Catapults General

Hello everyone - it's the catapult thread for showing off and discussing!
I've found with my catapult design (Any probably other people's), you can simultaneously lower the flight path and increase the power by adding a 1-4 block high plank on the back of the cup rising up, it seems to keep the ball in for longer, and it hits harder.

My current (Fairly appalling) best design, I just need to figure out how to stop the wheels falling off periodically :rof:

 

That method seems to be equivalent to pulling the torsion spring further back than normal.
(since normally you have a limit how far you can pull it back, AND youll stop it before its fully relaxed to prevent shooting at the ground)

Also, a tip for cool catapults:
You can attach more than 1 big projectile to each other (like with any other block), to make "cluster projectile". If you attach 2 on top of each other, it ill probably also end up spinning fast (effectively making it hit at higher velocity I assume)

 

I've tried a couple of different designs just messing around with different configurations. I'd really like to get a working Ballisa, haven't found a working one yet. It seems we might be out of luck until compound ropes play nice. I haven't yet figured out a way around using one.

 

Yeah, I tried making a ballista, the thing shook and shook until it shattered

And I was playing around with Waterlimon's ideas,and (Also inspired by the medeivel weapon 'bolas'), I realized that connecting 2 small balls with a length of string, and firing one from a catapult can have some *very* interesting effects. The range is decreased, the pitch is sharply increased (So my catapult needed some modification so it didn't fire over the castle), but the balls hit with quite some force!

 

I built a successful ballista, well ballista-esque contraption, the thing to do is to use one arm attached to a torsion spring that is just shy of two full wooden beams in length, two full beams cause funky stuff to occur. Then draw the arm all the way back using a rope and place guide rails along a straight line from where the tip of the pole is on block below with a one block gap between them for the medium projectile. Place a shot right next to the arm, and let it loose.

There may be some range issues, but strangely it seems to change on different worlds. I built one that had lousy range, my friend convinced me to post it to the workshop, he used it and got fantastic results doing the same thing with no modifications. But it shoots almost perfectly straight and hits the same spot almost all the time, never more than a block off from where it is aimed.

 

That was a devastating shot!

 

So things I've noticed about catapults in general:

1. The Stock Cup/Spoon Part
I recommend using this only for firewood but never in a catapult. It just has too many problems. It's flimsy, tending to break off the main arm at the slightest provocation. It's difficult, even unsafe to load with a rock unless you've pulled the arm back nearly horizontal. This limits your ability to adjust the range of the shot by not pulling back all the way. On top of this, the cup/spoon part is actually harder to pull back very far without making the arm and/or distance between spring and rope drum excessively large. It's much easier to pull back a home-made box of wood blocks, even if the overall arm length is shorter with the box.

2. Homemade Boxes for the Cup/Spoon
Make these a total of 5 blocks wide, 5 blocks long, and 2 or 3 bocks high on the sides and bottom with the top end open. 5 blocks wide, using 2 for the sides, leaves an open space 3 blocks wide, perfect for holding big rocks, fire buckets, and stone pillars. You can also put a small rock in there if you want. 2 or 3 blocks high on the sides and bottom end keep the ammo from falling out accidentally and allow safe loading and firing without pulling the arm all the way down. The open top end allows a clean release.

3. Crossbars
Crossbars are a good idea because if you don't have one, the arm swinging all the way forward has a tendency to make the catapult kick up at the rear, decreasing accuracy between shots. Also, you'll probably have to walk up front to connect the rope, then walk back to turn the crank, which decreases rate of fire. If you make your own box to hold the ammo (recommended) the height of the crossbar needs to be either so the bottom edge of the box hits it, or passes well above it. If the crossbar is just below the bottom of the box, it's possible for the box to get wedged on top of the crossbar and you can't pull the arm back without removing the crossbar.

4. 1-Player Operation Without Flying
If you can't fly in survival mode, you have to provide platforms, ladders, etc., so a player standing on his feet can reach all the parts needed to operate the catapult (rope end, rope drum, crank handle, ammo box). And until cooperative multiplayer comes along, you'll have to do all these functions yourself. It therefore is a good idea to design the catapult so that one player on his feet can reach everything from 1 spot without having to move much if at all. A platform just above rope, combined with a crossbar to limit arm travel works for this. Rate of fire will be dramatically improved, too.

 

Make the catapult arm 2 blocks long, that should fix the cup breaking issue because the force is applied for a longer time period. Also, keeping the drum near the ground will make it fire able without flying.

 

Haha. Exactly what I was thinking. Someone should fire their Engineer!

I think SI still has some issues like this where it cascades out of control. Or perhaps the projectiles have too much mass or just flat out cause too much collateral damage.

Best example I can find at the moment:



Notice the large hole between the two towers. Now that's what a first placed shot should look like. Castle walls were designed to be pretty stout. Most catapults were better suited to fire incendiary projectiles or dead animals/people to cause disease.

Now if we're talking some large trebuchets throwing boulders the size of cars...

 

What about a totally unrealistic Gatling Catapult mechanism concept ?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=399373282

 

Hahaha... Genius!

 

I'm okay with such a design, it is not "so much" effective, and moving this around would be a pain.

 

An update to my last...

1. The Cup/Spoon Part
02.005.x REALLY improved this part. Now it's much tougher--haven't had one explode yet though I've given them plenty of abuse. Also, they've been reshaped so now hold rocks at much steeper angles, AND will hold BOTH sizes of rock just fine. Plus, they're way lighter than any box you make out of wood beams, which means greater arm speed and longer range. So bottom line is now to use this part and NOT make your own box. In fact, you can use multiple cups/spoons on the same arm if you want.

2. Arm Length
This is really weird right now and will no doubt change in the near future, but for the moment (02.005.x)...

Short arms thrown small rocks further than long arms. In fact, an arm only 4 blocks long between spring and cup will throw a small rock clear across a medium-size map in a nearly flat trajectory. It's insane. HOWEVER, the arm moves so fast it often clips through the crossbar. When this happens, or if you don't use a crossbar, the small rock goes practically straight up at the same insane speed, coming down like 5-7 seconds later about 200-300m away.

OTOH, a 4-block arm will hardly throw a big rock 20m. For that you need a longer arm, 10 or more blocks between spring and cup. 15 seems to be about the best for range. You can get about 150m with a big rock with a 15-block arm. The same 15-block arm can also have 3 cups on the end. With 3 small rocks, it will go about 200m. And it will throw 1 small rock a very long way, although not as far as a 4-block arm.

 

UPDATE 02.006.014

This update SERIOUSLY nerfed catapults and I wanted to find out how much. So I did some experimentation with a firing range I made. I've heard the cubical stone blocks are 2.5m on a side, so I make range markers every 5m out to 200m in total (NOTE: In what follows I assume these distances are correct--if not, let me know ). Then I lined up a bunch of fixed (static) catapults so I could test variables such as:

* arm length
* presence or not of crossbar, and its location relative to the shot cup and the torsion spring
* position of rope drum relative to torsion spring position and length of arm

Here's a pic of my firing range:



The results were rather interesting and can be summarized as follows:

Maximum Range
This was measured from where the shot first hit the ground. Because catapults mostly shoot at elevated targets like the towers of castles built on higher ground, hitting such targets requires the shot to be high in the air, so the effective range against such targets is rather less than the maximum range.

None of the variables had any significant effect on maximum range. Regardless of arm length, crossbar or not, etc., a catapult will shoot a small rock ~100m +/-5m. Likewise, all catapults will shoot a big rock ~50m +/-5m.

The only effect of the variables was to alter the shape of the trajectory, as explained below.

Ammunition
Catapults now are pretty much limited to single small rocks. They can no longer shoot big rocks high enough or far enough to be useful in attack, although just lobbing them off the top of a wall on nearby attackers might work. Same goes with shooting multiple small rocks from a single spring. Even having multiple empty shot cups on the same arm slows the arm so much that it won't shoot a single rock far enough to matter except, again, perhaps defending the foot of the wall.

Shot Cup
In 02.006.x, you can no longer attach the rope end to the shot cup but must put it on the beam between cup and spring. This has implications for rope drum placement as discussed later.

Arm Length
The shortest workable arm length (measured the beam between the spring and shot cup parts) is 3 wooden blocks long. This is very marginal, however, so 4 is probably the real lower limit. This does not, however, make a very effective catapult. So longer arms are better in 02.006.x, which is the opposite of 02.005.x.

Arms of less than about 8 blocks long cannot be pulled back nearly horizontal. In survival mode where you can't fly, this means you need an elevated loading platform.

Arms of less than about 8 blocks long produce very flat trajectories. A 4-block arm shoots so flat that the small rock will often not break on impact with the ground but will roll 10-15m before stopping. This makes short arms largely ineffective as siege weapons because they don't get the rocks high enough to hit anything tall or on higher ground. They might be useful as defensive batteries mounted in low outworks to sweep the glacis, although such projectiles appear to fly slowly compared to those from longer arms. They might not hit anything hard enough to hurt.

Longer arms produce trajectories with more arc, so would be effective against tall targets on higher ground from a range of about 50m. The longer the arm, the higher the arc. However, striking velocity seems to peak with arms about 10 blocks long. Any longer and the stone falls more slowly, so would probably do less damage.

Crossbar
Having a crossbar flattens the trajectory for a given arm length, and the further back the crossbar is mounted relative to the spring, the flatter the trajectory becomes. This is the opposite of what you'd expected, because if you stop the arm before it reaches the vertical, you'd expect it to launch the rock more upwards.

As with longer arms, the higher arcs produced when you don't have a crossbar, or if the crossbar allows the arm to pass the vertical, appears to reduce striking velocity. It's thus a balancing act between arm length and crossbar position to get enough arc to hit higher targets while retaining enough striking velocity to inflict damage. The best combination seems to be an arm about 10 blocks long with a crossbar that stops it at or near the vertical.

Remember, none of this affects the range, just the trajectory. The rock will got about 100m no matter what you do with arm and crossbar.

Rope Drum Placement and Other Details
To crank the arm down nearly horizontal (so it has the most spring force and can be loaded without flying), first you need an arm at least about 8 blocks long. Then the rope drum needs to be several blocks behind the top of the shot cup when the arm is horizontal. Either that or you must mount the rope drum far below the spring's level, which results in an impractically tall engine and creates more loading problems.

It's a good idea to have a crossmember in the frame about under where the shot cup will be when the arm is horizontal. This tends to reduce the tendency of the arm to get the jitters when pulled all the way back.

DISCUSSION AND OPINION

While I suppose catapults are intended to be light artillery, I'm disappointed that I can no longer shoot multiple small rocks or a big rock with devastating effect.

The way that neither arm length nor crossbar design has any effect on maximum range is disturbing. It smacks of a hardwired limit more than the logical workings of the physical world, and nips a lot of creative engineering in the bud.

There is now a bug in catch blocks that gives them momentum when you crank them, so that they keep on turning after you stop cranking. This is severely annoying because it largely precludes making fine adjustments.

 

With the new update I am impressed in that you were able to get your arms to retract at all. For some reason, I cant get any retraction (using rope drums / windlass) on any of the arms / cats that I have built.

 

I must experiment with FlyingFirePig's chain shot idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain-shot) - could be good for windmills and light buildings.

Has anyone designed any mobile catapults? It seems that these things are powerful against static structures, but defenders will have them too, so to attack a fortification might require mobility.

 

As to chainshot: In 02.005 when catapults could shoot big rocks effectively, I experimented tying 2 big rocks together before shooting them. I wasn't impressed with the results. Tying the stones together made them fly in close formation but one would always hit slightly before the other. Because it was a big rock, that one usually shattered not only the block it hit directly but also the surrounding blocks, so the other rock of the pair just hit a wedged-in piece of rubble without doing any further damage to the structure. I found it more effective not to tie the stones. The natural dispersion of the salvo resulted in a higher chance of the 2nd rock hitting virgin stonework and thus doing more overall damage to the building. And you can't at present attach ropes to small rocks.

As to mobile artillery, sure, you can do that. At present, it doesn't really require wheels because you can push any dynamic object no matter how heavy. Wheels do, however, help the object over bumps in the terrain that a wheelless object would break on.

The problem with mobile artillery, however, is that it moves from recoil of the shot. This means you have to relay the gun before each shot, which at present is not really amenable to fire control. It also means you have to build a bigger firing platform to start with so the recoil doesn't drive it off the edge and break it. A fixed gun on a vertical pivot stays in place between shots and traverse can be finely adjusted as needed.

To avoid defensive fire, don't leave your siege batteries in the open---dig them in and erect earthworks in front of them. Even when terrain gets SI, I doubt that a gently sloped bank of earth will suffer much from roundshot (it didn't historically) and won't make lethal fragments when struck.

My prediction: This game is about engineering, which means battles are more about artillery than mass assaults. IOW, defensive works will face more concentrated fire in the game than they did in real life back in the day. And right now, stone walls are easily destroyed by catapults, which they kinda need to be due to the focus on artillery. So I figure that before very long, nobody will be building castles with high stone walls. Instead, they'll be building low, wide earthworks. I figure the typical fort will evolve to resemble something from the 1870s. That is, a polygonal trace, a wide, deep ditch with counterscarp galleries and caponiers, and earth ramparts at their angle of repose made from the dirt excavated from the ditch. Besiegers will advance by saps and parallels, and will attempt to mine the defenses as well. IOW, the architecture and tactics will be from a few centuries after the game's timeframe even if the weapons are not .

 

I sincerely hope their focus on engineering doesn't result in the obsolescence of actual castles. 'Medieval Trench Warfare Engineers' sounds kinda balls to me.

 

Well, movies, TV shows, and novels about medieval warfare do tend to focus exclusively on the derring do of storming the walls and the power of siege engines, but this has IMHO given folks a false impression of how castles were taken in real life. "Medieval Trench Warfare" was actually a major thing, at least in terms of undermining the walls. Quite a few famous castles were taken that way. Probably more than were taken by battering down the walls or storming over them. And once ME gets SI for terrain and fires that can consume wooden structures, that tactic will become viable in ME battles.

Besides how fast artillery can batter down castles, a lot also depends on how many players and bots the game can support. If that number is small, then castles will have to be small as well, so they can be defended by a small force. if castles are small, then artillery will have to be nerfed significantly or nothing much of the castle will remain after just a few minutes. If artillery is nerfed too much, then folks will try other tactics.

 

Update 02.007.012:
The 02.007 update did not change catapults very much. Most of what I said in the 02.006 notes is still the same. None of the variables of catapult design have any noticeable effect on catapult range, they just affect the arc in the trajectory. Small rocks still always go about 100m, big rocks still go about 50m, and multiple small rocks aren't any better than 1 big rock.

The only noticeable change in 02.007 is that highly arced projectiles do not lose nearly as much velocity as they did in 02.006, so are now capable of being a significant threat to the roofs of castles.

The best catapult design still seems to be an arm about 10 blocks long between spring and cup, and with a crossbar 1 block ahead of the front of the spring. Much shorter and the projectile has very flat, relatively slow trajectory that doesn't do much damage. Much longer and you also seem to lose velocity.

 

Update 02_008_011:
There seems to have been zero change in the functioning and ballistics of catapults this time around. That's all the same as 02_007.

What did change is that now we have a new type of ammunition, the "stone" which is on the G list right next to the regular roundshot ammunition. Like the roundshot, the "stone" comes in 2 sizes, big and small, both of which fit nicely in the catapult cup. Results of using this new ammo are interesting:

1. Small "stone"
Do NOT use this as ammo. Every attempt to do so will result in the immediate explosion of the catapult arm upon releasing the rope. The cup and stone simply drop straight to the ground while the torsion spring snaps forward and often destroys itself as well.

2. Large "stone"
This is identical to what you get when you dig with the pickax, only you can move it around like any other block you place. This one actually works as ammo and is fairly effective. The large "stone" appears to weigh somewhere between the large and small sizes of roundshot.

Ballistically, as with roundshot, catapult variables only seem to affect trajectory, not range, and the large stone will go about 60-75m, a bit further than the same catapult can throw a large roundshot. The large stone also has a higher trajectory so is more effective at hitting higher targets or getting over walls than the large roundshot. And in flight, the large stone has a higher velocity. However, the trajectory of the large stone is nowhere as consistent as with roundshot, varying significantly in range for the same amount of arm pull-back and also somewhat in deflection for the same laying of the catapult. As such, repeatedly hitting the same spot on the target is largely a matter of luck.

Upon impact, the large stone causes interesting damage effects. The actual damage done in terms of the number of broken blocks and the severity of damage appeas to fall between the large and small roundshot, closer to the smaller. However, the large stone does a much better job of removing debris from the impact area, being more likely to knock loose rubble aside instead of leaving it in place.

The main difference between the large stone and the roundshot is that the large stone does not itself break up on impact. This allows it, for example, to penetrate a roof and then cause damage to the interior of the structure. This isn't as useful as it sounds, however, because the initial impact usually robs the large stone of most of its velocity, after which it just falls due to gravity. If it doesn't have far to fall, it probably won't hurt what it lands on. Still, it is a bit more realistic in this regard than the roundshot, which even a tapestry can prevent from touching the wall immediately behind.

The large stone also lasts forever as it is a block, not a piece of debris. This means a prolonged bombardment will clutter up the target area with large stones, which at present are impervious to player tools (the hammer will destroy a small stone), cannot be picked up, and are a bother to kick out of the way. This can be a serious impediment both to defenders and successful, occupying attackers. Once players get to ability to pick things up, this problem will go away, but OTOH this would allow a defender running low on ammo to shoot back at the attacker.

I don't expect large stones to remain indestructable for long. Still, in the meantime, this is an interesting effect.

 

lol.

 

With a few players on either side and some siege equipment a bunch of those ha-ha walls would make a fun map. ive been trying to get a good half wall up, but there isn't anything that really does it. Are you using terrain?

 

I'm using voxel hands to dig a ditch with a slope heading down into it from one side and then having a wall rising up from just behind. Making it so that not only do enemies need to break the wall, they need to construct a bridge over the ha-ha to get through.

 

I wonder where the name "ha-ha" came from. I mean, such things had real names back in the day they were common custom.

 

I don't know, because it is so similar to haha as in a term for laughter which is also much more common, my searches using Ye Olde Google turn up the origin for haha and not ha-ha.

 

In what is called the age of "classical fortification", the age of the bastion, from the late 1500s until the early 1800s, when folks like Pagan, Vauban, Coehorn, etc., were large and in charge, the wall on the inner side of the ditch was called the escarp and that on the outside the counterscarp. And in those days, it was customary to use the dirt made available by digging the ditch to create a glacis outside the counterscarp wall and also build ramparts atop the escarp walls. The effect was to present the attacker with a continuous slope of dirt from the bottom of the glacis to the top of the rampart, totally hiding the masonry in the ditch below the dirt contour, and allowing every weapon on the covered way (directly atop the counterscarp wall), islolated outworks in the ditch, and the ramparts to provide grazing fire, often in infilading crossfire, over the whole ground surrounding the fortress. And even if the attacker managed to cross the glacis, he then faced the ditch, still under crossing infiliade fire as well as frontal fire.

There was nothing "ha-ha" about this. It was just the logical application of the weapons of the day, all forts were built this way, everybody expected it, and nobody thought it was funny. And everybody knew you reduced such a fortress by digging saps and parallels until you crowned the covered way, at which point the defenses tended to break down because siege batteries emplaced on the covered way had a clear shot at the masonry escarp wall.

As a result, by about 1800, folks began to replace bastions at the level of the ramparts with caponiers in the ditch, and to replace the escarp wall with dirt at its angle of repose from the ramparts to the bottom of the ditch. Opinions differed on what to do with the counterscarp wall. Some folks retained it and in fact put firing ports in it to flank and take in rear anybody trying to cross the ditch. Others removed the counterscarp wall as well, leaving the counterscarp at its angle of repose so that the ditch became V-shaped. And over time the bottom of the ditch became filled with barbed wire, or interrupted by the "Carnot Wall". So things developed through the 1800s and were put to the test in WW1.

 

Huh, interesting. So they were the begging of trench warfare. Another use for ha-has that I remember is that they were used on some estates to provide what amounted to a wall without interrupting their view of the landscape. They were also used on hunting preserves to artificially increase game population by permitting deer and the like to jump into the ditch into the preserve but not able to jump out of it.

 

Cool use of the wall to trap deer .

Trench warfare goes back way before the 1500s. It was a normal part of any siege at least since antiquity (Caesar at Alesia, for example). The besieging force had to prepare itself to defend against relieving forces and sorties by the garrison, and it also needed some form of shelter while preparing to assault the defenses. Making a practicable breach takes time and anything capable of doing so will probably be within range of defensive fire. Plus, the storming party must be mustered as close as possible to the expected breach, so it can charge right in at once before the defenders have time to react.

So, trenching has always been part of sieges and nobody ever thought there was anything wrong with that. "Trench warfare" only acquired its negative connotations in 1914-1918 when it expanded from the immediate vicinity of a besieged place to dominate the behavior of armies in the field. There's no chance of the latter happening in ME, but players should expect to dig if they conduct a siege.