Months vs years? It literally took over a decade to develop a good archer. And it’s not like standing ground in the face of the enemy was a new thing. You think incoming arrows aren’t scary? A charge of cavalry? A line of sword-weilding opponents? Keeping troops in line was a common need long before muskets.
At musket-firing range, you’d think crossbows would be a huge advantage in regards to rate of fire and accuracy. The Chinese had repeating crossbows centuries before, but even a Euro design with a winding mechanism and heavy bolt would’ve been feared. Unlike archery, you don’t need to be strapping or particularltly artful. Roman scorpions would’ve been a useful powderless companion to cannon as well.
Not to mention that the musket is 5 feet long, and nearly 10 lbs. A “cut down” musket (limited evidence of their use in the AWI) is only a few inches shorter. Reloading in a prone position would be nearly impossible, especially as the barrel begins to foul and you actually need to apply force to the rammer to fully seat the ball on the powder at the bottom of the barrel.
FWIW, The British army standard was 3 round per minute. And it is exceptionally fast. A video shows it being done under ideal conditions… which a battlefield was not. A man on a full run charging with his bayonet can cover a lot of ground in the (ideal) 33 seconds between shots. Having been on the receiving end of a charge in a reenactment, where I knew I wasn’t going to be actually bayoneted, and the other side wasn’t running full out, I can only begin to imagine how that would slow down the other side’s ability to load properly, make ready, then fire at the oncoming charge. I wanted to run, and I knew there was ZERO danger to my wellbeing.
You might think so, but guns didn’t come to replace bows or crossbows overnight. There was plenty of time where both technologies were used on the battlefield simultaneously. Guns won out over arrows, so there has to be some advantage.
Crossbows, even with crank mechanisms, took time to reload as well. Part of Agincourt was the English longbowmen against the French crossbowmen, and how the longbows had longer range and higher rate of fire than the crossbows.
I believe you are thinking of Crecy.
There were some battle-specific reasons the crossbows failed there - the English had the high ground, their strings were not wet, and the crossbowmen did not have their shields (pavises).
But more significant than any of this, and perhaps the root cause, was the fact that the French at that time simply did not appreciate the proper use of mixed-arms tactics - symbolized by the fact that the French cavalry wasted their charge on their own mercenaries in disapointment over their “cowardice” (rather than recognizing that they had blundered in deploying them in these conditions) and were consequently completely disorganized when attacking the English. This arose from the continued primacy accorded to the heavy cavalry by the cult of chivalry. In contrast, the English, for all their lip service to that cult, adopted a set of tactics here and in other battles like Agincourt that maximized the strengths of all of their troops.
Perhaps under the right general, or under the right conditions, crossbows could have “worked” against bowmen - though the higher rate of fire was always going to be the bowman’s advantage. The fundamental French problem was not that of having inferior weapons, it was one of inferior battle tactics - they acted like amateurs versus professionals, and thus got beat.
With a crossbow, the shooter is still using his muscles to power the projectile. Using a windlass or similar mechanism to load a crossbow is much more tiring than loading a musket, in which the gunpowder is doing the work of propelling the projectile. If you were defending a fortification a musketeer can load and shoot long after a longbowman or crossbowman would be exhausted. Musketballs and gunpowder (depending on your exact situation) are cheaper to produce and transport than arrows or bolts.
My impression was that gunpowder was actually very expensive, relatively. Also, extremely tempermental to transport, store and distribute to your troops in all weathers - suffers from humidity moreso than arrows or bolts. “Keep your powder dry” being the operative expression …
Yeah, but you don’t use much gunpowder per shot (of a musket at least, cannons are a different argument). The ball and powder required to shoot 100 shots from a musket could be carried by one man (although soldiers typically carried far less ammunition than this). Now imagine a soldier carrying 100 arrows. Not impossible, but a bit more difficult than the equivalent amount of musket shots. In addition, one of the bow’s chief advantages over the musket was its faster rate of fire, which requires even more ammunition. A soldier, boat, or a draft animal could carry more musket ammunition than bow ammunition, which is a huge logistical advantage.
As you and other posters have pointed out, wet weather can wreck all sorts of weapon systems, including certain types of bows and crossbows.
I added a qualifier in my previous post because depending on which society at which time period we are talking about, gunpowder certainly could be more expensive to produce than arrows.
It is true that lack of ammunition could and did interrupt the arrow storm. However, that’s a peculiarity of the high rate of fire.
While I have not found a source for the capacity of medieval quivers, modern quivers have a capacity of 25-30 arrows (though the note is that this is “more suited to modern styles”):
http://www.reference.com/browse/longbow+quiver
The entry also notes:
I haven’t found a good cite as to how much your average archer would carry with him into battle, or be “supplied” in this manner for battle. This site states that at the battle of Crecy 7,000 archers shot an estimated half-million arrows, for a total of around 70 per man.
http://www.archeryweb.com/archery/crecy.htm
This site states that each archer was supposed to have with him 24 arrows at Agincourt:
http://archery.mysaga.net/archy3.html
That would tally with the “25-30” in the modern quiver.
In contrast, a musketeer’s bandloier held 8-14 charges:
This “ready ammo” was supplemented by a powder horn or box, but I haven’t found a cite as to how much it carried other than one assertion that musketeers carried around 50 round’s worth in total.
I have not found reference to how this supply would be supplemented from central stores, but presumably it would have been.
Point here is that access to 'ready ammo" in quivers on bandoliers indicates that bowmen had about twice the shots instantly available. However, as their rate of fire was much higher, they would of course run out of that far sooner. Archers apparently had access in battle to around 70 arrows; musketeers, to approximately 50 shots.
In summary, the fact that archers often ran out of ammo during battle while musketeers did not appears to be a function of the former’s much higher rate of fire, rather than the convenience of the latter’s ammunition.