Leonardo's crossbow

Leonardo's crossbow is a type of shooting weapon designed by Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings are in the Codex Atlanticus. Never constructed by its designer, it was instead built to a scale of 1:1, as shown in the ITN documentary Leonardo's Dream Machines, which was aired for the first time in February 2003 by Channel 4. The original idea of Leonardo, as described in the drawings of the Atlantic Codex (1488–1489), was to build a giant crossbow in order to increase the range of the dart. Possibly used to fire rocks and bombs, it was mostly intimidation based.