[MUD-Dev] Source data on Crossbow

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199707170430.XAA16651 at laurel.actlab.utexas.edu>, on 07/16/97 
   at 09:41 PM, Cynbe ru Taren <cynbe at laurel.actlab.utexas.edu> said:


>|  http://www.gci-net.com/~users/w/wolfsoul/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html

>Excellent!

>NB:  While velocity (fps) is prolly a good measure of ability to hit
>a moving target or such, damage done to target is likely to scale
>with kinetic energy, i.e. velocity squared.  So the modern bolts
>travelling twice as fast should be four times as destructive, by and
>large.

This would also depend on the head form for the bolt.  Hunting arrows
typically have large bladed heads that concentrated on creating blood
loss.  War arrows typically had small conical heads that concentrated
on depth of penetration and armour piercing.  Broad bladed hunting
arrows in turn would bounce off or stick into (without reaching the
body) almost all armour.

To translate into bullet terms:

  Shooting a body and having the bullet merely pass thru the body
without impacting bone, or creating a large diameter hole, is not very
effective at either quickly killing or stopping that body. This is why
the US forces requested and standardised .45s during the various
Pacific Ocean conflicts.  (He's bleeding, a little, possibly
extensively internally, but is still definitely in the picture (they
had a problem with shooting attackers and still having them continue
to run at them, still waving their machetes, all the way to chopping
the poor surprised US infantry into bits before dieing))

  Shooting a body, and hitting and not penetrating the flak jacket (ie
100% transission of kinetic energy) will almost never kill, but is
quite capable of stopping a body.  (Even leaning into the impact, a
.45 can often throw the target to the ground (this is not TV folks))

  Shooting a body and penetrating deeply enough and causing a large
enough hole to cause major bleeding etc will stop a body immediate
(given enough kinetic energy), and can cause immediate death or
effective immobility (unconciousness, homeostatic shock etc).

>(We might note the existence of footbows, which allow the use of back
>and legs to draw them.  As far as I know, they've never seen military
>use, however.  

The chinese and related societies used them extensively.  Their arrows
more resembled spears than what were are familiar with as as arrows. 
Several chinese paintings of the period show unlucky targets
shish-kebab'ed by them.

>Good for setting distance records.  Might make for
>sort of a light artillery in some game settings.  

They also used rocket powered spears to great effect, tho more as a
generic ballistic weapon than individually aimed.

>Seems safe to
>presume they can reach 2-4x the draw force of a vanilla longbow,
>which has to be drawn by one arm instead of two legs, but I haven't
>seen any numbers.)

Suggested empirical test:

  One leg bowman.

  One line of (un)willing slaves in a line.

  How many can he spit in one shot?

Note: May be difficult to arrange in current political climates.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
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