Our new cheiroballista...

[P. Clodius Secundus]

Yes, your right.

But then, the Dacians probably thought they were the good guys in that case...

It makes sense to have them behind though, as they can be lobbed over into the enemy formation's attacking, and leaves the weapons less exposed to attack from infantry. The crews would be expert I am pretty sure, so not too much of a problem. Then once mounted on carts, it is pretty much a turkey shoot. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.

I'm glad it makes sense to you. I've had others insist that they were almost exclusively direct-fire line-of-sight weapons. Your contributions are hardly an interruption. The presence of the ballista with the Dacian forces during Trajan's first Dacian War raises interesting questions about the developmental timeline of the iron-framers. They could have been acquired as early as 87 AD, not long after 60-70 AD when Heron might have have written his cheiroballista text and when we find the last artifacts that point difinitively to the existence of a traditional wood-framed out-swinger (Cremona 69 AD). to me, the most likely scenario is that Heron, the Edison of his age, wrote about a new type of ballista (in-swinger). The small hand-held and manually-spanned type he proposed is impractical for battlefield use, but once the basic principle was scaled up to a winched and stand mounted size it rapidly outperformed and replaced wooden-framed weapons. Hand-held wood-framers similar to Xanten remain in use until nearer the end of the century and are last seen on the Tomb of Vedinnius.