Ok heres a quick idea pulled from a recent discussion, I always wanted a crossbow really.

Questions you may ask are in BOLD

[size=14px]Name: [/size]
The "Assassin Rifle"

[size=14px]History: [/size]
This ancient weapon served humanity well in the 16th century but to this date still finds itself a purpose, modern technology has raised the crossbow back from the history books and it is now a viable option for those who want a quieter combat solution.

The Assassin Rifle was designed by request of covert opps squads, they needed the deadliest weapon emaginable that does not make a single sound. A crossbow was perfect as it can easily handle large heavy rounds or even explosives without sacrafising safety, flexiblity or size. But most of all the bow does not make much more than a thump when fired.

As such the weapon was named the "Assassin rifle" after its intended use on the battlefeild, its light wheight makes it easy to aim or move quickly into position, its low recoil demainds assassin sharp precision and when your done you can press a button and the whole thing folds up neatly so you can store it in your locker.

[size=14px]Basic Description: [/size]
A high powered double tier crossbow. Its most outstanding feature, Something that previously was thought to be impossible; is the ability to fire multiple shots without compromise.

Its appearance is similar to the crossbow from Half life but emagine it with a larger stronger bow and 3 slots for holding the bolts, directly above is a second bow and another platform for holding 2 more extra bolts

The 3rd slot is of course concealed because of the second tier but that can be loaded from a clip, the other slots require manual loading

What do you mean by double tier? Its 2 crossbows in 1. There is an upper bow and a lower bow with the lower bow supporting the upper one. This mechanism allows 5 shots to be fired when the bow can only handle 3 at max. Each tier supports 2 extra shots.

Can the 2 bows be fired independantly? No, but if that does not raise balance issues that could work.

I thought I told you its not possible to fire multiple shots!

The CB-1100X2 uses a powerful pneumatic surface tention inducing High carbon thick plastic bow that restrains a flexi-chrome reinforced metal foil cable

it has enough power to launch up to 1250 grams of ordinance at speeds of 180KPH or a single small item at a top speed of 260KPH. The cable is pulled back by a gas powered tow lever that rests on a steel frame

Multipe shots are fully supported by this bow.

[size=14px]About the ammunition: [/size]
The CB-1100X2 can use 2 different types of bolts:

11 inch aliminium standard bolt for general purposes

OR

Explosive gliders that carry a small warhead and are designed to glide through the air for increased airtime despite traveling much slower. These can be guided using a targeting laser.

A single ammo clip holds 7 bolts below the rifle and supplies the centermost slot.

Each Explosive glider wheighs 150 grams and they will reduce projectile speed by 16KPH

Due to this wheight, the explosive bolts can affect the weapon. Standard arrows will have no affect.

[size=14px]Primary fire: [/size]
Launches all loaded bolts, a normal bolt travels at 260KPH, nearly hitscan and does alot of damage. A bolt going fast enough will peirce armour and go straight through enemies, a slightly slower bolt can even pin enemies to walls. Once you fire you can pull back the bow with a lever and you load one bolt.

If 5 bolts are aready loaded, they are fired at 180kph, but are still fast enough. Bolts spread out in a random pattern except the centermost bolt remains accurate

Gliders behave the same but travel slower.

Fire modes include:

-Standard bolts

-Gliders

How do you change the ammo type just by switching a mode? You reload with the new ammo.

How would the different speeds affect damage?

a bolt traveling at 180KPH would do about 60 damage (they are huge)
For each 16 KPH add 5 more damage points so the max is 85

Do explosive bolts to more damage Absolutely, an explosive bolt can do almost 125 damage by itself. The drawback is their slower speed and their tendency to negatively affect the handling of the weapon

can I headshot for an instant kill? Yes, although headshotting is probably easier to do with a sniper rifle.

[size=14px]Secondary fire:[/size]
Secondary engages a targeting laser, the gliders will attempt to curve in the direction of the laser using the smart aileron bolt aerodynamics. This is useful for the assassin to hit heavily armoured targets or targets under cover.

Can normal bolts follow the laser? No

The speed of the bolts mean they do not follow the laser as accurately as a RPG would but still effective. This would make the weapon very powerful at close range but unfortunately the recoil of the crossbow does not allow accurate aiming of the guiding laser the at the moment of firing. It is recommended that the laser is used for long range attacks only

For more precision you can activate Iron sights to use the x8 magnifying scope.

Can I use this to bend bolts around corners? Almost, but as the bolts travel faster than an RPG it is easy to send them off course instead. The guider must be careful.

[size=14px]Special ability: [/size]
Pull another bolt from your inventory and slap it on a spare open slot, loading extra bolts is fairly simple but can take some time.

How long will it take to get a fully loaded crossbow? I would say 4 seconds

Can I interrupt the loading animation? You can decide how many bolts you want by clicking X amount of times

I know how we can make this cooler! Your ideas are welcome, please share.

Very nice.

Nothing beeter then pinning your target to a wall.

I kinda find it ironic how a crossbow can be called a "rifle"...

Well... gotta look up rifle in a dictionary now... *swoosh~!!!*

5 loaded bolts would logically fire at 52 km/h, not 180. That just wouldn't make any sense.

Also, explosive arrows are boring and old hat. Why not replace them with shock arrows? Instead of a standard arrowhead, they have a tazer at the tip. Tazers make everything better!

Also, for the primary fire. Can you hold the fire button to pull the bowstring farther for more power? And will the arrows themselves be affected by gravity?

Its called a rifle for effect

Now Kaboodles if Miracle matter can make a black hole gun sound reasonable then I can do the same with crossbow technology.

I already explained the high speed of the bolts: enhanced bow cable and bow frame design. Just please...put down the realism card for now. Im not prepared to get mathematical about the weapons architecture

Now then, I was hoping this could be a "lightweight G5" but some more originality couldnt hurt, tazer bolts sound nasty; stab em & zap em double whammy. Fits nicely into the assassin theme, im all for it.

I was also thinking of taking a page from CUT2 and introducing vemon bolts as well. Im a bit short on other ammo ideas however.

I had to think about primary fire also and figured theres no way this thing could fire quickly.

The extremely strong bow cable (considering that there are 2, both are attached to the same tow lever) requires a gas powered tow lever to pull back. The cable is simply too strong to pull back yourself in less than 1.2 seconds

Once you fire, you push the tow lever forward to snap it back in place with the cable then the tow lever automatically pulls itself back as far as it can go. This process would logically take 2 seconds then you can fire again. So sadly there is not an option to enhance the firing power yourself.

But thats why there is multiple shots, Want your shot to go faster? Load just one, want to do more damage? Load more.

I expect the speed/damage tradeoff keeps it balanced.

yes arrows will be affected by gravity. But they are capable of gliding to increase air-time, once agian this is another advantage of the advanced bolt aerodynamics technology.

With such "advanced crossbow technology", what's stopping it from launching a single bolt at 900 km/h?

A crossbow uses released tension in the bow to push bolts forward at high speeds. That's basic physics right there. I can excuse sci-fi hi-tech quantum-physics voodoo mumbo- jumbo weapons, but I just can't ignore a weapon using basic physics that don't make any sense.

Actualy this bow isnt as magically futuristic as I originally put it. Its just that the tention of the bow is several times stronger because of the materials used.

Stronger tention means heavier ordinance can be used as was the case with the ballista, a giant crossbow used by the romans in 150BC to kick serious butt.

You could try picturing this weapon as a ballista that has been skrunken down into a smaller size

I left further details down to the weapons design.

Actually, if you want this to be super-powerful, apparently this beast is capable of spitting out a standard bolt at 405 feet per second, or 444 km/h. Blows yours well out of the water I think

Of course, it is firing 425 grain bolts, which are a hell of a lot smaller than your 150 gram bolts. Why is your ammunition so heavy, by the way? Plus, how do you draw this monster? What's a "gas-powered tow lever"?


Also, the targeting laser is a little silly. The recoil from firing this monster would knock the laser off-target and would cause you to miss the target. Plus, covert assassination requires a weapon with absolute reliability and precision. If you can't hit the target without having to guide it with a laser, you really shouldn't be the one taking the shot. Plus, the electronics and motors required in each bolt increases the complexity of the weapon, and thus increases the probability that something important might break. It has to be relatively simple.

Give it a scope instead. Perhaps one that can calculate s the range and velocity of your target, so it can predict where you need to angle your bow to make the shot.


EDIT: Okay, reading more of your original idea.

Why the double-decker design? That's just needlessly complicated. And separate slots for extra bolts would be rather pointless as well. A single small slot at the center within a larger mega-slot would be sufficient. The first bolt goes in the slot for accuracy, and if you're going to be firing more than one, chances are you're not going for accuracy, so you simply plonk more bolts over the first one within the mega-slot. It would look kinda like this:

====\\__-----__//==== <--- Mega-slot for crossbow shotgun action.
=======\\_//======= <--- Single slot for single-shot accuracy.

They are not small as I mentioned earlier, they need to be big enough to garuntee that massive ugly Skrith is going to die. Also consider that they are filled with explosives, avionics, targeting sensors and electronics.

All this junk is in the crossbow bolt so they can identify and follow the targeting laser. In fact they are essentially unpropelled rockets but now that I think about it; an assissin would not need these if he is not fighting Skrith militia.

Perhaps I can include normal lightweight bolts that just behave as a crossbow bolt should as an additional ammo type. These will certainly fire pretty fast, and probably will be just as effective too, but the laser wont affect them at all.

But no I am not removing my explosive bolts, they are here to stay.



I kinda avoided going here because im not confident in my drawing abilities (something I may have to do to fully explain the schematics), I worked it all out in my mind fortunately. Dont think that I have not put much thought into this.

Tow lever = this is what you use to pull to bow cable back. Its just a clip (part of the main crossbow body) that attaches to the cable and pulls it back for you. It uses a gas powered motor so this mechanism actualy has a chance of pulling the cable back. Remember its pretty tight.

Originally I was going have the cable pulled pack by hand but then I realised that if the cable is so strong it can fire multiple shots, its probably pretty hard to pull back yourself

[edit]

I see where I went wrong here, another one of my posts called this same item a "pulley". But the proper self-appointed name is "tow lever"

Previous post has now been fixed



Quick idea: Shock absorbing stock plus dampeners at the end of the bow, could help negate some recoil and sound, I will add that to the design brief although production costs might rise for this weapon.

But of course any assassin with half a brain will try to keep this thing as stable as possible, it should be the users responsibility to make sure they are not trying to run with the laser on.

apply the risk/reward balance theory



A fair point, another reason why am considering "normal ammo" as opposed to simply switching the bolts on and off.



Yep, scope is already installed. But I have not thought about a trajectory calculator (I recall the UT99 redeemer having one), I will keep that in mind. Be aware that may make this weapon alot more easier to use than it should be. But well see.



As someone once told me:
'Chicks love the Girth man! Its all in the Girth!' quoted from a bodybuilder at the local gym in town

You can see I took this to heart with my weapons.

But the logical reason for two bows on a single crossbow is because I wanted to fire up to 5 shots at once but I knew 3 in a single bow would be too many (emagine how wide it would be). So we add a second tier. It may increase recoil I know but fun has a higher priority in this case than evidentual fact so long we have plausiblity.



Ok, mega slot idea has been noted but im not sure if I interpret you correctly.

By slots I meant the grooves that the bolts sit in to stay straight. Are we thinking of the same thing?

I really don't think laser-guided arrows will work. Even with shock dampeners and whatnot, the force of the shot will juke your aim enough to put your laser dot off-target right as you fire. Given the speed of your projectiles, that split second of off-targetedness will have you guiding your bolts well away from your intended target.

Plus, all of the avionics and electronics weighing down your bolts are decreasing the speed and range of your bolts. If you simply do away with the whole mess, your bolts will move faster, reach the target more quickly, and won't require you to lead as much or compensate for drop as much. It's self-defeating. Any covert assassin worth his salt would be able to hit the mark with high-powered crossbow without relying on weird laser-guidance and avionics.

Although I guess it could be useful for extremely distant targets, where it would be impossible for but by then you'd be better off using laser-guided gliders (which might be a neat idea for an ammunition-type itself. Explosive gliders. Hmm...)


As for "Girth", the double-decker design would only server to make it more complicated to load. Plus, it'll be heavier, making it harder to aim and decreasing the wielder's mobility, which is bad for a covert assassin.


And yes we are thinking about the same thing with the slots and grooves. The single smaller slot is used for accurate shooting, and more arrows are piled up on top of it in the mega-slot for loading up ordnance.

Ok so its official, standard inexpensive bolts are now available as an additional ammo type. These are much simpler but also should be more reliable.

The explosive bolts are to be retained for special cases. They should be more useful at long ranges and less so at short. Im giving the explosive bolts a deadlier explosion, im giving them better flight capabilities but also a little slower. They are pretty much gliders rather than bolts now just as you said.

The guiding laser is just so your explosive bolts fly accurately to your target but you still cant use it at close range because of recoil. You need to fire first and activate the laser later for an accurate shot. Hey, you dont want a "n00b" gun do you?

Sound like a good idea?

As for the two tier design, I dont think it will make reloading more problematic.

Looking from the front, (not to scale):

..............(+) <-- scope
.............x | x <-- two upper bolts, pretty easy to reach
....------====------
...........x | x | x <--side bolts, still accesible from sides but 3rd slot is concealed
------=======------
...............[] <--ammo clip, loads the 3rd slot as you cant do it by hand,
...............[]

As for the wheight, true, but its a risk im willing to take. The stock could be made a bit heavier to avoid end heaviness but the best way to reduce wheight is to not load 5 explosive bolts. Thats where most of the pressure would come from. Power comes at a price.

See, with the two-tier design, to fully load you have to place two on top, and reach into both sides with an bolt each, and will also have to reload a clip on the bottom every so often. So you'll need both clips of bolts and just a box of them for easy access, to load multiple bolts faster. It's much easier with a single deck so you can take all your bolts from a box (quarrels from a quiver?) and plonk them all on there. If you need to change your ordnance levels and want to remove bolts, you can do that more easily as well. Just grab them all by hand. You won't have to do any reaching between decks to load and unload.

EDIT: About the laser, it might be a good idea to have it tied to the scope, so it's not activated when you're not using the scope. You'll never need to use the laser at short ranges, and the scope will pretty much be a necessity at long ranges.

Ad a memeroy metal bolt head. Once it hit the target the head spreads out in the body causing x points of damage each few seconds for a limited time. Also each damage burst would knock the shooter about causing his aim to be thrown off. Take that you sniper!! Let's see you draw a bead as you wriggle like a speared trout.

An explosive bolt would probably have the same effect, if not more. The bolt embeds itself in his body to cause injury, then a split-second later explodes, blasting the wound wide open.

You know what Yoke? Instead of standard piercing bolts, let's just keep them all explosive. You can instead choose between explosive standard darts and explosive glider darts. There's really no point in having darts that can shoot through people when you can stick a dart halfway in a guy and make it explode. That would do much more damage I think.

So if im understanding Meatboy correctly, that is a bolt that contains little bullets and when it imbeds itself in the body it shoots your internal organs.

Uh, chances are you would be already dead from the initial impact. Althought that is an clever new take on the poison dart.

Im putting more thought into the ammo clip rather than the actual ammo now.

I realise that the magic that allows you to use both induvidual bolts and clips of bolts is the same anomaly that occurs every time you reload: the remaining rounds get mysteriously distributed among the rest of your ammo clips. Fancy that

If I get this detailed about how munitions are handled I may have to think of a logical explanation for that reloading anomaly too. I will have a good think about how it can work, im already thinking of making the clip part of the weapon itself and you freely snap induvidual bolts into the clip rather than replace it.

The reason why I am reluctant to use just one tier is because I still want to keep the bow slim to a degree.

Laser tied to scope = nice thinking, added that to design brief.

As for making them entirely explosive, hmm... you loose the ability to pin people to walls however.

If you're going to just snap bolts onto the clip instead of replacing it, why have a clip in the first place?

Also, why would having two tiers make the bow slimmer than one?

To increase the fire rate of course, its faster to have a set of bows ready to be quickly and automatically inserted as soon as the bow cable is pulled back, rather than have to fiddle with your inventory and slap a new bolt on every time. After all that clip serves the main slot where your precision should be focused on. You definetly want a reliable method of reloading that slot

It now works similar to how the shotguns are reloaded. Dont forget that the additional bolt slots are not part of the reloading process. Those slots are loaded through a different loading animation.

As for your other question, ask yourself this:

How does an apartment building with 100 rooms on 10 floors save more space on a city block that a hotel with 100 rooms on 1 floor? Assume all rooms are an equal size.

You may begin pondering.

Why would a single-level bow have to much wider than a two-level one? You might need a little more room to accomodate 5 arrows, but that would add no more than 4 inches to its width. And it would be a lot lighter than carrying what amounts to 2 crossbows at once.

I mean look at ChaosUT's crossbow:



It can easily fire 5 arrows at once, but it wouldn't be much narrower if it could only shoot one. It reloads from a clip on the underside.

For the thin standard bolts yes you are right, 2 tiers would not be needed. Its the big fat gliders im thinking about. They are almost the size of rockets. I dont think the Chaos UT crossbow can handle 5 bolts that big...or does it?

I tell you what, im planning on grabbing the final version of Chaos UT pretty soon. With that I can see how thier crossbow works and grab some more ideas.

I still like my double tier idea, maybe it is irrational, but it is original However if everyone votes for just one tier then I will make it that way.

The gliders can have wings that fold out mid-flight. They'd only be needed for part of the journey anyway, as the wings would slow it down considerably.

mmm deployable wings cool.
i really like the glider idea, but i agree with what kaboodles sed the laser would lose target due to recoil force.

so how about the bow locks on to the targets thermal energy signature nd then transmits this information to the glider before it is fired then the glider will track the energy signature and when needed deploy its wings to correct it self on2 the target.

or using somthing like facial recognition software (but that will recognise whole bodys) to track the target.

That would make it essentially a G5-Lite. Not sure if that's the intended effect.

Lock-on homing projectiles is a G5 thing, lets not allow the 1100X2 to overlap it.

But the issue with the laser and recoil is already resolved = Dont have it on when you fire!

You see, I am allowing recoil to be a balance factor in this perspective:

The gliders are supposed to be a long/medium range bombardment device. But being allowed to guide them the instant you fire allows close range useage of the gliders. Since the gliders do 125 damage, that would make the 1100X2 obsolete the G5. Because of the recoil, you would not try to guide them at close range thus giving the assailant half a chance to evade and counterattack with a shotgun. As long as that is possible this should remain a powerful weapon to use but not a complete dominator.

Retracteable wings are already installed on the gliders. But they are still big.

Big enough to justify doubling the weight and complicating the reload process by adding a superfluous second tier? I think not!

The thickness of such a bolt would be 1 cm tops. That's still small enough to accommodate 5 on one bow.


Oh, and if the take any damage on the head, they explode instantly. If they take any damage anywhere else, they are knocked off course and swerve depending on where they are hit, detonating on impact with the ground.

You think the gliders are 1cm in width? Well...that explains things.

I would not have bothered with such a large and strongly reinforced bow cable if they were only 1cm in width (I would point out that my Brother-in-law has a compound hunting bow and the arrows are that same thickness)

I quote myself and I was not exaggerating:


The gliders are closer to 4cm in diameter and need their distance between eachother too so the dont collide. They are made of an aluminuim payload shell, smaller than G5 rockets but definetly thicker and shorter than conventional bolts

In foresight of further comments I will quote this also:

4 cm would make the things gliding M900 grenades. The ability to fire 5 of those at once will the weapon quite overpowered, so even then, you've got a problem.

It would do greater total damage than the G5 without the highly visible rocket, be even harder to completely eliminate than a G5 rocket as you now have 5 targets to shoot down, and be less of a danger to the user at close ranges due to the smaller blast radii of the grenades.

Plus, in order to accommodate these rockets on a two-tier design, you'd need over 4 cm of space between the tiers to make it possible to reload. The weapon would end up very bulky as a result, and would pretty much destroy any versatility the weapon might have. Plus, it would drastically increase the spread of the weapon make firing multiple standard bolts very silly indeed. Also consider the size of your "grooves" for holding the arrows. They'd have to be quite large. Too large for the standard bolts, unless you do the "groove within a groove" thing.

An assassination weapon must be easily portable. A huge double-decker crossbow simply won't fit that bill. The weight would make it unwieldy and difficult to aim, and a pain to carry around.

Ok hold on, you might be rushing to conclusions a bit to quick.

3 posts ago they were fine, then I said they are closer to the size of rockets and now its a cluster nuke? Give me a break here.

I know there are alot of holes in my theorum but of all the things I have considered I am positive balance is the one thing I thought about the most. Allow me to elaborate.

The gliders still do 125 damage max, if that is still to much I can bring that back down to 90 but they are not 4cm x 15cm of dynamite as you need room for everything else, especialy the wings, alerions, tails, and fins needed for flight.

Gliders still travel at the same slow speed. Firing 5 makes still them even slower and loading 5 takes you a while to do in which you are vulnerable. Having that many still bears consequences in the form of speed and accuracy. Firing 5 should mean you know what your doing, not looking for a cheap kill.

They still weigh 250 grams, I emagined that would be thier wheight in proportion to their size from the very beginning and they only penalise overall weapon wheight if you choose to load them. I already understood thier bulk and that can be accounted for in the weapons design. Overall the crossbow is not that heavy. It is not 2 decks of solid steel.

You should be glad they are 4cm in diameter because 1cm is impossible to hit. A shotgun could even work against them as their lower blast radius means you can set them off closer to you without taking too much damage. Yes they are harder to spot but thats why they are used on an assassins weapon.

There is supposed to be a spread, accuracy is reserved for single shots. If you want over 125 hit points of centralised damage grab a G5. If you are still worried about the accuracy of a single shot I could make the central groove accomodate only one ammo type.

How easy it is to reload has not changed, you attach bolts in the clip as easy as always. How easy it is to add extra bolts was never easy. It should take time. Yes I considered the grooves

And however portable it may be, that wont change with one wide tier that has be at least 25cm in width to be fully outfitted with its most powerful ordinance and the bow will need to be twice that. Im sure one super strong bow that reaches almost a meter to your sides will be harder to move around than 2 smaller bows that rest firmly on top of eachother. I will risk the bulk for that.



Actualy ignore everything I just said and observe this next statement:

You know we could argue this until Duke Nukem forever is released but I think they only way to settle this is if we develop 2 prototypes of the 1100X2; one with 2 tiers and a second prototype with one large tier and test them out to see which is more effective. However we may be lacking several years in the future in order to do this

You ever wonder why nobody's ever built a double-decker crossbow before? Because it's completely impractical and ridiculous!

Here's some more things to consider:

-Do they really have to be 4 cm thick? Making them thinner wont' make them harder to shoot down, as their wings would still have to be fairly wide. If they're going to be that large, it would probably be easier to fire make them grenades instead, fired from a grenade launcher.

-What's the blast radius for one of these gliders? 5 x 125 is a lot of damage. How much damage do they do to vehicles?

-There is very little reason to load only one explosive bolt, if the speed penalty doesn't scale proportionally. On the other hand, there's no reason at all to load more than one standard bolt, as the spread would be as large as an MRT6. So there's only really two real uses for the weapon here. Single shot against infantry, and glider barrage against vehicles. Okay, and maybe a single glider might work against one infantryman, but that's it. It won't be nearly as versatile as it could be.

-A single-tier bow doesn't necessarily have to be much wider than your two-tier one. The bow doesn't have to be incredibly wide to release a lot of power

Who said anything about this idea being practical? I thought of this weapon because I like the idea of stabbing a group of people simultaneously with crossbow bolts, not because it made sence.

If I wanted a crossbow thats was realistic I would have re-invented the Half Life 1 Crossbow long ago.

But I already played Half life 1 and I want to see something different here.

Anyway, Kaboodles how small do you think a set of wings can collapse? Im not too sure how easy it is to cram a set of wings and fins into a 1cm tube but you seem to have a pretty good idea. Maybe you know something I dont?

If its possible to make them that size then ok, I will drop the second tier. Like I said; I only included it to reduce width.

The blast radius I dont think would be too big, of course we must be careful about this one. Especialy if we consider how large the warhead will be. A 4 x 4cm warhead would have a fair blast radius but a 1 x 4cm warhead should be smaller. Either way it would still be deadly.

As for vehicles...hmm im not sure. Tanks could get hurt pretty bad from this thing as it would be hard for 5 gliders to miss. A manta on the other hand would just zip right past your shots

And by the way, I disagree the spread would as wide as the MRT6. Im not using curly fries as a bow cable! All shots a lined up quite solidly. I thought the bow cable should have a metal backing that keeps the end straight. It would prevent tention from the sides forcing the outer bolts at an angle...in theory

However accuracy is implimented it should follow this deliverable:
Multishots should be innacurate enough to make the bow more threatening at close range while at the same time it must not be accurate enough to instagib a guy from across the map.