The TRUTH about medieval CATAPULTS
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2018
- The Medieval Catapult is a very misunderstood siege weapon, so much so that most people don't know the difference between a Mangonel, Onager or a trebuchet. There are even popular ideas about catapults that never existed historically. In this Video I clear up the confusion.
Shadiversity on Patreon: / shadiversity
Awesome shirts by Shadiversity: teespring.com/stores/shadiver...
Catapults can be built after the development of Mathematics, and they have six attack power and one defense power. All else is heresy.
HebaruSan it also takes several years to build one.
more like civilization 1
Civilization 5 too ^^
Yeah, it took 200 years to built one in average cities XD
Krankar Volund Gotta wait those trees growing
What's the HP on them?
Next you'll tell us that arrows cant destroy castles either.
The secret is to hit the castle knee
Dwarfurious they have to be fire arrows, of course!
pretty much
or tell that a swordsman can't set a structure on fire by hitting it multiple times
Throw the pommel at a castle wall to end it rightly.
Wait now you wilk tell me that when a group of soldier armed with swords attack a building directly i doesn't go on fire???
No, that's perfetly accurate, the swords hitting stone make sparks That ignite the flammable stuff in the building XD
I am a time traveller and i can confirm that swords indeed are able to set stone in fire.
Too much AoE man...
What? Too much AoE? You don't believe me, do you? I can prove it, take a real historical sword and keep hitting a stone with it, it will light on fire, trust me.
Trust me, I'm a BLACKSMITH! Made me laugh though.
In age of empires people use the mangonel or the onager to actually kill soldiers and it barely does damage to castles
That's what i was gonna say
In age of empires you can also knock down a castle with a spear
Wanna treb war?
yup, usually my own soldiers...
This guy is talking about aoe1 1997and1998
Did someone say
T R E B U C H E T
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Correctly pronounced as tree bucket.
(ironically it's literally a wooden bucket that moves)
He shouldnt of associated the two in the same video imo, just disrespectful
Aaaahh yes, the superior siege weapon
it can take a 90 kg stone up to 300 m
I can 100% confirm this. In high school my father and I built models of both an onager (3ftx4ftx4t roughly) and a trebuchet (close to half the onagers size). The trebuchet was able to launch the same projectile as the onager, but further. We didn’t try cow corpses, but i was only 17.
You say that as if you tried again later, _after_ you were 17.
...
I'm proud of you.
You probably shouldn't try to launch objects bigger than the entire catapult anyway.
Which corpses did you use then?
In age of Empires 2 onager and mangonals were actually used most effectively against infantry. They were ok against walls but the trebuchets were much better. Just thought I should point that out. Great and interesting video!
I came to the comment section for this comment.
ARE. Are actually used :)
@@paweb3810 This was 2 years ago before DE came out, so I think it makes sense to use past tense. The game is over 20 years old.
I mainly used them to clear forests though.
@@humangarbage6559 HD already existed and the game's community was alive and well.
Just FYI Shad, in Age of Empires you don't use the "mangonels" against walls, you use them against enemy troops.
Don't "usually" use. There are exceptions. And low-tier players (like me) who are too dumb/disinterested in the meta.
Though the fact that castles auto-punish things means that trying to use them against a castle is just futility and (hopefully) a lesson quickly learned.
This guy is talking about aoe1 1997and1998
Actually, Shad, the Mangonel/Onager line in Age of Empire II is primarily a massed infantry counter, as it was in real life. Trebuchets, rams and bombard cannons are the anti-building siege units. So yay for Ensemble Studios for getting it right!
Actually Mangonel/Onagers can damage walls. A villager with a knife can damage a wall.
Daniel Truong Yeah but it doesn't do more. That's even more so game mechanics.
Well, a villager would take the wall down in 222 ingame years (considering vils have actually a +6 bonus against walls). I think it is quite realistic for a man to take down a wall in 222 years if he was to live that long :D Anyway it i not supposed to be realistic, it is supposed to be fun and balanced which they achieved very well.
@@cubiss1273 i am fairly certain that noone would try to wear down a massive stone wall by grinding it away, with whatever tools at hand. Much more effective is to ether put a long wooden log between the stones, and try to force them appart, or to tunnel under the wall and to collapse it.
I haven't played that game in 17 years but I distinctly remember from the second mission in the Joan of Arc campaign that you gotta use your mangonels to take out the watchtowers guarding the castles and scattered throughout the countryside because they're the only ones that could stay out of range. So quite a bit not right about that, but it was a lot of fun.
Actually, I just had to go look it up and it wasn't that the mangonels outranged the towers it's just that they had sufficient piercing armor. Still not right considering real mangonels were operated by a crew.
One thing Shad faiked to point out. Unless my information and logic are wrong, no historical onagers used a spoon to lob their rock at things. Instead, they used a sling like on some of Shad's pictures and on trebuchets, increasing the effective arm length and rhus projectile velocity. There are medieval manuscripts showing spooned onagers, but apparently those were all made after cannon replaced them and trebuchets...
The spoon indeed was historically almost never used. Its spread probably originates from Hollywood movies, movie props need not to be effective, and it takes some knowledge and experimenting to determine proper sling lenght and release angle stuff, so they practically invented the spoon cause it was easier and they didn't care for the performance.
In real machines the lower effectivity means not only less projectile velocity, but also more energy remaining in the machine, placing unnecessary and potentially damaging loads on it.
Using a spoon is like dry firing a bow. At the end, most of the energy is still in the arm and it's going to hit a wooden post, which isn't good.
A sling transfered the energy out of the arm.
I blame Leonardo da Vinci for the popularity of the spoon.
mangonels in Age Of Empires are used as anti-infantry( or anti-archer) units NOT to destroy castles or walls. They are made from the siege workshop and can out range town centers but will be destroyed by a castle with ease. Don't throw AOE under the buss(Onager?) like that man.
I dunno, I'm dumb enough to use them against walls. They have more range than a sword and sometimes that's just what I need and have access to.
But does the catapult have machicolations?
In Siege towers maybe?
What about pommels
@@discododo0468 hurl the pommels to end your enemies rightly at range.
@@halfjack2758 Wrong channel.
@@Ith4qua people make and understand the joke her too.
The mangonel might be able to destroy walls in age of empires, but so can literally every other unit in the game. The mangonel is primarily designed to be used against massed soldiers in aoe2 whereas trebuchets are used in siege because of their longer range and superior damage against buildings.
Having said that though, when the main criticism of your historical video isn't about historical errors then you're definitely doing it right.
Good job!
That kind of catapult did happen once in history. It was not used for battle, but instead was made just to understand if it could be done. It was made by a man named Illida during the second/third era. He was a great craftsman and engineer that understood the workings of many technologies and wanted to see if doing something like this would work. It did not do well so the project was abandoned shortly after the third era started. It was recorded in the Book of Raver Pg. 210 mark 14.
Interesting information !
Great, now I want to have a trebuchet
I mean.... what's stopping you?
You mean that you didn't already.
I'm about to build one right now so that I can bring it to school as an "engineering project"
If someone wants some building tipps, I already build like 3 of those. For much lower price then normally*
@@siegfried_artificer what's the arm length ratio for whipper trebuchets because I heard that it's shorter than 3.75:1 but can't find more information.
8:15 - FYI, especially in the modern meta (AOE II), mangonels/onagers are predominantly slated for anti-footman deployment, as it's much more efficient and effective to use trebuchets, rams, and cannon to destroy buildings. The mangonel/onager option can take down simple buildings like houses easily enough, and can have some effect against towers, but typically they're not that effective against sturdy structures like castles, or even walls.
I'd risk saying that lobbing construction material onto your enemies fortifications is not the most effective way to bring them down.
Or ammunition such as arrows and bolts.
I immagine that all the stones that where flung over the wall by some type of catapult can be much easier trown out of the machiculations, and thus litteraly dropping hell on the people trying to storm the castle...
@@JonatasAdoM
And good sized stones that they could load onto their own trebuchets and mangonels.
Looks awesome though
the memes were right, trebuchets are clearly the ultimate weapon
They really are amazing. They actually kept being used for at least a century after cannons became available, and if memory serves correctly, Leonardo da Vinci actually drew a number of trebuchet variations in his famous collection of "inventions".
Gaseous Snake Oh really? Do trebuchets have a pommel? Can you end a castle rightly with them? Didn't think so.
Have you ever known a meme to be wrong before?
What if we were to make a giant pommel, and then use the trebuchet to launch it? Truly, a weapon to surpass metal gear.
You read my mind, sir. If only siege engineers read the manual, we'd have a weapon to surpass metal gear rightly!
I love this guy´s videos, he puts alot of enthusiasm on them. This is what I wanted my school history teacher to be like when I was a kid
If a Trebuchet would be able to destroy castle walls, sieges wouldn't have lasted several years and often only ended due to the defenders running out of supplies. Even if the attackers didn't have any, they could've constructed them then and there and use them to knock down the walls instead of waiting for the defenders to give up, but they didn't. Without being an expert, I'd assume that any sort of catapult would mostly be used for intimidation and harassment of enemies and to support attempts to take the walls.
Hurling corpses, animal parts, pots of hot coal and higly flamable substances beyond the walls was also done to set inner buildings on fire and to cause chaos and diseases among the defenders. Once gun powder was invented, armies used sappers to dig tunnels under the walls and blow them up, which was the earliest effective way to directly attack thick stone walls, but at that time we're mostly beyond the medieval period.
From what I know, before they had gunpowder. They would chip under the walls or at corners and then put in wooden props which they would set fire to when they wanted to collapse that section of the wall.
the parts that give defenders cover can be destroyed by trebuchetfire.
Of course - not while an attempt is made to take the walls. U'd rather not hit your own ladders, siegetowers (etc).
No, I meant while your troops try to approach the wall you target the defensive structures at the top (if they're made of wood) and try to cause a bit of chaos behind the wall, but you stop once your troops reach the base of the wall.
Catapults? Trebuchets? Oh no, they are after my MACHICOLATIOOOOOOOOONS!!!
But what about dragons?!
I know you like your terminology, but I am still of the opinion that trebuchet should be renamed "War Seesaw"
that is a much better name!
For two reasons:
1. That is literally what it is
2. "Trebuchet" is a French word, so there really isn't an English word for it. In German we have "Tribok", but that's just a Germification of "Trebuchet". At least I am quite sure, because it would mean "Triple Goat", which makes 0 sense.
actually, there is another german term for Trebuchet: Blide, which comes from the latin "palida" "To fling", because, well, it's flinging rocks.
Trebuchet seemingly also was derived from a latin word, "Trabatium"... though I have no idea what that means. "Trabalis" means bar or beam.
Nerobyrne 'Bock' can also mean a sawhorse or similar contraption, so Tribo(c)k could conceivably describe the triangular frames and tripod structures that make up the 'classic' trebuchet. Though I know too little to make any hard claims in that regard.
when i first saw them in LOTR i was calling them Slingapults!
@@undertakernumberone1 lol the germans used it to throw goats
Very interesting video, learned a lot!
There's a glaring mistake here, in Age of Empires 2, the onager and mangonel are used as they were intended. The game rewards you for targeting soldiers and other units, it does do damage to walls and buildings but it is REALLY slow to bring them down.
Ha ha archer micro go brr
So, catapult is basically a blanket term in the way the term “artillery” is in this regard.
Not confusing at all.
A Howitzer and a Mangonel are both Artillery but a Howitzer isn't a Catapult but a Mangonel is 🙃
+Voron Agrrav Of course. That's because a howitzer uses a propellant and not a catapult to launch it's projectile ;)
The strength of a rope (and hence, I believe, its ability to store energy) is proportional to its cross-section. This means that doubling the length, height, and width of a mangonel would quadruple its potential strength. This is still not enough to allow it to scale up indefinitely, but it _does_ mean it does better than the video implies.
Not a particularly critical error, but one I felt I had to point out. Mostly because strength being proportional to the square of length is a good approximation to spread around (and not just for ropes).
Still won't stop an onager slowly bashing itself to bits though...
Yes that's true, it goes squared. But if you want to have a big stone, it's better to have a linear size of catapult then a x^(2/3).
Another problem with the ropes, if you make it bigger, they will have more internal friction between the single strings.
The fun thing is, this scaling also works the other way around, that means if I want to have a small system a rope based one is preferably to a trebuchet. For example a Scorpio or an Manuballista really exists, while there are no known (at least to me) instances of hand held trebuchets.
Timothy McLean o
@Factory of Redstone: Slings?
A sling works on a other principle than a trebuchet. Even a trebuchet, a balista and onagar are more similar to one another then a sling.
While a trebuchet and onager stores it's energy in potential energy, either in the height of heavy objects (gravitational potential) or the tension of strings or springs (elasticity potential), the sling stores the energy in kinetic energy, to be more specific rotational kinetic energy.
So you don't really store the energy somewhere to give it to your projectile at the moment of release, but you put the energy directly in the movement of the stone and hold the stone in a circle with a sting. To have more time to put more energy in it.
At the moment of release, you just stop applying a zentripetal force to the stone and Newtons first law takes over and the stone fly with the speed the had already required not in a curve anymore, but in a straight line.
3:04 The mangonel in aoe2 is hard countered by castles, ie attacking a castle with them is a terrible idea. Search for the aoe2 video called "Greatest Troll or Biggest Throw?" to see an example of this. So, that misconception cannot come from that game.
Shad's Patreon is Legend....
Wait for it....
DARY!!!
The question is, do Trebuchets unpack in 3 seconds flat when I research Kataparuto?
Havoc they are capable of lobbing a 90 kilo stone over 300 meters, but I digress.
Onagers are what you get when you upgrade your mangonels at the cost of 800 food and 500 gold. Make sure you research Siege Engineers to get that extra range though.
And you need Shinkichon as the Koreans for even more range
Id prefer torsion engines tho. More splash means more juicy shots.
You did not mention the efficiency of the trebuchet and the "catapult" against the wooden castles, which in many videos have said to be the most common type.
Wooden castles? Wouldn't they just have a dragon breath fire on it?
Nice, I was watching one of your older videos, and you reacted to a video-game's depiction of a medieval ranged siege weapon, and I wondered if you had a video on such weaponry.
PS I can't speak for most games, but AoE2 not only calls them Mangoels and Onagers, but the mechanics support their historic usage. Most pros nowadays rarely use these siege units to wreck walls and buildings, but rather cut down swaths of infantry and unaware calvary. Though buildings are hardly realistic with short build times and vanishing which enough sword swings.
well I AoE2 you can also destroy a castle by firing arrows at it or by swinging enough swords at it, so there's that...
Exactly, in AoE2 the Onagers and Mangonels are primarily anti-infantry and anti-cavalry units. They are damn near ineffective against buildings.
Well, in game-terms, the onagers and mangonels aren't good against anything you just mentioned, unless you have a good choke-point.
In game-terms, infantry is melee only, and melee units are actually fairly good against mangonels/onagers, because they have decent hp and the mangonels/onagers have minimum range. Cavalry is a counter against siege, so no, Mangonels/Onagers are NOT good against cavalry. What they are good against however, is archers. In fact, Mangonels/Onagers are considered a hard-counter against archers. Well, that is unless you play against a certain 15-year old Austrian kid, where even mangonels and onagers can't save you from the archer masses.
Yeah, I meant more massed units who are controlled by a noob. Archers are easiest to take down with Mangonels and onagers (as you mentioned), but if the opponent is terrible at microing his troops, you can get some nice hits on groups of infantry and cavalry. Just not as effective as against they are against archers. It's been years since I played AoE2, and even longer since I played online (since before HD and that other one that a lot of people play on these days). Still love to watch game casts on it, just don't have the ability right now to play it, so I'm working on memories from 2005 and before lol Excuse the slight ignorance of my above comment.
That and pros rarely use a single unit to comprise their army, Halberdiers are a great support to Onagers, since they can block, and kill most Calvary with ease.
On the other hand, you can use manganels to fire soldiers into hay stacks on the other side of a castles wall. Try doing that with a trebuchet!
Hate to be the killjoy here, but the acceleration that a trebuchet imparts on its projectile is actually a lot more gradual than that of a mangonel, since it relies on gravitational pull rather than a sudden release of elastic potential energy, so in reality, being launched by a trebuchet is probably more survivable than being launched by a mangonel, simply because the G-forces are lower. Of course you'd still be killed on landing, regardless of whether you land in a haystack or not...
Since managers can only fire projectiles the size of a human head you have to fire really tiny soldiers or cut them to pieces first.
+Martin Neumann - Managers are quite different to mangonels; they can actually fire whole people. :p
No Robin hood used a Petraria Arcatinus.
We need a collapsible glider system for landing. At least that's more believable.
Sad when Warhammer Fantasy Orcs are more accurate than films. It was only _mostly_ suicidal.
It's nice to see Shad cover bigger-picture topics like Medieval Warfare at large. Most people focus on the martial arts and man-to-man scale of combat in this period, because we all just assume that we know how this stuff in actual battles worked. But then you actually look into it and realize just how much public knowledge got wrong.
Hey Shad and others,
were there machines used in open battles? Weren't the machines used to throw projectiles over the walls? Or against infantry attacking the castle?
Some machines were used in Russia to destroy castle wall because the walls were mostly wooden p to the 13. century.
Can we see some historical artwork or other evidence of machines used outside sieges?
I liked this video. I read an article years ago about a pair of guys who wanted to make a catapult. They made one, but it was one of the hybrid mangonel/onager-crossbow/ballista versions, and insisted throughout the article that this was the most historically accurate version (if I recall correctly he said something like, "All catapults are essentially crossbows.") I enjoyed the story of the article but his assertion that historical siege weapons of this type had bows as part of the design always bothered me. Anyway, thanks for clearing it all up!
Mangonels must have been very intimidating to face especially the ones that were loaded with pommels.
All these years I believed in lies!
Now you believe in new -lies- inappropriate generalizations like the 'big' Warwolf
Blame Follywood!
Dawid, more to come.......
Great video!
I really did lern something.
But I have to say that in Age of Empires II, which you've shown, mangonels and onagers are more useful against groups of infantry than against buildings, just as you said. So the game is kind of accurate at that.
The limitation is that everything in the game has to do at least a bit damage to everything, so you can destroy a castle with them (but you need many because they don't stand much damage), but a trebuchet is correctly depicted being much better at it.
Great video, as ever, really enjoy your content! If you get a chance Shad, visit Caerphilly Castle in South Wales UK, they have a collection of reproduction catapults, including a trebuchet, perrier, mangonel, and ballista. Hugely interesting to see in reality, and great fun to see the projectiles being loosed into the moat!
first pluto's not a planet now this?
Pluto is called a dwarf planet, thereby technically making it a planet. Pluto is a planet!
"Dwarf planets are not planets" - astrophysics nerd
"Your mom though I was big enough" - Pluto
I know, I have the mentality of a 14 yo...
Dwarf planet. It has planet in the classification, thereby making it a form of planet. Don't want it to be a planet? Reclassify it as a tailless comet or an extra large asteroid. But so long as it is a dwarf planet, it is still, by technicality, a planet.
"You are technically correct, the best kind of correct." -Bureaucrat 1.0
How can I explain his to you? Dwarf planet ≠ planet it is like saying a wale shark is a wale because it has wale in it's name. This massage has been brought to you by the society of people who think names don't aways make sence seriously!!! Electric eals are knifefish not eals!!! Who the hell named them that?
You know when you really think about it with this information. Using a catapult of any design to try to smash through a fortification of the period is no more logical then Orcs launching goblins with them. Ergo, that means firing green skins to assault your enemies is just as logical!
Gobboz iz less useful den rocks, an' far more annoyin' ta be around. Launch 'em wiv da catapult, boyz!
One gob lobber comin' right up!
Great, now I'm picturing catapult-flung goblins with medieval-fantasy style parachutes being used as the first paratroopers.
It's actually a special unit in Warhammer Fantasy for the Dwarfs. You can see some footage of it in the Total War: Warhammer games.
I believe in my next P&P low fantasy setting I'll create a faction that launches pissed off honey badgers or wolverines at the enemy.
*LEGENDARY!!!*
Now that’s how it’s said 😂
Great video as always shad!!!
I enjoy and appreciate your precise usage of words.
I remember how I got a playmobil set as a child including a "roman" onager with a bow... Even as a child I could hear historical authenticity laughing at me :'(
I remember something similiar about a history-TV-show for kids were they showed those things...
The confusion of terms used to day, is on par with the confusion of terms used by the ancients.
Shad, every time you make a video you make me want to play Empire Earth 2 again so I always end up binging your content again while playing EE2: Art of Supremacy expansion lol
I having been waiting for this video for 20 years
By far my favorite historical trebuchet was Malvoisine, which is French for "Bad Neighbor".
Worth noting, it's the female word for bad neighbor... Much more scary XD
Baaahahahahaha!!!! XD
Wow, I thought "War Wolf" sounded imposing, but that sounds way more intimidating. Glad to hear folks in medieval times had such a sense of humor about their neighbors.
Slight detraction: In age of empires the Onagers and the like are primarily an anti archer unit, and are only used against castles if the user wants to waste gold.
Rams and trebuchets are way better for taking care of castles
Catapult is a term for umbrellas. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up Shad!
Bravo Shad on another great video. Hope you do a vid on explaining different types of ballista next.
Wondering how effective these weapons would be against wooden fortifications...
Also I would very much like a part 2 about the kinds of catapults you only mentioned in this video, the Ballista and the Scorpion.
PS:
Love how every second comment is pointing out that Shad is wrong about AoE2
it depends on what you are firing from the catapult. wood can be quite durable, and there is a ship, the USS constitution, that is an example of this. it was nicknamed old iron sides for the reason that its oak hull could repel some cannon fire with negligible damage. if you launch a fire based projectile like a pot of burning pitch or oil, then you might be able to burn the wall down.
So about wooden fortifications, there was an episode from Our Fake History podcast that was talking about the siege of Vienna, where in order to counter Ottoman cannons, the engineers surrounded the city with several layers of wood and stone fortifications so instead of blowing a hole the wood and stone structure would just collapse and turn into mounds of obstacles. Now I don't know what the differences are between trebuchet strikes and cannon strikes are, but I assume one is weaker than the other so when it comes to cannons you'd rather build a insane number of fortifications to deplete their ammo supplies than a single permanent structure since it won't last that long anyways.
Porkinski against cannons, you want short, thick, angled walls with cannons of your own to make it crazy to try and bring ladders and siege towers.
Look up star forts for the evolution of that design.
traditional catapults operate on mechanical propulsion to throw projectiles. this means they have a functional limit to the size and weight and velocity of the projectile they fire. in terms of size and weight a catapult can throw bigger projectiles but they will often be slower and thus in a less direct arc than that of a cannon. a cannon uses a contained, usually an explosion though air or water are other options today, to launch a projectile, this allows for a smaller round to be fired faster and in a more direct arc at a target so their is more significant force on target. with any projectile you want to be able to reduce the effective force on target by forcing glancing hits or off angle hits. early in counter cannon defenses, sloped and flanged walls were added to increase the chance of a glancing hit from a cannon and then walls would have also been built at angles and towers would have been more rounded rather than square. star forts and earth works were also strong counters to cannon. building up an embankement to a wall would have added a soft barrier to the main wall to take most of the impact, stopping or greatly reducing the velocity of the round.
A huge misconception between people that don't play age of empires 2 is that all units made in siege workshop are for destroying building. It is simply not true. Onagers and scorpions (ballistas) are primarily used against infantry.
Tbf, in Age of Empires 2, mangonels and onagers are primarily used against groups of soldiers. They do much less damage to buildings than trebuchets or bombard cannons.
I like it how Shad has TRUTH in all caps. It's a nice touch
Can't simply shoot a larger rock? Well, that's where the pommel comes in.
Woah now! Let's not talk crazy talk. A load of flung pommels is too stronk. It's gotta be a war-crime or something.
What the! Not a LOAD of pommels. You want to conquer that city, you can't nuke it. One pommel, maybe even with a bit of padding wrapped around it.
yeah, why bother with these "crazy" contraptions like a "trebuchet" and a CAT a pult when you can just position one of your knights in front of the wall and threaten the defenders with the pommel.
*Knight* OY! Surrender now or i'll level the entire city!
*some archer* YEAH!? WHAT ABOUT DRAGONS!?
*Knight* You mean this dragon *begins unscrewing the pommel*
*Some archer* Hey... what are you doing? stop it its not funny.
*Knight* Who's laughing now ya bum-wax... i don't even know what that is.
*Some archer* PLEASE STOP MY FAMILY LIVES HERE!!
*Knight* should of thought about surrendering before i started unscrewing.
*Some archer* You mean... its too late?
*knight* yup. *unscrew's furiously*
*King nugget* Whats happening...? OH MY JESUS BABY!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
*knight* suck pommel mate *cover's the pommel with 5 layer's of gamberson*
*King nugget* OH SHIT NOOOOO!!
pop
the year is 1254, the death of king nugget shook the entire world, some called his death valiant and brave when he took the pommel straight to the head and thus destroying half of his nugget beard and head. the knights of shad took over the city of mundania and soon the rest of middle marius.
i assumed you meant attatching a pommel to the catapult to act as an effective counterweight, not what the rest of the comments suggest
Mikosch2 A TREBUCHET CAN LAUNCH A 90 KILOGRAM STONE PROJECTILE OVER 300 METERS
Great video Shad, as always. Though I do want to say something about the AoE2 reference. Siege onagers are quite awful against castles and buildings in general, they are better against infantry by a long shot. If you send a siege onager against a castle, it will get destroyed in no time.
Only if you don't defend it, and if you send like 15 of them the castle goes down quick (though then again if you send enough villagers the castle goes down quick too...)
That being said; the most effective use I ever had for them was instantly clearing forested bits of the map that I wanted to build a wall through.
Great video, It helped me a lot to clear some misconception I had about catapults. I can see the onager tho be of some use against wooden structure or to fire incendiary projectiles but it seems that those types of siege weapons were no more in use in mediaval times in favor of counterweight systems. Catapults/Onagers might have been more useful not to attack a castle but to defend it.
It shouldn't be that hard to set them up on walls or towers as you can simply assemble them on top of the wall instead of trying to lift up the whole thing. Of course narrow walls could prevent that and it might be impossible to place them in some areas but since a defensive catapult would stay stationnary you can custum build the frame to fit it's resting location. And in the worst case, since they were already making wooden constructions on top of the walls like hoardings, they could well build a kind wooden platform to have the room needed to operate the catapult if the wall is too narrow.
Great informational videos.
great job, the lack of using rubble from a wall as a barrier always bugged me about video games as it doesn't make much sense. the points you have made were convincing at hitting this weak point. i am still going to need some time to process this, but it looks like you may be right about siege weapons.
That was one of my favorite things in Kingdom of Heaven. I could totally buy that they brought down a part of the wall by focusing all of their catapults on one area in a prolonged siege. But then where did the battle at the walls take place? On top a pile of rubble almost 1/3 the height of the wall! I loved it.
I can see that, specially if you are going to have to go back and reshoot later or something weird like that.
Doesn't mean that I don't love that they put in the effort though.
jamoecw undermining the walls of a castle could create a breach which you might storm the castle through because the walls would fall below ground level when they collapse, but attackers tended to set the tunnel on fire to burn the wall's foundations when undermining, instead of mining and then bombarding the wall.
@Owain Williams - the tunnels were not that big, less than the height of a human being, and not very long due to carbon dioxide build up. it works with walls built on a hill so that the heavier carbon dioxide will fall out of the tunnel, instead of digging down and having the dioxide have to diffuse up and out of the tunnel. so the walls wouldn't fall into the tunnels.
of course with walls they were generally also retaining walls so the rubble would make a ramp to help get into the castle. it turns the terrain from assaulting a cliff to assaulting a hill, definitely an advantage relatively speaking.
really bugged me as well... especially since i always built kind of crazy fortifications... i commonly used a method of taking over enemy territory, it was often enclosing one piece at a time within a wall lol.
*This?!* this is what my patreon money buys me?!
i love it!
Actually age of empires gets it like, exactly right. Mangonells are very powerful against people, and while they can damage castles, it isn't cost effective at all and we just use trebuchets like, 99% of the time.
I got here from reading the word "Mangonel" in my 5e DM's guide I've been studying recently. And I am now better for having watched this. :-) THANK YOU SHAD! YOU JUST MADE THE 5e GAME I'M ABOUT TO RUN BETTER!!!
Imagine a siege weapon in a form of DDDRRRAAAGGOOOONNN!!!!!
If I'm not mistaken, in east asia, it was rather common to have canons modeled after dragon heads.
But wait a second, I'm pretty sure mangonels were suppost to be lumbercutting devices.
FOREST NOTHING
Ownager montage.
NEXT.GAME.FOREST.NOTHING
t90salute
More like Lumber disintegration devices. The Trees are nowhere to be seen after a few barrages.
@@Broockle do they use the infinity gauntlet?
Thanks. This was both interesting and informative.
Thoroughly enjoy your content.
Onagers/Mangonels in AOE2 are not anti-castle weapons. They are anti-units weapons. They are depicted in the gravel throwing and flammable material variants and are mainly used to deny areas to enemy units or attack tight formations. Trebuchets and rams are the actual anti-castle options. The bowl shape instead of a sling is questionable but I think it's a technical limitation, the model being to small for a sling to be visible. While so many video games are to blame for the catapult myth, it's sad to see you point out one of the few games where they had it right.
Drift: Agreed
btw chad. I have to debunk you on something.. Onagers are not effective weapons against castles in Age of Empires.
Only Koreans have special onagers that can outrange a castle.
But the same logic applies to age of empires as it does to real life.
Why use a Onager/Mangonel against a castle, when you can use a much more effective alternative: Trebuchet
In Age of Empires, they have the same cost, but the Trebuchet is just much more effective when it comes to sieging.
Good video. Your information is very useful.
Good video, never knew there was a difference between catapult and the Onager. The few times I've delved into siege weapons I've come away rather confused due to the terminology issues. This video made some things much clearer.
I'd love to see you do something similar with ballistas (ballistae?).
The worst design flaw that gives the so-called "petraria arcatinus" as a fake is basic mechanics. If you want the bow limbs to develop any significant power on a significant part of the arm travel, they have to pull on a single plane. If the limbs are solidly fixed to the chassis, as the arm swing, the line in which the bow limbs and "string" pull the rotating arm are necessarily off that plane most of the time, resulting in tremendous torque on the limbs, that would either break the limbs, or break what holds the limbs to the chassis. To be mechanically viable, the "petraria arcatinus" should have its bow swinging freely, or almost freely. It's not impossible, but it's never what's being depicted.
Also, considering making an efficient bow for a crossbow already requires some work and skill, making it X times larger, for developing X times more force, while a single arrow could create a weakness that would weaken it to the point it would crack after just a few "shots" is really not a clever money/manpower investment. Even if the bow cracks the thing could still be used as an onager, but an onager, as you demonstrate, is not that helpful in the first place. How many days, or weeks would it take a whole workshop to make an petraria arcatinus bow? It isn't even a real trade! No bowmaker or crossbowmaker would feel competent in making one, and that's not a carpenter's job either.
Yes it can work, but as you say, it is not practical, and in basic terms in warfare, it comes down to Economics and Logistics - you gotta pay for it, and you gotta get it there. Some weapons are not worth the cost and trouble (e.g. Hitler's super gun - sure, it worked, but at HUGE cost).
Yeah, a balista is cheaper and better, so just use that, or just a trebuche. Not this balista onager hybrid moster. Balistas should be able to become really powerful reasonally easy, you just need a shitton of hardened steel, that's the only challenge.
Jasper Mooren, not to argue... Just to point out the metallurgical...
Correction for you, I'd recommend "Spring Steel" as opposed to "Hardened Steel"... provided you're actually interested in a ballista in modern materials...
I might posit (tentatively here) that the "Shit ton" requirement would be relative to the size of machine and thereby the size of projectile you're interested in throwing...
Modern material science suggests, that it wouldn't be utterly impractical to launch a projectile(ish) of a relative "arrow form" the size of a telephone pole... on the order (or scale) of a thousand meters range. It would be expensive, but not impossible, and I'd hazard that such a weapon system would certainly command respect on the field.
Of course, efficacy would be a different question all together. :o)
simply use a twisted rope balista as the bow. then the limbs don't need to be a work of art. lol
@@blackdeath4eternity The main frame of an onager has to be strong enough to resist the torsion of all those twisted ropes. You're just tripling up the complexity of the device instead of scaling up.
for all these confusion and misconceptions about "catapults"
we can once again thank hollywood for that. they never bothered about accuracy in ALL their movies.
not then, not now.
I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't really care.
Adam B perhaps.
Like Shad said games are also pretty bad for this, like age of empires and many other "medieval" games. Which is why I personally thought Mangonel where used for sieging
I don't know would a 100% accurate movie be very hollywoodish or mainstream, TBH.
spykez spykez the sfx budget would probably skyrocket.
One has to remember that many of these weapons were used in conjunction with other siege activites such as undermining and scaling forcing defenders to keep their heads down.
Big up Rome Total War, thanks to that game I've always called Onagers by their proper name. Another great video Shad, thank you for helping make my D&D games both more accurate and more fun.
Imagine putting a handful of pommels in there instead of a rock! Mangonels could end many opponents rightly!
KasasTheWarlock ah, i see your a individual of culture aswell.
That will be super shotgun of the time.
Video really brightened my day, especially the intro LEGENDARY
Oooh ooh ooh I learned something! Thank you Shad!
That video clip of the crew loading the onager looks awfully familiar ;-)
We had some great times with those siege engines in Caerphilly castle!
On ah jur. I knew trebuchets were classified as catapults but I didn't know that the same applied to Balistas. Keep up the great content Shad.
They're not. They're classed as siege weaponry, but not catapults. Mostly by laymen without true knowledge are they usually called catapults. Which is wrong. Trebuchets are sometimes classed as catapults, if they use the term tension catapults about onagers, but not all that common either really amongst scholars. They tend to only use the term about tenison catapults, or onagers and mangonels. Not about ballistae, scorpions, trebuchets etc...
True. As far as I understood 'catapult' it applies specifically to object lobbing contraptions that use levers of some sort to lob their objects of choice overhand style (like they trained soldiers to do with grenades in the world wars.
Huh in Mount and Blade i always though it strange that they just took out the top of the wall instead of tearing it down with the Trebuchet they have but apparently that more an accurate representation. Also its funny how in Castle Crusader 2 they removed the option of using ladders and siege towers from the game so you don't even have the option to do historically accurate sieges.
Ray Nightshade
Can’t wait for Bannerlord where we can actually use catapults, and what looked like to be a scorpion on the battlements.
Actually, in Age of Empires, mangonels and onagers are best against infantry, they aren't overly good against buildings.
This guy is talking about aoe1 1997and1998
I'm glad I played Age of Empires as a kid now. 🤣
Mangonels actually aren't useful for taking out castles in AoE either. Their smaller range and low hit points mean they die to castles.
Awesome video! The confusion of terminology on this topic has bothered me for years. And you didn't even get into all the various names and variations of ballistae and traction trebuchets. Another video perhaps? :)
One of Shads best appalled reactions is from the catapult like device from “For Honor” 😂 oh man priceless I thought he was gonna have a heart attack
I know you focus primarily on the medieval time period, but could you possibly do a video on the ballista? I'm interested specifically in Roman ballista which supposedly were able to fire 78kg stones and were used for sieges during Antiquity
Learned something new today ❤️
Honestly Shad.. real empires used Seige Onagers...
for felling trees 😁
There is a pond on this map an I *will* get that fish.
That's a nice wall you've got there next to your woodline. It'd be a shame if someone cut around it.
Then they shot the trees at people with ballistas.
You only need onager now
Very good video shad! But i have to defend AoE2 here, cause in this game it is actually far more effective to take down castles with trebuchets! ;)
And onagers are AMAZING against blobs of units.
Love your vids!!
While building both a small model and a full sized example of a trebuchet, I discovered that you need four things to make it perform that I did not expect: 1. A much heavier counter weight than you think you need 2. A much longer arm than you think you need 3. A counter weight that swings rather than being attached to the arm itself 4. A sling. A perfectly designed sling. A fifth factor tying the previous four together is proportion. For any kind of catapult there seems to be an exact proportion of its parts at which it functions most efficiently.
Since you talked a lot about fortifications in previous video, how about talking some more about siege machines, their use and their effectiveness ?
Some of the biggest guns ever to exist existed in the 1400 when cannons were meant to destroy castles, those cannons bye the way were really really big.
Take that Constantino... Well damn they filled in the hole already.
gotta love me' bombards
In Age of Empires 4, we have mangonels, which suck against buildings, while trebuchets are pretty good. I wanted to find out why, and why it wasn't called a catapult, which led me to find this video :D
I'm always blown away by how complicated and intricate Medieval engineering can be.
*ROMAN CATAPULT!!!*
They can damage the outer wall of a barbarian settlement!.
They look nifty, and trendy!.
Classy wood finish!.
People will stop and stare with jealousy when you're out in public with one!.
TOTALLY NOT GAY!!!.
ABSOLUTELY NOT GAY
If you say that it's gay, we'll END YOU RIGHTLY. (U N S C R E W S P O M M E L)
Catapults are machinery made to launch large pommels to end the target's structure rightly
cemo1999 hahahahaha 😂😂
Can your roman catapult throw a 90 kg projectile at 300 m? I THINK NOT.
I want t-shirt "Trebuchet did it better" :)
Very informative. Thank you
3:11 - nope, watch any up-to-date match commentary on Age of Empires (yeah it's still being played!), its most important use in game (as far as the mangonels and onagers are concerned) is to bombard enemy troops