ground them in reality, no...
what i would imagine is that it uses a cocking mechanism, a crank or such... there is clock work things in the game, so most likely a crank, at least on higher end ones.
ill imagine that they will be powerful, accurate, and not suffer normal bow short comings (if you don't know how to fire them) , making an early one a likely 1 hit kill for normal enemies, with a reload so long that you switch to second hand weapons. while higher end ones, i can imagine they will use a system closer to a repeating crossbow, take out allot at once, possibly weaker shots, but getting 4-7 a "clip" and needing to reload that clip when it runs out takes so much time that you switch to you secondary weapon.