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> > Way back in history...there was a terrible weapon
...
In fact, they got the pope to forbid it as not christian.
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Unless employed against heathens, as I recall... ;->=
I can't think of a way of draggin' this back on topic, but I was reminded
of somewhat later invention, an auto-crossbow. Apparently, the user, a
relatively untrained serf or the like, was expected to hold the trigger for 3
or 5 shots at oncoming troops, then drop the dingus and run. Does anyone know
of it?
> --- devans@uneb.edu wrote:
> I can't think of a way of draggin' this back on
Grosse Gott! This "dingus" as you call it has become quite the legend among
fantasy roleplayers who think it's the medieval equivelant of the SMG. It's a
lever-actuated crossbow (very light--otherwise you
couldn't operate it) with a box of about a half-dozen
bolts on top. It's existence is based on less than a dozen illustrations in
Chinese texts. They've built a couple of "reconstructions" but I've never seen
one in action. They are supposed to be unwieldy, poorly balanced, and
impossible to aim due to a big box sitting on top where you've be sighting
over.
Chinese had a crossbow with a gravity-fed magazine and a rotary crank to
draw the bow, IIRC. And the point of *all* crossbows was that an untrained oaf
could use them. We had a fencing master at university who was so fast that a
novice person literally could not see his movements; the only way I knew
when he hit me was to hear/feel it. He said that for fencing, starting
at age six was really too late to be any good. Being a knight was a fulltime
occupation (if you expected to survive your first fight, anyway), nomad light
cavalry literally learned to ride before they could walk, and to make a good
longbowman, start with his grandfather. With a crossbow, any peasant can learn
to draw, load, point, shoot. You
only have to win one battle with them--you can replace your losses (you
always have more peasants than you can mobilize) but if your opponent has high
quality troops, it'll take a generation to replace them.
From: devans@uneb.edu
> I can't think of a way of draggin' this back on topic, but I was
> "laserlight@quixnet.net" wrote:
> Chinese had a crossbow with a gravity-fed magazine and a rotary crank
You only have to win one battle with them--you can replace your losses
(you always have more peasants than you can mobilize) but if your opponent has
high quality troops, it'll take a generation to replace them.
> "laserlight@quixnet.net" wrote:
[snip]
> With a crossbow, any peasant can learn to draw, load, point, shoot.
You only have to win one battle with them--you can replace your losses
(you always have more peasants than you can mobilize) but if your opponent has
high quality troops, it'll take a generation to replace them.
Generalising about a few hundred years across a whole continent or more is
always going to open up a can of worms, but...
I honestly can't think of *any* time or place when this holds true, that it
was seen as desirable to recruit and equip a vast number of untrained oafs as
crossbowmen. Indeed I think things were very much the contrary, that the
crossbowmen used in battle
were ideally well-paid and well-equipped mercenaries, or recruited
from among the bourgeois.
One obvious example would the Genoese mercenaries ridden down by zealous
knights at the battle of Crecy.
I recommend Jim Bradbury's "The Medieval Archer" for a treatment on the Papal
prohibition. Working from a fallible memory, what the Pope banned exactly
translates as "archers and crossbowmen" *not* crossbows, *nor* crossbowmen
alone.
[quoted original message omitted]
> --- David Brewer <david@brewer.to> wrote:
> I honestly can't think of *any* time or place when
If you expect your troops to hold the line in the face of a shock cavalry
attack, you damn well better not have untrained oafs. They tend to fire one
volley and run.