Crossbow vs Arquebus There should be citation on the part that says that the most powerful crossbows took longer to reload than an arquebus According to this it takes roughly 60 seconds to load a matchlock I m imagining that the most powerful crossbow used a windlass pulley mechanism which did take a while but the loading might have taken similarly as long as a matchlock given the number of movements seems to be similar attach pulley crank windlass secure string to drawn position detach pulley from string remove pulley load bolt vs matchlock replace whick light whick load main charge ram ball and clog load primer blow on whick this doesn t include the possible added step of cleaning the barrel before all these steps My point is that the number of steps to load matchlock is similar and more finite than the windlass pulley crossbow Also crossbows utilized a narrow bolt vs the ball stone or lead or whatever it might be of the matchlock Narrow force equals pressure over a smaller area which greater force per area thus greater penetration though also greater deflection when glancing Because of this I think the penetration of a crossbow would have at least been greater most of the time though I suppose a matchlock could be argued as more powerful in that there s more energy to the gun than the tension of the bow