Catapult Design, Construction And Competition With the Projectile Throwing Engines of the Ancients

Customer Reviews

Many Different Full Sized Designs

2006-08-10
My son and I are using a design from this book as a basis for a ballista we intend to enter in the Punkin Chunkin contest. The book appears to be designs entered in a contest during the 1970s where the object was to toss a one pound bolt. That is a far cry from a pumpkin. Still it has good ideas although many are more geared to school projects rather than fathers and sons playing with power tools in the garage.

From the publisher.

2006-05-09
If you've ever wondered how to build a catapult or trebuchet, or wondered what you'd do with it once you've built one, then this book can help. Filled with anecdotes, plans, photographs, drawings and detailed descriptions of the workings and history of all the major types of catapults, these pages will help you get started in this fascinating hobby. You too will feel the joy of harnessing the power and energy of simple and ancient machines.

Those who involve themselves with a catapult project invariably find within themselves the enthusiasm, lit by a private spark of wonder, to participate meaningfully in the work. Almost at once and without planning, the task draws participants into a mature collaboration many have never known before. Here is a project that teaches one how to learn-- not to parrot, but to generate knowledge. Catapultors discover that they are collecting real information concerning a phenomenon about which very few people in the world know anything.

It's easy to design a simple catapult with modern tools and materials, but when you constrain the project to use only tools and materials available from a thousand years ago, and require that machine to compete with modern equivalents, then you start to see a lot of creativity sprout up. It's a puzzle, a challenge that inspires people to learn and it generates new respect for the ancients and their ingenuity.

The ancients had limited power and resources available, and had to concern themselves with efficiency and clever applications of leverage and other basic principles of physics. Helping kids to learn how they did these things in the Medieval world also helps those kids compete in today's world by inspiring them to be more creative and do more with our limited resources.

Catapult Design, Construction and Competition is a truly unique book that describes all types of catapults, including tension bow powered machines, ballistae, onagers and mangonels, and of course, trebuchets! There are a multitude of photographs, including some truly large machines that can hurl 100 lb. missiles! But there's more than just pictures. Schematics are included for four record setting machines, and detailed descriptions of their construction too.

This book also includes the results of early catapult and trebuchet competitions, and the rules and regulations for holding your own competitions. Including the definition of what is a catapult, safety, classes and categories of machines, judging, registering results, and lots of other details.

Also included in this volume is The Projectile Throwing Engines of the Ancients. This is one of the most important books in the history of hurling. Written by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey in 1907, it's the first serious work on the ancient catapults to be written in modern times.

In this book, Sir Ralph explores the ancient writings of seiges and their artillery. Not content to take the writings at face value, he endeavors to assign credibility to the writer, and then go on to produce his own working versions of the ancient machines to test the principles and the claims of the ancient writers.

Containing forty-four pages with over 22 illustrations, this section gives details about the design, construction and operation of the three fundamental types of siege engines- the Catapult (also known as the Mangonel or Onager), the Balista (Ballista) and the Trebuchet, as well as the history and effects of such weapons.