I have a few ideas of weapons that would work well and be pretty cool in place of cannons such as: Ballistae (as in giant crossbows), repeating crossbows that are mounted in such a way that they can swivel around like a machine gun ( awesome, I say), slingshot type things and catapultish things...does anyone have thoughts about the feasibility of any of these ideas? Does anyone know of books that have stuff like this on ships? Has anyone else gone through this sort of thing? Discuss?

I've thought about this kinda stuff! Although I seem to be referencing movies more than books.

1. If the ships are made out of wood, incendiary weapons are great. Ballista bolts designed to get caught in sails/rigging could be lit on fire before being launched. Clay pots of oil could be launched from catapults (like in the movie Gladiator, or the naval battle in Ben Hur).

2. Ballista bolts with grappling hooks and cables attached (think Helm's Deep) could be used to try to pull rigging down, or if fired from higher up, used as zip lines for boarding enemy ships.

3. What sort of strength are you using to reload the repeating crossbow? With Chinese Chu-ko-nu's, it's the pump action of a single human arm--not very powerful, resulting in range and accuracy even lower than a longbow. You could have a crank to rewind the bow using a drive chain (like the Polybolos)--or maybe two men, one on either side, who pull long levers to re-bend the bow, and the gunner is at the back to aim and fire it. With the strength of four human arms (+gunner = six arms?) pulling together, you might have a reasonably powerful weapon that could fire one round every 2-3 seconds. Finally, what sort of targets are you hoping to hit with this bow? I don't think it would be powerful enough to do much damage to the ship, but if it's for individual enemy soldiers, it might be better to have three men with longbows than three men working this thing. If the bolts were bladed instead of arrow-tipped, then perhaps they could cut down more than one person, and could be fired into formations of enemy soldiers, or used to deliberatly cut ropes in the enemy ship's rigging.

Cool, thanks for posting! Movies work good, too, then you've actually seen what you're talking about, I just didn't think of that because I haven't seen a lot of movies.



Now that, is an awesome idea, I think I'd thought of fire-arrows, but hadn't thought of incendiary fluids being launched-that would help the arrow/bolt to really catch the ship on fire!



That sounds cool, it sounds like a more advanced form of the roman's method of marine combat:



It also sounds pretty awesome! I mean, ziplines are pretty cool, to incorporate them into naval combat would be awesome. If blackbeard really knew his business, he should have altered his ship to do this... I also like the idea of destroying the rigging, if this was done effectively enough, then those aboard would be at the mercy of those that still have sails...



I haven't done a lot of research on the repeating crossbow, so I didn't know that it was less powerful...but that makes sense since it's reloaded by a single arm.
I might try to make an alternate polybolos, maybe one where the arm the reaches forward and grabs the bowstring is under tension from a spring-making it hard to move it to the string, but speeding up the process of pulling it back once there, thereby allowing a much heavier draw weight...does that sound feasible to you? I might have a ballista that uses several people to operate, I think that'd be pretty cool. But I'd like to try and come up with a powerful repeating crossbow (a mounted one though, so it's basically a miniature ballista I guess) that could be run by one or two people (one to use both arms to twist the windlass, the other to aim and shoot).
I've thought it'd be cool to make the bolts very sharp and streamlined so that they would go deep into the wood of a ship, and have pores through which some flammable substance (that I may have to invent if I can't find a real thing that would work for this) has been packed into, making a fire-bolt that would be capable of setting something on fire without additional flammable weapons.

Your idea about cutting ship's rigging with bolts made me think of like disc-shaped ninja star type things...I'll have to think on that idea!

Thanks for your ideas, they're really helping me figure this out better...I'm also going to be checking out some books about weapons and specifically about ancient naval battles.

Oh, and I don't know, do you think a bolt that is basically a spike with sharp blades at the back for fletching would fly well and go through more than one person? That'd be a really neat weapon too, I'll make a note of that!

For the flammable material, I suggest Greek fire or an equivalent. It was the superweapon of the ancient world.

I gave my ships ballistae for the most part.

Ooh, I like that idea, they'd probably mostly use it in grenade form, and maybe spraying from the prow head mostly for signaling purposes. Yeah, ballistae are cool!
I was sort of thinking about something though...it'd be cool if I could make a type of ballista bolt that would stick really far into a ship (if shot from a short enough distance at least), and then release something similar to Greek fire, that way the fire would be inside the ship (if there is a below decks) and be almost impossible to put out within minutes! Thanks for that, Varon, I hadn't heard of Greek fire (or I forgot about it anyway), and had to look it up on wikipedia!

Hmm. That might be a tricky weapon to design, but Greek fire would work with that. It's very hard, if not impossible to put out.

You're welcome.

Yeah, it will be, hopefully I can pull it off! Yeah, Greek fire is pretty scary sounding...

It is.

Those were used by the Romans; I don't think they were used ship-to-ship, because they're so slow to reload and hard to aim, and the Romans' ships weren't all that maneuverable anyway.

As cephron pointed out, your power is limited by your draw strength, and a repeating weapon is inherently less powerful than an otherwise-equivalent non-repeating version. And I'd think a weapon that's fixed at a point but rotating freely could be a liability (or at best not very useful) on a platform that moves ... And also note that a repeating ballista (an automatic repeating ballista, at that!) was invented in the third century BC by Dionysus of Alexandria.

If you had them fixed and set to do the equivalent of broadsides, those might work, but again you've got trouble working on an unstable platform.

I'm fairly sure that the ancient Greeks and Romans and their contemporaries tended to just use rams and personal ranged weapons, and to lock on to the other ships and board them. If their ships had been as good as the sailing ships that were eventually equipped with cannon, their tactics would have been very different, which is well worth speculating about.

Those were, I think, more or less standard practice in the ancient world ... but the wood of a ship itself tended to be somewhat fire-resistant, perhaps from the contact with the salty air, perhaps from whatever was used to waterproof it. (Which is why Greek fire was the super-weapon of the ancient world ... it could sit on something that had been fireproofed and keep burning until it overcame the resistance.)


The trouble with zip-lines is getting back But grappling hooks were often (usually, I think ...) to pull the enemy ship close enough to board.


"even lower than a longbow"? The (English) longbow was the master weapon of the medieval era (while they had sufficient yew to make them, anyway ...), with (in the hands of a trained archer) unparalleled range, accuracy, and rate of fire. The reason crossbows and muskets replaced it is that they don't require so much training.


Indeed. Even cannons had less effect on a standard wooden ship than you'd expect ... it was the cumulative effect of a series of broadsides that would cripple a ship. (Or sparks setting the rigging on fire ...)


That's the one advantage that I can see of ballistae (or other siege engine) over longbows (or even crossbows) ... the necessary angle is lower, so a double-hit is even possible.

That'd require really accurate and really lucky shooting ... shooting from one moving platform into another, trying to hit something only about twice as wide as the arrow ..


As far as I know, it was standard practice to try to destroy the enemy's sails---not an easy proposition. But in the ancient world sails were secondary anyway (Roman ships were known by how many levels of oars they had), as they didn't know how to sail into (or even across, really) the wind ... and naval battles tended to be like a lot of land battles (rush towards each other and hope the first impact broke them, then hack at them until one side is destroyed). And so some battles turned on which side could destroy more of the other's oars. Also, destroying the sails would leave the ship at the mercy of those with sails (provided they had the wind ...) for the battle, but they would (at least in the Age of Sail, which was post-gunpowder) carry more than one set of sails (for different conditions, if nothing else).


A ship's hull is designed to be hard to puncture; bolts of any sort tended to bounce, not stick. There's a reason grappling hooks were thrown across an enemy deck, then dragged back until they caught on something.

Your standard flaming arrow was an arrow wrapped in cloth soaked in oil then set alight. I'd expect any wood that would absorb enough oil in itself to work as a flaming bolt wouldn't be hard enough to work well as a projectile. And also, you don't want fire anywhere near a crossbow, which is a complicated machine made almost entirely of thoroughly oiled and polished wood, rather like a ship's deck except probably polished with a flammable rather than flame-resistant polish.


The trouble is, as usual, how to get them there hard enough and accurately enough.


I know they made metal crossbow bolts; as I noted, a crossbow bolt (even a metal one) would be unlikely to pass through one target to hit another. And I'd think that sharpness and aerodynamics of the vanes (or whatever you call them when they're not feathers ...) would be unlikely to converge ... and you also don't want to be cutting the hands of the person loading the crossbow, who will be in a hurry ...

Thanks kingjon for the reply. I don't have time to reply to everything you said but I appreciate the information you gave me. For future reference, I am talking about ships with sails.

Yes, yes ... But in the history of the Western world, I believe cannon were developed before sailing ships (as opposed to galleys etc. that can also hoist sails when the wind is blowing the direction they want to go), so if we want to look at actual weapons and tactics used by ships without cannon, we're rather restricted to the ancient world.

Defeatist thinking, I say! You don't "get back", you take her a prize!

Really? Ok. I always assumed that many crossbows could outrange the longbow, with rate of fire being the clincher that made the longbow superior. Anyway, not something I've researched. Cool to hear.

Well, when I said "bladed bolt", I was picturing something more along the lines of this, except with an even wider pair of swept-back blades. How feasible/flyable this kind of bolt is, I don't know, but the idea is that the width swept by the bolt would be something like ten times the width of a rope. As for moving platform difficulties, the rotating (and tilting, I assume) mount should help, at least. I was picturing the gunner holding the back of the stock and moving it around more-or-less freely, looking through a rudimentary sights.

I agree with basically everything in here, Cephron! Oh, and I really like the idea of those bolts with the blades, if they will work! Oh and also, you're right Cephron, when I said "swivel around like a machine gun" I meant from side to side and tilting up and down...I fail to see how this would be a problem on a moving platform or otherwise, seems like it would be quite helpful to me.

And hope you don't damage the ship too much in doing so ...


Fair enough.

Mmm ... Gunners and archers have enough trouble tracking a moving target when stationary themselves, or when firing at a more-or-less-stationary target while moving themselves (there's a reason horse archers were so comparatively rare); having the weapon fixed might help if you could be certain your target was within its ideal field of fire ... but that's not likely to be the case. And I think it'd be easier to compensate for your ship's motion if the weapon isn't directly connected to the ship.

Some cases they might be detachable...