect of gunpowder weapons. The tremendous bang of a line of early firearms would have a significantly more damaging effect on the morale on the receiving troops than the twang of similar crossbows.
The goal of warfare from time immemorial has never really been to kill all the opposing troops (a few Cannaes excepted), but to make the enemy run.

[smiling bandit]

Rogbert Jordan definitely does not know his stuff. Such a weapon as he decribes would be all but useless, as it would neccessarily have very low force; the full cocked state of the crossbow would be weak. This means it would have low range, accuracy, and penetrating power in battle, and still be more unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to use than bows. What possible use could there be for such a weapon?

In real life, crossbows were generally used to soften up a target pretty much like bows were. Until fairly late in their development (they date well back before BC, IIRC), they were rarely used on the battlefield. By the Middle Ages, they had a lower rate of fire than bows from other regions of the world*, but had considerable force and good range.

They had a particular use in seige warfare, since it didn't take much to makea very large and powerful crossbow. Hence, you could make one with the same technology which was a small man-portable seige weapon, capable of a three thousand pound draw! It took a while to re-cock, but in a seige a few minutes more or less won't matter.

*The advantage was that the recurved wood/bone/animal glue bows used elsewhere in the world tended to fall apart in Europe. Too many cold, damp mornings. The bows just got soggy and flew to peices. You could use them for a battle, maybe, but on real campaign they were useless. A crossbow could be unlimbered and used as soon as the mechanism was dry. A lack of just that caused severe problems at Poiters for the Genoese mercenaries in the service of the French.

[Little Nemo]

Crossbows are a deadend technology. Ultimately, you're dependent on muscle power. Guns are based on chemical energy which gave them a lot more room to develop in. This was obvious right from the beginning of gunpowder technology so weapons designers realized that even if contemporary guns weren't better than crossbows, an investment in improving gun designs was better than an investment in improving crossbow designs.

[Miller]

I believe that crossbows such as you describe were available and surpassed early firearms in rate of fire and effective range. They used a variety of ratchet, windlass and lever systems. This wasn't enough to keep them in use, however. Crossbows are complicated mechanical devices, with many moving parts (things to break) and are expensive to manufacture and maintain. Early guns by contrast were little more than a bored out metal tube with a touch-hole and a wood stock. Other than a slightly higher rate of fire, why would you choose the more expensive and fragile option when you're passing out weapons to the tercios, even if it were feasible? Until Gustavus Adolphus the bulk of the work was ususally done by pikemen anyways. :>

Which brings us to a much more important point: ditch that Robert Jordan crap, and go pick up a copy of Eric Flint's 1632.

[Martini Enfield]

Guns also possess a psychological factor not present with crossbows... they're noisy and generate smoke and flame- if you employ them against an army composed of conscripts who are unfamiliar with them (especially in the late middle ages or early Renaissance), and you're going to have an extremely effective physical and psychological ranged weapon.

[Windwalker]

Robert Jordan has become a very tedious writer, but I wouldn't hold his crossbow "invention" against him. He's a fiction writer, for chissakes, and a fantasy one at that! The genre is filled with all sorts of contraptions and such that have no hope of obeying the laws of physics. Perhaps the magic that the Aes Sedai draw upon also infuse crossbow mechanics (think of it like power steering ;)).

[Lumpy]

*The advantage was that the recurved wood/bone/animal glue bows used elsewhere in the world tended to fall apart in Europe. Too many cold, damp mornings. The bows just got soggy and flew to peices. You could use them for a battle, maybe, but on real campaign they were useless.It isn't cold and soggy in Japan? In northern China?

[MrDibble]

Such a weapon as he decribes would be all but useless, as it would neccessarily have very low force; the full cocked state of the crossbow would be weak. This means it would have low range, accuracy, and penetrating power in battle, and still be more unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to use than bows. What possible use could there be for such a weapon?

The Chinese managed to get use out of just "such a weapon" for 2 millennia - did you read athelas' link?

[chowder]

The Chinese managed to get use out of just "such a weapon" for 2 millennia - did you read athelas' link?
Then they came up with gunpowder :p

[Malodorous]

The Chinese managed to get use out of just "such a weapon" for 2 millennia - did you read athelas' link?

The weapon in athelas's link actually has the flaw Smiling is talking about, its underpowered compared to slower firing crossbows (and firearms, presumably).

[RedSwinglineOne]

You tube has a video that from the history channel of a repeating crossbow here. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=H8QIFvW4d60&mode=related&search=)
Its about 1 min. in.
Underpowered doesn't begin to describe it.

[Malodorous]

You tube has a video that from the history channel of a repeating crossbow here. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=H8QIFvW4d60&mode=related&search=)
Its about 1 min. in.
Underpowered doesn't begin to describe it.

Yea, it drives the arrow (shaft? quarrel?) just like 4 inches into those hay bails at close range. Against an armored opponent, you'd just be pissing them off.

Neat video by the way, thanks.

[Sailboat]

The English longbow was made from wood with two different resistances to bending -- if I recall, from a single piece of wood, but, cunningly, some of it was "heartwood" and the rest normal timber -- thus mimicking (not consciously) the stronger performance of the wood, glue, and bone composite bows used in Asia, but without the dange of glue getting wet in the English climate.

In general, bows had several military advantages over crossbows.

They could fire faster, being easier to load and draw. They imparted more impulse to their projectile, giving greater accuracy. (Impulse in this case was a function of acceleration over time, time being draw length).

Their projectile (an arrow) was itself longer, allowing the stabilizing feathers to be placed farther from the arrow's center of gravity, reducing destabilization or tumbling, especially at long range.

Beacause the bow is tall and narrow when in use, more bowmen can be packed into a given frontage of the line than crossbowmen.

Hence, from two equal lengths of front, bowmen would throw many more projectiles farther and more accurately and much more often than crossbowmen.

The longbow was considerably better than early firearms that replaced it.

But it required much more training, its armor-penetrating power was quickly surpassed by guns, and it lacked gunpowder's ability to frighten unfamiliar troops (and perhaps also cavalry horses). Also, arrows take more wagon space than lead balls, when one is packing tens of thousands of them.

Still, a force of crack longbowmen would have been an asset even as late as the Revolutionary War, perhaps.

Sailboat

[XT]

I thank everyone for their posts...very interesting. Even those who don't like Robert Jordan (which seems to be the majority position around these parts).

First of all, even the most powerful crossbow wouldn't have the armor piercing ability of a basic arquebus

What do you base this statement on? Unless I'm mistaken a heavy crossbow has the ability to penetrate period armor about the same as that of the early (or even later pre-rifled) arquebus. At about the same range. The primary problem with the cross-bow was that it was bulky, cumbersome and the rate of fire was far less than for the bow....and less than for even the early model firearms too IIRC.

Trouble with that is, spinning the crank just 3 times to cock the bow makes it twice as hard to crank as one that requires 6 spins. Or ten times as hard to crank as one that requires 30 spins.

Sure, depending on what gearing you are using...or what ever else you are using for mechanical advantage. My assumption was that there is a gearing mechanism out there that could move a heavy crossbow into firing position by cranking the device 3 times...but not requiring the user to have a hulk like build. I'm reasonably certain such a winding mechanism is possible...whether its feasible or not I couldn't say.

For the debate I was basically just saying what if such a thing WERE possible. That a HEAVY CROSSBOW (not a light crossbow that other posters seem to be fixated on) were capable of being fired at a rate of 5-6 shots per minute.

One way or another, you're turning muscle power into projectile energy. There's a limit to the work rate a human can provide. Fire more often, less energy per projectile.

Certainly...probably why we develop machines to give us mechanical advantage, ehe? Otherwise why use a bow at all when you could just throw a stick at your opponent. I've seen modern heavy crossbows that use muscle power to cock...and can be cocked rapidly. Granted they are using modern materials. However, I'm relatively certainly that, even using period methods, a winding mechanism could be made to enable a heavy crossbow (with all the power that implies) to be cocked relatively rapidly. Whether such a beast was feasible to make in quantity given the technology of the time is another question.


I can't find it now (I'm at work and don't have much time) but one poster in the thread mentioned the complexity of a crossbow (and of course the even more complex mechanism proposed to cock it so rapidly) as a potential problem. I admit, I hadn't thought of that and this seems a very valid argument. Much more so that 'Robert Jordan sucks', in my own book anyway.

-XT

[matt]

My assumption was that there is a gearing mechanism out there that could move a heavy crossbow into firing position by cranking the device 3 times...but not requiring the user to have a hulk like build. I'm reasonably certain such a winding mechanism is possible...whether its feasible or not I couldn't say.I'm not so certain that it IS possible by modifying the drawing mechanism. You're limited by conservation of energy. Heavy crossbows used a gear-and-ratchet bar mechanism (cranequin) or windlass to draw them back. To make these operate faster, you'd have to reduce the mechanical advantage they give, so the operator needs greater strength. The only way you can get "something for nothing" from this end is if the cranequin or windlass are very inefficient and waste a lot of the operator's muscle power. By removing such inefficiences, you could up the cranking speed without requiring greater strength. I have no data regarding this.


I've seen modern heavy crossbows that use muscle power to cock...and can be cocked rapidly. Granted they are using modern materials. However, I'm relatively certainly that, even using period methods, a winding mechanism could be made to enable a heavy crossbow (with all the power that implies) to be cocked relatively rapidly. Whether such a beast was feasible to make in quantity given the technology of the time is another question. That is different. According to this site (http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html), modern crossbows transfer much more of their stored elastic energy to the bolt, to the extent that a 150 lb draw modern crossbow can loose a bolt with higher velocity than a 740 lbs (ye gods!) draw medieval crossbow. Such a bow could certainly be cranked more rapidly, in fact by weakening the draw to 125lbs you could dispense with the crank and pull the thing by hand (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2866061), giving 7-8 shots per minute.

Whether such a bow could be constructed with period technology is a good question. I suspect that much of the improvement is due to the compound string arrangement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Horton_Hunter_Supreme_by_IvE.jpg) rather than materials technology. The trick is to put more of the bow's energy into the bolt rather than leaving it in the juddering ends of prod after the bolt has departed.

So, assuming a powerful but low draw force, 3-turn crankable bow could be build with period technology, your OP becomes feasible! How would such a development have affected history? Not my field, but I suspect gunpowder weapons would initially have been limited to artillery. I'm not sure at what point a gunpowder firearm would have appeared a viable alternative to the advanced crossbow... after breech loading was developed? Cartridged ammo? In this scenario, there would be little impetus to develop the matchlock and flintlock firing mechanisms!

One advantage that primitive gunpowder has over advanced crossbows however, is that there's no decent crossbow equivalent of the pistol in terms of bulk, or rather the lack of it. Perhaps pistols would have developed anyway as sidearms and short range weapons, locks and barrel making improving over time, and the musket then emerging from them.

Tangential, but I thought I'd share this link:
http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=6838

[XT]

Excellent post matt! Exactly what I was looking for in this thread.

I'm not so certain that it IS possible by modifying the drawing mechanism. You're limited by conservation of energy. Heavy crossbows used a gear-and-ratchet bar mechanism (cranequin) or windlass to draw them back. To make these operate faster, you'd have to reduce the mechanical advantage they give, so the operator needs greater strength. The only way you can get "something for nothing" from this end is if the cranequin or windlass are very inefficient and waste a lot of the operator's muscle power. By removing such inefficiences, you could up the cranking speed without requiring greater strength. I have no data regarding this.


Maybe I'm missing something here. I've used a ratchet system to lift a car rapidly using just muscle power...and a car weighs significantly more than even the 750lb draw you mentioned (I'm also not exactly Arnold here with massive thews of steel). Granted, most of the rapid systems I've seen are hydrolic...but it should be possible to do the same thing with a series of differential gears, perhaps with some pulleys as well. No? Using a modern understanding of how mechanical advantage works, surely its possible to get 750lbs of draw by someone who can do 125lbs...thats less than 7 to 1 which doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

-XT

[BrainGlutton]

According to Michael Bellesiles' controversial book Arming America, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America) the great range and penetrating power of the longbow (not the crossbow) did, in fact, relegate personal firearms to a marginal role, until somebody invented a fairly simple and reliable muzzle-loading flintlock musket (the earlier arquebuses having been more complex and more difficult to handle in a combat situation).

[Gorsnak]

Maybe I'm missing something here. I've used a ratchet system to lift a car rapidly using just muscle power...and a car weighs significantly more than even the 750lb draw you mentioned (I'm also not exactly Arnold here with massive thews of steel). Granted, most of the rapid systems I've seen are hydrolic...but it should be possible to do the same thing with a series of differential gears, perhaps with some pulleys as well. No? Using a modern understanding of how mechanical advantage works, surely its possible to get 750lbs of draw by someone who can do 125lbs...thats less than 7 to 1 which doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

-XT
Here's the thing: as you increase mechanical advantage, you also increase the input movement length. Take two hydraulic jacks, a one ton jack and a ten ton jack. For the same amount of work I do pumping the handle, the ten ton jack will only move 1/10 as far as the one ton jack. A hydraulic jack (or any other mechanical advantage device) doesn't amplify your physical effort; it merely concentrates it.

If you increase the mechanical advantage on your crossbow crank by a factor of three, you now need to move the crank three times as far to pull the string back the same distance. The only way to increase the mechanical advantage of a crank without increasing the number of turns it has to make would be to increase the length of the crank arm itself, thereby providing greater leverage, but I would imagine that longer crank arms on a crossbow very rapidly become impracticable.

[ralph124c]

In the accounts of medieval battles, most crossbowmen seemed to be mercenary soldiers (Genoese, Swiss, Florentines). Being hired, most would probably not have fought with such elan as the English longbowmen. In an account of the Battle of Crecy, these hired crossbowmwn actually sized up the situation and left the battle early. I suspect that the crossbow was a good weapon for siege warfare, but not so good in open battle (a longbowman could get of several arrows while the hapless crossbowman was winding his crank. In any event the crossbow disappeared very rapidly, once the musket was developed.

[RickJay]

Certainly...probably why we develop machines to give us mechanical advantage, ehe? Otherwise why use a bow at all when you could just throw a stick at your opponent. I've seen modern heavy crossbows that use muscle power to cock...and can be cocked rapidly. Granted they are using modern materials. However, I'm relatively certainly that, even using period methods, a winding mechanism could be made to enable a heavy crossbow (with all the power that implies) to be cocked relatively rapidly. Whether such a beast was feasible to make in quantity given the technology of the time is another question.
Now, though, you're starting to get not only into complexity, but also weight and dimensionality issues. Machines can get you the most out of yoiur muscles, but the upper limit is still reached far, far below what a relatively primitive chemically powered device can do. And there's a limit as to what gears can do for you unless you start getting into some pretty large and/or heavy gears, and there's a limit to the tension that a machine of a given structural strength can take. You don't want your soldiers carrying frickin' bicycles around.

Machinery's great but the conversion from muscle-powered to chemical-powered devices is invariably a huge, huge revolution in warfare, whether it's the propelling of projectiles or the movement of soldiers and material.

[MrDibble]

The weapon in athelas's link actually has the flaw Smiling is talking about, its underpowered compared to slower firing crossbows (and firearms, presumably).

...and yet they were still using them at the end of the 19th C. So clearly it had some utility for them, even when they also had composite bows, foot bows, firearms, flamethrowers... bandit said he couldn't see what possible use such a weapon could have. Maybe the high rate of fire is all it takes to make it useful in certain situations.

Then they came up with gunpowder
This is a woosh, right?

[matt]

Using a modern understanding of how mechanical advantage works, surely its possible to get 750lbs of draw by someone who can do 125lbs...thats less than 7 to 1 which doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

-XT Perfectly correct. It's just that your 7 to 1 mechanical advantage also means you have to move the cranking device through 7 times the distance of the straight pull. Another factor here is how you use a crank or windlass, compared with a straight pull. Compare the two images near the top of this page (http://www.arcobosque.com/ballesta.htm). It's quite a different way of using your arms! The sorts of mechanical advantages I've been reading about are between 40-1 and 100-1 for a cranequin, depending on the gearing. Whether you actually need such high mechanical advantages to crank, I've no idea without actually trying the things.

My ballpark guesstimate is that a 3-turn crank gives a roughly 19-1 advantage (I assumed crank arm is twice the draw length) which on simple considerations should be more than enough, but is nowhere near the advantage of historic cranequins. Truth is, unless we build the things and play with them, we're just not going to be able to know how easy or hard they were to use. I can't even find out how many cranks the historic cranks take to draw a bow, youtube and google video have let me down...

[matt]

And now I find a link that cites a Scientific American article:
http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Science/Helicon.asp?SID=2&iPin=ffests0227

"the windlass, was introduced in the 14th century. This used pulleys, attached at the butt end of the stock to a winding device that, when hooked onto the bowstring and wound, drew it to the trigger. The windlass could draw the string in only 12 seconds, even though it had a pull of 545 kilograms (1,200 lb)."

"The cranequin required very little strength to draw the crossbow string, but it was slower than the windlass, requiring 35 seconds for loading."

So it looks like the cranequin was like a scissors-type car jack, not requiring much force but taking a lot of winding.

[Scumpup]

According to Michael Bellesiles' controversial book Arming America, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America) the great range and penetrating power of the longbow (not the crossbow) did, in fact, relegate personal firearms to a marginal role, until somebody invented a fairly simple and reliable muzzle-loading flintlock musket (the earlier arquebuses having been more complex and more difficult to handle in a combat situation).

Not quite. The matchlock musket was a very successful weapon for a very long time. While it isn't particularly suited to use a personal defense weapon or hunting weapon, due to the smoldering match which ignites the powder charge, matchlocks worked reasonably well as military weapons. The matchlock musket could be fired more quickly than a crowwbow that required a cocking mechanism, too. Wikipedia has a decent article about matchlocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchlock).

[smiling bandit]

...and yet they were still using them at the end of the 19th C. So clearly it had some utility for them, even when they also had composite bows, foot bows, firearms, flamethrowers... bandit said he couldn't see what possible use such a weapon could have. Maybe the high rate of fire is all it takes to make it useful in certain situations.

Alright, I should have been more specific. On a battlefield, these things were not as useful, and the Chinese did not use them on the battlefield very much. They did use them for guarding, and were popular on the Great Wall. You could send out a nice volume of fire. But volumes of ineffective fire wasn't that useful unless the enemy tried human wave tactics. Anyone with seige weapons could easily defeat a city defended by Chu-Ko-Nu.

On the other hand, note that the Chinese didn't use them all that much on the batllefield, and that virtually none of their enemies wore serious armor. In addition, they're not known as particularly great weapons, and no accounts of Chinese wars or battles I've read give so much as a mention of them, whereas they sometimes go into considerable detail about force composition, training, and armament. The best late Chinese generals, even against light forces (where you'd expect the things to be most useful), used wholly different weapons.

This (http://www.arco-iris.com/George/chu-ko-nu.htm) site has the sole description of the things being used in battle I've ever heard of.

The chu-ko-nu is of quite ancient origin, there being reason to believe that its lineage dates back to, at least, about 250 BC. The earlier lien nu version reportedly was used in 210 BC by the first Ch'in emperor for shark shooting (1). During the 1st century BC, the retreat of 5,000 Chinese troops before a much greater force of Hsiung Nu (Hun) cavalry was successfully covered by 1,000 crossbowmen, who are said to have shot 500,000 bolts in a day (1). This is quite a feat which, if reported accurately, indicates that the chu-ko-nu may well have been part of the armamentarium of these crossbowmen. There is no doubt whatever that the chu-ko-nu was used as late as the Boxer Rebellion. The writer clearly recalls a published photo of a ravaged Peking fort, showing an abandoned chu-ko-nu, at the top of a battlement, its muzzle thrust upward and its bow in full profile, vividly silhouetted against the bright featureless sky!

However, there's rather some doubt as to whether or not this story is likely. It's highly implausible that a force of 1000 crossbowman could even get their hands on that many bolts. Likewise, if they had to fire that many, the enemy either had about a million men or were not particularly hurt by it. And given that the Chinese eventually had to bribe the Huns, it aparently wasn't a devastating weapon.

[Lumpy]

One innovation used in crossbows was a mechanism that varied the force of the bow through the range of it's draw. It was referred to as "the Virgin", since "it offered little resistance when slack and much resistance when taut". :D

[XT]

My ballpark guesstimate is that a 3-turn crank gives a roughly 19-1 advantage (I assumed crank arm is twice the draw length) which on simple considerations should be more than enough, but is nowhere near the advantage of historic cranequins. Truth is, unless we build the things and play with them, we're just not going to be able to know how easy or hard they were to use. I can't even find out how many cranks the historic cranks take to draw a bow, youtube and google video have let me down...

I still appreciate your and others posts in this thread. Its given me a lot to chew on here. I've always wondered why anyone bothered with gunpowder in the early days when it seemed you could get more battle field effect from the more convention weapons of the day (long bow and cross bow). I understood why the long bow was eventually eclipsed...it took a lot of training and practice to make an effective long bowman (or horsebowman). Years in fact. While training some mope to stand in a line and fire even the early matchlock weapons was really just a matter of a few weeks training to load and fire...and the much harder training to get them to actually stand there and do it when under fire. But I always wondered about the crossbow. It doesn't take much training to teach someone to load and fire, and if you used it in the same kind of line formation and if you could get it to reload relatively rapidly...well, a lot of what ifs there, no doubt.

I guess I have my answer though.

-XT

[chowder]

...and yet they were still using them at the end of the 19th C. So clearly it had some utility for them, even when they also had composite bows, foot bows, firearms, flamethrowers... bandit said he couldn't see what possible use such a weapon could have. Maybe the high rate of fire is all it takes to make it useful in certain situations.


This is a woosh, right?
:D