[MUD-Dev] Source data on Crossbow

[Cynbe ru Taren]

Matt Chatterley <root at mpc.dyn.ml.org> notes:

| To quote the simplified version of NII:
| 
| F=ma
|
| ...

Heh, didn't want to betray my undergrad physics
career :)

| If anyone is interested, I can try to turn these fps figures into impact
| forces given average missile masses. I'm not terribly good at applying the
| above, though. :)
 
Air resistance goes up as the square or cube of velocity?


| I've not really seen much of such things, although I did know of their
| existance (ie: saw them in a book once). Are there any other (un)commonly
| refered to missile weapons to consider here? Perhaps ballistas.. although
| that gets us into seige weapons ...

I was avoiding that, yeh.  Good article on trebuchets in Scientific
American a year or two back, and L Sprague de Camp's book The Ancient
Engineers has lots of stuff if anyone is interested in seige weapons.

Um, how exotic do you want to get? :)  Exotic weapons used to be
an interest of mine.  Giant toads for hunting birds, comorants for
catching fish, fun stuff.

The sling is a weapon not to be underestimated:  Light, portable,
ammo is often easily available, considerable range and impact.
Makes the longbow look skill-free by comparison, though:  Took
me a -long- time before I could hit a three-foot-square target
at about fifteen feet.  The missile's point of origin is at your
feet or about five feet off to the side, depending which way you
swing it, and trajectory is amazingly sensitive to exact moment
of release.  But they used to be used on a par with archers as
light infantry in the classical period.

Beyond that... bolas?  War bolas with elastic lines and heavy weights
can be unpleasant: they only have to be accurate to within four or
five feet to wrap around the target, with the weights ending the wrap
with a bone-crunching wallop.  Boomerangs?  Serious weapon ones don't
return, but are nontrivial threats, with a long flat trajectory.  The
Chinese used sort of giant Roman Candles early in the gunpowder era.
Spears and pikes have always been much more important than the
attention they recieve would have one think, from the hunter-gatherer
era through the classic era (the Roman legionaire carried two types, a
light one designed to penetrate a shield and then bend, crippling the
shield and preventing it being thrown back, and a heavy duty one as
well) the medieval Scandinavian era (the sword got all the poetry, but
the spear was the principal weapon) and right on up through the
bayonet period, although it sort of ceases to be a missile weapon at
that point.  Add a spear-thrower, and it becomes even more dangerous.
An Aerobee-style flying ring with razor edges could be unpleasant, but
didn't get invented early enough to find use.  No reason why the
Greeks or Scythians couldn't have developed the design by trial and
error and been throwing zillions of light rings three hundred meters,
though :).

Fire and smoke and plague-ridden bodies and such don't really count as
missile weapons, although they've been effective in sieges ...