[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by MachingunJoeTurbo

@endoperez and rdonj: Ah I see. Well at least I know I wasn't completely crazy and imagined the whole thing with the cave people.

Well, you didn't imagine the part about the agarthans. The rest of it is dubious.

Generally, a nation that puts the most effective fighting force on the field at the cheapest cost wins. Of course there are all kinds of exceptions. But crossbows allowed a very cheap unit to kill very expensive units.

I'm guessing at the numbers - but crossbows were 80% as effective at 20% of the cost. With the primary cost here for longbowmen being a restricted pool of conscripts caused by the lengthy training time, and the difficulty in churning out bows.

Crossbows are not cheap. Where do people get the notions that they were cheap? You need bowmaking skills to make the bow part of the weapon. You need someone to fashion the trigger and the small mechanics. Someone to fashion a tiller. Someone to make the string. Someone to make the device to reload the weapon. And the person to put it together could be completely different. With a bow one dude can make a bow and that is often how it was done. Someone who could produce a complete crossbow on his own was very rare and needed more people. People who had to be organized and communicate to one another. The sheer complexity of construction and the number of folks needed to be *paid* shows that this idea is faulty.

Dude. I made a fully functional crossbow, that would penetrate 2" of wood in 5th grade.

The "bow" part of the weapon is called a stock. And no, you don't need any particular bowyer skill.

I think you have *no* general idea of the level of complexity that societies of the time were capable of generating. For example, looms of the times had up to ***10,000*** moving parts.
To think that societies couldn't crank out crossbows with 10-24 parts cheaply is .. simply laughable.

The reason looms were successful is the same reason that crossbows were successful. Large amounts of standardized parts could be cranked out, and assembled, quickly and cheaply.

And yes, compared to knights, sappers, artillerymen, crossbowmen *were* cheap.

Crossbowmen had essentially no need to train. These troops were often raised in mere weeks, vs. the years required to gain excellence with the longbow. Because they had virtually no training - they were easier to raise, deployable from virtually any population. And when killed they were easily replaceable.