xkcd #3129: Archaeology Research
Title text:
The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3129/
Sounds like what Jorge Spräve (the slingshot guy on Youtube) did. He developed a mechanism that could be attached to any bow, with multiple arrows stored for rapid fire, draw assist, holds the string back at full draw, and has a trigger mechanism. Apart from the draw assist (which used slingshot bands), everything was theoretically producable during the middle ages, it just was never invented
This sounds suspiciously like a crossbow.
more like it attaches the quiver to the side of the longbow as a magazine to make the bow repeating. he did make one for the crossbow that is a lot more weildy though
edit: inventor and review/historical analysis. decide for urself what the wacky thing is
Repeating crossbows are abaolutely a thing though. There's examples from ancient China. That being said, they tend to suck because they're really low powered to make them easy to shoot rapid-fire
The invention in question is called the "Instant Legolas" for reference
It's possible for someone to have made one as an experiment and it not being found, but it's also not very practical for war. Warbows needed to have 100-200lb draw weight to be particularly effective in battle. Trying to rapid-fire 5 shots from those bows would have been exhausting, and reloading the Instant Legolas was slow and would likely have reduced the total number of arrows you could fire throughout a battle. And having an extended period of time where you're unable to fire back when attacked is a major drawback. In modern firearm training, reloads are taught to minimize the amount of time the gun is incapable of firing, as a modern example.
Another big drawback to the Instant Legolas is that the ammunition needs to be shorter, reducing its overall weight thus further limiting its effectiveness against armor. While this does have the benefit of limiting your opponent's ability to collect your ammunition and fire it back against you, your side is then similarly limited unless your archers take the time to remove the Instant Legos from their bows in the middle of battle
The Instant Legolas would also have doubled or tripled the cost of bows and would have made them more difficult to store, which were significant problems with even extant equipment. There's plenty of example of soldiers abandoning or selling armor in favor of something less protective aimply because said equipment made marching too hard.