How does a ballista fire

Depends on the size of the fire. I will park as far away as I could. To find articles about the Roman ballista, just use your browser. Type in "ballista" or "roman ballista" and you'll come up with several. Gigi Ballista's birth name is Luigi Ballista. The maximum range of the ballista was over yards m , but effective combat range for many targets was yards m.

In outer space, it could fire an infinite distance. The Romans adopted the ballista from the Greeks and perfected it. Ballista is a Greek name. A ballista is an ancient military engine in the form of a crossbow, which is used for hurling large missiles.

The Romans also made use of bowmen and slingers. They also had various sizes of "ballista" which were mainly siege engines, but smaller, mobile ones were used on the battlefield as well. The ballista could fire either rocks or large arrows. The ballista was a powerful siege machine. Top Ballista was created in Gigi Ballista is 6' 2". Alexander the Great was credited with inventing the first ballista.

The Romans then improved on his design, and the Romans invented the Repeating ballista. The average musket could fire about yards; close to the length of a football field. A ballista is a giant bow. Its flaming arrow also causes significant damage to buildings, which can be set on fire when damaged enough. In Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends , portable fire ballistae do not fire automatically. Their target must be manually assigned, even when set on 'aggressive stance', so they are more useful for offense purposes rather than defense.

Tower ballistae retained automatic fire, however. The fire ballista fires flaming bolts, meaning that it can easily set fire to a whole fortress if it sets ablaze to a building inside it.

Some players, before lighting up a castle , usually take care of the wells to be sure nothing will put out the fire. Thus having a bowstring that's only as strong and heavy as necessary is very important. Efficiency can be increased by increasing projectile weight. A heavy projectile will by necessity move slower than a light projectile, given the same amount of stored energy. A slower projectile also means that the arms and the bowstring move slower, and thus have less residual energy in them after the projectile is on its way.

Effeciency can also be increased by increasing the amount of bowstring movement for any given arm rotation. For details, look at the personal torsion weapons article. The efficiency of a well-made and fully-tuned cheiroballistra has not yet been determined, but it seems fairly high.

Until fairly accurate measurements are taken, this statement is not of much value. However, it will be interesting to see how the cheiroballistra compares to similar weapons. Reducing bolt weight causes a fairly steep drop in efficiency and increases the loudness of the shots considerably.

More energy can be fed into the springs by increasing the draw length i. A long draw is particularly important in weapons that are cocked by hand, i. All cordage has it own, characteristic limits on how much it can stretch before breaking. The cord stores energy when it's stretched, and returns the energy when it's relaxed. It's important to realize that the energy spent pretensioning the cords is lost, and that the benefits of pretensioning are indirect: this is because we can't feed energy into the spring once i.

For details on various spring cord materials see the article by Clift et al The "torsion spring stack" is rather hard to explain in text only, but I'll try.

At rest, the spring cords are straight, forming an " " you will. Doing this increases the draw weight of the ballista, as the cords are forced to stretch more as the arm is rotated. However, this comes at the cost of reducing the geometrical advantage provided by cords in a " "-shape. Developed from earlier Greek weapons, it relied upon different mechanics, using two levers with torsion springs instead of a prod, the springs consisting of several loops of twisted skeins.

Early versions projected heavy darts or spherical stone projectiles of various sizes for siege warfare. It developed into a smaller sniper weapon, the scorpio , [3] and possibly the polybolos. The early ballista in Ancient Rome was developed from two weapons called oxybeles and gastraphetes. The gastraphetes 'belly-bow' was a hand held crossbow.

It had a composite prod and was spanned by bracing the front end of the weapon against the ground while placing the end of a slider mechanism against the stomach. The operator would then walk forward to arm the weapon while a ratchet prevented it from shooting during loading. This produced a weapon which, it was claimed, could be operated by a person of average strength but which had a power that allowed it to be successfully used against armoured troops.

The oxybeles was a bigger and heavier construction employing a winch, and was mounted on a tripod. It had a lower rate of fire and was used as a siege engine. With the invention of torsion spring bundle technology, the first ballista was built. The advantage of this new technology was the fast relaxation time of this system. Thus it was possible to shoot lighter projectiles with higher velocities over a longer distance.

For an oxybeles, the rules of a torsion weapon demanded that the more energy could be stored, the thicker the prod had to be and the heavier the projectile, to increase the amount of stored energy delivered to the projectile. The earliest form of the ballista is thought to have been developed for Dionysius of Syracuse , circa BC. The Greek ballista was a siege weapon. All components that were not made of wood were transported in the baggage train. It would be assembled with local wood, if necessary.

Some were positioned inside large, armoured, mobile siege towers or even on the edge of a battlefield. For all the tactical advantages offered, it was only under Philip II of Macedon and even more so under his son Alexander , that the ballista began to develop and gain recognition as both siege engine and field artillery.

Polybius reports about the usage of smaller more portable ballistae, called scorpions , during the Second Punic War. Since these weapons delivered lighter munitions thus delivering less energy on impact it is a widely held opinion that they were used more as an anti-personnel role, or to destroy lighter structures.

A less accurate weapon like an onager or other single-arm artillery could hit with more force, and thus would be the more useful weapon against reinforced wood or heavy masonry.

Ballistae could be easily modified to shoot both spherical and shaft projectiles, allowing their crews to adapt easily to prevailing battlefield situations in real time. As the role of battlefield artillery became more sophisticated, a universal joint which was invented just for this function was integrated into the ballista's stand, allowing the operators to alter the trajectory and firing direction of the ballista as required without a lengthy disassembly of the machine.

Roman 'catapult-nest' on Trajan's Column. After the absorption of the Ancient Greek city-states into the Roman Republic in BC, the highly advanced Greek technology began to spread across many areas of Roman influence.

This included the great military machine advances the Greeks had made most notably by Dionysus of Syracuse , as well as all the scientific, mathematical, political and artistic developments. The Romans 'inherited' the torsion powered Ballista, which had by now spread to several cities around the Mediterranean, all of which became Roman spoils of war, including one from Pergamum, which was depicted among a pile of 'trophy' weapons in relief on a balustrade.

The torsion ballista, developed by Alexander, was a far more complicated weapon than its predecessor and the Romans developed it even further, especially into much smaller versions, that could be easily carried.

The early Roman ballistae were made of wood, and held together with iron plates around the frames and iron nails in the stand.