Is it easier to maintain a crossbow or a musket from day to day?

Is it easier to maintain a crossbow or a musket from day to day?

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About equal for the weapons themselves, but a quarrel isn't ruined by getting wet so the crossbow has slight advantage

Crossbows. Just grease the string and metal bits and they're generally good to go.

Muskets require that plus cleaning after use and you have to contend with either your flint or slowmatch.

I'd guess a crossbow, because it generally has less moving parts and carrying spare strings sounds less of a hassle than carrying around miscellaneous spare parts for a musket in case something breaks. Plus muskets need specialized brooms to keep clean, whereas a rag and some wood/metal polish could do for a crossbow.

>a quarrel isn't ruined by getting wet
But crowssbow string is.

Wet wood warps. Quarrels would need to be regularly checked for signs of it in damp areas.

What infrastructure is present?
A crossbow might take more banging about (and as long as you pocket the string in bad weather it should be good). But making bolt heads and fetching is harder to do than melting down a bit of lead to make a musket ball.
On the other hand, not every idiot knows how to make powder.
So... it depends.

>which is easier to maintain
>A piece of wood with a metal tension bar
>a metal tube containing chemical firey explosions
Hmmmm

They both require regular maintenance and weather protection.
That said if you use a shitty gun powder it will corrode the metal very quickly without constant attention.

What's shitty gun powder?

Shitty gunpowder is just when an extra ingredient is added to the mix by accident, usually due to one of the usual ingredients being of poor quality (saltpeter with rock dust mixed in, charcoal with ash, etc). An impure mixture will leave extra residue instead of combusting completely, which can clog or corrode the inside of the barrel if you don't clean it more often.

Firing a musket a dozen times can bruise the shoulder up as well.

Bow.

While water would be a concern, it wouldn't be a "well my pack got mildly damp so my weapon is now just a stick" type of concern.

>youtube.com/watch?v=PwyuBumlDzc
You can fire muskets in the rain. Even medieval fantasy rain.

Kay.

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Flintlocks maybe, Wheel Locks or other more archaic firearms that were actual contemporaries of the crossbow?

Absolutely not

That’s only a problem for paper cartridges really, your horn would keep the powder dry (even after getting soaked) and the barrel getting damp isn’t a huge deal. But paper cartridges are in use in your fantasy setting you might as well allow for modern cartridges since they were both 19th century inventions at the edge of when armor all but vanished from the field.

Fufufu.

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MFW

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Depends on the crossbow, depends on the musket.

All-wood or (even worse) composite crossbows can go badly wrong when exposed to damp or extremes of temperature. Ones with metal arms are more reliable, but prone to rusting. All of them are under considerable strain when fully drawn, can't be left drawn for too long and can break from the stress of being used repeatedly.

A musket has fewer moving parts, but the chamber is subject to a lot of stress and black-powder can be pretty corrosive.

Generally speaking, as far as I can tell, muskets were considered to be logistically simpler by the people at the time when both were common. Given that they required expensive gunpowder which had a host of issues with chemical reactions, damp, accidental fires and so on, that suggests muskets were generally a lot easier to work with. That might simply be a case of them being able to survive storage better though, not sure about a weapon which would be carried every day and used frequently.

Long story short, the both require considerable maintenance work.

Too much sulphur or other corrosive compounds, or shooting slavshit surplus.