Volta - conceptual future crossbow

A little side project I worked on… I wanted to imagine what a crossbow of the future could look like.

The end result uses a solar powered auto draw feature around two coil springs… main inspiration was the crossbow from half-life 2 and Tesla coils. I also latched onto the idea of “bolt” having two meanings traditional crossbow bolt… and bolt of lightning.



I like your data model - the big drawback I see is maneuverability (between trees, around objects, near zombies). When it’s cocked the centerbolts would be hanging out unnervingly close to the user and when un-cocked that’s a pretty big package. If those springs were 1/2 as long…

Rotate them up or down…

I dig the idea of the linear coil springs. Really interesting. Could you do just one spring onto of the arrow shaft? Or maybe they are just really tight to the side of the arrow shaft. Super cool idea. I love it. Maybe for the Hunger Games part 5?



thanks for the feedback! that’s one area I may go back in and take a look at when I get some time… pulling the coils in further / changing their positions, changing to a single coil design (which would be sick if the bolt could fire from inside the diameter of the coil)… I also may take a look at firing from compression rather than tension… engineer friend of mine seemed to think that would be less wear on the springs. I also want to explore dampers on the springs… like on mountain bike shocks.

whoa, firing from inside the coil! That is a cool idea… it becomes less of a cross bow, but still really cool. How does a harpoon gun work? Springs?

oooh. good call! I’ll have to look into how harpoon guns work.

interestingly they are powered by air or rubber:

This is a really cool concept, nice work!

I wonder what it would look like if the two spring columns and bolt barrel were laid out as three points of an equilateral triangle to make it more compact? So that the barrel is the top point and the spring columns are the two bases of the triangle underneath.