From the invention of the crossbows, they were used vigorously in the warfares and the battlefields. The repeating crossbow is also known as zhuge nu in Chinese. It could fire as many as 10 iron bolts without reloading. This article appears in the Winter 2020 issue (Vol. The repeating crossbow was so powerful that it could destroy something as big as a city tower even. Special Operations Command (Osprey Publishing, 2019). To compensate for the latter, crossbowmen generally tipped the bolt heads with poison.Ĭhris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. Its effective range (about 80 yards) was poor, and penetration was limited. A chukonu could unleash 10 bolts in just 20 seconds (a standard crossbow’s top rate of fire was three or four bolts a minute), but there were substantial trade-offs. This ingeniously simple weapon figured in Asian warfare until the 19th century. The crossbowman then drove the handle forward, pushing the whole mechanism to the front to reengage the string for firing, as the next bolt took its place in the flight groove, ready to go. When drawn to the rear, the handle both cocked and, at the full extent of the draw, released the bowstring, firing the bolt that had dropped automatically into the flight groove. It featured a top-mounted magazine, in which multiple bolts were stacked, and a large operating handle. Yet they were slow and cumbersome to load, leaving those who wielded them vulnerable to attack.ĭeveloped in the second century BCE, the chukonu was intended to overcome this deficit. Conventional crossbows, invented in China in the seventh century BCE, required far less training to master than standard bows and delivered immense armor-piercing power. The Chinese chukonu-a repeating crossbow-was a magazine-fed semiautomatic weapon, but one predating its firearm equivalents by millennia. The Ingeniously Simple but Deadly Chukonu Crossbow Close
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