"The strongest automatic crossbow."
Well, an automatic crossbow wouldn't be that strong compared to what a regular one can be, but it sure can be the strongest of those. The problem is that the lever doesn't provide as much power as the more advanced loading mechanisms crossbows have, and that's more of a limitation than how much draw weight you can construct it with.
It so rare that characters actually point out that bows require a fair amount of strength to us. Actually more than the armours and swords he was comparing with. Crossbows may or may not require a lot of strength.
That piercing power is just magic.
Unless there is some magic effect going on, a repeating crossbow is still only going to fire with the energy provided by the crank pulling back a string so that thing is firing too hard or too fast.
Yeah. I get the impression that some people just look at the draw weight number for a crossbow and compare it to bows. But they need that extra weight to compensate for the short power stroke. A regular bow pulls the arrow much farther back, so the time the arrow can accelerate at release is longer, which requires less power for the same projectile velocity.
For a repeating crossbow to be reloaded that fast it can't require too much effort to reload, so it can't be that powerful. Wouldn't even be comparable to a windlass crossbow, for instance, and those can't be reloaded quickly.