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Saber Cherry said:
Firing a crossbow ballistically is like firing a handgun ballistically - possible, but never done (aside from corrections of a few feet of drop, generally calculated by the scope) since you only have control over a single factor, angle. At least, that's how it would seem to me...
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but that's how rifles and (some) artillery work today.
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I'm particularly surprised at the terrible arrowodynamics (get it? A pun!). This might be mitigated a bit by firing in high arcs, thus storing some energy as potential (immune to drag) for much of the flight, as opposed to firing flat, where the energy is always kinetic (and thus vulnerable to energy loss from drag, proportional to v^2 IIRC).
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you know one statement of the three laws of thermodynamics is "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game"? same with arching flight: yes, you can reduce *instanteous* drag with the high trajectory, but the time of flight is much longer than a flat trajectory, so drag works *longer*. i'd have to dig up the drag-corrected ballistic equation to figure out what the actual numbers are.
there's also the little problem that for fin-stabilized projectiles, their ability to stay pointed in the right direction goes up as v^2 also, since that term is in the equation for lift. so, there goes their precision.