Romans invent the repeating crossbow?

Darkest

Banned
Or any crossbow for that matter.

What happens when this awesome weapon comes into Roman hands? Say... 200 AD. Do they rule the world?
 

HueyLong

Banned
They had the crossbow, but it wasn't well built enough. They couldn't produce as many as China or later Europe, and not as well.
 
Darkest90 said:
Or any crossbow for that matter.

What happens when this awesome weapon comes into Roman hands? Say... 200 AD. Do they rule the world?

Nah...They still collapse economically, and have civil wars. But they do better in wars against huns and other barbarian nations. So I say, that Roman empire splits into smaller states, but aren´t occupied by Vandals, Franks or Saxons, but remain Celtish, Roman and so on.

Still I don´t know. Is the crossbow that superior?
 
Fabilius said:
Nah...They still collapse economically, and have civil wars. But they do better in wars against huns and other barbarian nations. So I say, that Roman empire splits into smaller states, but aren´t occupied by Vandals, Franks or Saxons, but remain Celtish, Roman and so on.

Still I don´t know. Is the crossbow that superior?

Against the Celts and the Germanic tribes? It'd be devastating.
 
There is some evidence that by the first century the Romans used the crossbow for hunting, including wild boar, so I would say it was certainly powerful and accurate enough to be adapted for warfare. Roman engineers developed the 'repeating' crossbow about 100 AD, but it was applied only to a fixed weapon.

Why a crossover between the hand held hunting weapon and the repeating fixed artillary piece was not made is a mystery.
 
MarkA said:
There is some evidence that by the first century the Romans used the crossbow for hunting, including wild boar, so I would say it was certainly powerful and accurate enough to be adapted for warfare. Roman engineers developed the 'repeating' crossbow about 100 AD, but it was applied only to a fixed weapon.

Why a crossover between the hand held hunting weapon and the repeating fixed artillary piece was not made is a mystery.
Because the actual mechanics behind a ballista and a crossbow are slightly different. A ballista is more like two catapults turned on their side (properly, the other way around, since catapults were a later invention), bottom to bottom.
 
Errrrrrrrr - small puncture. Repeating crossbows are *not* awesome weapons. Neither are repeating ballistae. The mechanics of the 'automatic ballista' as reconstructed by various archeologists do not lent themselves to use in a crossbow, anyway, because they would require three hands on the part of the operator, but that could have been solved.

More to the point, the Romans had both handheld crossbows with tension systems (probably composite, though no bows survive) and nut trigger releases and heavy but man-portable 'siege' crossbows with torsion systems and claw trigger releases. Both would by our standards be considered more 'advanced' than the 11th-12th century selfbow, groove-release crossbows that many military historians believe to have been such a devastating novelty. (The handheld tension catapult, while long theorised, was widely dismissed as a figment of the imagination until they excavated one in Germany last year...)

The problem with repeasting systems for crossbows is that they don't really produce any real bonus. The reason for that is that crossbows are fundamentally different from guns in where they get their energy. A gun gets its power from chemicasl energy stored in the ccharge. If you can cut short the process of inserting the charge into the weapon, you have cut down the time bertween firing considerably because that process is the most time-consuming part. Catapults and bows, on the other hand, get their energy by tensioning a system, and irf you ciuts down the time of placing the arrow into the tensioned system, the most time-consuming part of the operation - tensioning - remains unaffected. You can work around that by reduciong the tension, to speed up reloading time - the Chinese repeating crossbows do that - but of course that gives you less power. Roman repeating designs have been reconstructed, but never yet shot at anywhere near the possible power, so we have no idea how they would perform 'loaded for bear'.

Finally, the Late Roman armies most likely did utilise crossbow units (we do not know whether they bused tension or torsion designs). Apparently, they performed well enough to stay in service, but not spectacularly better than archers, who continued to outnumber them. And given that they trained all recruits in archery at that time - a time-consuming process - they must have figured that was the better move. I can see why - bows get better energy conversion, so archers can achieve vastly higher rates of fire with killing projectiles than crossbowmen can. Crossbows can get more energy in (but trade for even slower rate of fire), can be more accurate, and above all are easier to use, but none of this strikes me as a concern in the Late Roman army's situation.
 
Very true carlton.

The Chinese repeating crossbow could fire over 80 yards compared to 500 yards for a conventional crossbow. Unless the repeating crossbowmen could close quickly with the enemy they would be cut to pieces before they came within effective range to use their weapon.

I do not see how the use of a crossbow would make the legions any more effective. If they were still at their best around the second century there would be no need. Once the rot set after Adrainople, no new weapon would be of assistance.
 
MarkA said:
Very true carlton.

The Chinese repeating crossbow could fire over 80 yards compared to 500 yards for a conventional crossbow. Unless the repeating crossbowmen could close quickly with the enemy they would be cut to pieces before they came within effective range to use their weapon.

Couldn't the repeating crossbows be mixed with conventional crossbows, much like the mixing of rifles and SMGs in a WWII-era army?
 
Generally, the Greeks and Romans had two types of mechanical artillery, tension and torsion-powered weapons.

Tension-powered handheld missile weapons were:
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_crossbows
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gastraphetes

Torsion-powered handheld weapons were:
http://www.milites-bedenses.de/pix/Manu1.jpg (Reconstruction of a find in Xanten, Germany)

The Greek repeating 'crossbow', the Polybolos, was actually a torsion-powered missile thrower:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Mechanical_Artillery._Pic_03.jpg

The many types and the varying terminology may give a complicated picture, but the ancients already knew many types of crossbows, it is only a matter of debate to what extent. Mechanical devices for cocking steel-bowed crossbows, however, were a medieval innovation, unknown to both Greeks and Romans and Chinese.
 
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