Clearly they are very concerned over British Soccer Hooligans

I think an aerosol weapon loaded with de-alcoholized beer would probably be most effective.

That reminds me. I need to come up with a good reason for my players to run into some of the "transparent concrete windows" the BBB talks about on p 252. They may spoil my fun with legwork. But the *wham!* if they don't would be priceless.

A viewing window on to a chemical plant work floor that uses potentially explosive compounds would be a good one. Lots of solvents fall in to this category for example, these solvents could either be being made on this line or being used in the fabrication of antoher product.

Troll archery adept?

I remember seeing some pics of my dad (Force Recon Marine in Vietnam) carrying a tomahawk. It's even big today with V-TAC which has seen use in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he encountered some NVA and VC armed with very old crossbows. They can definently be nasty, silent weapons.

That would be valid in some cases. But not these guys. They only seem to have one though, even in other pictures, so it could just be for looks.

Or maybe situations where having a shot overpentrate or go flying though a wall is simply unacceptable? Though there already are glazers.

i believe the gun first became a proper equalizer when the revolver was introduced by colt and improved by S&W. before that you better hope to kill your target in one shot, or you had at best a poor club in your hands.

same deal with the crossbows really. hell, i think some of them was equipped with pointy metal bits, similar to a bayonet.

Uh, not really. Crossbows weren't just point and click killing simplicity in the Middle Ages. They were technologically advanced weapons that required skillful maintenance and using them in the field also required a high degree of discipline and practice (although much of the skill was in drilling to maintain proper formation). For these reasons the crossbow was the almost exclusive domain of highly paid professional soldiers for hundreds of years particularly the Genoese mercenaries, who were considered the best crossbowmen available. They were employed by nearly every European power and their prestige and dominance of the battlefield only came to end at the conclusion of the Hundred Years War.
So the average peasant was still basically fucked. Although what the hell a peasant would be doing fighting a knight is somewhat confusing. Or doing anything other than farming for that matter.
The Hundred Years War also saw the first massed use of the longbow upon European battlefields (a great weapon, but probably not the superweapon it's been depicted as by the, predominantly English, historians), and the beginning of the decline of heavy cavalry (who would remain in effective use for another three hundred years).

Ummm....history mode off? Sorry, don't know what came over me.

Have to agree with Kyrn here. Three words: Battle of Agincourt.

...which as I discovered are fully capable of killing a 400 watt stereo amplifier at 20 paces.

Long story...

Some models had flames, too.

Share?

SA seems pretty retardedly fast to me. I'd say SS at best (and only that because they have swanky clips full of bolts, etc).

So Professor, considering that the crossbow was so utterly owned at the Battle of Crecy, why didn't the European powers shift with all possible haste to widespread use of the longbow?

Good question. The bow is easy to make, just a piece of aged wood properly shaped. The problem was that it required years and years of practice to be able to handle properly. England was able to field large forces of archers because there was a culture of the bow in the countryside. Think NASCAR in the deep south and you're starting to get close to how archery was viewed in most villages. This culture resulted in boys who grew up learning marksmanship and then became men who, thanks to years of practice, could draw a hundred plus pound draw-weight longbow multiple times in a battle.

Examination of grave finds has shown severe disfigurement of the right shoulders and backs of most archers due to the strain of pulling a bow every day for years and years. Without such a culture of the bow, the other nations of Europe continued to rely upon the crossbow. After the Hundred Years War the English became alarmed as the popularity of archery waned in the countryside and one of the kings (one of the Henry's?) passed a law requiring every man under a certain status to practice with longbow every Sunday. Eventually the English were forced to return to using crossbows and then muskets because there were no longer enough experts longbowmen to field them effectively in military units.

FYI, several historians have noted that until the introduction of rifling the longbow remained the most effective ranged weapon in the human arsenal. It was just too fucking hard to use. Plus it had serious issues when it came to using behind cover (you had to be standing to fire it). This proved disadvantageous in sieges. Also worth noting is that the crossbow was (and is) a far better choice for sniping than the bow as you don't have hold a hundred pound string back for a few minutes while waiting for the right shot.

Yes I know, which would be why I used the Battle of Agincourt as an example to disprove Vaevictus' notion that someone armed with a bow or random melee weapon wouldn't stand a chance against a knight, and that crossbows would make all the difference (seeing as the french did have them).

And there were other important factors besides weather and terrain.