Composite Recurve Bows

[Nick]

Why do they require no iron? Why was this switch made?
It makes no sense. Why are they "composite" if they are only "composed" of one material?

[BladeofGrass]

It doesnt need to be a metal at all...


"Different materials are used so that different material properties can be taken advantage of. Materials particularly resistant to compression, such as horn, antler, or compression resistant woods like yew, are used on the belly of the bow (the part facing the archer when shooting) while materials that are very strong under tension, such as sinew, silk or tendon cables, or tough wood like hickory, are used on the back of the bow (the part facing away from the archer when shooting)." From

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow
If you read the whole page it does into examples of different types.

It doesnt even say iron...

[TatteredShoeLace]

Composite bows havent needed iron since I've been around I believe.

[Nick]

Composite recurve bows, aka war bows, used to need 50g iron.
And you trippin', TSL. You were around before modularisation of weapons.

[TatteredShoeLace]

My first day was day 1000, and at least by the time I knew enough about weapons, there was no war bow. Some were still offered for sale in old notes, but thats it. I'm not an oldbie yet, I'm just stale.

[SekoETC]

I used to imagine that the iron wasn't used for the bow itself but the arrows. Metal tip is better than just sharpened wood. When the skills kicked in and my character turned into an awkward hunter, I explained it so that she had ran out of iron-tipped arrows and was doing less damage because of that.

[Savanik]

Maybe Composite Bows should require some resin and sinew or something, eh? *grins* Finally have a use for that sticky stuff.

Sav

[BladeofGrass]

We could use the different wood suggestin for this. It will make the different wood typess useable. Depending how long you want to make the bow and/or what different types of building matrial you want to use. The english long bow took like 4 years to make....they were huge and had the greatist distance for a bow with up to ~200 pounds of draw force. But yeah..I dont know if people would want to take that long to make a bow...but maybe when the new version comes out it could take into acount bow distance....maybe. Yea...I dont know where Im going with so...yea

[Schme]

It's just two different kinds of wood glued together.

[El_Skwidd]

For simplicity's sake, I vote you can get all the wood you need in the forests. 100g of wood can be 50g of birch and 50g of hickory or whatever. I like composite recurves the way they are, although an upgraded form with some sort of resin or iron might be cool. As long as they stay the way they are now - that is, relatively cheap and available - I won't complain.

[Spider]

How I remember it is that once the change happened, they were only using wood and sinew, no longer having iron.