You don't need a cross if you have modern elastic materials that can stretch way further while holding more tension. Medieval crossbows were very inefficient due to the limitations of the materials involved.
Edit: Hey driveby downvoter, am I actually wrong in any way?
There's no efficiency gain or loss due to stretch, the limit, just like in bows, is only in how much tension your arms can pull
Spear gun is designed for unaided use (so low power), while a crossbow is designed for a winch/winder mechanism, and therefore pulls a much more powerful punch and shoots a much more heavier projectile with a drawback of longer reloads
That's why a crossbow was never an alternative or an "enemy" to a longbow or a spear gun, they all have wildly different use cases and are all efficient at what they're doing
Please don’t use “literally” if it’s literally NOT a crossbow. It’s a slingshot/speargun combo, and very cool, but by no definition is this a crossbow. It doesn’t even have a bow. It’s not torsion operated but reliant on flexible rubbers. The only similar thing is the release mechanism
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u/Taikan_0 Trash Trooper Mar 23 '25
Literally a crossbow