Trebuchets are magnificent weapons, yet their design is extremely simple...

did the romans have many large walls to contend with?

What's effective range/payload of a Roman ballista? 20kg at 150m?

With a decent Counterweight Trebuchet, you're talking about hundreds of kilos over 300m.

Not really, not often enoug for it to have been a big technology challenge.

OP it's probably because the Romans didn't "come up with" any of their siege weapons, they just took them from the Greeks after they subjugated the city states. Greeks had been using torsion-based siege weapons for centuries before the Romans ever got a hold of them, and then they just adapted the Greek designs to their needs.

Ballistae and Scorpios were anti-personnel not meant to knock down walls. They were used defensively as often as offensively, and even used on ships and came in a wide variety of sizes. The smaller versions were incredibly accurate and could be used to pick off enemy commanders if they got within range.

The heaviest Roman ballista could fire a stone weighing almost 80kg nearly 500 meters. Not very accurately, but it could go the distance. Romans generally favored small and accurate over large and powerful. It suited their needs just fine really considering there weren't many fortifications that could stand up to the Roman legion at the time anyway.

Based Greeks
Only thing Italians did before Greeks was fuk their own country

Testudo, advance.

They have things like Scorpion and Balista to shoot down any guys attempted to do what you've mentioned.

Actually I watched the great BRITISH series 'ancient Rome the rise and fall of an empire', not the American series 'Rome the rise and fall of an empire' which is a documentary not a BASED docudrama with Cato as Cato

>4th century
the Roman empire was already imploding at that point

As an invention that has existed since Alexander the Great, but was just never widely built because everything else worked just fine/ was more portitable/ didn't recquire so much wood

>Why did the Romans never come up with a gravity based siege weapon?

Traction trebuchets are man powered, not gravity powered. The Chinese did not start using not start using Counterweight trebuchets till the 1260s.

I assumed they didnt want to knock down walls because then theyd have to spend time and resources to rebuild it after

I doubt that, the Romans loved building things. Especially walls and forts.

Is Trump the spiritual heir of the SPQR?

He's a modern day Commodus.

Plotwist, stone hurling siege engines were highly ineffective in terms of actual damage, they had more of a psychological effect. Nobody brought down a wall by hurling stones at it for 2 days, this isn't Total War.

Might it have to do with the fact that they didn't need them. For most of their expansion they relied on manpower and resources, specifically having more of them than the enemy. This is great for classic siege warfare such as circumvallation and the like. They were also more likely to be defending walls than attacking them. Many times they simply asked the city to tear down its own walls, and were obliged.

There are many reasons not to, and only a few reasons to. Why provide a force multiplier when you have a monopoly on force? If a large army is needed for siege warfare and you have the only large army, do the math. Why fix what isn't broken?

lindybeige pls go

makes you wonder how much further the Roman civilisation would've gone, had they had a competitive enemy.

>what were the partharians/sassanids

technologically competitive

Oh really, name a castle which was successfully captured after siege engines breached the wall and attackers managed to successfully pour through the breach?

If stones didn't work, why didn't they just round up all the pee pee poo poo and throw that? Why not leather sacks full of an entire army's decomposing semen?

Can't remember which battle it was, but I remember reading about a Trebuchet slinging dead bodies into a besieged settlement which successfully spread disease.

That's not far enough, we need to go Freudian. Leathery sacks of semen and battering rams at the gates! Crudely-drawn banners of octo-Mars raping the queen who has cat ears for some reason!

You're drunk Caligula, go home

You are proving my point. That the artillery wasn't used as often as a wall crumbling death machines as the mainstream media would like you to believe. A siege tower, battering ram, undermining actions or even simple ladders were far more effective.
At the siege of Vienna the ottomans had cannons and they still had to undermine the walls to breach them, and a cannon was immensely more powerful than any trebuchet

>OP it's probably because the Romans didn't "come up with" any of their siege weapons, they just took them from the Greeks after they subjugated the city states. Greeks had been using torsion-based siege weapons for centuries before the Romans ever got a hold of them, and then they just adapted the Greek designs to their needs.

i think the onager is actually Roman because i can't recall it ever being mentioned by Greek sources.

the real question remains, the Trebuchet is extremely simple, why didn't anyone in the mediterranean come up with them -before- attaching obscenely large torsion springs to a frame?

>Why did the Romans never come up with a gravity based siege weapon? Was siege warfare not very common at during their time?
The speed makes up for the difference in force. They were also more efficient for large armies. The Chinese didn't have the brain power of the Ancient Aryans thus they did not think about what they were sacrificing or could be sacrificing by using trebuchets over catapults and onagers. The Romans are obviously the superior due to their efficiency.
>gravity base
Unreliable at different heights.

>The Chinese didn't have the brain power of the Ancient Aryans thus they did not think about what they were sacrificing or could be sacrificing by using trebuchets over catapults and onagers.
Its funny because the ancient Chinks were the first to put artillery siege weapons on wheels.

they did do things like that. shit, piss, dead cattle.

>stockpiling siege weapons
WEW lad

warring kingdom states had a spilling out of masonry and fortification building that coagulated as tech and knowledge passed along the silk road and filtered into zion (xian) from which is disseminated outwards to the rest of that shithole so i guess this could be my hyperthetical arguement as to why they hit it first

romans is an easy one, their trebuchet was a phallanx formation armed with gladius' that basically walked through any "Fortification" aka celtic-germanic etc tribes this side of the rhine/danube. remember what happens when we try to cross rivers?? huh?? huh??? anyone?? barbarossa???????

wasnt until xianbei proto mongs huns etc came wailing back across the steppe slamming all the iranians/turkics/&slavs into europe that you got the shit show

>gravity base
>Unreliable at different heights.

What do you mean by this? Counterweight Trebuchets work at any height

I believe these posters are correct. Trebuchets were more about psychologically affecting the enemy than doing structural damage.

They look imposing, and were often given names like 'Bad Neighbour', and lobbed things like burning sand and corpses as often as they threw stones.

Still nice to have in a siege though.

Because the breech created by trebuchets is any different? Bottlenecks are inevitable, short of tearing down the walls entirely. At least a ramp puts you on the walls rather than on the ground.

They are not the death machines of video games, but you underplay their utility.

You can infer a lot about somethings effectiveness by the inordinate amount of effort put into it.

They didn't throw up rough trebuchets and lob any old rubbish over a wall. They were crafted and carried by river and wagon at great expense and effort, their ammo was not usually the rocks in the surrounding area but were rounded stones made my masons and brought it. The most famous trebuchet Warwolf needed like 40 wagons to transport it.

>As an invention that has existed since Alexander the Great, but was just never widely built because everything else worked just fine/ was more portitable/ didn't recquire so much wood

I though the Romans loved building shit.

That can't be lindybeige because he's actually right.

because roman siedge weapons were tension powered, and used to pick of defenders

if romans wanted to tear down a wall the would dig out its foundation or just build a mountain over it

romans usualy went for solutions that make perfect sense if you have whole legions to die off in the process and the whole of the mediterran to draw manpower and resources from

notice how they decided to just wall off scotland, or how they would often tear down half a mountain so as not to lose some degrees of slope in a aqueduct or have to add curves in a road, they used slave labor like its nanotech, just move mountains why dont you - a city wall or a fort meant little to them, most often they just starved the defenders or built a fort around the fort

romans were weird, autistic people

maybe you dont understand how romans approached the problem of competition

speaking of sieges, were those hook things common?

The petraria arcatinus would have been effective had it actually been used.

And also a bit of a Nero

can we all agree on this?

"I suppose all research funding leads to Rome"

Atleast a catapult has wheels

This. The unpacking time is annoying, by the time it's ready the paladins and eagle warriors already attacking your shit.

>not using combat engineers to lay down some battle palisade walls