Help me remember the name of a film.

[theoryaction]

I want to design a homebrew crossbow based on one I saw in a Chinese (I think) film I saw a long time ago. IIRC, there were hundreds of crossbowmen that wielded massive crossbows. At a command, all of them fell prone onto their backs, put both feet in stirrups on the crossbow, placed the bolt, drew the string back with both hands, and released.

Is anyone aware of a film that uses these weapons on a battlefield, or aware of the name or origin of the weapon?

[theoryaction]

Nevermind! I just found it. The movie was Hero, and they are Qin archers.

[Aedilred]

The Chinese army of the period made extensive use of crossbows in a number of different forms. They also had a repeating crossbow which had a mechanism allowing it to operate semi-automatically. The Han army, which was a little later than the Qin one but pretty similar in terms of armament, is often touted as having been comparably effective to the contemporary Roman army if not slightly superior, and a large part of that is down to its mastery of handheld crossbows.

Whether the large crossbows would have been used en masse in the manner indicated, and on a battlefield, is more questionable. Certainly Qin-dynasty China had some very powerful crossbows available, but it seems more likely that a crossbow which requires the user to lie prone to use it would be a specialist weapon rather than standard small-arms, if nothing else because making a crossbowman lie on their back to reload and fire their weapon makes them both absurdly vulnerable and hopelessly immobile when it comes to skirmishing and missile exchange, not to mention making it much harder for them to sight their weapon and thus aim it accurately.

I am by no means an expert on the period or its weaponry, but my view would be that yes, the Qin absolutely had crossbows, some of which were very powerful, but the manner in which they were used in Hero was heavily influenced by the rule of cool, as with the rest of the film.

[Brother Oni]

I am by no means an expert on the period or its weaponry, but my view would be that yes, the Qin absolutely had crossbows, some of which were very powerful, but the manner in which they were used in Hero was heavily influenced by the rule of cool, as with the rest of the film.

While I fully agree that the film was heavily influence by rule of cool (plus that scene is described by a unreliable narrator), it's worth bearing in mind Qin doctrine for crossbowmen; they were to be used like artillery and saturated an area with indirect fire, rather than direct fire as is typical with crossbows due to their higher accuracy.

To aid this, achieving superior range over enemy archers is vital, necessitating a heavy draw weight and long draw length, which in turn influences crossbow design and use. Two man teams with the crossbowman lying prone with a spotter/loader would be one way of getting such a weapon to work.

Smaller crossbows than those depicted in Hero have been found in the Terracotta Army excavation and these have a trigger mechanism, something which is lacking in the Hero crossbows.