Crossbow, I support levelling of the playing field between a normal person and a rich sicko who has been able to spend their entire life training and can afford armor through their exploitation of the peasants. Also, I do not respect Pope Innocent II and his banning of crossbows was a skill issue.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Wait crossbows were armour piercing?
Crossbows can shoot through riot shields, helmets and soft body armour. Though, so can compound bows.
Edit: BIG crossbows can shoot through walls.
Yes, it will punch clean through solid plate armor. And as they alluded to above, knights lobbied the pope to ban crossbows from use in combat because it meant a peasant with a week's worth of training could own a knight that had trained their whole life for combat
> carrying around my crossbow. Has a rapid reload rate of 1 bolt per 10 minutes
> in a field made up of ~90% cow shit
> shoot my shot at the english sporting peasant during this season's duke's entertainment battle
> miss.jpg
> that's okay, let me get out my crank dohickey for 60 revolutions to reload
> english sporting peasant has long bow
> he just notches an arrow and pulls back
> I receive an arrow to the breathing humor
> mfw my tactical crossbow was insufficient
> be a teenage boy
> castle get sieged by the english
> get handed a crossbow
> own a king
....
> get boiled alive afterwards though
Longbows are weapons of the perfidious Albionoids while crossbows are the weapons of the peasantry
Bourgeois Italian mercenaries vs Peasant Welsh levies.
We'll see you at Crecy, Genovese.
The crossbow is the obvious choice.
It can be built small enough for a novelty assassins toy (pistol crossbow) or large enough to be used as a siege weapon (ballista) or anything in between.
Recent advancements have provided us with magazine fed crossbows with lever cocking mechanisms enabling rapid follow up shots with minimal reload time and the ability to keep the weapon approximately on-target while cycling the weapon.
The longbow requires strength and training to use properly, more so than the intuitive and superior crossbow.
Prolonged longbow use deforms the skeleton of the user.
Longbow wrist slap owies.
A ballista on the back of a technical provides a mobile crewed weapons platform that can be operated with a skeleton crew to devastating effect.
Crossbows are heavily restricted in my part of the world, demonstrating the understandable fear they strike in the heart of the hegemonic power structure.
Crossbows are still kept in modern military arsenals for a reason. (I don't know what that reason is but you don't want to be out-bow'd do you?)
Longbow wrist slap owies.
skill issue
Yes. 
Recent advancements have provided us with magazine fed crossbows
#ArbalestGang
this discussion is a false dichotomy wrought out of centuries of british antiquarians masturbating themselves delirious about the single period in english history they were actually able to trade with a peer on land. both crossbows and bows are fine. and neither were magic medieval armor-piercing ammunition.
much ado is made about the longbowmen 'long training period' but it was the common recreation & hunting tool, you generally had plenty of potential archers, the problem was economics---levying peasant laborforces for military service sucks for the harvest, and it was difficult to attract men to the campaigns professionally if there's not a labor surplus. the same stressors applied to crossbow soldiers, you didn't want nobodies without experience with crossbows either. the theoretical lower skill requirements isn't going to be relevant unless you're opening up an armory while under siege. unskilled burghers in that situation weren't particularly potent anyway, whatever implements you might give them.
so all we're really talking about is tactics, and it's pretty simple: is the field restricted, are there terrain obstructions and physical obstacles? clear case for crossbows because they require less space for the firing and range isn't an issue. on the other hand, a big field to maneuver can make the best of bows' range. if you want a rounded 14th century army you'd obviously bring both. notice 'firepower' is not included here, because whether or not 5% more missiles bite into an armor plate is not what decides a battle. missiles are harassment that damages the cohesion and effectiveness of the enemy, they don't have to directly kill people to achieve their purpose.
Yumis deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that. I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine yumi in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even pierce slabs of solid steel with my yumi.
Japanese bowyers spend years working on a single yumi and layer it with bamboo up to a million times to produce the finest bows known to mankind.
Yumis are thrice as powerful as European lobgbows and thrice as accurate for that matter too. Anything a longbow can shoot through, a yumi can shoot through better. I'm pretty sure a yumi could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple draw and release.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Samurai and their yumi of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the yumi first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? yumis are simply the best bow that the world has ever seen. This is a fact and you can't deny it.
You may have a beautiful work of art historical weapon, but does it come in camo with a scope mount?
That looks like the bow version of
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The longbow, while progressive for it's time in its suppression of the dying heavy cavalry feudal order, was supplanted in turn by the nascent proletarian crossbow and it's ability to collectivise the means of destruction.
Longbows are bourgeois crossbows are the weapon of the people
crossbows were more likely to be wholly owned by the local lord/baron and given out during wartime and taken back after, while longbows were relatively commonly available (if not exactly cheap or easy to make) civillian hunting tools as well as weapons of war. crossbows are the rich lord's peasant levy weapon of choice since it leaves the peasants disarmed afterwards as the crossbows are too expensive (difficult to manufacture metal crank parts etc. compared to 'self bows' like the english longbow that can be made entirely out of one piece of wood with a little experience with curing) to not take back after issuing. plus, since crossbows are simpler to use and require less training, the lords would invest less in military training for their civilians/militias, leaving the more vulnerable to military domination when they didn't have their lord's crossbows in hand, whereas many places encouraged longbow practice and military tradition to ensure they had enough bowmen should they need them for war, creating a decentralized military power base and cultural attitude of resilience and self-reliance among the populace. crossbows were a way to centralize military power in the hands of the aristocracy, not some kind of proletarian worker's weapon of choice (which was probably either a staff, a club, a repurposed woodcutting axe, an improvised spear, or a simple hunting bow). there were exceptions to this general trend like the Taborites (who were a peasant indurgency that was famous for using crossbows, murray bookchin claims they were a kind of proto-anarcho-communism), especially in places without bow traditions (mainland europe for example) and as time went on and political power in general became more centralized (in places with longer traditions of centralized power, china for example, the crossbow was more common due to more standardized 'state armies' compared to ad-hoc european feudal militias). its kind of like early factories, sure there might be nothing inherently and essentially wrong with the centralization of production itself, but the way it was used historically was at the behest of and for the benefit of the ruling classes. for example, the prominence of crossbows in continental Europe (they abhorred missile weapons compared to many other cultures, bow training had to be forced by decree after military experience proved this to be disastrous) is almost solely due to Italian city states (such as Genoa) mustering entire platoons of only crossbowmen that they would hire out as mecenaries. Crossbowmen often were paid double that of an archer, even though the bow took more training. think about why that might have been if they are supposedly the 'weapon of the people'
crossbows were literally bourgeois, the guilds in the urban centres were manufacturing them
Staff sling 
Hoopak-maxxing on my epic Kender arc
Pope Innocent III banned crossbows because they allowed peasants to kill armored knights with no training while the knight had received a lifetime's worth.
Crossbows are the weapon of the people. The complexity of a weapon's construction is not an argument against the purpose of its use (see: Kalashnikov).
I want to learn to use a weapon fast... crossbow is my answer!
Crossbows because I think they're neat.
In the only battle between english longbowmen and genoese crossbowmen (that I know of, at least), the longbows won due to some mild rain, so I'm gonna go with longbows.
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Short bow, because I can loot one with arrows from Dick's Sporting Goods 
the actual struggle is recurve shortbows vs crossbows
Crossbow, cuz I actually own one and it's fun as fuck to shoot.
I'm just surprised that the fist cam mechanism was developed for crossbow triggers in 600BC, with the first pulleys being older than that, yet the first compound bow was only invented in the 1960s. Imagine how the history of warfare would've changed if someone went "hey, let's put these on the bow".
Material science just wasn't there. There WERE compound bows, but only in the sense that the bows were made of compound laminates composed of horn, glues, and wood. Mongols got really good at this and could produce very small bows with ridiculously high draw weights (150-200lbs) for their horse archers. What they couldn't do is get a string small enough to work through pulleys like modern compounds. That required modern synthetic fibers that ancient tech just had no equivalent.
Makes sense, the material science for the string fibres wasn't there. Thank you for providing that context and information.
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I like the recurve Tatar-style bows, they're like longbows compacted to fire enormous arrows from horseback. A widely used weapon and definitely did their fair share of European nobles in 😁
Longbows encouraged the development of a professional warrior caste, so I'll go with crossbows.
Light Crossbow because it doesn’t rely on stat scaling and with a lightning infusion you can do some major damage with lightning bolts.
Also dual-wielding hand crossbows if you can get the perk for stat-based damage bonus in the offhand.
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Crossbow because I like not having debilitating and severe back pain after I hit 25
I'm in a course I can't remember signing up for, much less attending, and the final is now? Also, I'm in school again? And where are my pants?!
Crossbow. I am a lazy engineery person. I did throw together a fun design for a lever action bullpup crossbow. Maybe I should revisit that
those ridiculous tacticool operator longbows from that silly modernized Robin Hood movie. So dumb it kind of becomes cool again
Longbow just because they are simple and cool.
I'm a crossbow kinda guy for the sole reason that my back muscles aren't prepared for a longbow. If I was gonna train to be the best at one or the other, though, obviously take the longbow. They're simply better given ideal conditions. But if you need scrawny nerds like me to be able to kill somebody, the crossbow wins.
Longbow because of faster reload times. I'm a terrible shot, so I need all the advantages that I can get.
If it's on the table, though, I'd go for a Mongol-style composite shortbow. Same draw strength, but far more portable. And this is under the assumption that the cams in a compound bow are witchcraft, so we're stuck with full-on 75-85 pound draw here.
Compound, it's basically cheating. I love it a lot.
Guns are very strictly better. But still a good skill.
It depends on how long I have to train. If I have a few years to git gud, the longbow is the superior choice because of the rate of fire. If I need to fight tomorrow, a crossbow because any idiot can point and shoot.
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