To be fair to Finney, we or at least I, have taken his statement in isolation. To me it sounds like a sort of summary which probably follows a section of explanatory text. Perhaps the intent is really to say that, "Despite the sling's apparent simplicity, any device which so greatly enhances the user's natural capability needs care in manufacture and is worthy of study".  Would that be a fair assessment?

My only real peeve is that Finney may have unwittingly strayed outside his area of expertise. I am nobody's historian or archaeologist and I am sure Finney is an expert in his field. However analysis of projectile trajectories is really the preserve of physicists and is hardly an unknown field. Granted it is not an easy task to locate expert slingers, but to base a thesis solely on the results of one's own beginner level slinging, assuming those results to be typical, is a bit unprofessional, is it not?

Thearos wrote on May 25^th, 2010 at 4:15am:


Well, I'll try to do just that. It will have to wait a day or two I think, I'm unable to work on it at the moment.

A summary, though, is that Finney only touches briefly on the effect of air resistance, in the hope that he can neglect it. He decides he can, because at high Reynolds Numbers the drag coefficient falls (this is the 'drag crisis'). For a sphere it drops from about 0.5 to 0.1. He calculates that he has velocities above the drag crisis, says 'yippee!' and proceeds to ignore drag for the rest of the work. He should have gone further, but this would have 'opened the can of worms' probably further than anyone would like. Evaluating with any degree of certainty actual values for his launch velocities is going to be close to impossible, particularly because he was clearly not a very experienced slinger, and it seems his launch velocities really are all over the place. In addition each throw involved a different stone.

More later, I hope

I started reading chapter 5. Exciting.
Just one example :
The one who throws at 70/80 meters is ok. His necessarily diminuate average is approximatively in the space between the ramparts. It's consistent.

Iron Age Hillfort Defences and the Tactics of Sling Warfare
By Peter Robertson

Not: Robinson.

Also it turns out that if you put the right search in, Amazon still has it
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hillfort-Defences-Tactics-Sling-Warfare/dp/178491410X/r...

Given that Pete's book is the only one that involved experienced slingers (myself and David Morningstar) it's pretty much the only book on historical slinging based on accurate information and statistics.

https://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1501413657

I only found this post. Maybe a bad job ?

TOMBELAINE wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 5:29am:


My english isn't good; I want to say "maybe I'have been looking bad".

I'm sure your test is good. So, I'm interested.
The text about Le Puy d'Issolud is in french but I advise it to read.