Duuude...

[telophase]

The TiVo caught an episode of "How Did They Do That?" on History Internationl. This one is on ancient CHinese personal weapons. They showed a working model of a Chinese repeating crossbow. Duuuuude! Repeating crossbow! Apparently a trained crossbowman could shoot close to one arrow per second.

You can see a drawing of one on Wikipedia. You put arrows into the magazine on top, and the lever only took one motion to pull the string back, drop the next arrow into position, and release the string.

Yah, my TiVo knows me. XD

In other news, random fireworks have started up again. The cat has chosen to retreat under the bed.

Comments

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

i want a repeating crossbow!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

...wait a minute, does that mean the show Brock Sampson was talking about on Venture Brothers was real?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If he was talking about it this week and it was right at the beginning of the show, then my TiVo cut it off. :P In other words: I don't remember it. :D


(But I have been going around saying "Crap! I made an umlaut!" at random times all week. XD

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

No, it was last week at the party, when Brock has ditched everybody and is watching Discovery or something. "They're gonna shoot it! It's huge!"

(I've been on the gayest day camp ever.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, I remember now. XD Yeah, there's a lot of Big Ancient Weapons shows on right now. There was one on siege engines fairly recently - they did a reconstruction of a ROman ballista. So YEAH the show's really on. XD

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The parents' cats begged to go outside, then the fireworks started and they were clawing at the doors to get back in, and then running and hiding.

[fuchsoid.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago, I was involved in cleaning a collection of weapons from the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich, and it included two of these crossbows. They had been taken as souvenirs after some colonial war in the 19th century. They were very simply constructed; I could probably make one, given time and the right tools. Ours didn't work, because the rawhide power cord had dried out and split, but you could definitely get off a dart every second or so if they did work. Apparently they didn't have much penetrating power, so the darts had to be poisoned to make them more effective.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Nifty!

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Never made one myself, but I've played with Chinese repeating crossbows as battlefield weapons in the SCA. Much good clean bloodthirsty fun! :-D Though they do have the drawback of most repeating weapons--they run out of ammo way too darned fast. :-(