RE: [OT] CrossbowRe: [FT] (LONG) The Balance of Power -- Fighters and a Defense

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
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?

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