repeating crossbow?  Is there such a thing?

Also in the movie "Van Helsing" there was a repeating-machine-gun-like crossbow, but the device didn't really make sense.  In another movie "Lady Hawk" there was a crossbow that can fire two shots.  I think that's just about as good as it gets.

There really is such a thing as a repeating crossbow, made primitively.  It was invented by the Chinese, used during the Sino-Japanese War and then the Boxer rebellion - nineteenth and twentieth centuries - but it was almost certainly used much eariler than that.  It is quite simple and relatively low power, but it can shoot about 10 shots in 10 seconds, apparently.  It is made almost entirely of wood and a bit of bamboo, for the prod.  Do a google image search for "chinese repeating crossbow" or something similar.

That's right.  The entire magazine is pushed forward, so that the string gets into a notch at the back of the magazine; the string going back, because the magazine being pulled back by the same lever that caused it to be pushed forward, means that there is nothing hindering the bolt from falling into the groove.  The crossbowman pulls the lever all the way back, and a small peg knocks the string out of the notch in the magazine.  Here are some pictures:  www.atarn.org/chinese/rept_xbow.htm.  It also describes the mechanism.  With diagrams and motions.
 Apparently the bolts were quite small, light, with almost no fletching - nothing to jam the bolts.  Anyway, go to the site (the whole www.atarn.org site is good actually) and check it out - I have attempted making one once, but it was very crude and hardly worked, the lever was odd, the magazine was too small, the string jammed, as did the bolts, the bow was really light.  In the end, I gave and threw it away.  I might try to make another crossbow sometime.
  Apparently the text on the site, and the images, are from "The Crossbow", by Ralph Payne-Gallwey, a book mentioned in other crossbow related threads.

Wasn't there something like a repeating ballista used by the Romans? The reason it wasn't used much (I can imagine) is that there's not much need to ballista something twice in quick succession.

well me and my mother have picked the appel orcherd clean and its starting to get cold around here...cant mow for a while...That leaves foxs pizza den..my boss hurt her back...That sucks...Any way time to pull out the snow shouvel and the wood spliting axe.


I think my favorite artiliry pice is the trebucet. I think it was rather cool how they would put the burning heads of there enemys and fire them at the besiged fortress.

I told my history teacher that she started to gag. That might be anoter reason my girl beating away stick is still intact..

yes but i have a love of the trebuchet.

maybe english girls like that here all they can think of are horses and most are a little more manly then the men. I was a little appaled when one of the better looking girls in my school bent over, spit a hacker out on the ground then farted...She is a farm girl but still..

my favorite pickup line/conversation starter... you know those assyrians that piled their enemy's heads up in big pyramids...