catapult

[Robert Vermaat]

I watched the episode last saturday for the second time and agin I wondered about the lack of any engineer with experience in reconstructing Roman artillery. This becomes obvious at least at the end, when the bulders realise they can't load the machine proberly because the support beams are in the way of the trigger! It was clear far before that point, however, because the team just could not decide on a mechanism how to load the stone! Not only that, the upper part of the machine had to be hoisted on the lower part by a modern crane, because the 'original' A-frames cracked.<br>
I also wondered about their apparent joy over the end result, even though the darned thing only managed to shoot its load a mere 100 feet (or was it metres?) away, while being terminally damaged after just the second shot! One wonders why they did not start with a smaller one.. <br>
<img src="http://shopping.discovery.com/DiscoveryStore/images/products/largenew/684068_lg.jpg" style="border:0;"/><br>
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Interestingly, just a week or so before that show, there was a show about a French team building a human-powered medieval crane for hoisting stone on to a cathedral. I noticed some similarities. There was an ugly rivalry between the engineer and the artisans, who completely ignored him. I recall they built it twice as heavy as he would have allowed it to be. Didn't catch the end though. <p>Valete,<br>
Valerius/Robert<br>
[url=http://www.fectio.org.uk/" target="top]fectienses seniores[/url]</p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p200.ezboard.com/bromanarmytalk.showUserPublicProfile?gid=vortigernstudies>Vortigern Studies</A> at: 1/24/05 7:37 pm<br></i>