Crossbows made of common materials would be poor weapons in fallout, the low rate of fire would mean if you don't kill them in one shot you'd better have cover because you'd be dead before you reloaded. A crossbow made from simple materials would take roughly thirty seconds to reload, giving you a rate of fire of twice a minute, on par with a medieval crossbowmen. Crossbows made from modern materials can assisted the wielder significantly increasing the reload time, but those bows are more difficult to manufacture then simple guns. In any capacity the crossbow is completely unsuitable if your alone and out numbered.

Bows however are a bit more promising there harder to use accurately then a crossbow but they can fire ten times as quickly.


And the gun runners are said manufacture there guns, so not everything is salvaged.

I dunno, the motorized crossbow concept art looked perfectly workable to me. (Especially given that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS4RKoRyTik of something similar that somebody actually made.

The thing with a crossbow is that the tolerances are very loose. It isn't a precision instrument. A bolt is inherently a stable thing, being heavy and guided by its flights and launched by the application of a stout strong to the back of the bolt. Whereas any gun that you hope to reliably hit something further than 30 feet with a deadly amount of force *is* a precision instrument, with tolerances in thousands of an inch to create successful rifling and a tight gas seal.

Ohh no here we go again.^^this guy.

The crossbow of the Van Halesing movie was an automatic crossbow supposedly made pre 1900. Something like that would be deadly and (mostly) armor piecing.

I doubt armor peircing(depending on the type of armor) but that gun was EPIC would wreck people.

Well, if sharp enough, im sure a bolt could go through sheet metal. Maybe not as thick as Power Armour but enough to go though Metal Armor.

Well bows at close range can pierce heavy medival armor as seen at the battle of agincourt. A crossbow is even stronger and thus replaced the bow just before gun powder. The reason for that is that during the late medival times armor became so effective that more power was needed and there you go, crossbows. But in-game I could imagine crossbows to have high dam (maybe 20?) low dps while bows have high dps and low dam. Arrows and bolts could be reusable and easily crafted but still, even if it would work in-game I don't think it would fit like it does in mad max and such. There is simply to much guns and more is being manufactured.

Yes maybe but still i wouldnt risk it. Just use a bullet.

Piercing metal armor is not a big achievement. There's a reason why we don't run around in plate-mail anymore.

yah because its out of date and we have Bullet proof vests.

Bullet Proof Vest Note: Does not function like in Hollywood

Note to counter Bullet Proof Vest: Aim for the head... or the leg.

Yes i know this. But i was just pointing out this is what we have today. I could have said Kevlar but i said the other thing. Bullet proof vests are not totatly "bullet proof"

I know epicness, I was just cracking another badly played joke.

Good at least we can see eye to eye on something...

Bullet *resistant* vest. Non-sissy rifle rounds go through soft armor just fine, and even if you're wearing the absolute best body armor available to your nation's military, good luck stopping something like a APFSDS tungsten dart from the Steyr IWS 2000. There is no "bullet proof", just inadequate weapons.

Also, crossbows replaced bows in large because they are easier to use. Super powerful war bows worked just fine, but it took a lifetime to train somebody who was strong enough and skilled enough to use one. You can conscript a peasant and hand him a crossbow and he'll be just as deadly within a couple of weeks.

And lastly, arrows and crossbow bolts are fundamentally *sharp* things. They pierce. They cut. Bullets (unless with armor piercing cores) are blunt. Kevlar and spectra vests stop bullets because the bullet tries to smash its way through but these polymers have very high tensile strength and resist being snapped. They catch the bullet in a net basically. Soft body armor alone does NOT protect you from cutting and piercing any more than a few layers of regular fabric would; the fibers are very strong lengthwise but they can be cut as easily as any other plastic. Other materials are added to give protection from stabbing and edged attacks. In other words: body armor would provide some protection from arrows and bolts when made with the right materials and layers, but you can't *assume* that just because the body armor will stop a bullet that it can resist arrows and bolts since they function in a different way.

Are you confusing crossbows with early muskets? Im pretty sure they where replaced because of the peircing capabilites. Hmm I think I heard it in association with the battle of constatinopel (sorry don't know how to spell it in english) but there might have been more then one reason :stare:

Early firearms were not very useful. Powerful yes, accurate no. And they were difficult to make. And had a bad habit of exploding in the shooter's face due to flaws in the steel and forging process. And required a lot of discipline to be work with fire, hot metal, and gunpowder without blowing up the formation. Earliest practical use of firearms was mortars and cannons, for attacking the walls and gates of fortresses (huge, stationary targets). By the time hand cannons became at all practical (late 15th century), crossbows had almost entirely replaced bows for about two centuries.

(Yes I'm aware the far east has a different timeline)

Yes yes I am aware that early gunpowder weapons where quite ineffective and by early i meant when they began being used as standard armament but not fully developed. But the reason gun powder weapons became so standard is because it was easy to master so I thought you may have confused the two Crossbows may very well have been popular for the same reason but im saying that it doesn't have to be one way or the other.

Guns replace crossbow because of range. the range it can pierce plate mail and the range it can reach, not to mention the noise it makes. However cold arm units still have their place until late 17th centuries. Also Chinese was quite up to date with their black powder weapons until the Manchurians take over.

Still, bows and crossbows are adequate hunting weapons, especially in the wasteland when you can make you bow/crossbow next to no cost while maintaining a gun would cost most of your earning.

With crossbows it was definitely about the ease of training. A couple of weeks would get you a deadly ranged unit. Compared to a master archer, a crossbowman is rather mediocre on the battlefield but you can crank out crossbowmen in a couple of weeks. Really almost anybody can learn to shoot a crossbow proficiently in a single day, but it takes more time to drill the loading procedure into them so they can perform under stress. With firearms it was all about the power. Accuracy was low, cost of manufacture was insane, the training was more lengthy and difficult than for a crossbow (this was long before pre-measured paper wrapped cartridges, and soldiers screwed *those* up constantly). The advantage a hand cannon has over a crossbow is that, when impacting the surface of the armor...it deforms. Where a bolt's sharp point will skate across any sloped plate and be deflected harmlessly, a lead bullet will smash flat against the surface and deliver far more of its punch to the target.



See above. Early firearms had *abysmal* accuracy. Each gun would be hand forged by a smith (or cast in a mold), then the bullets would be cast in a rough mold, and then you're aiming the thing more by intuition and experience than by using any kind of sights (the cannon was mounted on the end of a pole, which you clamped under your elbow). Standards? Unknown. Manufacturing tolerances? Very very loose. Where a crossbowman's effective range versus a military formation might be, oh, say 150 yards. Handgunners might be around 50 yards. That's against a *formation*. For an individual target, halve that. A crossbowman uses sights attached to his weapon and aims very precisely, has his weapon braced to his shoulder for better control, shoots a projectile that is inherently self-stabilizing, and really only has to "guesstimate" the range to target and thus the amount he needs to hold over to get a hit. A bullet from a hand cannon is partially deformed on firing, so it flies irregularly, it's not spin-stabilized (Rifling? What's that?), and will spray out of the barrel somewhere in a vague cone shaped area.

Compared to the crossbow,
Rate of fire: Comparable
Power: Good.
Intimidation factor: Outstanding
Accuracy: Pathetic

Things improved somewhat with the matchlock, but hand cannons were already in wide use by the time those turned up.

I belive we must be thinking about diffrent time periods, for guns im talking somewhere around 1630 and forward (the battle at Lützen) and crossbows maybe 1450 something. I am quite positive that around that time period crossbows where used because of their heavy hitting power, also maybe cause they where easy to master don't know. At lützen the swedish army was composed of pike's, cavalry armed with small pistols and musket wielding infantry. Why would the majority of the army wield expensive, ineffective weapons? And a couple of years ago I saw a documentary on discovery channel about muskets, they said that they where very easy to master and thus became so popular.

We seem to have the wrong time periods in mind, you must be thinking of earlier firearms

Well when the discussion is about why firearms replaced crossbows, I assumed we were talking about hand cannons, since those are what replaced them. The 1600's had much more effective firearms, but that's more than a hundred years after crossbows fell into disuse.

But the crossbow weren't forget right away, the transition would have taken some time (im just assuming right now). But to bottomline it crossbows renderd armor useless and where able to peirce heavy armor... uum what's my point? I can't remember why we are arguing about this XD

Actually, the Turks (and Byzantines) made good handcannons that out range the crossbow.

But yes, handcannon never replace corssbows, musket does (arquebus still use along with crossbow); by then technology and production standard is good enough to make up for the accuracy.

I would love to see this.