It worked!
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with my
trebuchet and a whopping big dart. Well two of them actually. So what were these things about?
Well they might be complete fantasy, but if you look in the pictures, the manuscript pictures,
they are there. Lots in Arabic texts, less in European texts but both Francesco Martini who
was another one these sort of sculptor, engineer, architect, polymath guys like Leonardo da Vinci
and Mariano Taccola, they're all in the same kind of group of work that they did, both Taccola and
Martini show darts in trebuchet troughs. The Arabs did it a lot, so it's a thing and if it's a thing
and I've got a trebuchet, I have to find out what's happening. So I've got a couple of them
and we're going to shoot them off, but the thing is these are weighing in at about three and a half
kilos about eight pounds something like that, I'm pretty sure and I really annoyingly can't find the
picture from Taccola at the moment, but I'm pretty sure he showed two in the trough at the same time,
so I'm going to shoot, well the two of them and then this is just about heavy enough I'll be able
to shoot one and keep the machine relatively safe, but we'll do that after in case it busts. But here
we go, let's shoot two of them, see what happens. I've got my darts now sitting in the trough
and I've just put it on one rope; looks a bit precarious so it might get exciting when I shoot.
Let's see what happens. Here we go, two giant darts! No idea what's going to happen. Close!
oh yes! Oh that is fabulous! That is absolutely fabulous! Missed my men at arms, but they always
do that, I even tried to attract it to them, I put a GoPro next to it. Anyway didn't work. Let's
go see what we got. Well that was absolutely glorious and I just so hope I managed to catch
those two arrows, two darts going up through the air together and falling together because it was
from where I was standing. It was just brilliant, so they've come down about six metres apart, well
you know that's trebuchet's for you. One of them is broken, doesn't really matter,
it's a single use item, very tedious for me today but I have gaffer tape. So we're going to go again
and we're going to see if we can hit our man at arms even with me teasing with the GoPro,
Graham the fourth or whoever he is. We're going to see if we can destroy him in various ways today.
Fabulous, right let's go again. Oh blimey! I thought that was going to be easy,
well that was absolutely brilliant to see. I just loved it, but the thing is the trebuchet
has to be rigged a little differently now to when we do the sling with the bowling balls. So I'll
explain what the difference is. So first of all we've got this head here and it's got a little
hook and then we've got a loop on the end of the rope and the loop is kept open by a wooden wedge,
so it's a very free, very open connection that will drop away easily, so have a look at this.
There you go. Now with the sling you leave one end attached onto the arm and that way the ball
goes flying you keep the sling. Works beautifully. But in this case if you left the rope attached to
the spear, which you could do, it would create an awful lot of drag, so you'd lose distance.
If you leave the rope attached to the trebuchet arm it will just rotate this around and slam
them straight down into the ground, so what happens now is the rope slips off the arm
just as it normally would but then also this is now traveling through the air
and it goes traveling through the air, bit of wind resistance and the rope just falls away.
Cleanest possible release. No friction, no complication, utter repeatability. It's a
really simple system, the only thing is you just need to go find your rope again. Right
enough of the chitter chatter, we're going to go again. Here we go again; pair of darts. Loose!
Oh if I thought the first one looked good, the second one was just awesome. So these darts were
just side by side the whole way through and came down within a metre and a half of each other,
it was epic. It was so very cool. We're going to go again and loose!
Oh nice now those are things are just undoubtedly so very, very cool.
Reason enough surely, but in a real sense what is the point? Let's collect them and
talk about it. Now there is one thing I have decided about these and this is a fact,
no question. These are very cool they are very cool indeed, but is that reason enough to use
them on a battlefield where pragmatism and effectiveness are generally more important?
Now the thing is the Arab texts, you can find quite a few pictures of these things
actually, pictures of trebuchets with the darts in them, so they were obviously doing it.
Europeans you can find in the works of Taccola and Martini you can find them as sort of like textbook
sketches, but not on battlefields or I haven't seen one, not battlefield manuscript pictures of
darts and trebuchets, so I'm going to guess here, less done in Europe. Maybe it was just
known about and speculatively mentioned, maybe it's just known about and speculatively drawn and
actually it wasn't really done, but the Arabs did it, so we're going to come back to that. So the
thing is why would you do it and this comes back to the old chestnut of wheels on trebuchets. Again
i've flip-flopped on my decisions about this, whether they did or whether they didn't.
Now there are some things which seems to be the case, they are definitely more efficient,
you know the work of Tom Stanton for instance and various documentaries have shown that
that's the case. You can argue that you don't want to build one within the bow shot
of a wall of a garrison because it's going to be very dangerous. That's a fact. But then you look
at the medieval manuscript pictures, the actual pictures of trebuchets and I cannot find a single
one with wheels on them, I can't find them, so I'm going to say now, again change my mind yet again,
they didn't have wheels on trebuchets. They might have put them on rollers, brought them in,
but they didn't put wheels on them so these things are static.
Now what that means is that weight for weight an arrow is going to be less drag than a rock,
it is more aerodynamic that means it's going to go further, so the only reason I can think of,
except for reason one; cool as heck, is that they go that little bit further. So when your trebuchet
has exhausted its distance and you need just a little bit more to harass the enemy, darts. That's
it, that's my reason, except for reason one, cool as heck, fact. But the other thing is some of you
may have noticed throughout this film there's been a GoPro mount on here. I think it's time we found
out the bird's eye view. I've killed three GoPros in the past, will this be number four? Loose! Oh!
Oh nice!..... and down. So you've just seen a bit of GoPro footage. I don't know if it's the world's
first, who cares? But anyway it was crazy, it went absolutely bonkers and the reason was I decided to
put one dart in because I didn't want the other dart knocking against the GoPro and stuff. I
thought it'd be cleaner, but actually there was such a yank from the trebuchet on the start,
look at that it just bent the fin completely on the front of my dart and as a consequence
it just spun through the air and it went, yeah you saw the footage. But the thing is
I've tried to do this before actually and I had a different approach last time with my dart. I had
a housing at the front, really heavily armoured housing with the GoPro set back maybe about 20
centimeters/eight inches. It hit the deck and it just extruded soil up into the casing, thankfully
I hadn't put GoPro in that time, just wanted to test it, so these pictures here just show how
difficult it was to protect it as an armoured job. So this time I've just gone lightweight.
Graham the fourth, maybe the fifth, who knows? I'll straighten that, we'll go again. And
Whoa!
Yes!
Lovely lovely lovely lovely. Let's try and find the GoPro in the cornfield.
I just watched the GoPro footage and I just love the way that you could see the other dart in that,
it's just brilliant, so cool. So trebuchet is cool, we know that,
giant darts and trebuchet cool, so that's cool times cool. Can you make it even cooler? Well
plumbata. You've got to get them in everywhere. Now these are horrible scrappy ones, I'll show
you in a minute. But basically what you can do is you can put a support ring on your main dart,
that holds the butt of your plumbata put a cord around it with a burning fuse link. Time the fuse
link right, this will carry it to target, these will deploy, so well multiple deployment system.
Fantastic. Cluster munitions. Brilliant. Could they have done it? Well I mean did they do it?
Almost certainly not. Could they have done it? Yes they could, there's nothing to stop them,
they had fuse technology at the same time that trebuchets were around, it's absolutely possible.
So they could do that, now the question is would they have done it with real plumbata? Yeah they
probably would because if you're going to go to the effort of besieging somewhere, you'll make
effort. These ones are not them, so if you have a look it's just a wooden shaft, lump of clay,
some hazard tape. Now the thing is the farmer, the lovely, lovely farmer who has mowed a strip
so we can carry on playing in his cornfield with our trebuchet, drives tractors in there I don't
want to lose plumbata in that field. I don't want to lose them for me and I don't want to lose them
so that they spike his tyres, so these can stay out there till the end of the harvest,
then I can collect the hazard. There's no problem, no problem. Also they're cheap.
Are they effective? Well check this out, they self-correct beautifully, they throw beautifully
and they cost about five pence each and they're free actually if you go and dig
your own clay. So we're going to put those on to our shaft here, tie it up with a fusible link,
GoPro, see them spread, launch them. I don't know, maybe they'll scatter on launch,
maybe they'll well stay the course and we'll do it, but we're going to find out. Let's do
that now. Attempt one, multiple deployment darts. Short fuse I'm gonna have to be fast.
Fire!
Wow
So
that was very, very epic indeed. It worked! It worked brilliantly! To conclude
these things are great, so the giant arrows great. Cluster ammunition version absolutely great. Did
they do it? I think probably not because I think they're probably a bit too fiddly,
you know it'd be a bit hit or miss, if you excuse the joke. But
could they have done it? Yes they could. Are they cool as heck? They absolutely are and for those of
you who are curious, this bent again as you saw it in the GoPro. It bent after it left the machine,
so I think the arm, the arm of the trebuchet must have come down and yanked that rope, yanked
the cord before it properly left the machine because that happened in the air, not on launch,
which is really weird. Anyway it worked, it was fantastic, it was good fun. See you again. Thanks.