A lot of people in the hunting and archery community have been debating on whether crossbows are faster than compound bows. The fact of the matter is that this discussion has from time immemorial favored crossbows, up until a certain point. You might have noticed that I implicitly added “up until a certain point” in the previous sentence. The reason for this is the fact that compared to compound and traditional bows the velocity of a crossbows quarrel slowly decreases or decelerates over longer distances. This makes them less than ideal when they are in competition with arrows and the targets are much farther than their intended range. But in terms of raw power and speed the crossbow is king in the 30 to 40 yard categories and you’d have to look for a bow with a draw weight that’s equal or much heavier than what the crossbows have.
So how fast does a crossbow’s quarrel travel to reach a certain target that’s around 30 to 40 yards away from it? Well, there are a lot of things that can affect the velocity of the quarrels once they’re in motion and among these factors would be the power stroke. The power stroke is basically the length the string travels from being drawn fully up until its rest position. Together with the draw weight, these two factors dictate the velocity of the bolts or quarrels fired from crossbows. Consequently, with these two factors in mind, anyone who would want to get the fastest crossbows in the market need only to make sure that they get the weapon that has the right combination of these two factors and they could easily make the speediest kills of the game that they usually hunt down.
One advantage of a bolt or quarrel that’s moving fast is the fact that once it hits, the target will immediately feel the force of the hit. This makes maiming or killing game much easier because you really would not want to have game surviving your initial shot. If you have plans on skinning the animal, then you would not want the skin to have a lot of holes in it right? This also lessens the suffering of the animal because nobody wants game to thrash around and possibly also ruin their coat once they’ve been hit. Additionally, there are other factors that might affect the velocity like wind speed and direction but usually these are considered negligible.