Ahem – as an aside, if you want to get back into the medieval crossbow discussion, I’d be happy to re-hash some of our conversation from the old forum. I do think there are in fact a lot of merits to the narrow and short power stroke crossbows, though that does not make them the best. There are reasons for why you would want both Eastern and Western-style crossbows; neither is necessarily better in my (current) opinion.