Bow or trebuchet? With what are you going to shoot today?

Rapsod · Post by **Rapsod** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:10 pm

May I have trebuchet please?

Look at this nice pictures and pay attention on upper central part where is writen range. What do you see. No. It is not wrong. And missile is only 200kg.

Rapsod · Post by **Rapsod** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:20 pm

And now something different. Missile is 45.36kg.

This program is called ATreb and simulates trebuchet. This is only demo so counterweight is fixed. Range of 20kg is over 800m.

Thomas Duvernay · Post by **Thomas Duvernay** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 5:48 am

Interesting treb games (the second one is a bit more scientific):

http://www.warwicksiege.com/flash_game/flash_game.asp

http://www.globalspec.com/trebuchet/#cheat

Rapsod · Post by **Rapsod** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:08 pm

This ATreb is good because take everyting in consideration for calculation.

Too bad there is no hand trebuchet. Maybe one day with miniature black holes.

Stephen Selby · Post by **Stephen Selby** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 6:20 am

Rapsod wrote:Too bad there is no hand trebuchet. Maybe one day with miniature black holes.

Voila'

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:11 am

In some of the Chinese military literature there are one-man, hand-operated trebuchets. They consist of a vertical pole with a pivot at the top to which the throwing arm was attached. The bottom of the pole was sharpened to stick into the ground. I don't know what the scale was or the range. They could be carried by one soldier and were used in siege warfare.

Rapsod · Post by **Rapsod** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 2:56 pm

Nice sling but 200kg is 200kg. Can you imagine what trebuchet can do if loaded with 200 stones of 1kg?

In some of the Chinese military literature there are one-man, hand-operated trebuchets. They consist of a vertical pole with a pivot at the top to which the throwing arm was attached.

There is same type in medieval europe too. On one side there is long arm and on the other 5-6 soldiers poll ropes conected to short arm.

ATreb caltulated that is posible to shoot stone of 0.1kg at distance of 106m with counterwight of only 20kg. English war arrow is around 60-70g. Can longbow of 44# shoot arrow of 100g at 116yards?

Rapsod · Post by **Rapsod** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 11:58 pm

Old medieval trebuchet. There is lot of books with iluminations with pictures of this type of trebuchet. Easy to operate and light. What do you want more?

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 12:18 am

I think some years ago, Nova did a program on trebuchets. They had large effective machines, but they tested with a long bow and found the operators were within range of heavy war arrows.

jkekoni · Post by **jkekoni** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:20 pm

There is an other name for hand trebuchet. It is staff sling.

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 3:39 pm

A staff sling has no pivot and no upright poles. So they are poles apart (only in a joke, in reality one is the development of the other).

Jim Welch · Post by **Jim Welch** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:41 pm

I agree that a staff sling and a trebuchet are two different things but a staff sling does have a pivot point. It's just dependent on how you hold it.

I see a staff sling as just the throwing arm of the trebuchet scaled way down.

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 1:29 am

Jim,
Perhaps I should have written "fixed pivot point". You are right: the advantage ofa staff sling is that it can be varied. All I know of the origin of the staff sling is that it probably post-dates trebuchets. Does anyone have a date for the first mention?

Tomaz · Post by **Tomaz** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:35 pm

That little trebuchet calculator is neat but I believe the results are often too optimistic. I have been doing a fair bit of research on trebuchets for the past several years as we might eventually build one at the museum where I work but I think you would be hard pressed to shoot a 200kg projectile to a range of 248m with a counterweight of 4500kg. Several experimental trebuchets have been built in that weight range (check out the Middelalder centret in Denmark) and to my knowledge, none have come close to achieving that kind of range with such a heavy missile. You would need a very large machine to hurl even a 100kg stone much farther than 100m.

Also, the machine on the last picture is a traction trebuchet. It's powered by a team of operators sharply pulling the ropes together rather than a heavy counterweight. The traction trebuchet is inherently less accurate than the counterweight type. It also tends to be less powerful because even with a lot of people pulling the ropes it's difficult to generate as much force as a big counterweight.

P.S. The staff sling must be a fair bit older than the trebuchet. There are quite a few depictions of them in the high-medieval artwork and I seem to recall at least one from the Carolingian era. It may have been known in Roman times, though as that lies outside of my main field of study I couldn't really say.

Hyarmendacil · Post by **Hyarmendacil** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:50 pm

The trebuchet probably came to Europe a lot earlier than that--George T. Dennis's article on the Byzantine use of the word elepolis and Stephen McCotter's analysis of the spread of trebuchets both contend that the weapon might have reached as far west as Greece in the seventh or even the sixth century A.D. Of course, I don't know how that would compare with the staff sling....

(Wasn't the trebuchet originally invented in China, BTW? Does anybody know any theory about the original Chinese traction trebuchet being inspired by some form of the staff sling or the like?)