Whether you’re a a chivalrous hero or a dastardly black knight, CatapultKits.com sells the right siege weapon for you, from onagers to catapults, trebuchets to ballistae. Many items are available in pint-sized desktop format, so you can lob projectiles over cubicle walls at your co-workers. They’ll never know it was you — unless you happen to be the only one at the office with an authentic scale replica of an ancient Roman onager on your desk. Then they’ll know.
The bad boy up top is a replica of the trebuchet used in the siege of Stirling by Edward Longshanks in 1304. (Yes, the bad guy from Braveheart.) The original stood 30 feet high and launched its projectiles up to 1200 feet — something in the area of four football fields. The replica, unfortunately, is just 18 inches tall, but it’ll still nail a target 60 feet away — more than enough for your inter-cubicle warfare. At right is a Greek ballista that’ll fire golf balls up to 200 feet. Your neighbours will love you!
Real siege weapons, of course, didn’t fire golf balls — they launched anything from stones to flaming pitch to the rotting corpses of animals and fallen soldiers. Imagine how terrifying and demoralizing it must have been to be bombarded with all this awful stuff by a besieging army that’s sitting safely four football fields away.
If you’re a siege weapon snob and only the real thing will do for you, check out Steve Seigars’s 52,000-pound trebuchet, built at a cost of $100,000 to advertise the owner’s pumpkin patch. The contraption can send a regular pumpkin 1,760 feet and once launched a 300-pound pumpkin 400 feet — enough for a homerun at Chicago’s Wrigley field.
“When it hit,” Siegars says, “it sounded like a cannon going off.”
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment