7 ms·
Well, this might be supersonic but doubt it would throw heavy boulders at fortresses anytime soon to be useful as a siege weapon.
by fabianhjr 5y ago
Well, this might be supersonic but doubt it would throw heavy boulders at fortresses anytime soon to be useful as a siege weapon.
- deegles 5y agoA scaled up version of this would be terrifying... I'm sure with the right materials (and budget) it could launch a cannonball at those speeds.
- kingcharles 5y agoI was thinking it would be more fun with a rotten cow.
- Someone 5y agoA rotten cow might disintegrate before it leaves the launch site. I wouldn’t classify that as fun.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat strongly depends on your vantage point. Definitely not from the point of view of the cow.
- dredmorbius 5y agoRotten cows have limited perceptions.
- IntrepidWorm 5y agoSourcing?
- kingcharles 5y ago[citation required]
- dredmorbius 5y agoRotten cows ... write no research papers.
- jacquesm 5y agoAssume a spherical, rotten cow... nm
- dredmorbius 5y agoA sphere is a perfect form, and hence, immune from corruption.
- klondike_klive 5y ago"Fetchez la vache?"
- robbedpeter 5y agoPink mist with subsonic bone shrapnel would still be a terrifying siege weapon.
- ThrustVectoring 5y agoThere's some square-cube issues in scaling this up. Specifically, material strength is proportional to cross-sectional area, while the masses of the structures (and projectiles) involved is proportional to volume. The video hints at this with the mention of the difficulty being proportional to the length of the arm to the 1.6th power, slightly more than 3/2.
- 0_____0 5y agowouldn't need to be a boulder at those speeds. energy goes up with the square of velocity 50g @ 460m/s = 5290J 25kg @ 50m/s = 31250J that is to say, the small but fast projectile is 1/6th the energy but only 1/500th the mass edit: formatting edit2: a 300g projectile at 460m/s would have approx the same energy as a the 25kg boulder at 50 m/s. at point blank range anyway.
- technobabbler 5y agoAt a certain point, wouldn't the tiny fast pebble just drill through the fort and leave a small, hot hole in its wake? Like a big neutrino?
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoA small projectile like a pebble would be vaporized pretty quickly by friction with the air at those speeds (and of course a bigger projectile would take more energy to launch).
- 0_____0 5y agoYou fire the weapon. The tiny pebble breaks up on impact, creating a little crater in the rock. To you, the medieval siege engineer, this is annoying. The frenchmen taunt you from their parapet, yelling maternal insults and farting in your direction. Your supersonic trebuchet is a failure, tactically speaking. You can't take their mockery anymore, so you set about fixing your projectile. The pebble lost much of its energy in flight - drag is a huge issue with any distance to target. You make a projectile in the shape of a rod. This has the effect of decreasing the cross-sectional area of the projectile relative to its mass, minimizing drag losses. There's a limit to the length:width ratio, however- go too skinny and it'll deform under firing forces. The projectile's length also allows it to burrow deeper into the rock -- when material at the tip breaks off on impact, it's got the rest of the shaft behind it, just as mad. To pack the most punch into your projectile, you craft it from tungsten (then known as Wolfram). In order to keep it from yawing in flight, you add some rigid vanes at the back. It looks like a small, superheavy arrow. Now you have the issue wherein it doesn't fit well into your cannon anymore. No mind -- you set it in a cup of sorts that seals the barrel. Wait, where did you get a cannon? This is the year 1217 AD...??? Congratulations: you have constructed an armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot munition (APFSDS). You load it into your M256A1 120mm smoothbore cannon. You peer through the sights.... now where were those sac à merde?