They sure where heavily inspired by Rome, especially ww2. "They called themselves the third reich" because they considered themselves the successors of the holy roman empire even adopted the eagle
"Pointy end towards the enemy" -Commander Biggus Dickus, 69BC EDIT: Just to say that everyone who edits their comments to say "thank you" for fake internet points is wack
Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school very quickly with rotten behavior like that. BRIAN: Can I go now, sir? slap Aaah! Eh.
Interesting thing was, at Maiden Castle, around where the gates of the fortification would have been, they found hundreds of ballista bolt heads, which indicates that when the Romans fought there they must have set up a whole bunch of these catapults, and when the Britons sallied forth, just let rip on them. The talk I heard, from an archaeologist on the site, reckoned the ballistae there were a LOT bigger than this one. The human remains indicated bolts the size of light javelins passing through possibly 3 fighters at a stroke. Imagine a volley like that, most of the people you're with shot through or impaled in an instant, the psychological impact of that.
@@mikkel066h not even remotely the same thing. Imagine groups of 3 of your comrades in arms as you charge out from the gate, swords upraised to meet the invader, impaled, pinned together, screaming, out of the fight in an instant, your company wiped out, maybe 2 or 3 left standing, and there's the Roman line, scutae locked together, advancing, gladiae stabbing as they methodically butcher anyone left standing. Nothing you do will pierce the shield wall, the day is lost, the castle taken.
It may not have had the same effect as light artillery did during Napoleon era ie doing most of the work, but it did give romans one important factor - introduced "deadline" to opposing force. These things are neither fast, nor mass produced, nor very accurate at long ranges. However it retained enough power at the distance and had enough accuracy to fire into groups and injure people despite shields and armor and thus if the opposition has them, you can't just sit several hundred meters away and continue circling each other to find the best position for your troops as you would be constantly losing men at a steady trickle. Tl:dr it forces opfor to attack your line BEFORE they can find an ideal position, doesn't allow them catch their breath or regroup in peace. No idea if it allows harassment of enemy archers or counts as harassment force at all😅 P.S.: that's just my opinion, I'm new to the channel and roman warfare is certainly not an era of history I know anything about. I'm more about history of industrialization, production and vehicles type of guy😅
Yeah I can’t imagine a bunch of engineers carrying this expensive heavy equipment around positioning it perfectly at the start of every battle and not become a target for arrows. I see it having more use mounted on a castle wall being aimed at enemy siege equipment then each individual solder (there are arrows for that)
@@greenlamp9219 The Roman Scorpion was light enough that two guys could set one up fire then run with it to a new position and repeat rather quickly. The ballista and onager however required more or less stationary use
@@greenlamp9219 well it was writen they were mounted on carts for transportation and when you can shoot a few hundred further than an archers, plus in combination with your own archers, counter fire gets a little tricky
I'm not sure if it was useful on the battlefield. If you want to harass the enemy you'd want to use archers and slingers, as that'll has a much larger area of attack and many more projectiles.
Now just imagine back in those days trained professional soldiers that have that thing mastered how accurate and efficient they could fire round after round at an approaching army
most modern re-enacters with more than 10 years experience could shoot 4 times per minute with about 60% percent accuracy. Some experts believe the humble Legionare could do it between 6 and 7 - and arguably more accurate.
Not greater speed than a regular bow archer, but perhaps greater distance? They could fire a heavier bolt than a regular archer could (did they even have archers back then?).
I dont know about open battlefields, but this is brilliant for siege warfare. Id seen the more powerful version of this (a mockup, obviously) that used horsehair or rope to hold the potential energy instead of the wood/spring apparatus.
They used them to "snipe" leaders and signallers on the battlefield. They were plenty powerful. I was at a reenactment event where they had one of these things and it was putting the bolts in to 4" thick pine targets at about 50m with enough force that the iron tip of the bolt was poking out the back. they were having to hammer them back through with a wooden mallet. Interestingly, the flights on the bolts were made of leather.
Maybe yeah, that could work. However, if you're trying to overcome a Roman fort, you'd swarm it, and it's kinda hard to get 4 of the enemy standing still in a line to get hit together like it's a group picture Taking out leaders would make more sense, that kind of warfare requires a lot of individual leadership, having those small team leaders removed would make the line collapse.
@TheCow2face true, those weapons were also used in a roman expedition in Germania in 235, we don't know who was the emperor, Alexander or Maximus. The scorpions inflicted many casualties to the germs
Imagine in another 2000 years, some future hobby historian trying to reproduce our firearms from today. Making the springs and gunpowder and rifled barrels. "They used chemical reactions to fire spinning metal slugs at each other? How primitive. Let's make one!"
Can't wait until we get Afghanistan War reenactors. "And this is the FOB's porta-potty. On paper, it's merely a plastic latrine. But, from the remnants of the ancient internet, we've deduced that its primary function among the grunts was to masturbate where the master sergeant can't see them. In the heat of the day, it could reach up to 106 degrees inside, and some grunts would black out mid-stroke. This was by far one of the most hazardous and common ordeals faced by the United States Marine Corps in the 20 years of occupation."
And this were the small versions. The big one could fire large round metal or stone projectiles and at a short range it wasn't too dissimilar to being hitted by a cannon.
If youve got 1 to shoulder, 2 to crank of which 1 will place the bolt and the other will fire on command of shoulder guy, i bet those reload times arent bad at all..
I like how Europeans like rome, the Japanese like Knights, and Americans Like the Samurai, pretty neat how our histories interest eachother more than ourselves.
because they are highly romanticized, tons of stories, legends, history about them, the more romanticized it is the more popular it becomes, people like cultures with a rich collection of stories, myth, legend, content. Just like chinas three kingdom periods, or warring era periods, to the point that majority can't differentiate myths from real history, highly romanticized. This doesnt just apply to history, but also fictions and games, like warhammer 40k lore, star wars lore, star trek lore, etc.
@@yamnayaseed356 he probably meant northwestern european types, while the romans themselves were more southern europeans-mediterranean in appearence, as they described themselves
This is actually a Roman scorpion, an early ballista, the true Roman Ballista was MUCH larger and could fire anything from large iron pikes to stone boulders
When you load the bolt I was taught to never put my fingers in the area of where the bow strings move because if the retention mechanism fails the strings will slice off your fingertips with ease. I’d advise these guys to load the bolt at the far end and use a pusher stick to move the bolt up to the strings
I do believe that's actually a Scorpion, a smaller variant to the Ballistae. Similar concept of course, but Ballistae were actual siege equipment to hurl large darts as well as other projectiles a far distance. Scorpions were the anti-personnel machines, often placed on fortified positions (e.g. walls or within towers).
From what I've been learning, it's range. And it can fire heavier bolts with more stopping power than an arrow can. Nominally this would be used on targets with much harvier armor than an arrow could penetrate.
I feel like it would be more efficient to use bows right? At least this Verdot’s not seem that useful, you have to carry around its big heavy wooden frame and take time to set it up so you can’t deploy it quickly and it doesn’t fire very fast
I would want to create a special arrow that uses some material very weak that holds blades section down. It would be able to be set to a certain distance and then at that distance it would open up becoming a horizontal blade shooting towards a line of men with enough force to cut through.
in terms of siege warfare, this is a very efficient weapon as a defender it's accurate, so you waste less ammo but then again, most sieges are more just starving out the enemy, so it makes sense that this didnt make a massive impact
I wonder why torsion siege engines seem to disappear in the middle ages. And what the advantages and disadvantages of a small torsion weapon such as this are compared to a limb powered weapon like a crossbow.
because tech generally regressed in the dark ages and only began ramping up again from 1000AD the tech for proper torsion engines, which the greeks and romans build according to precise mathematical formulas to maximize power output, range and precision, had been largely lost with rickety springalds remaining at best also, unlike, say, trebuchets, torsion artillery required not only more mathematical know-how and specialized engineers, but a far more robust logistic and bureaucratic system since these things do tend to wear out far more often than basic engines working on gravity like trebuchets, , meaning they need far more replacements and spare parts, things which the roman republic and empire or hellenistic states could easily store and supply thanks to their advanced logistics, but that most medieval western european states would have struggled far harder to
That Tech would be wicked if we figured out how to make them more Mobile, maybe increase the fire rate, apply some physics and... help i just found our stash of guns
Need some decent length of the slide for accuracy. Like the longer barrel on a rifle can propel a 9mm bullet at higher velocity and accuracy than out of a pistol
I wonder if the role of machines like this might be a bit overstated in historical documentaries and courses. Its a single shot arrow weapon that seems to be extremely expensive to make in Roman times and is substantially less combat effective than a guy with a bow. The reason I say it worse than a guy with a bow is that the guy will be ready with his bow in about 15 seconds where this thing takes a few minutes to get together, the guy with the bow can also fire about 20 arrows in the time it takes to reload the bloody piece of junk and the added force you get compared to a bow is laughable when compared to the cost of manufacture and the hassle of operation. It also seems to be tying up the efforts of three men that would be a lot more useful if they had bows or spears.
They've got armour piercing ability that goes through the shield wall! Or through several archers. At extreme bow ranges. If you can't see how that wins you fights and saves your men, you're no general.
@@NigelTolley Dude, even the big ones like Tod made barely had more than 200 meters range firing slightly downhill. So sure it will have some usefulness in a siege situation, but in open battle it means you get one shot with it before the enemy is at the ballista position. The amount of resources used in the construction, carrying and maintenance could have been spent in ways that would have given more pay off in a battle situation and logistically. They are weapons that will hurt people badly if you hit them, but the cost/benefit makes no sense from every demonstration I have ever seen. The small ones do not even reach extreme bow range and you are wildly exaggerating the effect on target as the small ones stop in any half decent shield and the big ones are unable to go thru more than one person because of the arch you need to fire it in. It would basically hit your chest at a downward angle, go thru and get lodged in the ground 80 centimeters behind your heels.
@@rustknuckleirongut8107 And yet we have actual evidence of barbarian commanders pinned to trees with ballista bolts. Just because you can't see that sniping your enemy's leadership with these things wins you the battle in 60 seconds, doesn't mean some guy in 200AD can't.
@@balazssebestyen2341hey these things were not only powerful (at least enough to pierce one or two men) but also numerous. Alongside onagers, balistas and archers and slingers, romans were always tossing things around. Even late romans understood how annoying is to be under constant fire. Using even war darts and cheirobalistas
Man, it would’ve sucked so hard to be a soldier in those days. Imagine you dodge this slow ass bolt, just to be bashed in with a hammer, axe. Or blunt sword. They’re not going for kills right away, once you’ve been incapacitated, they’ll focus on more threatening targets. If you manage to survive to the end of the battle wounded, what came next? Well, if y’all won. They’d attempt to render aid, but if not. They’d kill you, or leave you to die. If yall lost, well. Nothing good comes next
They literally had teams of boys who ran across the battlefield to stab felled soldiers through the eye slots of their armour. So yeah, wasn't the politest society, despite everyone being armed.
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I like how it went from MAXIMUS to Louee
Must have been a Celtic volunteer.
Yeah Louee’s a real weird name huh
"Why do I always have to be Louee?"
@@Certified_Dude It's the dude who makes the videos
@@egekazakmusic I’m making a joke because my name is Maximus
Ah yes, the great Consuls of 69 BC - Claudius Lucius Maximus and his co-consul, Louee.
hes surely parthian with a name like louee 😂
Considering the accent, would way the roman colonised britannia pretty well
Sounds like a remake of _The Emperor's New Groove._ I like it.
Shouldnt it be Lucius Claudius Maximus? Lucius is a Praenomen...
And their second in command, Centurion Gary
Looks like a WW1 German soldier on an MG on that over the shoulder shot
Pickelhaube Alpha Test 0.21
@@Thomas-xd4cxtop comment 😂😂😂
They sure where heavily inspired by Rome, especially ww2. "They called themselves the third reich" because they considered themselves the successors of the holy roman empire even adopted the eagle
@@BubajumbaThats cool but he said ww1, you got your world wars mixed up.
German empire was the 2nd reich tho... or did they consider the HRE the 2nd reich? @@grunt5074
That latin 101 is paying off, could understand most of it
Nah this part of the legion was just stationed in Britain, lol.
Romans go home! Romanus eunt Domus! 😁😇😂
@@khaelamensha3624 People called 'Romans' they go the house?
@@khaelamensha3624 Romanī īte domum!
"Pointy end towards the enemy" -Commander Biggus Dickus, 69BC
EDIT: Just to say that everyone who edits their comments to say "thank you" for fake internet points is wack
Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school very quickly with rotten behavior like that.
BRIAN: Can I go now, sir?
slap
Aaah! Eh.
@@Jeff-lf4hyDo not forget to make him fighting rabid wild animals within a week 🤣
He learn that from his wife Incontinentia Buttocks
I think he lived a few decades later.
@@gezimkokoshi3468Ayooooo thats pretty good🤣🤣🤣
Interesting thing was, at Maiden Castle, around where the gates of the fortification would have been, they found hundreds of ballista bolt heads, which indicates that when the Romans fought there they must have set up a whole bunch of these catapults, and when the Britons sallied forth, just let rip on them. The talk I heard, from an archaeologist on the site, reckoned the ballistae there were a LOT bigger than this one. The human remains indicated bolts the size of light javelins passing through possibly 3 fighters at a stroke. Imagine a volley like that, most of the people you're with shot through or impaled in an instant, the psychological impact of that.
This is a scorpio. Ballista would be heavier yes.
Still nothing compared to modern artillery and drone grenades.
@@mikkel066h not even remotely the same thing. Imagine groups of 3 of your comrades in arms as you charge out from the gate, swords upraised to meet the invader, impaled, pinned together, screaming, out of the fight in an instant, your company wiped out, maybe 2 or 3 left standing, and there's the Roman line, scutae locked together, advancing, gladiae stabbing as they methodically butcher anyone left standing. Nothing you do will pierce the shield wall, the day is lost, the castle taken.
@@Skiamakhosuhm are we still talking about artillery ?
@@mikkel066hThese are not artillery ya dingus. The scorpios were the equivalent of the anti material rifles back in that period.
It may not have had the same effect as light artillery did during Napoleon era ie doing most of the work, but it did give romans one important factor - introduced "deadline" to opposing force. These things are neither fast, nor mass produced, nor very accurate at long ranges. However it retained enough power at the distance and had enough accuracy to fire into groups and injure people despite shields and armor and thus if the opposition has them, you can't just sit several hundred meters away and continue circling each other to find the best position for your troops as you would be constantly losing men at a steady trickle.
Tl:dr it forces opfor to attack your line BEFORE they can find an ideal position, doesn't allow them catch their breath or regroup in peace. No idea if it allows harassment of enemy archers or counts as harassment force at all😅
P.S.: that's just my opinion, I'm new to the channel and roman warfare is certainly not an era of history I know anything about. I'm more about history of industrialization, production and vehicles type of guy😅
Yeah I can’t imagine a bunch of engineers carrying this expensive heavy equipment around positioning it perfectly at the start of every battle and not become a target for arrows. I see it having more use mounted on a castle wall being aimed at enemy siege equipment then each individual solder (there are arrows for that)
@@greenlamp9219
The Roman Scorpion was light enough that two guys could set one up fire then run with it to a new position and repeat rather quickly.
The ballista and onager however required more or less stationary use
@@greenlamp9219 well it was writen they were mounted on carts for transportation and when you can shoot a few hundred further than an archers, plus in combination with your own archers, counter fire gets a little tricky
I'm not sure if it was useful on the battlefield. If you want to harass the enemy you'd want to use archers and slingers, as that'll has a much larger area of attack and many more projectiles.
@@senseishu937 and 3-4 times less range...
On this day, I thought of the Roman Empire.
How do you say this in Latin?
@102938475646665
in hac die, Im 'somniare de imperio Romano
today, i dream about the roman empire
Did it happen to be on April 19th?
Now just imagine back in those days trained professional soldiers that have that thing mastered how accurate and efficient they could fire round after round at an approaching army
most modern re-enacters with more than 10 years experience could shoot 4 times per minute with about 60% percent accuracy. Some experts believe the humble Legionare could do it between 6 and 7 - and arguably more accurate.
Yeah the Jews know of this weapon.
@@raven1462They probably would, presuming that the Romans used it when the Jews threw a hissy fit.
Not greater speed than a regular bow archer, but perhaps greater distance? They could fire a heavier bolt than a regular archer could (did they even have archers back then?).
@@STSWB5SG1FAN yeah but a arrow doesn't go threw a wall unlike a metal bolt.
I dont know about open battlefields, but this is brilliant for siege warfare.
Id seen the more powerful version of this (a mockup, obviously) that used horsehair or rope to hold the potential energy instead of the wood/spring apparatus.
quiet useful on battlefields, the romans used them to win a battle in Germania during the revenge campaign for Teutenburg forest
They used them to "snipe" leaders and signallers on the battlefield.
They were plenty powerful. I was at a reenactment event where they had one of these things and it was putting the bolts in to 4" thick pine targets at about 50m with enough force that the iron tip of the bolt was poking out the back. they were having to hammer them back through with a wooden mallet.
Interestingly, the flights on the bolts were made of leather.
I do think it useful as a shock weapon. Hearing several man being impaled in one shot will cause them some fear I think.
Maybe yeah, that could work. However, if you're trying to overcome a Roman fort, you'd swarm it, and it's kinda hard to get 4 of the enemy standing still in a line to get hit together like it's a group picture
Taking out leaders would make more sense, that kind of warfare requires a lot of individual leadership, having those small team leaders removed would make the line collapse.
@TheCow2face true, those weapons were also used in a roman expedition in Germania in 235, we don't know who was the emperor, Alexander or Maximus.
The scorpions inflicted many casualties to the germs
The Brits love re-enacting… keep popping up in my feed.. everything from French nepolion armies to Romans
It's the same channel mate😂
Imagine in another 2000 years, some future hobby historian trying to reproduce our firearms from today. Making the springs and gunpowder and rifled barrels. "They used chemical reactions to fire spinning metal slugs at each other? How primitive. Let's make one!"
Can't wait until we get Afghanistan War reenactors.
"And this is the FOB's porta-potty. On paper, it's merely a plastic latrine. But, from the remnants of the ancient internet, we've deduced that its primary function among the grunts was to masturbate where the master sergeant can't see them. In the heat of the day, it could reach up to 106 degrees inside, and some grunts would black out mid-stroke. This was by far one of the most hazardous and common ordeals faced by the United States Marine Corps in the 20 years of occupation."
“Pointy end towards enemy”
This is one of my favorite lines ever
And this were the small versions. The big one could fire large round metal or stone projectiles and at a short range it wasn't too dissimilar to being hitted by a cannon.
"Is that the same guy??" Sound like my gramdpa back in 79 when we had to fight Chinese
😙👌
So you are Vietnamese?
lmfaooo
Roman artillery is astounding.
Maximus, hmm. I want to be Ejaculus.
Biggus Dickus*
@@backalleycqc4790 or the Greek auxiliary, Spurtoclese!
I want to be Pussyphagus
@@backalleycqc4790 So your wife's name is Incontinentia Buttocks?
@@Nelsonwmj So, you're named Butthole McCucked?
The big caliber sniper of the roman empire.
If youve got 1 to shoulder, 2 to crank of which 1 will place the bolt and the other will fire on command of shoulder guy, i bet those reload times arent bad at all..
6-7 bolts per minute with a good team. Now imagine a few of these Bad boys raining bolts while infantry is skirmishing. Gets some work done
Ah yes, the sniping .50 from classic and medieval age
I like how Europeans like rome, the Japanese like Knights, and Americans Like the Samurai, pretty neat how our histories interest eachother more than ourselves.
because they are highly romanticized, tons of stories, legends, history about them, the more romanticized it is the more popular it becomes, people like cultures with a rich collection of stories, myth, legend, content. Just like chinas three kingdom periods, or warring era periods, to the point that majority can't differentiate myths from real history, highly romanticized. This doesnt just apply to history, but also fictions and games, like warhammer 40k lore, star wars lore, star trek lore, etc.
Rome was/is in Europe why wouldn’t we be interested in it?
@@yamnayaseed356 he probably meant northwestern european types, while the romans themselves were more southern europeans-mediterranean in appearence, as they described themselves
pointy end lol
Naughtiest Maximus
This is actually a Roman scorpion, an early ballista, the true Roman Ballista was MUCH larger and could fire anything from large iron pikes to stone boulders
maybe more comparable to an anti tank gun than an mg. i imagine a full sized one could probably punch through any shield or armor it would have seen
The Scorpion was so 🔥🔥
Fantastic! You guys are doing a great job.
Thank you for all the work and complete history you have on one of the greatest army in the world.😅😅
Boy thats some super realistic looking armor mate lol
The Indians make good repro armour 😅
This man is living his best life
Great video
When you load the bolt I was taught to never put my fingers in the area of where the bow strings move because if the retention mechanism fails the strings will slice off your fingertips with ease. I’d advise these guys to load the bolt at the far end and use a pusher stick to move the bolt up to the strings
I do believe that's actually a Scorpion, a smaller variant to the Ballistae. Similar concept of course, but Ballistae were actual siege equipment to hurl large darts as well as other projectiles a far distance. Scorpions were the anti-personnel machines, often placed on fortified positions (e.g. walls or within towers).
Der Rasierpinsel auf dem Helm ist auch super.
Old school 50 cal
It’s crazy seeing them talk so casually while wearing such insane drip
Ngl, about to use this tech in FRC
Pointy End Towards the Enemy! 😂always good to remember? 😂
The God walker behind the hedge 😮
So they basically put a crossbow on a tripod?
I thought it was a narrator, and suddenly I saw that Roman's mouth move in sync with that clear British accent. Cultural shock
these things fucking shredded in Rome II
This is Legionary Louis, our latest recruit from Gaul...
Gotta love that hat, so useful to clean the house with it.
👁️👃👁️🙏
Literally a giant crossbow 😮
I never understood the practical use for this. What makes this any better than a foot archer?
From what I've been learning, it's range. And it can fire heavier bolts with more stopping power than an arrow can. Nominally this would be used on targets with much harvier armor than an arrow could penetrate.
I feel like it would be more efficient to use bows right? At least this Verdot’s not seem that useful, you have to carry around its big heavy wooden frame and take time to set it up so you can’t deploy it quickly and it doesn’t fire very fast
"crank it back" - Barely travels across a backyard
I would want to create a special arrow that uses some material very weak that holds blades section down. It would be able to be set to a certain distance and then at that distance it would open up becoming a horizontal blade shooting towards a line of men with enough force to cut through.
Korean veteran in Vietnam: "Is that the same guy?"
in terms of siege warfare, this is a very efficient weapon as a defender
it's accurate, so you waste less ammo
but then again, most sieges are more just starving out the enemy, so it makes sense that this didnt make a massive impact
Commander Biggus Dickus in action
That's very cool
When your enemy has the best stuff....
The enemy had to stay quiet and waiting for the proyectile. I wonder how this scene could have been made by Monthy Python
The ancient world's equivalent of the 'front towards enemy'
Fantastic
I wonder why torsion siege engines seem to disappear in the middle ages. And what the advantages and disadvantages of a small torsion weapon such as this are compared to a limb powered weapon like a crossbow.
because tech generally regressed in the dark ages and only began ramping up again from 1000AD
the tech for proper torsion engines, which the greeks and romans build according to precise mathematical formulas to maximize power output, range and precision, had been largely lost with rickety springalds remaining at best
also, unlike, say, trebuchets, torsion artillery required not only more mathematical know-how and specialized engineers, but a far more robust logistic and bureaucratic system since these things do tend to wear out far more often than basic engines working on gravity like trebuchets, , meaning they need far more replacements and spare parts, things which the roman republic and empire or hellenistic states could easily store and supply thanks to their advanced logistics, but that most medieval western european states would have struggled far harder to
Is it supposed to be so rickety? It looks like it wants to fall apart
Ah yes, the roman rocket launcher
pointy end has always been towards the enemy
Louee loueee.... oh oh ... i really gotta go now
All that effort yet it doesn't go very far or do much damage to the wooden target. What was the point?
That Tech would be wicked if we figured out how to make them more Mobile, maybe increase the fire rate, apply some physics and... help i just found our stash of guns
So it’s like a giant more powerful crossbow?
Are these the guys that threw the rotating javelin?
Alexander the Great got shot by something like that. It hurt, but he survived. He musta had some good doctors. LOL
I'd expected that the projectile was bigger, given the slide length. Either way, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end 😉
Need some decent length of the slide for accuracy. Like the longer barrel on a rifle can propel a 9mm bullet at higher velocity and accuracy than out of a pistol
ah yes , the famous mg 42 of the roman empire
Roman’s where so close to the steam age
One medeival engineer: What if we did the same thing.... but smaller?
I feel for u guys in the uk. I feel like reenactment is so big over there bcs yall cant own fire arms
Or maybe, just maybe, Europeans have a bigger interest for history...
How far it goes - about 10-20m at maximum? Odd a basic bow gets far more range
I feel like a bow would be more efficient :v i mean i get the idea, but... This would only be good for like a max of 2min ad the beginning of a seige.
Try calculating the projectiles trajectory using Roman Numerals.
What is the effective firing range?
I wonder if the role of machines like this might be a bit overstated in historical documentaries and courses. Its a single shot arrow weapon that seems to be extremely expensive to make in Roman times and is substantially less combat effective than a guy with a bow. The reason I say it worse than a guy with a bow is that the guy will be ready with his bow in about 15 seconds where this thing takes a few minutes to get together, the guy with the bow can also fire about 20 arrows in the time it takes to reload the bloody piece of junk and the added force you get compared to a bow is laughable when compared to the cost of manufacture and the hassle of operation. It also seems to be tying up the efforts of three men that would be a lot more useful if they had bows or spears.
They've got armour piercing ability that goes through the shield wall! Or through several archers. At extreme bow ranges. If you can't see how that wins you fights and saves your men, you're no general.
@@NigelTolley Dude, even the big ones like Tod made barely had more than 200 meters range firing slightly downhill. So sure it will have some usefulness in a siege situation, but in open battle it means you get one shot with it before the enemy is at the ballista position. The amount of resources used in the construction, carrying and maintenance could have been spent in ways that would have given more pay off in a battle situation and logistically. They are weapons that will hurt people badly if you hit them, but the cost/benefit makes no sense from every demonstration I have ever seen. The small ones do not even reach extreme bow range and you are wildly exaggerating the effect on target as the small ones stop in any half decent shield and the big ones are unable to go thru more than one person because of the arch you need to fire it in. It would basically hit your chest at a downward angle, go thru and get lodged in the ground 80 centimeters behind your heels.
Actually they were very common. Your assumptions are incorrect.
@@rustknuckleirongut8107 And yet we have actual evidence of barbarian commanders pinned to trees with ballista bolts.
Just because you can't see that sniping your enemy's leadership with these things wins you the battle in 60 seconds, doesn't mean some guy in 200AD can't.
What was the effective range of this thing?
Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this a Polybolos
Bro I could have sprinted that distance by the time it took you to wind it 😂
And died to a rain of either spears slings or arrows yea
Roman version of the 50 cal
Whats the poundage/power of this balista?
Looke heavy, but not very.
Surely he should be called minimus
"Do you want to aim it Maximus?" Ahahaha😂
This dude coulda wore a sweet and trackers and got the same point across but he went full Larp
Yay a Scorpion no?
„Metallurgy“
Usually ballistas are very much more bigger
Never heard Metallurgy spoken like that. British standard?
That's how they say it in the legions
Biggus Dickus Likes it👍
What's the point of a giant heavy crossbow that can't even puncture a wooden slab?
Looks like a M2 .50 Cal machine gun
Can I buy one?
Wow. The British really were across time and space! Now they are Romans!
Do you yell wait and reload before or after the enemy
You have infantry in the front obviously?
Imagine this thing in rust
The roman equivalent to a machine gun.
More like a crossbow. It's not a rapid fire weapon by any means. It's a single shot, spring loaded hand cranked stationary crossbow......
@@fallstaff1517 I know how it's been constructed and how it's been used.
@@fallstaff1517 TBH it looks pretty inefficient. A simple bow might be less powerful but has a much better rate of fire.
@@balazssebestyen2341hey these things were not only powerful (at least enough to pierce one or two men) but also numerous. Alongside onagers, balistas and archers and slingers, romans were always tossing things around. Even late romans understood how annoying is to be under constant fire. Using even war darts and cheirobalistas
artillery barrage. Not machingun.
Man, it would’ve sucked so hard to be a soldier in those days. Imagine you dodge this slow ass bolt, just to be bashed in with a hammer, axe. Or blunt sword.
They’re not going for kills right away, once you’ve been incapacitated, they’ll focus on more threatening targets.
If you manage to survive to the end of the battle wounded, what came next?
Well, if y’all won. They’d attempt to render aid, but if not. They’d kill you, or leave you to die.
If yall lost, well. Nothing good comes next
They literally had teams of boys who ran across the battlefield to stab felled soldiers through the eye slots of their armour.
So yeah, wasn't the politest society, despite everyone being armed.
Thought it would have more range, huh