I've always wondered why there are no bows or crossbows in this game or other fallouts (as far as I know of).

If you've seen Book of Eli, he makes good use of a bow in his post-apocalyptic world. It almost makes more sense to have them rather than guns as the main ranged weapons. Even advanced crossbows would be easier to make than guns, it should have been "bow runners" or something.

I'm not saying change the dynamics of the game, I'm just suggesting a bow or crossbow eventually come up in some DLC maybe? You could scatter bolts and arrows all around like they did with the empty syringes after the patch. Put them in the guns category and be done with it.

I am going to be rude: Book of Ali:facepalm:

But yes, Bow and/or Crossbow would be cool.

Well after seeing what the spears did, I'm glad there isn't crossbows.

This.

I'm gonna have to chalk this one up to a contradictory prioritization of development time. <_< Too much dev time spent for too little player enjoyment. Who wants to use a crossbow when you have a shotgun? Rule of Cool neatly dodges the whole issue of there realistically being almost no functioning firearms or ammunition left after hundreds of years, except for a few specific cases like mass produced 5.56mm rounds pumped out by the NCR to arm their troops or the apparently hand-assembled cartridges sold by the Gun Runners.

I loved using arrows in Oblivion, and probably would in Fallout because I normally play stealthy. It kind of takes away the realism when my character is sneaking with a melee weapon and then.. "AARGGHHH *whoosh* *splat*" and the npc on the other side of the room doesn't hear it.
Though bows make more sense in a post-apocalyptic world than the enormous amounts of guns there are. Most of them must have survived since before the war.. there must have been guns laying around everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Imagine.
But honestly I don't care if they're in the game or not, I'm just being realistic haha.

Bows= wood. And not a 200 year old dry radioactive log pried out of a cabin wall. You need living , elastic wood, and there's a distinct shortage of trees in the Mojave, isn't there?

Granted, it IS possible to make composite bows that would supplement wood with Bighorner horn and sinew, but those would still require wood. Or be all industrial and make modern compound bow with metal and carbon fiber- but that would make crafting a bow more complicated than crafting a shotgun.

yes, add spears, throwing darts, wereboars and vampire hunters guild

You can make a perfectly serviceable crossbow out of a car's leaf spring. There are plenty of cars laying around.

It also is not merely about the weapon itself but the ammunition. Making black powder from found material is not easy (nevermind cordite or nitrocellulose), and if you want a firearm more advanced than a matchlock, you also need to develop percussion caps. For a crossbow, all you need is anything fairly light and small and straight.

If you have the craftsmanship for that, you can almost certainly improvise a zip gun. Or even a Sten submachinegun.

Sten guns are ridiculously easy to make. The anti-Nazi resistance in Europe ran unedrcover workshops mass-producing Stens out of bicycle parts, motorcycle parts, hydraulic cylinders- anything tubular. The gun's all tubes and springs, no precision machining required. The per unit cost was something like $8-10. In Israel, the early, pre-state undercover arms industry the Zionist movement ran under the nose of the British Mandate authorities made 9mm rounds out of empty lipstick cases (they used to be made of brass back then). It's not THAT complicated really.

You are kidding.

You are trying to said a bronze age weapon is equal if not harder to made compare to a 20th century weapon?

In an environment where modern materials and tools are abundant? Yes. Criminals make zip guns in the real world far more often than they make crossbows.

Keep in mind that crossbows have a short draw length. If you wanted to make a crossbow that fires bolts heavy enough to penetrate armor and kill something human-sized behind it, you'd need a weapon with more draw force than a human hand can usuall provide. That's where the design gets complicated, because you need to add a cocking lever or even a windlass. You need a complex trigger mechanism that is rather like that of a gun, etc

I was originally saying a crossbow would be more likely to still work after 200 years. Not that one or the other would be harder to make. Hell, there are old ships that still float, a treated wooden bow would probably last too.

You can argue that all you want, but leave any semi-automatic gun on a shelf for 5 years and then try and shoot it.. :banghead:

Crossbows have been penetrating armor for centuries. A leaf spring from a truck is certainly heavy enough to get the job done.
Not to mention if you can cast bullets, you can cast bolts. Silent. Deadly. And realistically the bolts are re-usable, provided your leaf spring crossbow
didn't send the bolts into the next county.

Now that we are on the subject of hurling projectiles without gunpowder: where's my rail-gun?

Are we playing the same fallout game? There are so many trees in Jacobs Town the super mutants could start their own bow and arrow manufacturing company. That and not all crossbows and arrows are made of wood. I for one would never use them but they would make a good addition to the game.

This is the USA we're talking about. There are 7 shotguns/rifles, an old musket, and a pistol in my house right now. Now, them being in working condition 200 years from now is another story...

Hell, I'm from New Zealand and we have about four rifles around the place, plus a couple of slug guns. Used to have about 7 rifles, but a few got stolen.

I liked that movie. :sadvaultboy:

Personally, I'd love for there to be bows and arrows. It's a lot of fun to use them in Oblivion, so I'm sure it'd be as much, if not more fun to use them in New Vegas.

A crossbow is not a terribly complicated machine. Certainly it is less complicated, and more forgiving of fabrication errors, than any firearm more advanced than one using a rubber band and nail as the firing mechanism. As for power: a light crossbow might have a draw weight of 100 pounds; very difficult for a handbow, but a crossbow is drawn very differently and this is no great challenge. Here's what a goatsfoot lever looks like for an intermediate power crossbow: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16277/16277-h/images/107.jpg << What about this looks difficult to make? This specimen is certainly more fancy than it needs to be. Even a winch drawn version wouldn't be as difficult as you imagine, in a world where we have ready access to small winches in the form of cargo straps, come-alongs, awning cranks, and hundreds of other common machines.

But once again I must point out that making the weapon is only a fraction of the work. How many criminals would be building zip guns if they also had to hand make the cartridges that it uses as ammunition? It would be ludicrous. Something like a bungee-powered spear launcher is a far easier weapon to make than coming up with the machinery and chemistry you need to start manufacturing ammunition on any large scale.

But the guns you're shooting in New Vegas are new, manufactured by the Gun Runners etc.

(That, and a World war II M1 carbine WILL shoot after 5 years on a shelf. Or 50. During my IDF service days, when our unit was going on a few days' leave to the Red Sea as civvies, I volunteered as the group's designated guard and was issued an Uzi that hasn't been shot since the 1956 Sinai campaign- full sized, with a wooden stock. The thing was heavier than an M16 by a good kg, but it didn't jam on the shooting range. Not once.)

Most of my guns work fine after 7+ years of laying on a shelf, I recently went hunting with them so I fail to see a big point here.