There are a lot of great educators out there, but too many people just to critique without actually considering why it's like that.
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Thus why crossbows are better in film
They're just as flashy as bows
they're simple and just as bad ass.
Then again, I'm not qualified to speak on how accurate bows and crossbows are, but if you're going to use one in an action movie, then I'd say crossbow definitely 100%.
there's a reason crossbows were invented and popularized and it's that they're superior to a bow in most ways as a martial weapon. they allow increased draw weight for better stopping power, and they may be drawn in advance and fired when ready which allows more accurate aiming and a quicker response time once a target is spotted. the main disadvantage is that they're heavy and have a lot of complex moving parts. they're also not appropriate for all settings because they're a much more modern invention than bows are.
...I don't usually reply to things like this, but I just wanted to point out that the reason that crossbows were popularised was not because they were superior weapons. In skilled hands, bows continued to dominate crossbows in battle long after they began to coexist (and probably still would, imo).
The increased draw weight isn't as impressive as it looks because the draw /length/ is a lot less (which is why pistol crossbows are much less powerful than rifle crossbows of the same weight). And that slight edge on the first shot is rendered more or less irrelevant when the reload time on heavy crossbows was best measured in minutes, while archers put out a minimum of 1 arrow per 5 seconds (especially in open warfare, which is what most battles were).
The real reason why crossbows (and initially guns) replaced bows was that it takes so much less time to get someone good enough with one. You could raise an army of crossbowmen in a couple of months, but archers needed to be embedded in your culture and trained from childhood.
I'm not trying to undersell crossbows, because that is a HUGE tactical advantage, but it's just not the case that they were instantly superior weapons!
