Haven´t bee following all the pages, but Mr. Panzercracker got a few details wrong here (though I admit it is a nice rhetoric effort):
While they were riding on horses and using lances, indeed it is the same *concept*. This is the key word here, the similarities related to the thechnology level are striking. If they were warping and shooting themselves up with photon torpedoes it would still be the same *concept*.
Nope, the concept of a tank is to be able to take and
hold ground, while the tank is by principle used as an offensive weapon the concept is to have a mobile bunker.
A medieval knight on the other hand was a purely offensive creature completely unable to support other types of arms, hold ground or be employed in defensive operations, just because both units are offensive doesnt mean they're the same idea, based on that we could say that celtic berserkers who ran at the enemy dressed stark bloody naked are the same concept as tanks since they were both offensive units.
The only thing knights and tanks have in common is Civilisation PC game series.
Here you are definitely factually wrong, crossbows *were* specifically designed as armor piercing weapons, and an improvement on the longbow. They would penetrate chain mail and plated armor, whereas the longbow would be held off about 50% of the cases and did his effect on the horses rather.
From RPG-forums:
From Wikipedia:
Rattler
At the time crossbows were first widely employed there was no plate armor and chain mail was thin as paper (late Roman Empire) whoever wrote wiki probably got the idea from Discovery or somewhere, by late medieval you had half plates, heavy haubergons and other armors to which a normal hand drawn crossbow could do little to nothing.
The reason why crossbow was so widely used is because it required no training whatsoever, if there ever was an idiot-proof weapon crossbow is it, draw the string, put arrow in and point towards the enemy.
Crossbows were not employed so widely because of armor improvements because the only serious threat to plate armor were windlass siege crossbows or heavy arbalests, hand drawn crossbows were only a thread at 30~ feet, crossbows were employed so widely because it took only a couple of hours to train your average Joe the peasant in their use so they're not analogous to development of tanks vs AT weapons.