That's treb-buck-ket
For centuries, before gunpowder dominated the battlefield, the trebuchet was the most powerful siege weapon known to man. Essentially, the trebuchet is a gigantic seesaw. A 250 pound rock projectile sits on one end, and on the other, an immense counterweight. The longer, missile end of the trebuchet is winched down; and just like when you were sitting on the seesaw and the fat kid jumped on the other end, when it is released, the counterweight flips the missile hundreds of yards to (hopefully) hit the target.
A group of enterprising engineering geeks have endeavored to create a trebuchet simulator. With this nifty timewaster, you can adjust the mass of the projectile and the counterweight; and change the launch angle, counterweight height, wind and even gravity. Test your engineering and medieval geekiness against the distance, power and accuracy challenges.
I had the opportunity to play with a very small but nevertheless very real trebuchet a while back, and this is almost as fun. Though it doesn't throw watermelons or footballs. Thanks to A Voyage to Arcturus for the link.
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That is one right-cool use of
That is one right-cool use of the Interweb.
Where do I find a real one to fiddle with?
My pal mechimike may have
My pal mechimike may have drawn up some plans for the one that he built. It's a small one - 300lb counterweight, six foot arm, about six feet high. It can throw a medium sized watermelon almost a football field.
I saw one of those watch
I saw one of those watch-people-work shows, maybe "Junkyard Wars", and the teams competed to design and build a trebbucket that could hurl a car.
One design with maybe a pneumatic drive (it was awhile ago; memory faulty) failed utterly. The second design w/traditional counterweight also failed, but much more spectacularly: the thing was like 3 stories high, and the massive counterweight came to far under the contraption; the whole thing pulled itself apart and collapsed in a huge heap of girders.
THAT was way more fun to watch than to see it actually fling a junky old car!
Fun game! Did you see the
Fun game! Did you see the flash one that was with a knight patrolling a tower with a flying bird? Bonus for killing the knight and the bird. I'll have to ask someone at work for the link on Monday...
I remember the JY episode...
I remember the JY episode... Amazing. I wasn't surprised that the contraptions failed.... the amount of torque required to fling a Mini, or even to generate enough centripetal force to make one fly around on the end of a rope, is huge. Neither team had the use of good I-beams, if I remember correctly, and neither had enough time or material to brace properly, much less figure out a way to get what must have been 500 lbs of car moving.