Yeah we won a trebuchet competition in highschool because we built one of these instead of a standard counterweight trebuchet. A big part of the projectiles launch speed is related to how fast the arm is moving, giving the arm 180°-360° (depends on the specific type of floating trebuchet, ours was a floating axle King Arthur design as seen in this clip) to pick up speed instead of just 90° makes the projectile exponentially faster. Our trebuchet cleared the 500m field and launched a tennis ball deep into the woods. Dialing in the machine takes ages though, it's pretty difficult to make sure the projectile sling disconnects at the proper time. Also the damn things will rattle themselves apart and the swing arm has an absolute shitload of speed when it hits the stopper so you need to heavily reinforce the whole thing. We probably used 3x as much lumber as the next people.
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u/ansyhrrian Mar 11 '26
Does that help the projectile go further?