I'm a longbow person because I value quantity over quality.
Crossbow, I support levelling of the playing field between a normal person and a rich sicko who has been able to spend their entire life training and can afford armor through their exploitation of the peasants. Also, I do not respect Pope Innocent II and his banning of crossbows was a skill issue.
Crossbows can shoot through riot shields, helmets and soft body armour. Though, so can compound bows.
Edit: BIG crossbows can shoot through walls.
Yes, it will punch clean through solid plate armor. And as they alluded to above, knights lobbied the pope to ban crossbows from use in combat because it meant a peasant with a week's worth of training could own a knight that had trained their whole life for combat
The crossbow is the obvious choice.
It can be built small enough for a novelty assassins toy (pistol crossbow) or large enough to be used as a siege weapon (ballista) or anything in between.
Recent advancements have provided us with magazine fed crossbows with lever cocking mechanisms enabling rapid follow up shots with minimal reload time and the ability to keep the weapon approximately on-target while cycling the weapon.
The longbow requires strength and training to use properly, more so than the intuitive and superior crossbow.
Prolonged longbow use deforms the skeleton of the user.
Longbow wrist slap owies.
A ballista on the back of a technical provides a mobile crewed weapons platform that can be operated with a skeleton crew to devastating effect.
Crossbows are heavily restricted in my part of the world, demonstrating the understandable fear they strike in the heart of the hegemonic power structure.
Crossbows are still kept in modern military arsenals for a reason. (I don't know what that reason is but you don't want to be out-bow'd do you?)
Recent advancements have provided us with magazine fed crossbows
#ArbalestGang
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Longbows are weapons of the perfidious Albionoids while crossbows are the weapons of the peasantry
Bourgeois Italian mercenaries vs Peasant Welsh levies.
We'll see you at Crecy, Genovese.
> carrying around my crossbow. Has a rapid reload rate of 1 bolt per 10 minutes
> in a field made up of ~90% cow shit
> shoot my shot at the english sporting peasant during this season's duke's entertainment battle
> miss.jpg
> that's okay, let me get out my crank dohickey for 60 revolutions to reload
> english sporting peasant has long bow
> he just notches an arrow and pulls back
> I receive an arrow to the breathing humor
> mfw my tactical crossbow was insufficient
> be a teenage boy
> castle get sieged by the english
> get handed a crossbow
> own a king
....
> get boiled alive afterwards though
The longbow, while progressive for it's time in its suppression of the dying heavy cavalry feudal order, was supplanted in turn by the nascent proletarian crossbow and it's ability to collectivise the means of destruction.
Yumis deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that. I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine yumi in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even pierce slabs of solid steel with my yumi.
Japanese bowyers spend years working on a single yumi and layer it with bamboo up to a million times to produce the finest bows known to mankind.
Yumis are thrice as powerful as European lobgbows and thrice as accurate for that matter too. Anything a longbow can shoot through, a yumi can shoot through better. I'm pretty sure a yumi could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple draw and release.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Samurai and their yumi of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the yumi first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? yumis are simply the best bow that the world has ever seen. This is a fact and you can't deny it.
You may have a beautiful work of art historical weapon, but does it come in camo with a scope mount?
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crossbows were more likely to be wholly owned by the local lord/baron and given out during wartime and taken back after, while longbows were relatively commonly available (if not exactly cheap or easy to make) civillian hunting tools as well as weapons of war. crossbows are the rich lord's peasant levy weapon of choice since it leaves the peasants disarmed afterwards as the crossbows are too expensive (difficult to manufacture metal crank parts etc. compared to 'self bows' like the english longbow that can be made entirely out of one piece of wood with a little experience with curing) to not take back after issuing. plus, since crossbows are simpler to use and require less training, the lords would invest less in military training for their civilians/militias, leaving the more vulnerable to military domination when they didn't have their lord's crossbows in hand, whereas many places encouraged longbow practice and military tradition to ensure they had enough bowmen should they need them for war, creating a decentralized military power base and cultural attitude of resilience and self-reliance among the populace. crossbows were a way to centralize military power in the hands of the aristocracy, not some kind of proletarian worker's weapon of choice (which was probably either a staff, a club, a repurposed woodcutting axe, an improvised spear, or a simple hunting bow). there were exceptions to this general trend like the Taborites (who were a peasant indurgency that was famous for using crossbows, murray bookchin claims they were a kind of proto-anarcho-communism), especially in places without bow traditions (mainland europe for example) and as time went on and political power in general became more centralized (in places with longer traditions of centralized power, china for example, the crossbow was more common due to more standardized 'state armies' compared to ad-hoc european feudal militias). its kind of like early factories, sure there might be nothing inherently and essentially wrong with the centralization of production itself, but the way it was used historically was at the behest of and for the benefit of the ruling classes. for example, the prominence of crossbows in continental Europe (they abhorred missile weapons compared to many other cultures, bow training had to be forced by decree after military experience proved this to be disastrous) is almost solely due to Italian city states (such as Genoa) mustering entire platoons of only crossbowmen that they would hire out as mecenaries. Crossbowmen often were paid double that of an archer, even though the bow took more training. think about why that might have been if they are supposedly the 'weapon of the people'
crossbows were literally bourgeois, the guilds in the urban centres were manufacturing them
this discussion is a false dichotomy wrought out of centuries of british antiquarians masturbating themselves delirious about the single period in english history they were actually able to trade with a peer on land. both crossbows and bows are fine. and neither were magic medieval armor-piercing ammunition.
much ado is made about the longbowmen 'long training period' but it was the common recreation & hunting tool, you generally had plenty of potential archers, the problem was economics---levying peasant laborforces for military service sucks for the harvest, and it was difficult to attract men to the campaigns professionally if there's not a labor surplus. the same stressors applied to crossbow soldiers, you didn't want nobodies without experience with crossbows either. the theoretical lower skill requirements isn't going to be relevant unless you're opening up an armory while under siege. unskilled burghers in that situation weren't particularly potent anyway, whatever implements you might give them.
so all we're really talking about is tactics, and it's pretty simple: is the field restricted, are there terrain obstructions and physical obstacles? clear case for crossbows because they require less space for the firing and range isn't an issue. on the other hand, a big field to maneuver can make the best of bows' range. if you want a rounded 14th century army you'd obviously bring both. notice 'firepower' is not included here, because whether or not 5% more missiles bite into an armor plate is not what decides a battle. missiles are harassment that damages the cohesion and effectiveness of the enemy, they don't have to directly kill people to achieve their purpose.
I want to learn to use a weapon fast... crossbow is my answer!
In the only battle between english longbowmen and genoese crossbowmen (that I know of, at least), the longbows won due to some mild rain, so I'm gonna go with longbows.
Why did the rain impact the crossbows more? Was it because the longbowmen were better trained in rain or something?
No, it's because you can't unstring a crossbow. Both are equally affected by the rain - string gets wet, fucks up the tension, have to wait for the string to dry out to use it again - but you can just take the string off a bow in a few seconds, coil it up, and pop it under your hat to keep it dry. As soon as the rain stops you restring the bow and you're good to go again, but the crossbows still need to dry out.
There was an additional complication for the Geonese in that something disrupted the supply lines and fucked up their 3-guys-per-2-crossbows tactic (one to fire, one to reload, and one to hold the shield they're all hiding behind), but I'd also consider that a point in the bows favour - all you need is the big stick, some little sticks, and a dry string.
Crossbows more complicated/finicky so they tend to lose reliability more when wet? No idea if that's the reason or even true, but it's the first thing that came to my mind.
Short bow, because I can loot one with arrows from Dick's Sporting Goods
Longbows encouraged the development of a professional warrior caste, so I'll go with crossbows.
skill issue
