Just do it. You can order a fibreglass composite bow as the prod

@@tods_workshop 😅😅😅 you of course 💪😄

I've been wondering the exact same thing. My guess is that a longbow being pulled for a microsecond and instantly releasing the tension is not the same as the bow being permanently tensioned in the crossbow.

@CrooK They're so mysterious that trying to research them would drive you blue in the face....

I've hunted with a bow (in Australia). You almost never 'snap shoot' at an animal. An arrow simply doesn't travel fast enough to make that a sensible thing to do. When hunting, you stalk and shoot at a stationary animal, so there is no need to be able to instantly loose off a shot.

I've hunted and killed whitetailed deer with both and it really comes down to trade-offs. With a crossbow you don't have the movement of drawing back when you are close to an animal and that is a big advantage. I don't think the crossbow has an accuracy advantage at hunting ranges. It might be easier for a beginner to learn but I'm pretty sure someone skilled with a hunting weight longbow could outshoot someone with a crossbow. That's not verified but I think so. With the vertical bow it is easier to shoot multiple times, easier to make and maintain the weapon, and the arrow is every bit as deadly when it hits.

It's good to torque.

@@tods_workshop One or two examples I have seen show significant deflex like this example i.servimg.com/u/f58/19/66/40/27/fullsi10.jpg the tiller is a modern addition though but it doesn't seem to have a drawlength much over 8-9 inches. i.pinimg.com/236x/fd/56/3a/fd563ac1e5c742d8e6f90dabf85e5e63--medieval-life-mes-photos.jpg What do you think the length is based on the manuscripts?

Chinese crossbow from Han dynasty (200BC ... something like that ... maybe?) onwards looked very similar to this Pictish thing, but with a pistol grip on the back ... sort of like an enormous assassin hand crossbow. I've never seen a Euro historical crossbow with a pistol grip, except for a hand crossbow from about 1700 AD.

@Andrew Gray yeah, I don't know. You'd have to go back on time 2000 years and ask the thousands of Chinese soldiers who thought it was a good idea. Maybe they braced it against their cheek? But I agree, in hindsight it all seems so inefficient compared to a full stock with an angled neck for the hand. Amazing how such simple geometry takes centuries to develop.

@Andrew Gray It seems like you're under the impression a pistol grip is for shooting single handed, that's not the case.

The advantages to a straight grip stock are primarly lighter weight and quick handling for snap shooting (specifically it has been shown that they should faster, and are more accurate at the hip). The primary advantage to a pistol grip stock is that it provides the shooter a more secure grip and therefore much better control when shouldered. straight grips are also easier to grip in two hands by your waste, making them easier to carry over longer time periods. there are also some who believe straight stocks point faster and more naturally (due to both hands being in line with each other). I would also like to point out pistol grips became common after techniques for the controlled growth of trees was a thing, but i don't think this affects crossbow much

eomer chua well, the crossbow was quite popular in Chinese history, would be surprised if they mastered it to a pretty good extent. I’d say what was more impressive for the Qin however was how they mass produced crossbows for such large armies. “Stronger” is a relative term anyways.

@@midshipman8654 The Chinese invented the crossbow & were very innovative with them.

2bingtim it was probably both invented in Greece and China independently. I agree, the Chinese were very inventive with their various crossbow designs.

Sort of. Qin dynasty crossbows were often made with composite bows scavenged from the battlefield, and combined with their trigger and lock mechanism, had much longer draw lengths than medieval European crossbows. This does mean they were more powerful than the hand-drawn medieval crossbows and perhaps more powerful than those with basic spanning tools (stirrups, or maybe belt-and hook). However, wooden and steel crossbow laths are much faster to produce than composite ones, and steel ones can be made for much higher draw weights. Combined with some of the more potent spanning devices (goats-foot levers, spanning belts w/pulleys, cranequins, windlasses, etc.), and medieval European crossbows could be significantly more powerful. In short, Qin crossbows were significantly more powerful than European crossbows of the same draw weight, but medieval European crossbows were able to achieve far higher draw weights with spanning devices.

If i remember well, the chinese used composite crossbows with long draw length, these crossbows outperform steel crossbows

Theoretically yes, but no experimental archeology data have ever been collected, and I wonder why the European just don't apply bowmaking principles on crossbows?

@@zhuyouan0412 I don't remember composite bows being used in europe (excepet imported weapons)

They do. And especially used on crossbows (albeit generally not recurved and often poorly made). Meanwhile Chinese also use self-construction wooden bows on their crossbows and it is said the power is comparable with even the most powerful composite ones, but much longer and bulkier.

@@zhuyouan0412 makes sense since a longbow is about as powerful as a composite bow except it's longer And any sources on european compositd bows?

That's interesting. I hope to see more content from you soon.

Plumbata were a hand thrown weapon, similar to a Swiss Arrow

Crossbows are relatively complicated to make and a bit expensive. Furthermore, it would be cumbersome to try to equip heavy infantry with such weapons. It's also worth noting that the bows used during the classical period were not very powerful and classic Rome never really put very much emphasis on their archers either. Mind you, Romans were anything but defenseless on a distance. It's quite hard to cause casualties on heavy infantry with bows, and especially later Roman legions had light throwing machines, such as Scorpios and manuballistras, with mobile larger weapons such as carroballistae available as well. The good thing about the larger weapons was that unlike crossbow bolts, ballista darts were very likely to penetrate any shield or armor that the enemy combatant would be likely to wear. Late western rome saw small cheiroballistae that were mechanically very different but in practice fairly similar to crossbows, but they remained rare and expensive. Pila were extremely simple and cheap. Armor wasn't, but chainmail is to a large extent self-maintaining and easy to repair. With limited exposure, a maille shirt could easily see decades of use which wouldn't be possible for a mechanical implement such as a crossbow. In short, crossbows weren't really worth the cost in the gigantic classic armies. The benefits wouldn't really rise above the costs, and I think you might really not appreciate the expenses, seeing as you suggest arming half the legionaries with crossbows. Even at their height during late medieval period, crossbows weren't statistically that common.

I am not really convinced. Being complicated and expensive did not keep the Romans from making armour for all their soldiers, and also build big war-machines. Given what else they made, I can't really see why they would have more trouble making crossbows than say the Italian city-states in the late middle age period, and they did it. Nor do I really buy the idea that it would be too cumbersome for heavy infantry, again Italian city states did so rather successfully, without it seeming to have been to much of a challenge for their economy or their soldiers. And defensively units or crossbow armed legionars along side the pila armed legioners, would be a deadlier adversary. I am not saying that they weren't a thread at a distance, they did use auxiliaries, and the big machines, but those would also be more cumbersome. The Pila was very effective(!) but again, I am not saying that they would ditch that weapon, but use it alongside a crossbow that, had the same good thing, being easy to operate (but being powerful at the same time). You point on the effect on heavy infantry might be on to something, however we assume that a large number of Romes enemies could not afford heavy infantry to the same degree that Rome could, so if we for a moment disregard the civil wars, most of Romes enemies would be vulnerable to a bolt, even with a shield, given it is accurate enough that it could shoot after the legs and such. My point is, the crossbow will later become one of the dominant weapons during the middle ages, it was well within the technological accomplishments of the Roman republic and later empire. China issued crossbows in a large scale in the similar time period, so clearly the cost could be brought down a bit. Fact is the Romans didn't, and I suspect the real reason has more to do with ideas of honor (on both a unit and personal level). Perhaps the Romans simply saw it as nothing more than a plaything, instead of as a real battlefield weapon... But that seems very "unroman" like.

Many of Romes enemies were actually fairly wealthy and could afford armor for their infantry. Gaul nobility used maille, the Greeks were arguably the most heavily armored soldiers of the western world at their time, Phoenicians had armor, Seleucids were famous for their heavy infantry and cavalry, the core of the Parthian army consisted of extremely heavily armored cataphracts and so forth. Rome was not short of armored enemies during its time. It's notable that Germanic tribes that usually didn't have much armor used large and protective shields. The republic of Rome was proud of its capability of learning from enemies, though imperial Rome was a bit less flexible. Rome took their sword design from the Iberians, imperial helmet from Gauls, war machines from Greeks, warships from Carthage and the list goes on. The idea that a good tactic or weapon would have been left unused because of dishonor seems REALLY unlikely to me, especially given that for example Caesar butchered 25% of the entire population of Gallia during his conquests. Romans were definitely not above dirty tactics. You seem to have the misconception that medieval crossbowmen were heavy infantry. They weren't, they were primarily archers, and they were actually often quite unwieldy. For example, in the battle of Agincourt, the Pavises used to protect the crossbowmen during battle were stuck in a supply train which left the admittedly well-armored Genoese mercenaries vulnerable to English arrow fire. This was made even worse by the fact that as heavy crossbows can't be easily destringed, the wet weather had permeated the strings and decreased the performance significantly. Meanwhile, it is fairly easily to take off the string from a regular bow, which greatly lessened the effect on the English longbows. The Genoese were forced to act as infantry when the French knights charged them, impatient and frustrated with their ineffectiveness, and they suffered significant losses. The important factor here is that during campaigns, a good portion of a crossbowman's kit was carried in the baggage train, and Romans tried to keep theirs as light as possible. Especially so after Marius. I would additionally like to point out that performing maintenance on, say, 3,000 (About half of a legion) crossbows is more labor-intensive than doing the same for 30 larger war machines. This is further made difficult by the fact that the machines were usually manned by dedicated crews who were pretty independent in maintaining their equipment, something that a rank-and-file legionnaire couldn't be with a crossbow. Again, a crossbow has parts that are not easy to replicate or repair if the handler lacks experience and training, and seeing as you theorized that a large percentage of the entire legion would have crossbows, this would cause significant strain on the logistics chain, or force the legion to have more non-combatant craftsmen than otherwise. Another thing is that bolts pose an entire wealth of logistical problems if you expect huge numbers of men to use them. Bolts are hard to make on the field, much more of them are needed than pila, which are simpler to construct to boot, while naturally requiring more materials. The problem can be partially alleviated via wooden fletching, but that causes the accuracy to drop. However, as half of everybody is an archer, the standard of shooting wouldn't be that high to begin with. There we run to another problem. Bows and crossbows are mostly useless at extreme ranges and rapidly lose penetration power over distance. This can be fought by heavy projectiles with higher sectional density and lower relative drag, but that basically takes us to arbalests and war machines, which are most certainly not the equipment of choice for the majority of soldiers. Arbalests wouldn't even have been an option in the classical period due to lack of necessary metallurgical advances. Moreover, shooting on parabolic trajectories is actually difficult. All this leads to the fact that bows were often used at surprisingly short ranges, and the units using them were not deployed in depth, but rather as thin screens. We can see experimentation on this very idea in the development and experimentation on pike tercios in the 15th century. There, too, it was discovered that large numbers of crossbowmen, later arquebusiers, in primarily melee formations weren't actually useful as the saturation threshold was rather low. Funny enough, I think that the comparative number of archers and skirmishers in Roman legions was comparable to the ranged component in tercios. I want to stress this point. War machines can be deployed in depth and are effective at all ranges. Having dedicated crews and being relatively few in number, they require less volume in the baggage train than equipment for thousands of archers. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about gigantic siege engines here, I'm talking about smaller machines such as Scorpios and carroballistas which Romans valued highly. Small war machines lose effectiveness with smaller armies as archers and cavalry become more effective, which is why their popularity sharply fell in the early medieval and rose again in late medieval and renaissance. It is most certainly true that China used crossbows en masse. However, China had quite often defensive deployment or fortifications to use which favor ranged weapons and if we look at the actual composition of the armies, ranged troops, crossbows or otherwise, were not a large portion. While there were a lot of crossbowmen, there were even more of other kind of soldiers. Equally importantly, the Chinese didn't find plunging fire with bolts very useful either, which basically means that the larger the army is, the less archers or crossbowmen it needs proportionally.

"Gaul nobility used mail", nobility being a key word here. "the Greeks were arguably the most heavily armored soldiers of the western world at their time", not during the Romans, at that time the Greeks had largely adopted the style of the Macedonians that resulted in less but more practical armor, however as I understand it, their armor was largely less effective than the mail used by the Romans. "The idea that a good tactic or weapon would have been left unused because of dishonor seems REALLY unlikely to me, especially given that for example Caesar butchered 25% of the entire population of Gallia during his conquests." That is because you are thinking in terms of dishonor, however honor was largely seen in the light of the Ilaild, where feats of combat was seen in a different light, so there were less honor in being an archer, than being up close and personal. J. E. Lendon of the University of Virginia argues in the book Soldiers & ghosts, that Greek and later Roman soldiers did look to the Iliad for how to act in battle, and that it was a big reason as to why comparably few archers made up their armies, and formed the basis as to how they thought they should fight. Regarding Genoese mercenaries, they were the most famous, however compared to other archers they were much better armored, and later we have paintings of them in mail and plate armor, compared to the Roman infantry, they would fit in, in the armor category, replace the Pavises with the legion shield, and not much has changed. Regarding the crossbow itself, there is no reason to assume that they would have skipped much, so the bow at best would likely be where the Europeans were at 11-12 century. Regarding labor, seems somewhat fair to me, that given Rome had a lot of slaves, that they would be making most of them, making the cost drop by a lot. Regarding bolts, you are right, they would be harder make in the field, but again slaves, and infrastructure, I don't see it as unreasonable that they were made by slaves and then shipped off in carts. Regarding range... That is what it is, if they could shoot at 50 meters, or 100 meters or 150 meters (with some effect to the enemy) then they are worth something (especially if the pilum is thrown 15-20 meters). That being said, I buy the argument that half the legion would be unreasonable... However still if it was a third, fourth or even fifth, it would still offer the legion some additional firepower, and especially against cavalry or from prepared defensive positions (something the Romans often fought from), the crossbows would have an effect.

I think the math's was done at some point, and crossbows in large numbers and bolts lost out to the existing already paid force of archers and massed pilums. The running costs are probably equal for bows vs crossbows, but not a pilum, they double as a spear, are more durable on the march and can be discarded into the enemy.

@@tods_workshop "Brilliant!"

Simply the ease of use and aiming. War bows are a real pain to use and you have to have quite a strong back to shoot it efficiently. Crossbow can be handed to an ordinary Joe and he won't have a problem when shooting it.

@@GaiusCaligula234Thanks! The old shotgun vs a sighted rifle rule. Just point it that way, not at me, that way and pull the trigger!

The carvings taken together with the find of an antler crossbow nut from a Scottish crannog however changes that assumption rather drastically.

100 lbs

@@tods_workshop sorry i had nothing more profound to say. Your work is always amazing

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rayAarqd2r7KoGg.html You may find this video relevant, the short answer is yes, but they weren't common.

Yew north of the southern europe belt (Spain, Croatia etc) grows with a twist in the grain that precludes the use of the trunk timber for bows - you need a large branch, which has much straighter grain, to make a bow, and that requires a large mature tree, which would be in very short supply indeed. This is why England was importing Spanish yew in the high medieval period. The bows from Dublin ( in the Dublin Museum) date from the 9th and 10th century and are all bough bows. As far as I know there are no more bows found from the British isles until those found on the Mary Rose from some 600 years later.

That's how I see the crossbow being invented. The person was like. Wait.... Oh my god

@@tods_workshop Thanks Tod! You might be thinking of a different bow, though The Berkhamstead bow was 54mm wide and 38mm deep: thearbalistguild.forumotion.com/t1387p15-wood-prods#13174

ok thanx sir

When Tod says rectangular, he means the short sides top & bottom & the long sides front & back, as the bow sits on the crossbow stock. Taper the width(top to bottom as above) towards the ends & always follow the line of the grain without cutting or breaking it on theback of the bow(i.e.) facing forward towards the front end of the crossbow. Knots that can't be avoided need to be left with extra wood around them to compensate for their weakening of the bow stave, leaving a rough looking knobbly stave , but if tillered correctly, still giving a good even curve when strung & drawn. Make sure the wood chosen is suitable & properly seasoned before making into a bow. Don't race to try to force the stave into a bow, but take a little bit of wood off the stave at a time before re-stringin the stave, mounting it on a tiller-stock & carefully part drawing it to see what differenc & progress that has had. Doing this many, many times in the process of shaping a bow is the art of bowmaking. Also don't bend the stave as far as you dare in one pull/test, but "warm" the wood up by pulling it just an inch or so each pull before relaxing it & then repeating it with an exctra inch & so on until the stave is drawn as far as the bow stave shaping has got. There's plenty of good videos on KZfaq about bowmaking. Self prod crossbows(i.e. whose bow is a single stave of wood) were necessarily much longer than later medieval composite or steel crossbows that could be far shorter, because any stick can only be bent so far at any given thickness before it will break.

lol no

That is correct.

@@2bingtim They invented everything else.