Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas
I agree that the authors probably used either the LT crossbow rules or some blend of the old Vehicles rules and the GURPS gun damage formula, but I would not worry too much about what assumptions they used.
I have no idea where Wikipedia gets the idea about steel bows, but as far as I know they appear around the 14th through 16th centuries not the 12th. Arbalest is just Englished Frenched Latin arcuballista "bow-shooter" so it is just as vague as English crossbow. Many Medieval Latin sources just say "ballista" for all shooting machines from the kind that could be loaded on horseback to the kind which needed a team of men to move them from the store-room onto the wall when enemies approached.
|
Which reminds me ... kind of ironic that we tend to use "ballista" for "bolt firing engine" and "catapult" for "stone throwing engine" given that, IIRC, the Romans used precisely the reverse definitions.