The call of duty crossbow
The crossbow was first seen in black ops and was almost completely useless, now we have the black ops 2 crossbow which is better but still useless. But are these representations of crossbows accurate, do crossbows really work the way they do in the game or is this just a bunch of bologna.
First lets look at the history of the crossbow in the modern era. The last crossbow to be used by the American army was the Big Joe 5 in WW2, used for silent assassinations it was very large and not very easy to use. Either way there couldn’t possibly be a crossbow in the Vietnam war.
Next up is the bow it’s self for measurements we are going to assume that the players hand is about 7 1/2 inches long. The bolt looks to be about 2 hand lengths making it roughly 15 in long which is extremely short for any bow even a child’s bow would be longer than this. The string is set up in a very early compound design, compound bows were invented in 1966 so this does fit the time period but there were very few crossbows made with this design.
Finally the actual mechanics of the crossbow. The firing mechanism is simple enough on this model and should work but then there's the way the player loads it, after each shot the player pulls back the string by hand and puts in the next bolt. If you know anything about crossbows you should know that this is just stupid, the average draw weight of a crossbow is about 165 pounds, somewhat like lifting a 165 lb weight by just a string wrapped around it, it's very hard. It's understandable that tis is done as reloading a normal crossbow takes upwards of 30 seconds. Next is the actual firing of a crossbow. A normal crossbow bolt moves at 225+ feet per second almost 36 player lengths in one second, I can not find the actual fps of the crossbow but by watching some gameplay and timing how long it took shots to go different lengths I discovered that the black ops crossbow moves a pathetic 9-10 fps which is absolutely crazy. Going at almost 1/20 of the speed it should makes this weapon so hard to use that it has no practical purpose on the battlefield Stay tuned for the next installment of call of duty crossbows where I cover the black ops 2 crossbow.