Posted on 10/26/2009 4:19:17 AM PDT by JoeProBono
HUGO, Minn.- Four Minnesota friends fashioned a medieval catapult to fling a variety of objects -- such as wheelchairs and obsolete appliances -- into the sky, they said.
The men, all in their 30s, built a trebuchet -- a catapult originally designed in the Middle Ages to hurl objects at castle walls -- the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press reported Sunday.
The trebuchet was built by Kurt Modert, of Hugo; Roger Bacon, of White Bear Lake; Ryan Krueger, of Maple Grove; and David Proehl, of New Hope -- all municipalities in Minnesota -- the newspaper said.
They're catapulting items like defective bowling balls for now but they plan eventually to launch a clothes dryer, the newspaper said.
The friends began construction in spring 2008. The trebuchet is made of lumber, landscape timbers, aluminum plates and old garage door panels.
"It's stuff you can get at any Menard's. Kurt doesn't have much of a life, so he was working on the trebuchet all the time, said Bacon.
The full-scale catapult is constructed and permanently mounted on Modert's mother's 12-acre residential property , just a few yards from her house.
"It's too big to move," Modert said.
The friends are not certain how the project, which cost them $2,500, will affect the Modert's mother's property value.
"The tax assessor did come out earlier this year, and we're waiting to see what he says," Bacon said.
Trebuchets operate with gravity being the power behind the throw. On our Habitats, rotational velocity provides the artificial gravity.
Why would you use a portion of that energy to fling something, when you could simply release the object instead, and use all of it?
For extra oomph, extend a boom or tower out for more velocity, aiming it "downward", of course.
The launch was rather uneventful. After closing the zero-volume valves and disconnecting from them, and releasing from the docking clamps, they were slowly deployed by a sturdy cable.
It belayed them for a calculated distance, and at the correct time for their planned trajectory, it released them. No flame, no fuss …
No gravity.
But.. we can make it work.
With rockets!
*Bad idea generated*
I missed a good chance for a pun there.
... gravity being the “Power behind the thrown.”
Uh oh.
NNB isn’t feeling well, he missed a pun.
Tomorrow is Punday.
Sunday, Monday, Punday ...
The stars aren’t aligned!
Ia Ia Punthulhu.
Alright... Run away! Run away!
You;ll put yer eye out.
Didn’t we already work this out once? Or were we still in Scotland when we did that?
I sem to vaguely recall that we had set up a range for short-range weapons. Shotguns but not rifles, arrows but not cannon, that sort of thing.
I remember where it was, but I don’t remember what the specific exclusions were.
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