Dawesome21
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Slinging Rocks!
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I watched the series. I thought the sling segment was great. They had Luis make a sling, attempt to train some people with tennis balls, and they took some footage of Balearic slingers from David Morningstar's Youtube channel (I think). But best of all, they filmed Luis throwing and had him put a stone through a chronograph, shoot a ballistic gel dummy, and put a glans (glandes) into the dummy. I think they even mentioned the weight of the stone and the meters per second, but I can't remember how much the stone weighed. It was going 52 meters per second I think.
I liked the trebuchet segment too. But overall I found the series kind of bland, disappointing, and with very poor writing. The episodes didn't tie together at all, and each episode had three different weapons which sometimes didn't tie together either. It would have been better focused entirely on the ancient and medieval worlds. Or at least if it had left out the 20th century. It had too wide of a scope in trying to cover weapons from the stone age to the future and thus left out a lot of cool ancient weapons. And the show made some attempts to moralize war by showing the human cost of the weapons, but while showing the human cost of weapons is generally a good thing, it just didn't seem to fit in with the overall narrative. And it didn't give any single weapon enough time to be really worthwhile. Jack of all trades, master of nothing. A person would be better off doing their own research into things they are interested in.
The best part was the experiments and the hands-on stuff, like with the sling and the trebuchet. But a lot of the experiments were kind of poorly designed and hasty. They made a cannon and then shot it through a "ship" which wasn't nearly as thick as a real ship. Especially the catapult segment was poor. The ballista was very underpowered and weak and the bolts weren't flying properly. They did an accuracy test and half of the shots missed a large tower shield at like 20 meters. Then they said, "for the ancient world this is remarkably accurate." Thus they did poor tests and overvalued their tests.
But the Mike Loades stuff was great. Because Mike Loades.
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