Medieval

Tonight Nova is airing a program about a bunch of dorks like me who enjoy things medieval, especially seige engines. They build trebuchets! (A trebuchet is like a catapult.) While Abrams tanks are definitely a marvel of engineering, it's still really fucking impressive to watch a bunch of guys transform whole trees into machines that hurl 250-300 pound stone balls a couple hundred yards sans gunpowder.



Tanks today have all these computers for targeting. Contrast this with a counterweight that can accommodate 12 tons of dirt for distance and having to move a couple tons of wood to one side or the other. When that ball hit the stone wall built to simulate that of a castle, it put a good-sized hole in it. Quite impressive.