I don't think crossbows would be able to punch right through a leather faced (especially not bronze faced) shields though, so well protected heavy infantry would still probably be able to advance into melee range.
WI:Crossbows in 250 BC. Effects in armies?
- Thread starter Sersor
- Start date
Most of Rome's enemies weren't heavy infantry, so the crossbows could still be safely employed in the legions for most circumstances. This would radically alter anything that occurred in 1400, so improved armour would either be widely used by then, or not used at all (new weapons developed? too heavy?)
- BNC
- BNC
Rome's main enemy in Sensor's timeline is a Greek country that has not only adopted it's tactics and equipment,but improved upon it.It also seems to be the pioneer of crossbows.
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I made my last post in a bit of a rush and I thought I could elaborate on it a bit, and also apply it to the specific context the OP had in mind.
As a caveat, I know virtually nothing about China, so this is all based on the crossbow in a European context.
There's some talk here about crossbows and their "armor-piercing" ability. That, however, is not an innate feature of a crossbow. The innate feature of the crossbow is that, because a crossbow can hold a bolt in the loaded ("spanned") position, loading ("spanning") and shooting are two separate, distinct actions. With a bow, drawing and shooting are inseparable; with a crossbow, you can span it, eat a sandwich, and then shoot it. This gives a crossbow two distinct advantages:
1. You can wait for the right moment to shoot it, and then shoot without delay. Since spanning and shooting are separate, you can span a crossbow and then patiently wait for just the right moment to pull the trigger/tiller/whatever. You can aim a bow too, but you have to nock and draw first, which does take a moment. A crossbow may not necessarily be more "accurate" than a bow in terms of actually shooting straighter, but it can allow more accurate shots in the sense that it gives you the ability to make a careful, aimed shot at just the right moment.
2. You can use means other than your arms to span it. Since the spanning and shooting actions are separate, you can span it in some other way - with your legs, with a machine, etc. - and then shoot it with your arms. Obviously a bow doesn't let you do this.
Advantage #1 is probably the most apparent one, but it's also the least useful in battle, and it might help explain why "early crossbows" remained rare and in some cases never caught on as battlefield weapons. Some of the earliest instances we have of European crossbow use are in the context of hunting, which if you think about it makes a lot of sense - in a hunt, the ability to shoot without delay (e.g. at a sprinting deer that's going to be gone in a second) and to wait patiently for a shot (e.g. a rabbit that's going to peek out of its hole any moment now) is pretty useful. Notably, the Romans ignored the crossbow as a weapon of war, but it shows up in a hunting scene. This advantage, however, is not very useful in an actual battle, because pinpoint accuracy just isn't that valuable. I don't know a lot about ancient shooting, but medieval shooting was more like artillery - archers loosed mass volleys of arrows without aiming for a specific man. English longbowmen trained to hit a range, not a person: if you could reliably hit 150 meters out when your captain told you to hit 150 meters, then that's all the accuracy you needed.
Advantage #2 has no initial importance at all. Sure, you can span a crossbow with your legs if you want to, and you can build a marginally stronger crossbow that's intended to be leg-spanned, but this isn't a huge advantage; your legs are stronger than your arms, possibly enabling a marginally greater draw weight, but the advantage this gives you compared to the down-side of having to sit down to load is not that impressive. 11th-12th century crossbows tended to be self-bows with a prod length of maybe a little over two feet; a 2-3 foot wooden bow is a pretty normal bow, not something that's going to amaze you with its armor-piercing capability. To really take advantage of #2, you need two things: a means to make the prod much stronger without making it too large, and a means of mechanically spanning this much stronger bow. The former requires composite construction (or later, steel prods), which allows you to keep the length of the bow/prod small while drastically increasing the draw weight. The latter requires technical ingenuity to create things like belt hooks, spanning levers, cranequins, and windlasses. Notably, you need both together - a super-strong composite prod is useless without the mechanical means to span it, and a windlass is totally pointless if your bow/prod is weak enough to be drawn by arm/leg power. Once you get these things going together, however, you've got a new and interesting weapon that can potentially shoot with much more power than a bow (at the cost of decreased rate of fire, etc.). This, in turn, is what leads to the notion that crossbows are "armor-piercing;" but this is only an attribute of a sufficiently advanced crossbow that fully exploits advantage #2 with strong prod construction and mechanical spanning.
I suspect the Greeks never took off with the crossbow because while advantage #1 was apparent to them, advantage #2 was not, as they either lacked or failed to apply the technology to combine strong composite prods with mechanical spanning mechanisms.* Advantage #1 is nice, but it's nothing to write home about; it makes the crossbow a useful tool for hunting and perhaps a weapon for specific situations like sieges (as it was used in the 12th century), but it doesn't offer much that's useful in a battle situation that a normal bow lacks. If you only see #1 and never take full advantage of #2, the crossbow is at best a niche weapon; it's nice to have some around but you won't be outfitting many regular troops with them. Thus you see early crossbows pop up in various contexts but never really catch fire until the 13th century, with the discovery of composite construction, better spanning methods, and other technological refinements (e.g. the pole lathe for precision nut-making, as I mentioned in my last post). It was only then, as a gradual process going hand in hand with these advances, that medieval Europeans realized that advantage #2 potentially allowed them to make a very powerful weapon with distinct battlefield advantages (and disadvantages, of course) compared to a normal bow.**
The gastraphetes is an interesting device. If we've interpreted it correctly, you can use a good part of your body-weight to span it, which may be even better than leg-spanning. But it's a better spanning method without a correspondingly stronger prod, and for that reason it ends up being a big and rather unwieldy-looking weapon that probably wasn't something you'd want to give your archers to replace their bows. There's nowhere to go from there without composite construction and the realization that mechanical advantage, not merely raw muscle power (or body weight, in the case of the gastraphetes), is the key to spanning ever-stronger prods.
I have difficulty seeing how the Greeks of Massalia, all the way over there in Gaul, are going to develop composite construction. Composite bowmaking is pretty hard; horn bows of the steppe could take years to make owing to the seasoning of the materials and the setting of the animal-glue. You don't necessarily need to go that far with a crossbow, which could be of a much simpler composite construction, but this isn't the sort of thing that you could just reverse-engineer from a few samples that happened to find their way to Gaul. The Romans managed to produce composite bows and send them all over the empire, but their empire spanned the Mediterranean, their resources were vast, and their materiel-making infrastructure was unsurpassed for the ancient era. Now if this were a timeline about the Bosphoran Greeks, I could just maybe see this happening - they lived next door to the Scyths, after all, and I'm sure they had access to composite construction. Gaul, however, is a world away.
So what are we left with? Well, pre-composite crossbows aren't useless; after all, the medieval Europeans used them in the 11th-12th centuries. But it's not a game-changer. It doesn't really pierce armor any more than a normal bow. (Well, a gastraphetes might be a bit better at that than a normal bow, but look at the size of that thing.) What a pre-composite crossbow is best for, besides hunting, is exactly what a gastraphetes was useful for - siegecraft. It's nice if you want to pick off a guy popping up over the battlements. That's a valid use, but it's a niche use, and it's not going to lead to legions of crossbowmen. In a Genoese force recorded in the late 12th century, archers outnumbered crossbowmen by something like a 20 to 1 margin; that reflects the proper role of the early crossbow as the tool of a specialist, not a standard-issue weapon.
So, like I said in my earlier post, I don't see equipment, tactics, etc. changing much if Messalia, or anyone else in the ancient era without composite technology, becomes inordinately fond of crossbows for some reason. I suppose it's going to give them a slight edge in siegecraft, but such minor advances in weapons technology don't really matter much in comparison to strategic things like manpower, supplies, morale, generalship, and so on, and I can't really see macro-historical consequences (or even changes in armor construction) arising from the deployment of pre-composite crossbows in siege situations.
* The Greeks (and Romans) also employed alternate technologies, like torsion engines using skeins of sinew, that work very well for artillery but don't "scale down" to the size necessary for a hand-held weapon. Torsion is just grand for a ballista, but a one-man torsion crossbow would be silly.
** What's harder to explain is why it never caught on with the Romans, since they had both crossbows and composite construction. I don't have a ready answer for that.
As a caveat, I know virtually nothing about China, so this is all based on the crossbow in a European context.
There's some talk here about crossbows and their "armor-piercing" ability. That, however, is not an innate feature of a crossbow. The innate feature of the crossbow is that, because a crossbow can hold a bolt in the loaded ("spanned") position, loading ("spanning") and shooting are two separate, distinct actions. With a bow, drawing and shooting are inseparable; with a crossbow, you can span it, eat a sandwich, and then shoot it. This gives a crossbow two distinct advantages:
1. You can wait for the right moment to shoot it, and then shoot without delay. Since spanning and shooting are separate, you can span a crossbow and then patiently wait for just the right moment to pull the trigger/tiller/whatever. You can aim a bow too, but you have to nock and draw first, which does take a moment. A crossbow may not necessarily be more "accurate" than a bow in terms of actually shooting straighter, but it can allow more accurate shots in the sense that it gives you the ability to make a careful, aimed shot at just the right moment.
2. You can use means other than your arms to span it. Since the spanning and shooting actions are separate, you can span it in some other way - with your legs, with a machine, etc. - and then shoot it with your arms. Obviously a bow doesn't let you do this.
Advantage #1 is probably the most apparent one, but it's also the least useful in battle, and it might help explain why "early crossbows" remained rare and in some cases never caught on as battlefield weapons. Some of the earliest instances we have of European crossbow use are in the context of hunting, which if you think about it makes a lot of sense - in a hunt, the ability to shoot without delay (e.g. at a sprinting deer that's going to be gone in a second) and to wait patiently for a shot (e.g. a rabbit that's going to peek out of its hole any moment now) is pretty useful. Notably, the Romans ignored the crossbow as a weapon of war, but it shows up in a hunting scene. This advantage, however, is not very useful in an actual battle, because pinpoint accuracy just isn't that valuable. I don't know a lot about ancient shooting, but medieval shooting was more like artillery - archers loosed mass volleys of arrows without aiming for a specific man. English longbowmen trained to hit a range, not a person: if you could reliably hit 150 meters out when your captain told you to hit 150 meters, then that's all the accuracy you needed.
Advantage #2 has no initial importance at all. Sure, you can span a crossbow with your legs if you want to, and you can build a marginally stronger crossbow that's intended to be leg-spanned, but this isn't a huge advantage; your legs are stronger than your arms, possibly enabling a marginally greater draw weight, but the advantage this gives you compared to the down-side of having to sit down to load is not that impressive. 11th-12th century crossbows tended to be self-bows with a prod length of maybe a little over two feet; a 2-3 foot wooden bow is a pretty normal bow, not something that's going to amaze you with its armor-piercing capability. To really take advantage of #2, you need two things: a means to make the prod much stronger without making it too large, and a means of mechanically spanning this much stronger bow. The former requires composite construction (or later, steel prods), which allows you to keep the length of the bow/prod small while drastically increasing the draw weight. The latter requires technical ingenuity to create things like belt hooks, spanning levers, cranequins, and windlasses. Notably, you need both together - a super-strong composite prod is useless without the mechanical means to span it, and a windlass is totally pointless if your bow/prod is weak enough to be drawn by arm/leg power. Once you get these things going together, however, you've got a new and interesting weapon that can potentially shoot with much more power than a bow (at the cost of decreased rate of fire, etc.). This, in turn, is what leads to the notion that crossbows are "armor-piercing;" but this is only an attribute of a sufficiently advanced crossbow that fully exploits advantage #2 with strong prod construction and mechanical spanning.
I suspect the Greeks never took off with the crossbow because while advantage #1 was apparent to them, advantage #2 was not, as they either lacked or failed to apply the technology to combine strong composite prods with mechanical spanning mechanisms.* Advantage #1 is nice, but it's nothing to write home about; it makes the crossbow a useful tool for hunting and perhaps a weapon for specific situations like sieges (as it was used in the 12th century), but it doesn't offer much that's useful in a battle situation that a normal bow lacks. If you only see #1 and never take full advantage of #2, the crossbow is at best a niche weapon; it's nice to have some around but you won't be outfitting many regular troops with them. Thus you see early crossbows pop up in various contexts but never really catch fire until the 13th century, with the discovery of composite construction, better spanning methods, and other technological refinements (e.g. the pole lathe for precision nut-making, as I mentioned in my last post). It was only then, as a gradual process going hand in hand with these advances, that medieval Europeans realized that advantage #2 potentially allowed them to make a very powerful weapon with distinct battlefield advantages (and disadvantages, of course) compared to a normal bow.**
The gastraphetes is an interesting device. If we've interpreted it correctly, you can use a good part of your body-weight to span it, which may be even better than leg-spanning. But it's a better spanning method without a correspondingly stronger prod, and for that reason it ends up being a big and rather unwieldy-looking weapon that probably wasn't something you'd want to give your archers to replace their bows. There's nowhere to go from there without composite construction and the realization that mechanical advantage, not merely raw muscle power (or body weight, in the case of the gastraphetes), is the key to spanning ever-stronger prods.
I have difficulty seeing how the Greeks of Massalia, all the way over there in Gaul, are going to develop composite construction. Composite bowmaking is pretty hard; horn bows of the steppe could take years to make owing to the seasoning of the materials and the setting of the animal-glue. You don't necessarily need to go that far with a crossbow, which could be of a much simpler composite construction, but this isn't the sort of thing that you could just reverse-engineer from a few samples that happened to find their way to Gaul. The Romans managed to produce composite bows and send them all over the empire, but their empire spanned the Mediterranean, their resources were vast, and their materiel-making infrastructure was unsurpassed for the ancient era. Now if this were a timeline about the Bosphoran Greeks, I could just maybe see this happening - they lived next door to the Scyths, after all, and I'm sure they had access to composite construction. Gaul, however, is a world away.
So what are we left with? Well, pre-composite crossbows aren't useless; after all, the medieval Europeans used them in the 11th-12th centuries. But it's not a game-changer. It doesn't really pierce armor any more than a normal bow. (Well, a gastraphetes might be a bit better at that than a normal bow, but look at the size of that thing.) What a pre-composite crossbow is best for, besides hunting, is exactly what a gastraphetes was useful for - siegecraft. It's nice if you want to pick off a guy popping up over the battlements. That's a valid use, but it's a niche use, and it's not going to lead to legions of crossbowmen. In a Genoese force recorded in the late 12th century, archers outnumbered crossbowmen by something like a 20 to 1 margin; that reflects the proper role of the early crossbow as the tool of a specialist, not a standard-issue weapon.
So, like I said in my earlier post, I don't see equipment, tactics, etc. changing much if Messalia, or anyone else in the ancient era without composite technology, becomes inordinately fond of crossbows for some reason. I suppose it's going to give them a slight edge in siegecraft, but such minor advances in weapons technology don't really matter much in comparison to strategic things like manpower, supplies, morale, generalship, and so on, and I can't really see macro-historical consequences (or even changes in armor construction) arising from the deployment of pre-composite crossbows in siege situations.
* The Greeks (and Romans) also employed alternate technologies, like torsion engines using skeins of sinew, that work very well for artillery but don't "scale down" to the size necessary for a hand-held weapon. Torsion is just grand for a ballista, but a one-man torsion crossbow would be silly.
** What's harder to explain is why it never caught on with the Romans, since they had both crossbows and composite construction. I don't have a ready answer for that.
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Excellent post, Carp!
In an ATL, combining the crossbow and the shock-infantry-legion into a combined arms unit (similar to the Pike and Shot things in the 1600s) could still have happened, once the benefits and drawbacks of the weapon had been perfected.
- BNC
In an ATL, combining the crossbow and the shock-infantry-legion into a combined arms unit (similar to the Pike and Shot things in the 1600s) could still have happened, once the benefits and drawbacks of the weapon had been perfected.
- BNC
If the bolts can penetrate the armor of knights, shields should not be a problem
WRT longbows vs. armour, a few points to bear in mind:
- The English didn't abandon longbows, nor the French armour. So, clearly neither longbows nor armour were entirely ineffective, else there would have been no point using them.
- Most soldiers couldn't afford full plate armour, so even if longbows were useless against full plate, they could still be worth using for the 90% of soldiers who were less well-protected.
- At least during the early stages of the HYW, even if knights themselves wore plate armour, their horses generally didn't.
- Plate armour wasn't all of a uniform thickness -- generally the armour on the chest was thickest, that on the limbs somewhat thinner. So it's possible that an arrow which couldn't get through the thicker chest-plate might still be able to penetrate the gauntlet, say.
- Armour didn't remain the same throughout the whole 116 years, but was gradually improved to make it stronger and harder to penetrate. Hence a blow which could penetrate the armour of a French knight at Crecy (1346) might not be able to do so at Formigny (1450).
- The English didn't abandon longbows, nor the French armour. So, clearly neither longbows nor armour were entirely ineffective, else there would have been no point using them.
- Most soldiers couldn't afford full plate armour, so even if longbows were useless against full plate, they could still be worth using for the 90% of soldiers who were less well-protected.
- At least during the early stages of the HYW, even if knights themselves wore plate armour, their horses generally didn't.
- Plate armour wasn't all of a uniform thickness -- generally the armour on the chest was thickest, that on the limbs somewhat thinner. So it's possible that an arrow which couldn't get through the thicker chest-plate might still be able to penetrate the gauntlet, say.
- Armour didn't remain the same throughout the whole 116 years, but was gradually improved to make it stronger and harder to penetrate. Hence a blow which could penetrate the armour of a French knight at Crecy (1346) might not be able to do so at Formigny (1450).
It doesn't just have to penetrate the shield, though, it has to go right through it with enough force to penetrate any body armour and then cause a deep enough wound to take the target out of action.
RodentRevolution
Banned
Ah
See if arbalests can penetrate the armour of knights with an optimal strike at optimal range it does not follow that all crossbows can and further even arbalests found shields a problem much of the time.
Further but BNC wanted a crossbow with a rate of fire greater than 5 shots a minute which rules out arbalests and most other very powerful crossbows. Remember the crossbow is powered by its human operator. The advantage over a bow is that it can store that energy independently so you can add a bit at a time and thus store more than man could produce in a given instant to be released far more suddenly. However the more powerful your crossbow the longer to reload.
RodentRevolution
Banned
The evidence being rather more that quilted fabric armour such as gambesons was effective enough to merit wearing as protection against arrows and melee weapons, such armour did not commonly fall out of fashion until firearms became well established and even then such items as the buff coat lingered on whilst exposure to melee weapons was a major thrat.
A skilled user who was aiming for best penetration would not be as concerned with rate of fire, similarly one concerned with rate of fire would put less energy into each shot, knowing that 'just enough' is fine vs. lightly armoured Gauls or Saxons.
In some cases the bowmen would favour the heavier bow - if they were going up against an enemy that frequently employs turtle formation, they would be certain to want better penetration.
Like modern firearms, different weapons are better for different situations. 5RPM would not be ideal if all of them just stick to an enemy shield.
- BNC
In some cases the bowmen would favour the heavier bow - if they were going up against an enemy that frequently employs turtle formation, they would be certain to want better penetration.
Like modern firearms, different weapons are better for different situations. 5RPM would not be ideal if all of them just stick to an enemy shield.
- BNC
longsword14
Banned
In a collision if the other body colliding is very small then the total energy division is in the favour of the lighter object, i.e a bullet. If that were not the case a large shot with the same powder as a musket would be just as useful, but that is evidently not true.