Seems like a good time that I should post here.
Welp, with recent threads I've been doing and chat; I think it wise that I should speak about a weapon that I rather like but feel difficult to pull off proper. That Weapon being;
The Crossbow:
The Crossbow is a weapon that's quite ancient, obviously not as ancient as the bow but still rich in history, especially in Medieval Europe where armies trained many of their soldiers with the use of such a weapon. It was quite powerful, having usually twice the power of a regular bow and further range as well. In fact; at closer ranges it could pierce plate male, which made the nobility fear it since peasants who had a grudge against them had a way to stick it up their hindquarters, nasty business that. If I'm not mistaken, even the church had banned its use along with the bow against christians and such, although not all heeded it of course, in fact I'm rather certain very view followed it anyway after the passing of a few decades.
Indeed, it was quite a powerful weapon and simple to use. Its benefits were its power and ease of use. Soldiers needed only a week or so to be skilled at this weapon, which contrasted with bows. Bow's being that they needed the archer to still hold the string as they aimed, aim too long and their arms quickly tire and their aim may falter, on the otherhand, a Crossbow's string would be attached to a nutt that kept in place, requiring the user to simply aim down the sight without trouble.
In fact, the Crossbow was so simple to use that a soldier geared with it is worth much less than the actual equipment, after all, whats there to simply point and shoot?.
However, with the good points, naturallycame the bad. The Crossbow's 'bow' was smaller than regular bows, meaning its limbs can't produce the necessary power as it is pulled back. To solve that, the bow string needed a larger draw weight that was double or triple than that of a bow. for those of you don't know what a draw weight means... it basically translate that the string was much more difficult to pull, often necessitating two hands or special devices. This resulted in the weapon having a much slower rate of fire than that of, a long bowman could perhaps fire ten arrows in a minute whilst the crossbowman would perhaps fire only 3 to 5.
A modern comparison with weapons based on ancient designs showed that a crossbow with a similar draw weight of a longbow could fire 6 bolts to the longbows 10 in that same duration. Crossbows of the older time could have a draw weight of
300 lbs, so imagine the fun they had when reloading the thing.
Next issue was that the weapon was costly and harder to maintain, as the crossbow was a machine, it had moving parts that made up its construction
Which is the reason why it cost so much more than the men behind it, naturally this meant the weapon wasn't easy to maintain.
Of course, the weapon was still quite popular regardless, and many attempts to mitigate its rate of fire were made. Whilst it didn't quite lessen the load time by much, it made the weapon easier to use as a child or elder could use the weapon with such devices...naturally it upped the cost but as any soldier would tell you 'Whatever makes the fight easier, we'll take it'
All in all, the Crossbow is an effective weapon and excelled in situations that a regular bow would have trouble with. Whilst a bow excelled in different situations as well, especially with its higher rate of fire, making it still popular despite the time it took to train with one.
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