Question about Muscle-powered Range Weapons...

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Some designs have 80-90% letoff - You can hold a 70# bow with 7-14# of force at full draw. Check out the force-draw curves of modern compound bows. They're nutso.

Yeah. Just about everything about modern compound bows is different from traditional stick and recurve bows. They're vastly superior in just about every way except for the fact that you need high tech materials and machinery to build them.

For non-hoplology geeks, "let-off" is the force needed to draw a bow at a given percentage of full draw. Pulleys and cams give you a huge mechanical advantage when using a modern compound bow, especially as you increase the percentage of draw length to full draw.

If a traditional "self" (i.e., one piece of wood carefully selected and shaped) longbow has letoff curve which is pretty much linear or even exponential, a compound bow has a letoff curve which sort of resembles a bell curve. That means its actually easier to hold a compound bow at full draw than partially drawn, which is the opposite of a traditional bow.

In turn, that makes it easy to wait or aim for long periods of time without having to ready the bow by drawing it. Additionally, stabilizers, improved arrow rests, advanced arrows, string releases, and other gadgets correct just about every potential problem with releasing the arrow and getting it to fly straight.

That makes compound bows incredibly accurate compared to traditional bows both for target shooting and "stand" hunting. I don't know how much better they are for shooting moving targets on the fly, since they're usually a bit heavier and the stabilizers slightly slow your ability to track a fast-moving target.

Arguably, Bow (Compound) could be a separate Easy skill which defaults to Bow (Traditional) at -4 and vice-versa.