This is the third part of our [I, II, I don’t know, a few more?] part series looking at Rings of Power‘s Siege of Eregion from a military history perspective. Last week, we discussed the remarkably bad siege preparation of both sides: Adar’s complete lack of a fortified siege camp and Eregion’s complete lack of scouting arrangements. As with everything else in Rings of Power, both are quite bad by the standards of The Lord of the Rings but don’t matter because nothing actually seems to matter in Rings of Power.
That theme continues this week as Adar begins his attack on the capital, Ost-in-Edhil, opening with a catapult barrage that first defies design sense, before it defies tactical sense, before it defies physics. It really is an impressive encapsulation of so much common broken Hollywood thinking about pre-gunpowder warfare that we’re going to spend an entire post on it.
Now film loves catapults for its pre-modern battle scenes. I think the reason for this is likely to be the enduring influence of post-gunpowder warfare on how film-makers imagine battlefields: something has to take the visual and story place of (gunpowder) artillery, so it has to be catapults. However, as we’ve discussed, the sophisticated siege playbook existed before the invention of catapults and for most siege attackers, a catapult was less a ‘siege winning weapon’ and far more simply a tool to make the engineering tasks that would actually enable an assault easier by suppressing defenders. I think – and we’ll get more into this in the next post – that actual siege tactics could be made dramatically resonant, but filmmakers rarely try, instead reproducing the same handful of lazy and tired battle tropes over and over again.
But first, as always, sieges are also expensive! If you want to help out with the logistics of this blog and my scholarship more broadly, you can support me and this project on Patreon! I promise to use your donations to build some actual working catapults (I actually do have a miniature model of a trebuchet that throws ping-pong ball sized projectiles). If you, like Eregion, completely lack scouts or information gathering of any kind and are thus regularly surprised when posts like this appear outside of your walls, ready to sack your homes free time, you can get a bit more warning by clicking below for email updates or following me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@[email protected]) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Orc Catapults
Let’s start with the design of the orc catapults. We’ve actually talked in more depth before about trebuchet design and the features back when we looked at the Siege of Gondor, so I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing those points. In this case, Rings of Power has replicated basically all of Peter Jackson’s mistakes with the orc catapults, but without the saving grace of having quite sensibly designed Gondorian trebuchets to offset the problem. So here we have our orc catapults:
But if you had just built out one normal working trebuchet – a task hobbysts do all the time – you wouldn’t have this problem!
Unlike Peter Jackson’s orc catapults, here we have no problem determining the way these are meant to function: they’re counterweight trebuchets, albeit badly designed ones. The way this works is simple: when the long (firing) arm is released, the shorter (counterweight) arm, with its counterweight (the bag of rocks) accelerates downward, with the entire machine functioning as a large lever. The much longer length of the firing arm (anywhere from three to five times longer than the counterweight arm) gives the counterweight a lot of leverage to accelerate the projectile. The greater you can make that difference, the more leverage you can apply, so you want a quite short counterweight arm and a long firing arm.
Now the first problem is that these catapults – which are going to perform very capably on screen – are just visibly shoddily constructed. They’re built, for some reason, from unsawn, unplaned timber rather than planed wood, lashed together with rope. The thing is, the forces that the A-frame of a large trebuchet – much less its firing arm – undergo are considerable, so you want this to be well-constructed and study. Which means you want the joints between the wooden beams to themselves be quite precise and firm: if your frame has a lot of wobble because its only rudely lashed together, that’s lost energy. Catapults were precision machines, the height of engineering in their day and they needed to withstand and direct a lot of force and do so with precision (because you need to hit something with your big rock) and as a result, catapults tended to be quite carefully made. Of course what is absolutely inexcusable here is that if you look closely, the beam (that is, the firing and counterweight arms) are already bending visibly even at rest. If these things can’t stand up to the force of sitting still, I can’t imagine they’ll actually stand up to the force of shooting anything.
Also, I have broken bread with Lee Brice and he never told me he had a class build a working trebuchet, so I feel betrayed.
But design problems don’t stop there: the counterweight is a bunch of rocks, suspended in a bag from what I think we’re supposed to read as a thick, tightly coiled rope. Now I am sure such crude counterweights existed somewhere at some time, but in the historical artwork I’ve seen, the overwhelmingly vast majority of trebuchet counterweights are made the same way: a large, top-topped wooden box, often with something of a bell-shape to it. These are generally suspended just below the counterweight arm by an axle, so they can fall straight down even as the lever rotates. And here I know that these counterweights aren’t designed properly because we can see when they fire that the rope coil (?) remains rigid, meaning that the counterweight doesn’t really drop so much as it ends up twisted under the A-frame.
The reason it seems to be made this way, so far as I can tell, is that the catapults are not tall enough for the length of their counter-weight arm and the long coil of rope that suspends them. As you can see above, if that coil wasn’t (somehow) rigid, the bag of rocks would simply slam to the ground and stop long before the firing arm reached full elevation (assuming the force of the sudden stop didn’t simply shatter the whole thing). Instead, the way real trebuchets handled the forces of firing was to allow the counterweight, once released, to swing freely: the shot was released from the firing rope (we’ll get there in a moment) at the top of the arc naturally, at which point the great weight of the counterweight naturally brings the entire machine to a stop on its own, without any sudden shocks.
Meanwhile, the firing arm is also quite bad. It’s hard to see clearly in most shots – but then, everything is hard to see clearly in most shots of Rings of Power – but the firing arm terminates in what is simply a big iron bowl that is then filled with (burning) rocks:
However, the sling-release on a trebuchet is not really an optional part of the design. The way the sling-release on a trebuchet works is that the sling is attached firmly at one end to the firing arm and on the other end is held in place by a pin which it can slip off of. As the firing arm reaches the apex of its swing, the forces naturally push the pin-end of the sling off of the pin, opening the sling bag and releasing the projectile on an ideal arc. Making the sling longer so that it can rotate around the end of the firing arm even as that rotates around the axle of the trebuchet, allows for more time for the projectile to accelerate along a wider arc and thus more energy to be imparted. But what I want to focus on here is the release part of the release.
Because these catapults do not have a ‘stopper bar’ the way that the Siege of Gondor catapults did, there’s nothing to make the arm stop while the projectile keeps going. Given the deep buckets, it seems pretty likely that the end result here is going to be a catapult that fires its rocks directly into the ground a short distance in front of the catapult as rather than getting a nice, high arc of fire, by the time the projectile exits the bucket (in this case, now caused by the bucket decelerating due to the counterweight), it is now moving downward on the arc.
The final problem is that these catapults have wheels. Wheeled catapults are a standard in video games, but were relatively uncommon historical and to my knowledge counterweight trebuchets were never wheeled. There are a few obvious reasons why. The first is in the firing process: while the balancing of the lever and the lack of a stop-bar means trebuchets don’t ‘kick’ the way some torsion catapults (the onager in particular) did, you still want a really steady base for the machine, typically accomplished by building a wooden base for the catapult rather larger than the footprint of the A-frame.
But that leads into the second reason you don’t put wheels on this thing: why would you want wheels on it? These machines are very obviously too big to simply roll down the road to wherever you are going to do a siege. Instead, trebuchets were almost always constructed on-site; normally, you’d transport the trebuchet deconstructed (and loaded into carts) and then assemble it on site like a giant Ikea War Engine. That, of course, allows you to design the weapon with a nice, wide, stable base to absorb the forces of firing without any danger that the thing is going to start rolling.
Now to be fair, I get the desire by the showrunners here to have a catapult design that is visibly less refined than the very well-made and evidently working trebuchet models that the Gondorians got in Return of the King. But the result here is a design that I suspect most viewers can recognize isn’t quite right and shouldn’t work well, even if they can’t necessarily pinpoint why. I think there’s an obvious solution to this problem of a less-refined, but still effective version of this machine, on that communicates the power of the orcs in raw numbers: the traction trebuchet.
The popular conception, often mirrored in video games, tends to assume catapults developed from two-arm ancient torsion designed, associated with the Greeks and Romans, to single-armed torsion designs assumed to be common through the Middle Ages (often inaccurately named mangonels), which then coexist in the later Middle Ages with counterweight trebuchets. Part of this error, I think, goes into assuming first incorrectly that catapults were essential for sieges (they were not) that therefore every era after their invention must have some sort of common catapult. But in fact the single-armed torsion designs (the onager) are a mostly Late Roman design, replaced by the more powerful and much less complex traction trebuchet (actually what a mangonel is), invented in China, which reaches the Middle East and Europe in the 6th century. The counterweight trebuchet is then invented in roughly the eleventh century, likely in the Middle East.
Whereas the familiar counterweight trebuchet uses a counterweight to drive the short arm of the catapult, a traction trebuchet uses muscle power, by connecting the short arm to a large number of ropes on which many people could pull on at once. The ratio here still favored the firing arm, so the folks pulling the ropes still had a ton of leverage and with a lot of people pulling at once, traction trebuchets could still hurl large rocks substantial distances, though they were less powerful (but faster firing) than counterweight trebuchets. Having these catapults operated by having a few hundred orcs heaving in unison, I think, would be a pretty striking and memorable scene and one that would reinforce the themes the show is trying to create about Adar’s treatment of his ‘children.’
Instead, we get the standard ‘barbarian catapult’ remix, with a design I am fairly certain wouldn’t actually work – and certainly wouldn’t work well. Which is odd, because these catapults then proceed to do impossible things.
Fire Catapults
Adar opens his assault by using these catapults to hurl flaming munitions into Ost-in-Edhil, destroying buildings and lighting fires. He makes no effort to try to target the defenses (walls, defensive towers) but instead rains fire directly into the city.
Now, there are two sets of problems here: a tactical problem and a munitions problem. Let’s start with the tactical problem.
Adar’s plan does not involve getting Ost-in-Edhil to surrender. At no point does he, say, demand they just turn over Sauron so he’ll leave. Instead, his very stupid plan from the beginning involves storming the city in the hope that his orcs get lucky and manage, in the sea of fleeing Elves, to accidentally murder the one Maiar-disguised-as-an-elf they’re after. But given that plan, what purpose does bombarding the city for hours with catapults serve?
Now it is the case that during medieval sieges, attackers might intentionally use the high firing arc of trebuchets to fire over the walls, rather than into them. We’ll get to burning projectiles in a second, but this is when you might actually use them: trying to set fire to the densely packed buildings within a walled city or castle. The purpose of doing so was to tie down defenders fighting fires so they couldn’t challenge an effort to breach or scale the walls. But Adar lights the city on fire and then dams the river and then waits for the river to subside, by which point presumably the fires have largely burnt out and then launches his assault.
The other reason to target the city interior would be to demoralize the defenders into surrender. You might, for instance, smash up building and light fires to try to cause so much damage that a town would rather sue for peace than put up with a long siege. Equally, armies might use catapults to fling diseased or decaying corpses over the walls to demoralize defenders and potentially spread plague. But all of that only accomplishes anything if the defenders have an option to surrender (or the siege is going to last long enough that a disease outbreak might matter). That’s not a factor here: Adar has committed himself to a strategy of killing everyone in the city, so there’s little to be gained from surrender and thus little to be gained by trying to demoralize the defenders.
I think the show’s suggestion is that the purpose of this barrage is actually to create lots of smoke in order to darken the skies, though this is never communicated by anyone. Adar looks up at the smoke-filled skies before ordering his catapults to change targets, so perhaps this is what we are to assume. If so, this is an effort to echo the ‘broil of fume’ (RotK 89) used by Sauron to shield his armies from the sun in Return of the King. But Sauron, crucially has a volcano to work with; getting regular fires to equal the amount of dust and smoke a volcano can produce requires massive wildfires burning tens of thousands of acres of forest. Needless to say, a few square miles of city – mostly made of stone – isn’t going to do the job. Sauron is also a magical being with great and undefined powers that might include directing his volcanic ash strategically to cover a region; Adar has no such supernatural abilities. If Adar wants to darken the sky with for his army, he needs to somehow get the entire (quite green and not at all dry) forest behind him burning for something like a dozen miles in every direction and then hope the wind blows the right way (but not too much the right way, or his army will end up feeding the fires rather more directly than intended). Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, we have the munitions problem, which is both that these incendiary catapult shots are absurdly destructive and also that I have a hard time keeping track of how destructive they are – or perhaps more correctly, the showrunners have a had time keeping track of how destructive they are.
In the first case, incendiary ranged weapons – flaming arrows, javelins, and catapult shot – were certainly used on the ancient and medieval battlefield, but as is typical in these sorts of productions, their destructiveness has been vastly overstated. In particular, nothing an ancient or medieval army could hurl would explode, not even the famed Greek fire. For most societies, the incendiaries they were working with were things like pitch, resin and oils (animal or vegetable, not petrochemical). Anyone who has seen a cooking oil fire knows these can, under the right circumstances, burn pretty intensely, but they do not explode:1 an explosion is not necessarily heat but rather an expanding shockwave caused by a rapid expansion of gasses. You can absolutely have a fireball without an explosion.
As an aside, I think filmmakers tend to blur this distinction because Hollywood tends to love the bright, orange flames of gasoline fires (and the like) to represent all sorts of incendiaries and explosions, both for much less energetic reactions (like ancient or medieval flaming arrows and catapult shots), but also for much more energetic reactions (like modern high explosive battlefield munitions). Modern high explosives of the sort you’d see on a battlefield don’t usually produce much of a fireball at all, unlike in the movies: they’re almost all shockwave and very little ‘fire’ because it is the shockwave, not the heat, of a high explosive that does the killing. But in movies, everything is just a big orange fireball.
Adar’s munitions here are also a Hollywood staple, what I am going to call the “explosive fire-rock” – a catapult munition that somehow maintains all of the smashing power of a super-dense rock while at the same time burning brightly as it passes through hundreds of meters of air to then ignite whatever it touches on the other end, even things – like stone buildings – that are not generally particularly flammable. This is a nice munition to have access to when you have already suspended the laws of physics. We’ll deal with the impact part of this in a moment, so let’s focus on the incendiary component here.
Adar’s shots slam into the city, smashing (or blasting?) apart large stone structures and setting basically the whole city to light. They appear to be shooting large rocks covered with some kind of blackish goo – perhaps pitch. That would…simply be extinguished flying through all of the air they are throwing these things through. In practice, historical incendiaries tended to either be delivered at short ranges and low velocities (to avoid the movement through the air putting them out) or basically as grenades: breakable containers filled with the flammable material with a lit fuse that might break out and ignite on impact (and of course, rarely, sprayed in liquid form, as with Greek fire). The former is actually more common than the later: we see all manner of specialized incendiary arrows and javelins beginning in at least the Roman period, if not earlier: these usually have some design to enable a wrap or cord soaked in something flammable oils or pitch to be wrapped around them, ignited and then shot.
These sorts of incendiaries had pretty sharp limits: the amount of thermal energy they could deliver wasn’t all that high, meaning they were only going to set something on fire if it was already fairly flammable. Fortunately for ancient and medieval pyromaniacs, their ships were built of wood and cities were often mostly wooden buildings, roofed with very flammable thatch. It might still, with these weapons, take quite a few tries to get anything to actually catch fire, but in a siege context the attacker had more than enough time to keep trying to get a fire going which would then become a distracting liability for the defender.
Instead, Adar’s catapult shots are so destructive they reduce large stone towers to piles of brightly burning rubble, apparently almost immediately. Here, for once, we do have something of a ‘clock’: Adar begins his barrage at night and by morning apparently has enough smoke to contemplate an attack on the city. Or, in a piece of the show’s tremendously bad writing, a “ground assault” (Sauron’s words) which raises the question of what other kinds of assault are there in Middle Earth? Were the Elves of Eregion otherwise preparing for an orcish air assault?2 So in just a few hours, Adar raises a sky-blocking curtain of smoke and reduces much of the city to rubble, as we see here:
Except wait, does he? Because Arondir shows up three minutes (of screentime) after that shot of ruined, burning towers and looks out at the city – the river now draining – and sees this:
Apparently just a few scattered fires, a number of smashed roofs, but most of the city still standing just fine, with relatively little smoke and no damage at all to the city’s fortifications (something we’ll return to next week because this is what the catapults ought to have been doing). I realize we’ve already had respawning orcish armies, but I think a respawning Elvish city may be a bit too much. In any case, these sorts of scattered fires and limited smoke are rather more what I’d expect a barrage of pre-modern incendiaries to produce, rather than the enormous damage we see in the scenes preceding this.
But I think it speaks to the degree to which these weapons and their effects aren’t being treated as real by the showrunners: they’re merely events in a script. So they appear and seem to accomplish something (the burning destruction of large portions of the city) which then vanishes two scenes later, because the folks making the show don’t seem to feel the need to maintain the sense that this is a real physical place where, for instance, massive destruction in one scene ought to still be reflected in the next. The problem that poses, of course, is a loss of the sense of physical consequence. Adar’s army respawns, humans and Elves walk unharmed out of volcanic eruptions, armies teleport around the world: nothing matters. And if nothing matters…why should we care?
But of course we also have to talk about:
Dam Catapults
However much of the city Adar was going to burn, once he is finished burning it, he turns his catapults away from the city. His plan is to enable a breaching attack by draining the riverbed of the Sirannon, by using his catapults to collapse a stone mountainside to make a dam.
By which point, yeah, if Adar has shown up with the main battery of HMS Majestic (1894), I think he may be able to bring down this mountain but also at that point, probably doesn’t need to.
Just about every part of this plan seems to defy physics and worse yet – as we’ll get into more next time – the whole thing is entirely unnecessary as there’s a much easier way to get over the river and to the base of the wall.
First, we need to start with the catapults. Fantasy filmmaking in general has a hard time keeping straight how powerful even the largest catapults – like large, counterweight trebuchets – are and how to express that visually. As I noted back in the Siege of Gondor series, Peter Jackson himself struggled a bit with the physics of catapults and their ranges and shot-weights. But the upshot of all of this is that trebuchets are not gunpowder artillery and do not have anything like the range and power of even relatively early gunpowder artillery.
We have a range of estimates for the range of late medieval counterweight trebuchets – the largest, most powerful catapults built – both from historical reports as well as from modern reconstructions. Sources report large counterweight trebuchets throwing 100kg projectiles 400m and 250kg projectiles around 160m.3 That’s quite a bit of distance for some very big rocks. The Warwick Castle trebuchet, a modern reconstruction, was in theory designed to throw projectiles up to 150kg up to 300m; its record shot was a 13kg projectile hurled 249m with a launch velocity of 55 meters per second, but I’ve seen higher launch velocities, as much as 70m/s reported.
Now, launching a 150kg projectile at 70m/s is quite impressive. If that hits you, it is going to hurt quite a lot. But we want to put both the range (150-400m) and the energy into perspective.
The first thing we want to note is the range, which you may note is suspiciously just a hair beyond effective bowshot. That’s not an accident: your catapult loses power the more of its range it has to use (because these big projectiles are slowing down in flight) so to smash walls, towers and crenelations, you want to get your catapult as close as possible, and so you’re designing for what is, effectively, the closest safe range. Naturally that is going to mean ‘just outside of bowshot’ since a bow is the longest ranged weapon the defenders can use short of having their own catapult. ‘Bowshot’ as a distance varies based on the bows and archers used, but for the very best bows, effective bowshot – where arrows retain substantial lethality – fades out around 200m.
Two hundred meters certainly isn’t no distance at all, but it isn’t the miles of range we generally see catapults fire at in film. 400m, after all, is just 0.4km4 or just about a quarter of a mile. A fit person can run that distance in under two minutes. That of course has implications which loop back to our lack of circumvallation: siege engines cannot be placed so far from the enemy as to be beyond fear of attack. At 200-400m, the attackers do, in fact, have to worry that an enemy might suddenly sally out, dash the one to two minutes it takes to reach the catapult, overwhelm the defenders, destroy the catapult and dash back in before the full force of the besieging army could respond. That’s precisely the sort of thing your own field fortifications are meant to prevent.
The second point is about the amount of energy these catapults are delivering. To take something like the Warwick Castle Trebuchet – which is, I should note, quite a big example of the type and so serves as an ‘upper end limit’ to a significant degree – a 150kg projectile launched at 70m/s is leaving the sling with an impressive 367,500 joules of kinetic energy (though of course it won’t deliver anything like that many to the target, because of air resistance and the high firing arc). That is massively more than the launch energies of war bows – around 80-150 joules.
But it is a lot less than gunpowder artillery. How much less? To take a late example – because I can find complete statistics on it – the M1857 12-pounder ‘Napoleon’ (Canon obusier de campagne de 12) was a middle-weight field gun, much smaller and lighter than the siege guns of its day, and fired a 12lbs (5.4kg) shot with a muzzle velocity of 453m/s. That’s 550,000 joules for a relatively light field gun. It could throw that shot, by the by, 1,500m. Finding reliable ranges and muzzle velocities for earlier siege cannon is more difficult; Mons Meg, a 15th century siege cannon, fires a 160kg projectile with an estimated muzzle velocity of 315m/s – firing at a staggering 7,938,000 joules, a full order of magnitude more energy than the largest trebuchets.
The Meg that Says, “No, you shut up.“
(By the by, this is a great example of a hoop-and-stave cannon, an early production method of building up the barrel of a gun).
And we know that is basically right, because whereas the invention of the trebuchet did not really force any great revolution in castle design (castle walls get a bit thicker, but only marginally so), the arrival of gunpowder artillery in Europe absolutely did, because relatively thin castle walls that could stand up to trebuchet strikes simply could not stand up to cannon fire. The point of this exercise being: if your frame of reference for the destructiveness of artillery is gunpowder artillery, you are going to vastly overestimate the range and power of trebuchets and other catapults.
Which of course brings us to the point I suspect most people realized simply by watching this scene: there is no way these trebuchets can even get a projectile this far, much less this high, much less with the power required to actually cause any kind of collapse. Having had to watch this scene a few times, you can actually see this quite clearly in watching: the stones come off of the catapults at angles far too low to get very high up on the mountain and then when we see them flying, their trajectories are pretty clearly impossible – they seem to float upwards like leaves carried by the wind, rather than like very heavy objects moving in ballistic arcs. Meanwhile, it takes a LOT of energy to move a mountainside made of solid rock.
At the very least, even with his cannon-pults, it is going to take Adar a long time to collapse the mountainside, especially because counterweight trebuchets are quite slow firing, taking anywhere from half an hour to an hour to fire once. The reason for this is pretty simple: all of the energy of a counterweight trebuchet is still coming from muscle power – it is merely being stored in the counterweight. After all, it is muscle power that is going to lift that counterweight into the air. And naturally, if you have a bunch of humans putting a couple hundred thousand joules of kinetic energy into that counterweight, it’s going to take them a while (and a way to get a bunch of mechanical advantage). So each of Adar’s catapults is delivering relatively little energy (those rocks are impacting at the top of their arcs, so they’ve lost a lot of speed) and quite a slow rate. In practice, I suspect long before Adar would have dammed the river just by filling it with large rocks long before he triggered a cliff-face collapse. In a note that will become a theme next week, Adar would have been much better served by sending orcs with pick-axes and shovels to simply fill the river.
The worst part is, even if Adar somehow had high explosive ground-penetrating ‘torpedo shell’ catapult shot that he borrowed, presumably, from the First World War, this plan still wouldn’t work!
The idea here is to dam the river in order to enable his army to cross it to reach the wall. Now, there’s already the problem that damming the river doesn’t create dry flatland but silted, wet riverbed, which would be terrible ground to try to attack across (but more on that next time). But we don’t even reach that problem. Damming a river does not make the water go away, it merely begins to back up behind the dam, the water-level rising until it surmounts some part of the dam and begins discharging again. This is a very big river so that water is going to build up behind this makeshift dam very quickly. I suspect in actual practice, it would violently wash those stones away – or at least enough of them to force a passage – and Adar would have succeeded in creating rapids, not a dam (and still be very much stuck on his side of the river, but now with better options for higher difficulty white-water kayaking).
But assuming the effort to dam the river somehow succeeds, the water has to go somewhere. Now, what we see is the dam comes down between the shoulders of two mountains (so upriver, ever so slightly from the city), so the water is simply going to rise until it gets over the dam (which is a lot lower than the mountains) and then overflows the dam…right back into the riverbed. How quickly this happens, I suppose, depends on the height of the dam; I am not a hydrologist. But my sense here is that Adar is unlikely to be able to actually drop rocks in this river faster than the water level rises, which is to say I don’t think he’s going to get much – if any – window of dry passage to the walls. Eventually, if his dam is high enough, the water will instead discharge into the city, which would be bad for the Elves (though the city backs into the mountain, so they have high ground to go to) but also bad for Adar, because all he’ll have managed to do is move the impassable river to a spot where there are no bridges and where the rapid flow and choppy water behavior make building one nearly impossible.
Conclusion
Ironically, with a little planning ahead, this plot point might have been fixed. Instead of placing a dam upriver from Ost-in-Edhil, you could have placed a large dam downriver and have Ost-in-Edhil sitting on the reservoir that created. Adar could then blow the dam, rapidly draining out the resevoir and perhaps reducing a vast lake to a small enough stream that it could be forded. But of course this is, as you will recall from last week, a series that forgot in Season 1 to add walls to the city they were going to do a big siege sequence of in Season 2, so that kind of planning is almost certainly out.
Instead, to my mind the underlying ‘sin’ here is once again the attempt to be ‘clever’ with tactics and try to surprise the audience. I wonder if this isn’t an effort to recreate memorable moments like Saruman’s blasting the Deeping Wall or Tyrion’s use of wildfire in the Battle of the Blackwater. But – and brace yourself because I am about to say something nice about Game of Thrones5 – those moments work because they make sense and they make sense because they are based on actual historical tactics. Undermining and using explosives (like black powder) was a standard feature of siege warfare from the early modern period through to the First World War (and almost certainly more recently). Likewise, I suspect the inspiration for something like the Battle of the Blackwater lies in Byzantine use of Greek fire to defend Constantinople, as with the 7th century Umayyad siege of the city. While the fantastical setting can heighten the event – Westerosi ‘wildfire’ is even more destructive than Greek fire, for instance – it remains grounded because it is grounded in a historical event.
But that means the best way to create believable moments of surprise for an audience, where a character can be shown to be innovative by having them be innovative, the best way to do that is to read a whole bunch of history! It is to develop a familiarity with historical tactics and weapons, so that you have a scrapbook of historical tactics you can draw on and heighten for these key moments. What I always find so striking is that these ‘clever’ a-historical solutions both batter suspension of disbelief but are also a lot less actually clever than the historical solutions. Actual siege-craft required a lot of specialist know-how and often a lot of engineering to produce fairly clever solutions: armies collapsed walls by undermining, tunneled under them to gain access, suborned traitors to sneak in, damaged gatehouses so they couldn’t close, built pontoon bridges to cross water, towers and ramps to access walls and systems of defensive barriers (mantelets) to be able to safely approach walls. All of those ‘neat tricks’ are interesting and plausible (because they actually happened). But you have to study history to know about them!
What I am going to do now is watch The Empire Strikes Back, to wash away the taste of Rings of Power.
Next week, as Adar begins his “ground assault” we’ll look at some of the clever engineering a historical army might have employed to try to crack the defenses of Eregion.
- Though if you are very foolish and throw water on a hot oil-fire, it can flash-boil it, producing a fireball. I don’t have a ready link, but the Mythbusters produced some fairly epic grease-fire fireballs by dropping soup cans or water on them, but if you look closely you’ll see there’s very little shock wave – nothing moves, it just burns.
- I think I can actually guess exactly how this line got in the show, which is that it is lifted word for word from another, better film, The Empire Strikes Back. Of course there is makes sense because Darth Vader’s Star Destroyers are, in fact, capable of other kinds of attacks: airstrikes (that is, bombing with TIEs), air assault (landing troops directly into the base) or orbital bombardment. In that battle, General Rieekan is giving that order because he has already computed (correctly) that the base’s defenses (with the shield now raised) rule out every option except ground assault (landing well outside of the base’s perimeter and approaching on the ground), so the line makes sense. If I may paraphrase Roger Ebert’s famous quip, the Rings of Power showrunners have learned from better films that other writers sometimes have characters say things, but they have not learned why.
- P. Chevedden, “The Invention of the Counterweight Trebuchet,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 54 (2000): 71-116.
- God bless the metric system
- I have relatively more nice things to say more broadly about A Song of Ice and Fire than Game of Thrones.
Obligatory:
…that might even be the source of those spokeless wheels on the Rings of Power trebuchets.
” Last week, we discussed…”
Pretty sure that was two weeks ago. 🙂
There is a physics reason why would want a trebuchet to have wheels. It enables the counter weight to move in an even more directly vertical line, which increases of the efficiency of the transfer of energy from the potential energy initially stored in the counter-weight to the kinetic energy of the projectile at the end of the sling. Basically the same reason as why having the counter weight on a free-hanging pivot is better than having it fixed at the end of the main arm. It’s also fundamentally why the ratios between the lengths either side of the main axle with each other and the sling, and the ratio of projectile to counter-weight mass, are so important and need to be carefully matched with each other. Get them wrong and you’ll have a machine which will shake itself to pieces, or release it’s payload directly vertically onto itself.
Of course I 100% believe that in practice the wheels would break under the load, or dig into the mud, or a whole other load of practical problems. But there is a theoretical mechanics reason why it might be advantageous to have wheels if cows were perfect spheres living in a frictionless vacuum.
One thing wheels might help with is aiming. If you want your trebuchet to hit 25 meters to the left next shot, how do you do that? Or is the answer “you don’t”, or “get all those guys you use to crank the counterweight back up to nudge the base to the side”?
Good question! I feel like Tod from Tod’s workshop on YouTube might know, he’s been playing around with his trebuchet for a couple of years now. I guess it might also be possible to mess around with the sling and its release mechanism so it releases at a slight angle?
Considering that this is a weapon that takes about an hour between shots and is shooting at a completely stationary target, I suspect that the general approach to aiming is either “make sure it’s pointed in the correct direction the first time” or “take it apart and put it back together to launch at the desired trajectory”.
Range can be controlled by adjusting the length of the sling, or mass of the projectile or counterweight. Direction mostly doesn’t happen since you are aiming at a large fixed structure and presumably have professionals assembling your very expensive siege engine, but yes, either get a lot of people to move it or disassemble and reassemble as far as I am aware.
Were these things precise enough that they’d hit the same spot on the wall over and over until you re-aimed? Or was it more like, you aim at the castle, and mostly hit the castle.
It is my understanding that experimentation has demonstrated that, so long as all parameters of the device itself remain the same (mostly around the counterweight), the shots will remain pretty consistent yes.
Depends on what you mean with “same spot”. At maximum range, with well made round shot, and a good crew, you are probably able to hit the same 5 – 10meter section of wall every time.
Remeber those are big objects moving relativly slow in a high arc over a long distance. Loads of time for random chance to take its toll.
Kind of like a mortar. There is only so much precision you can reach with it.
The force imparted by the dropping counterweight should be the same each time, so your shots should cluster if you don’t adjust the counterweight and have consistent ammo. My understanding is that consistent ammo could be a bit of a problem; you’re finding rocks on-site and don’t want to wait for a master stonemason to carve and polish each one, so their aerodynamics will be irregular and their mass will vary somewhat. And of course there’s wind to worry about.
If you want the trebuchet to hit 25 meters to the left of the next shot, the first thing you have to do is spend the next month carefully carving and polishing boulders to create standardized shot. You also need a method to replace the structural wood in the catapult with some material that does not respond to damp.
If the wood is varnished or otherwise treated, it ought to do fine. Sure, it’s extra time and effort, but any civilization which can create a long-lasting wooden ship (where the hull is exposed to “damp” literally all the time) can do this as well.
https://johncanningco.com/blog/common-historical-wood-finishes-when-where-why-used/
Now, there is a downside where those methods also tend to make the treated wood MUCH more flammable, but under the circumstances a besieging army finds itself in, it seems like they would have to take the risk – although casually tossing flaming projectiles might end up out of the question.
Humidity would not really be a major problem, because the humidity of air changes relatively slowly, in the timescale of hours, and humidity of wood even slower. So, the impact of humidity could, if your weapons is otherwise so accurate that this is an issue, be taken into account by firing a trial shot and correcting for error. The error remains the same for hours, so once corrected, it will not be a problem.
I think you’d want to hit the same approximate spot multiple times, towers for example. Not like in the movies where one projectile completely destroys a reinforced stone redoubt in one shot and goes off like a fragmentation bomb inside, killing a bunch of dudes wearing plate mail but no helmets
I’m not sure that destruction of the structures (at least of stone ones) was really a key use. There just isn’t enough energy there to do a fast job.
As per the article, pretty much all pre-gunpowder siege weapons are for suppressing defenders rather than blowing holes in walls.
Make the defenders keep their heads down via ballistae (either big arrows or stones). For larger items like the trebuchet you might hit people with the stone, knock splinters off the target structures (wood or stone), and possibly collapse any wooden add-ons: walkways, archery covers, etc.
Collapsing a stone building or part of a wall would require mining instead. Which is why it was used so much, and why there’s a lot written about tactics etc.
First, we hypothesize perfectly spherical trebuchets…
I built a small one (height of a short one, threw water balloons) back in the day and added wheels to deal with the induced rocking motion (the front and back along the axis of ‘fire’ jumping up violently). A larger base would probably have corrected that however, and I suspect the size of actual historical trebuchets (and the corresponding size and strength of the wheels and axles) mean a larger base is simply more practical.
In any case you would never in a million years try to push one of these things from your home base, as our host points out. Age of empires got it right I think
I think the rocking was because both the projectile and the counterweight massed much more in comparison to the trebuchet than would be possible at 1:1 scale. See the square-cube law.
Scale models are useful, but they have limitations for simulation.
Partly. It might have also been an issue with balancing the parameters. If you shoot a trebuchet empty (ie, without a projectile) it will shake *violently* when the arm goes vertical because none of the energy has been released from the system. If you don’t get the mass and length ratios correct, then something similar can happen with with a payload, because the energy transfer is happening very inefficiently.
> It enables the counter weight to move in an even more directly vertical line, which increases of the efficiency of the transfer of energy from the potential energy initially stored in the counter-weight to the kinetic energy of the projectile at the end of the sling.
In principle this is correct, in practice it doesn’t work very well (compared to the free-hanging pivot design that everyone actually used) because you’re now moving the _entire structure of the trebuchet_, which is robbing a substantial amount of the potential energy stored in your counterweight.
*In theory* Middle Earth might also have amphibious assault — though unlikely to be phrased that way. And my layman’s understanding is that what *we’d* think of as amphibious assault is also a gunpowder thing (and mostly a WWII thing). Prior to that it was more a matter of finding a nice undefended bit of shore to get your army onto and then march off for a fairly normal battle or siege.
But even if that was intended to be the contrast that “ground assault” line just sounds dumb
Amphibious assaults definitely happened in antiquity too. Not often, mind you, but they did happen. Caesar’s opposed landing in Britain is the most famous example. A fair few sieges (off the top of my head: Tyre 332 BC, Syracuse (multiple) Carthage 148 BC, Alexandria 47BC) also had troops disembarking from ships directly into action – including siege towers/ladders mounted on the ships themselves. Whether this was classed as specifically “amphibious” rather than generic “naval” is beyond my pay grade. I suspect that in a world that cared little for precise categorisation, where fleets almost always moved within sight of shore, and there was little partition between army and navy officers, the idea of amphibious being distinct from true maritime might not make much sense.
Almost universally those were either fording a river or a siege. Generally you only tried that kind of assault when forced to, and it was generally a, pardon the language, utter shit show.
As such we see two plausible examples of that in the original LOTR, osgiliath and the landing of aragorn behind Saurons host at the Battle of the Pelennor fields. In both instances we’re in the context of a siege, hence why the river had to be forced there specifically. It’s still going to be astoundingly rare.
And crossing the Anduin at Osgiliath was helped a lot by the Witch-king using a fear-magic cheat-code on the defenders, making most run away. It was still a costly assault in troops (but Sauron can pay the cost.)
And if that had failed it was like three steps removed from being a terminal strategic failure, both in that tactically the strike didn’t need to succeed as it did, operationally he had redundant plans, and strategically the failure of the entire operation was ultimately only a mild setback.
Imagine the world where Adar starts crossing his dam and figures out, oops, miscalculated, now my army and myself are in a river, guess Saurons wins everything forever. A lot of tactical risks are more palatable when their failure is inconsequential, and drastically not so when it’s vital the plan work.
Constantinople was also subjected to amphibious assaults during the Fourth Crusade during both attempts to seize the city. Notably, these assaults involved siege towers mounted on the decks of ships, something so cool it’s just begging for Hollywood to do something with.
They had them in “Gladiator II”, I think.
And, IIRC, Scott criticized that scene.
Demarquis, I presume you meant to write Bret (Scott the director was hardly going to criticize his own scene?)
But yes, as cptbutton said, Gladiator II did in fact do that, and yes, an entire Collections is devoted to basically criticizing that scene alone.
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/06/collections-nitpicking-gladiator-ii-part-i/
Knowing that this thing was (according to you, at least) actually attempted in the Crusades does make me wonder if that scene in the film ought to get A LITTLE more of a pass based on this than it was given in the Collections. (I.e. only 90% stupid instead of 100%.) Another commenter also mentions that some records claim similar arrangements during the siege of Syracuse – I wonder if it’s too much to hope for an edit/footnote to the post doing a compare/contrast with those real-world examples?
Having said that, I actually watched the film before I discovered the blog and I have to say – even before I read the scene was ahistorical, I still thought it was a wash at best cinematically, for the simple reason that the CGI team cloned WAY TOO MANY Roman ships. Hence, there’s absolutely zero suspense in the combat which follows, and it’s just going through the motions. Sure, there was obviously no way the protagonist wouldn’t end up forced into the arena considering the title, but the battle could have been shot (and scored) much more like a tragic fait accompli, rather than pointlessly pretending the good guys could still beat back the siege.
@YARD: In the blog post linked Bret does say that siege equipment on ships was a thing, but that it was not a thing for Roman armies at their heights (Republic and Principate). So no need to nitpick on the degree of stupid, Bret already covered it.
> but that it was not a thing for Roman armies at their heights (Republic and Principate)
Well, Syracuse WAS taken over by the Republic during the Punic Wars, and the commenter was right that there ARE records of ship-borne siege engines being attempted at the time, from Polybius himself – to the point there is a Wikipedia article about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambuca_(siege_engine)
Now, all of this was 300-400 years BEFORE Gladiator II supposedly takes place and so not immediately relevant to that plotline, but still disproves your assertion they were not used by the Republic, and provides significant context to information in the Collections.
@Yard: For some reason I see no “Reply” button on your post, so I have to reply to you this way.
Though it may be true that there are a few (rare) examples of siege engines on ships in the past, I think the many errors Bret points out in Scott’s scene (sorry for that confusion) mean it is at least 95% stupid. To take just one example, siege towers are used to fire down on the defender’s ramparts, not to send troops scaling over the walls. The defending city’s walls in that scene are way too high for a ship-born tower to rise above it without tipping the ship over. The real ones, I feel fairly certain, were much lower and more modest in construction. There are other problems with that scene which Bret points out.
You can also consider the Spanish capture of Mers-el-Kébir in 1505
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir_(1505)
Part of the fleet bombarded the castle while the infantry landed and proceeded to take the upper ground and start preparing the circumvallation to resist the sortie (which happened the day later and was promptly repelled)
Now, if Adar happened to have a flock of those featherless giant birds the Nazguls ride, that might open up a few other assault options…
Also, on footnote 1, I’ve seen some careless use of cooking oil and frozen food produce impressive fireballs.
I guess you also have naval/amphibious assault. Not sure if those were terms in 2nd age elven staff officer school though. Would be cool to see the mighty Mordorian navy sailing up the river, forming a giant pontoon or something.
“Featherless giant birds” I believe you mean “a man”
*confused* Why do you suggest “a man” to substitute for Tolkien’s featherless creatures: “if bird, then greater than all birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers.”
Explanation:
https://sites.psu.edu/sierraastle/2019/10/21/behold-a-man/
It’s a joke about Diogenes the Cynic, who responded to Plato’s definition of man as a featherless biped by brandishing a plucked chicken and declaring “behold, a man”.
Air assault could be a thing in Middle-Earth, if you somehow recruit a number of dragons.
Of course, if you’re not Morgoth, or maybe Sauron at his height of power, good luck with that.
Only
Sauron never could command the great Dragons, only Morgoth did it when at the height of his powers. After the fall of Thangorodrim the surviving Dragons were scattered all over ME and there is no great mention of them in the following events, with the notable exception of Smaug.
True, but even Smaug was enough of a danger that Gandalf arranged to take him off the board years before the War of the Ring (see Appendix A RE: “a chance meeting.”
Because if Sauron had somehow managed it, Smaug would be a problem. It doesn’t mean it would be particularly likely, just that it was sufficiently uncertain Gandalf felt it better to get rid of Smaug.
Smaug was taken out by Gandalf for very different reasons. The Dragon had destroyed a whole kingdom of Dwarfs out of simple greed, not because Sauron ordered him to. There is no hint of a connection between Sauron and Smaug, except perhaps a very indirect one: While Sauron rises from the dead, regaining his form and powers, searching for the Rings as the Necromancer, other evil things grow stronger and bolder too, like the Nazgul who make their appearance once again, like Orcs multiplying in greater numbers etc. Smaug doesn’t obey him directly, but is influenced by his presence. BTW, the killing of Smaug was a very cunning political movement of Gandalf. He created a strong Dwarf-Men alliance in the North that held that front during the War of the Ring.
“There is no hint of a connection between Sauron and Smaug”
True: no hint of a past connection. But Ed8r is also correct: Gandalf is retconned as having feared a future connection.
> Among many cares he was troubled in mind by the perilous state of the North; because he knew then already that Sauron was plotting war, and intended, as soon as he felt strong enough, to attack Rivendell. But to resist any attempt from the East to regain the lands of Angmar and the northern passes in the mountains there were now only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills. And beyond them lay the desolation of the Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. How then could the end of Smaug be achieved?
> ‘Yet things might have gone far otherwise and far worse. When you think of the great Battle of the Pelennor, do not forget the battles in Dale and the valour of Durin’s Folk. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador, night in Rivendell. There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory here only to ruin and ash. But that has been averted – because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.’
And Unfinished Tales has a longer version in “The Quest For Erebor”
> To resist any force that Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountains and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: “I must find some means of dealing with Smaug. But a direct stroke against Dol Guldur is needed still more. We must disturb Sauron’s plans. I must make the Council see that.”
> I wonder if you fully realize the strength of a great Dragon. But that is not all: there is a Shadow growing fast in the world far more terrible. They will help one another.” And they certainly would have done so, if I had not attacked Dol Guldur at the same time.
Reply to kostaszag:
You have invented a motive that Tolkien does not suggest. Please read further in Appendix A: “…he knew then already that Sauron was plotting war . . . The Dragon Sauron might use to terrible effect.”
Now I’m curious about actual historical river crossings. Any particularly noteworthy examples?
Alexander the Great’s crossing of the Hydaspes is a textbook example, apparently still studied to this day. Less impressively is Caesar at the Axona. The general idea is to use light infantry/cavalry to cross where the enemy isn’t, and then use them to screen the crossing of your main force in front of the enemy. The same thing could be accomplished by field artillery / archers shooting from your own side of the river, as long as the enemy doesn’t have anything of comparable range. More esoteric tactics also existed, such as putting a line of horses / elephants upstream in order to reduce the flow of the water enough to make fording it easier (Caesar during the Ilerda campaign, Perdiccas at the Nile). Brute force and simply fighting across it always happened for small rivers (Alexander at the Grannicus).
The line of horses thing isn’t necessarily an esoteric tactic. It was used at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and seems to have been the standard way to cross a river, at least when the water was at a level that made crossing somewhat hazardous.
Tbh, I’ve never understood how that worked. If the line of horses lowered the flow downstream, that means less water is flowing past them as before. Aka, they act as a sort of partial damn, and so that excess water would build up behind them. But that would raise the water level, increasing pressure and hence the flow rate until it matches the original. Water is arriving from upstream all the time, it has to go somewhere!
So what is the line of horses actually doing? Turning a narrow fast flow into a wider slow one? Or a deep narrow flow into a wider shallower one? Something else I’m not getting?
If they stayed in the river forever, they’d slow the whole river and reduce flow through it at all points, and the water from whatever source would flow a different direction or evaporate more. (Same as any other river obstacle, or any other time water gets backed up in a drain or similar)
Over short term, presumably they slow and likely calm the water for the crossing time, then the backed up water flows a bit faster until things equalize.
@ Dillon Saxe
Well, no. Even if they stayed there indefinitely, they would absolutely not slow the flow at at all points. That’s just not how conservation of mass works, unless the horses magically affect rainfall in the river basin… They’re not going to change the amount of water arriving upstream and so, in equilibrium, they can’t change the amount of water flowing downstream. The most they can do is hope to raise the water level just behind them enough for the river to burst in banks and so reduce the depth / speed at the point the army wants to cross downstream. It’s hard for me to see how the conditions for that would be easily met and have a consequential effects. As another commenter said, hydrology is hard.
A line of horses, wagons, etc can’t stop the flow of the river, but it can greatly reduce the effect of waves. If I’m wading across a river, water up to my armpits, it won’t take much of a wave to soak or wash away whatever I’m holding up to keep dry or even knock me over.
They’re not creating a full dam with their bodies, they’re just fouling the currents in the river while also being a stable object a person can grab onto in a pinch. Normally in a river different parts of the water are moving at different speeds, and there’s only a few places where suddenly a man wouldn’t be able to stand; speeding up the movement of the still parts of the river doesn’t increase danger as much as slowing down the fast spots decreases danger.
Generally this is going to happen at a place where there’s a seasonal ford, but the water is just a little high temporarily.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense! It’s not about lowering the level or speed of the water generally, just smoothing out the more dangerous bits.
Gustavus Adolphus as the Lech did an entire complicated thing involving a pontoon bridge and basically a siege battery trying to get rid of enemy fortifications, but then he also had bunch of cavalry cross upstream to take the position from the rear.
Crossing a river when the enemy doesen’t want you to cross is really tricky.
Ceasar crossing of the Rhine comes to mind. He had his engineers construct a bridge over one of Europes biggest river. But that probably wasn’t a contested crossing.
Using the cover of darkness (when your orcs are still fresh and the elves are tired) to lay down a barrage of incendiaries to blot out the sun with the smoke when it rises is also the most missing-the-forest-for-the-trees kind of tactics one could come up with. Okay, after the entire night of barrage, as my orcs are tiring and the elves are all waking up, when my only cover from the sun is the bit of smoke I produced, *that* is the time I attack? Not the *checks notes* about twelve hours of guaranteed darkness before that where the sun is not going to be a problem at all because it’s below the horizon?
Also, not having watched the show, but given that there’s no landscape visible in that screenshot of the blotted out sun, it’s also already pretty late in the morning by the time he switches targets. Which just means his orcs are even more tired and even less at an advantage.
I can’t help but think of the contrast with the more careful use of the nocturnal advantage in the siege of Minas Tirith: The Witch King times his operations such that he reaches Osgiliath at night for what is the most dangerous of the outer defenses (the river crossing), and then also invests the city itself in the evening, to use the night hours for his assault. If the Rohirrim hadn’t disrupted his plans his army would have been able to move into the city in the morning hours, using not only the shelter of the ash cloud but also the city buildings while they worked their way through the inner city rings.
As general question, how much were real world sieges round-the-clock operations versus mostly daytime?
Did trebuchets do one rock per hour all day, or do you stop when you can’t see where you hitting and do maintenance and reinforcement of cracking structure?
Do the trench diggers work three shifts? I assume the foragers and tree-cutting parties wouldn’t want to work in the dark.
Varies by type of activity, but in general we industrial era people forget just how dark it is and how difficult to do anything when the only light sources are the moon or fire.
At the siege of Constantinople in 1453 shooting happened during the day, because the Turkish big guns needed to see what they were aiming at, and also see by how much they missed for correcting the next shot. The Turks would also try to fill in defensive ditches during the day, since they wanted to cross at particular points to attack a gap in the walls. The defenders would try to repair the walls, or re-excavate defensive ditches, at night when the Turkish arquebus and bow troops couldn’t see to shoot them, and also because just piling up / digging up rubble and earth didn’t require much precision.
Major naval operations around Constantinople all happened during the day, trying to do anything with multiple ships at night was just too difficult to coordinate and would lead to collisions, groundings, and other self-inflicted damage.
Interestingly the Turks did launch their infantry assaults at night, not during the day. I would guess that this was because there were a lot of guns in Constantinople, and attacking at night meant fewer casualties. However the Turkish infantry assaults had minimal success and heavy casualties until the final one, and I would guess that a large part of this was not being able to coordinate multiple assaults on different parts of the wall, and the Turkish command not being able to see where they were succeeding and send reinforcements. In earlier periods with less firepower the besiegers would be more likely to attack during the day under cover of their own missile troops.
Mining / tunnelling would be a 24/7 operation, as the light is always artificial and the small work zone would make it easy to run multiple shifts.
Yes, needing light to check your catapult, then setting the catapult on fire because your only light source is a bit too close, is both absurd and all too plausible.
Mediaeval night vision – there are accounts of defenders spreading chalk on the ground outside their defences to provide a pale background against which approaching attackers could be seen. And it’s still SOP to take a sight on every bush near your sentry position in daylight, so that if you see a bush after dark where it shouldn’t be, you’ll know it’s the opposition trying a bit of a Birnam Wood thing.
Indeed; I was surprised the body of the post itself doesn’t bring up such an obvious point!
Having said that; IF the Middle-Earth was apparently flat at this point in time, would it still have the same length of a diurnal-nocturnal cycle? I was near-certain there was going to be an xkcd on this subject, but after a few minutes of searching, the best I could find was the following, which only somewhat answers the question.
https://flatearth.ws/day-and-night
> The majority of the flat Earth models place the Arctic Ocean in the middle of the flat Earth, and Antarctica at the edge of it. The Sun is pictured floating and moving in a circle above it. The Sun’s area of light is limited to a circular area below it, like a spotlight.
> A problem: a simple observation of day and night cycles in a different area of the world cannot be explained in this flat Earth model.
> In such model of the Earth, a day near the equator will last only 8 hours, and night would have been about 16 hours long. Obviously, this is not consistent with real-world observations.
I imagine Tolkien had in mind the ancient version of flat-earth theory.
The earth has northern, eastern, southern, and western edges. The sun does what it appears to do: drops below the western edge of the world in the evening, spends the night below the world, and rises above the eastern edge in the morning.
This model can’t explain how you can get to the Far East by traveling west, which airplanes now do every day. I’m guessing that’s why modern flat-earthers adopted a different model.
As I recall, C.S. Lewis’s “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” features that ancient sort of flat earth.
Sure, that simple concept probably IS what such fiction (whether LOTR or Narnia, as mentioned below) assumes, but would it have ACTUALLY led to the 24-hour days, or would we see some other complication diverging the outcome from what we all observe in our daily lives? A serious treatment of this concept (Sun circling around a flat plane for 24 hours) with some physics/mathematics is what I was trying (and failing) to find earlier, instead having to settle for that description/debunking of the “flashlight model”.
Here, it’s probably worth noting that the 24-hour days we know to be true are not a constant, but a product of a complex interplay between the gravities of the Sun and Moon, and so the diurnal/nocturnal length actually varied substantially throughout the Earth’s long, long history.
https://www.space.com/how-sun-kept-earth-day-24-hours-long
This raises the question of how the gravity of the Sun and Moon would interact with that of a flat world. Obviously, the simple answer is that none of the celestial bodies in LOTR actually have any gravity, and it only exists within the confines of Middle-Earth’s atmosphere due to the will of the Eru. By extension, we have to assume that the same will is also what moves the tides, since a massless Moon clearly wouldn’t be doing that job.
So far so good, up until we start considering the implications. That is, if gravity is so obviously conditional in Middle-Earth, is there even a point in all the comparisons to real-world physics Our Gracious Host had done in the post above? If the world is flat and the Sun/Moon/stars are massless, what does it matter if untreated log trebuchets can survive the strain of their own operation, which trajectory the rocks they toss end up following, and with which kinetic energy they impact? Just say it’s more divine (diabolical?) intervention at hand. Same for the steam volcano and near-harmless pyroclastic flow in the preceding series (Rings of Power S1), broken logistics on all sides (in Jackson’s rendition) of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, or the implausibly strong trolls at Gondor/Minas Tirith?
To be clear, I do not advocate giving up on analysing the choices made by these creators and just “turning your brain off” (would I be here otherwise?) but it does illustrate there are limits to how much you can ultimately expect from even a fantasy work as venerable as LOTR. As was pointed out on here earlier, a similar argument is also valid for ASOIAF/GOT: just how much does it matter that Lannisters should not have the capacity to outfit their forces anywhere near as well as they do, that no city has the surroundings it needs to sustain itself, or even that King’s Landing should have never been a viable capital (since it’s impossible to transport grain via such a long land route without it getting eaten on the way) IF the multi-year winters we are told this setting has would almost certainly lead to a far more precarious world than what we see, even if all-year snowfall is mostly limited to the North and with “false springs” to enable agriculture (assuming such seasons are orbitally plausible in the first place, which I’m 50/50 on – if they aren’t, that’s the same point about conditional physics again.)
P.S. If one were to hypothetically set aside both LOTR and ASOIAF on these grounds, how much further do you think one would have to “fish down the food chain” of fantasy genre before encountering a work which can be reasonably claimed to exceed either on this specific kind of internal/external consistency? Something which still has fantasy elements, but doesn’t include astronomical/geological worldbuilding “details” with massive implications that are largely unexamined because otherwise they would completely rewrite the setting?
LotR is based on the world that our ancestors thought they lived in. They knew what it looks like when you throw a rock, so it looks like that in LotR. They knew the logistics of how armies work, so that applies to LotR. They didn’t know that the earth orbits the sun, so that probably doesn’t happen in LotR.
Exalted second edition makes similar astronomical / geological worldbuilding assumptions, and examines implications quite closely. For example, there’s a river which “naturally” flows uphill out of the sea, an ancient magitech desalination system built thereon, and a lot of fear and violence around someone’s attempt to repair it, restoring original performance spec… because that would alter output rates of substations, and thus the balance of power between city-states whose economy is primarily based on exporting magically extracted salt.
“By extension, we have to assume that the same will is also what moves the tides, since a massless Moon clearly wouldn’t be doing that job.”
Does Middle Earth even have tides?
“Does Middle Earth even have tides?”
Well, if it didn’t (or even if it just had the much weaker “solar tides” which would have been the only form present in the absence of a Moon), there would have been much fewer coastal wildlife like crabs. I am not sure about crabs, but seagulls are explicitly mentioned in the text, and they likely follow the same principle.
https://enviroliteracy.org/what-would-happen-to-the-ocean-if-the-moon-disappeared/#The_Immediate_Impact_A_World_Without_Tides
More to the point, if Middle-Earth eventually turned to our Earth, animals (and plants) which depend on tides had to have either already existed there, or somehow emerged rapidly even as the world altogether became less magical.
“Exalted second edition makes similar astronomical / geological worldbuilding assumptions, and examines implications quite closely.”
I have vaguely heard of that setting before, but I have never looked at it in more detail. It appears most people were like me – there only seem to be a handful of tie-in novels, and nothing like games or other forms of more materially intensive supporting material available not only for the ubiquitous DnD and Warhammer but “even” for say, Pathfinder or The Dark Eye (a German setting which got a surprising number of video games – from Realms of Arkania, to Drakensang to Blackguards to Chains of Satinav and its sequel Memoria (unlike the other three, not RPGs but rather point-and-click adventure games.) My favourite example, though, might be that of the DnD module Dragonlance spawning a bona fide musical in Russian, The Last Trial, which actually had been performed on stage several times.
A wonderful blog as usual. Thank you Bret. Excuse me for being overly pedantic, but you forgot a zero on one of the trebuchet shot weights, so it says 13 kg.
On the subject of fire arrows, you would do well to watch the Tod’s workshop video. Url here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNCU4WndtYk
I thought that, but if 13 kg is an error I don’t think it’s Bret’s. Bote the Wikipedia article on the Warwick Castle trebuchet, and their source https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/local-news/ursa-hurls-way-record-books-3123417, have the same figure. The newspaper also says 13.5 kg at one point, but never 135 or 130
I’m a complete layman, but I was just thinking the other day; the “siege” of Eregion might have seemed a bit more clever if the city didn’t have walls, and Adar distracts the elves by trying to take the city via the bridges or crossing on whatever cannoes he can scratch-build before making the attempt.
The elves laugh most of these off; the bridges are chokepoints that turn into a meatgrinder for the orcs, and the attempts to cross the river all fail because elven archers are hax.
And then we find out Adar sent an entire group of orcs up-river to find a place where they could (somehow) redirect the river, maybe by causing a rockslide with pickaxes and mallets. And then the elves just watch in dismay as the one thing keeping the orcs from swarming over their unwalled city drains away to a trickle.
Still not good, but I think it would have felt better than what we got.
One difference that strikes me about the people making these shows/movies is that Peter Jackson (and George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg) was a *filmmaker* — that is, he cut his teeth creating films from top to bottom, figuring out along the way how to turn each idea for a scene into a bit of visual storytelling, how to trick the audience into believing they saw what he wanted them to see, how to balance each special effect and camera angle with his overall vision for the larger film.
As far as I can tell, the showrunners for Rings of Power (like the showrunners for Game of Thrones) are *writers* — they got their experience in the industry by working in writers’ rooms at other TV series, in which they would come up with an idea for what needed to happen and then hand that idea off to technical people who would actually put together the scene on camera. And I wonder if that background, combined with an increasing reliance on CGI, lends itself to the people with the overall vision for the show delegating so many of the details that those details lose their connection to the story.
Maybe this isn’t actually an issue — I’m not an industry expert so I’m just speculating here — but as an audience member it often feels like RoP and the later seasons of GoT had scripts with a line that just said “[INSERT BATTLE SEQUENCE HERE]” and that was handed off to some other team.
The showrunners for every television show are writers; it’s baked into the production cycle of the medium. Though the showrunners for RoP appear to have had little-to-no TV experience; prior to being hired for this gig they did uncredited writing work on a few film scripts. The vagaries of writing credits are such that I won’t assume this means all their work was replaced or something. Who actually gets credit for a script in movies has a lot to do with guild arbitration and politics, and who gets credit for a script on a television show has a lot to do with the personality of the showrunner. Aaron Sorkin writes almost everything himself and insists on credit; David Milch, at least on Deadwood, wrote every line of dialogue himself but gave script credit to the writers on his staff, who helped him break the story; Whedon often did extensive rewrites on Buffy episodes (through season 5) without taking credit; I get the sense that the writers on The Wire were the primary authors of their credited episodes, etc. But RoP guys weren’t experienced TV writers, or indeed very experienced Hollywood writers of any kind.
In last week’s post I commented that older TV writers often talk about how changes in the production cycle mean young writers get much less opportunity to actually learn about how a script translates practically into a production shoot.
I read something a while back that although the show House had medical consultants, their job was not to come up with interesting medical conditions to inspire scripts, but to figure out what medical condition might conceivable match the cockamamie ideas the writers came up with
It seems to me, from both this post and “The Battlefield After the Battle”, linked in the introduction, that movie/game producers come up with these scenes backwards. The end product in both cases appears to be an answer to the question “we want a battle scene here where these things happen, figure out what it should look like to make it at least possible (if not plausible)”; rather than “this is the set/scene we have, figure out how a general would conduct a battle in this location”.
I’ve heard that Marvel movies often have a second team for shooting the fight scenes, often with little or no involvement from the overall director, which seems insane to me.
Second unit film direction is actually incredibly common and a well established part of film production. You even have many occasions in which a single individual sequence will have its own team, either for scheduling purposes or because their expertise fits it more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_unit
And Second Unit isn’t incompetent. Second Unit is frequently how directors gain the experience to become directors themselves on smaller productions. On a larger production like a Marvel film, having a 2nd unit handle specialized scenes (like fight scenes) makes a lot of sense. Second unit is also a natural fit for television, where directors are interchangeable and what matters is the style book for the show and the timeline from shooting to broadcasting is very fixed. I worked on several television shows where we had a different director every episode and there’s only 2 I can really remember because their style impacted production (positively in both cases – they were extremely efficient).
Also, “showrunner” was invented to clarify which of the Executive Producers actually does things as opposed to just funding things, because everyone and their dog got be EP. I very rarely saw anyone called a “showrunner” by the public on the actual set (and the one who did turn up bribed the crew with food to make up for what a gong show he made things whenever he directed – a good thing too or we might have mutinied). I do agree that most of these so-called showrunners lack practical experience or deep knowledge to make good decisions, and they have huge budgets and not enough people telling them “no.” Even Peter Jackson made worse movies with more money because you can CGI your way out of any problem, and he ought to know better. And there, too, we have the problems we see with armour design and video game approaches to warfare etc: the artists and designers working on these things have not studied the real thing, but instead are working off of existing designs which themselves have little basis in understanding how and why something works, and a shocking number of artists don’t study even basic anatomy.
And this is all before you get to the issue that shows like this are still usually on the same 8 day shooting schedule as far simpler productions, both recent and old, and if you are going to make half of a big budget epic movie in only 8 shooting days, there’s going to be a lot of sloppy shortcuts taken.
Well, I am confirmed in the rightness of my decision to not engage with this series.
“Sauron is also a magical being with great and undefined powers that might include directing his volcanic ash strategically to cover a region; Adar has no such supernatural abilities.”
To play devil’s advocate here, Adar having some undefined ability to, say, nudge the wind currents in the right direction could actually kinda fit with Tolkien. Tolkien leaves his magic fairly undefined, but there seems to usually be an element of both craft, involving physical matter, and a more ineffable application of spirit or willpower to it (which Elves seem to be better at than Men). Fëanor is able to create the Silmarils, gems that magically produce light, but says when they are stolen that he is unable to make more; it’s not a mere technological advancement, he’s put something of himself into them that can’t be replicated (much as the Two Trees cannot be remade). More recently, Celebrimbor has been making rings that produce magical effects like keeping things preserved beyond their natural time. Now, they’re both exceptional craftselves among the Eldar, but that’s a difference of quantity rather than quality. Theoretically you could imagine some other Elf (like Adar) who was able to craft a device that could produce (relatively subtle) effects like nudging the wind in the right direction, and I think that could actually fit not too uncomfortably with what Tolkien wrote. Maybe include some scenes with Adar carefully handling something and cryptically talking about how the winds would work for him to blow the smoke.
But given what I’ve seen from the show thus far (based on these posts), I doubt anything like that was actually thought out.
To be honest, at times I wonder if Feanor’s insistence that he could never remake the silmarils because they were the product of a one-time only burst of inspiration or the emotional energy invested in them or whatever was not just him being a bit of a diva.
I’m inclined to believe him, but I think it’s definitely open to that interpretation as well. He says he can’t remake the Silmarils directly after Yavanna (one of the more powerful of the Valar) admits she can’t remake the Two Trees. She does seem genuinely unable to remake them*, and it fits the whole epic prehistory narrative to have great deeds that can only be done once and never again, so from that perspective Fëanor may be telling the truth (or at least what he thinks is the truth). But given his tragic character flaws it would also absolutely be in character for him to just be being petty about it.
*She, unlike Fëanor, doesn’t seem to have any reason not to because of pride or whatever.
I assume this is like Sauron and the One Ring, you have to put part of yourself into a Great Creation like that, and you can’t get it back or grow a new one.
There’s actually a deeper theology behind it all-all creation comes from Iluvatar, what these magical individuals are actually doing is channeling the energy from creation into an object. They power doesn’t come from them, they aren’t generating it. They were gifted it when they themselves were created, so they’re like batteries that can’t be recharged. That said, all individuals, even magical ones; aren’t equal. Power flows hierarchically, first the Valar, then the Maia, then the Elves. The farther you get from the source within Middle Earth (the seat of Manwe in the West), either geographically or temporally, the weaker the magic gets. That’s why it’s fading in ME by the end of the 3rd Age.
“first the Valar, then the Maia, then the Elves.”
No, the Valar and Maiar are all coeval, the Ainur created by Eru. Some have power than others, but Maiar aren’t powered by Valar. Likewise, while Elves are generally weaker, and _learned_ from the Ainur, their power is their own.
“The farther you get from the source within Middle Earth (the seat of Manwe in the West)”
The apparent power gradient isn’t because Manwe (or his throne) is emitting power and it gets weaker further away, it’s just that almost all of the powerful beings ended up settling in the West, and gathered a lot of the elves to them as well. Someone who moved from Aman to the far east would be just as powerful. (At least at first. There’s some second order stuff of Morgoth having corrupted Middle-earth more, so there’s faster ‘fading’ there than in Aman.)
(And of course all that is in the context of the Flat World, before it was rounded near the end of the Second Age.)
Isn’t part of the reason he couldn’t remake them that they were using the light of the trees? And well, the trees are gone. (this is also why the Valar wants him to turn them over, so they could remake the trees)
I think when Fëanor says that he couldn’t remake them, he’s saying that’s the case even if their sacrifice allows Yavanna to successfully revive the trees and bring their light back, not that he can’t make more now that the trees are dead (which everyone in his audience would already know).
More simply, Elrond controlled the river at Imladris (though he was boosted by Vilya, his Ring), and the Witch-king (not even an elf, though with his own Ring and Sauron’s covert backing) was believed by the Snow-folk to control the northern weather (this in Appendix A.) So there would be some textual argument for a powerful elf controlling winds.
Additional trebuchet physics point: the counterweight is a box (not a round bag of rocks) so that it can be narrow, so that the frames can be close to each other and the axle can be kept short. This is mostly because the axle is (potentially) subject to much higher bending loads than any other part of the trebuchet.
“That’s not an accident: your catapult loses power the more of its range it has to use (because these big projectiles are slowing down in flight) so to smash walls, towers and crenelations, you want to get your catapult as close as possible, and so you’re designing for what is, effectively, the closest safe range.”
Not quite. “Big rocks” have ample ballistic coefficient.
The reason is that getting a (fixed) trebuchet to shoot farther by using a lighter projectile is taxing on the structure, approaching “dry-firing” at the logical limit. The higher the velocity with which the projectile leaves the trebuchet, the faster its moving components have to move during the shot, thus the higher the loads (accelerations; since the components aren’t massless, this means forces) they are subject to, and likewise, when/”after” the projectile departs, the more energy is left in the motion of the components, which has to be dissipated somewhere.
It is possible to change the design (longer firing arm and sling, taller frame — leaving the counterweight and arm unchanged, to keep energy fixed) but the longer firing arm in particular makes the whole design more difficult to implement.
“leaving the sling with an impressive 367,500 joules of kinetic energy (though of course it won’t deliver anything like that many to the target, because of air resistance and the high firing arc)”
The high firing arc doesn’t matter; that merely converts the kinetic energy into (gravitational) potential energy, from which it gets converted right back into kinetic energy when on the other leg of the parabola the projectile descends to the target. This would only matter if the impact point were significantly above (or possibly below) the trebuchet (‘s projectile release point).
Air resistance (as a force) is proportionate to the cross-sectional area of the projectile and to the square of the velocity, but the mass is proportionate to the volume, thus the bigger the projectile, the lower the deceleration it suffers. And, relative to gunpowder weapons, the lower velocity makes it much less important.
Re: the high firing arc mattering– the thing is, the part of your projectile’s velocity that matters vs. the fortifications you’re using it on is that perpendicular to the wall. Sure, you get that energy back when the rock comes down, but that vector of force isn’t very effective for damaging walls and is essentially wasted.
In fact, isn’t this the same point brought up in one of the earliest Collections on here – the one about kiting archers? That is, the simple math where impacts against armour at an angle become exponentially less effective as the slope increases. I don’t see why that principle wouldn’t apply to stones hitting stones.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/
If your projectile (or its shattered remains) glances off the wall or armor, the vertical/parallel component is indeed wasted. However, if it does penetrate (i.e. puts a dent into) the surface of the target, thus the downward movement of the projectile/remains is arrested by the wall, the downward component of the energy is made good use of. In particular, it would tend to move the face of the wall below the impact point forward, bulging it out, where it can outright fall down.
With arrows impacting armor, the situation is different inasmuch as the target has a more complex structure. Even if all the energy is still used — to chew up the armor more comprehensively — but less is spent on actually wounding the target, will not make the shooter dance a jig out of joy. But if what we have is a rain of plumbata against unarmored targets, they will inflict wounds just as grievous as if they had been thrown horizontally at point-blank range.
But the downward force mostly just moves your stone downward into relatively elastic earthen foundations, possibly doing superficial damage, but that sort of damage isn’t going to get you an actual breach. It’s not entirely useless, but it’s enough less effective that Dr. Devereaux is entirely justified in discounting a portion of the energy of the trebuchet launch.
Depends on your target. If you are hitting the face of a wall, then you are correct. But if you are hitting the top of the wall to cause parts of the walkway break apart, it is just as good as a directly horizontal hit against the face. And if like here you hit deep into the city into random buildings, it matters little since their roofs are unlikely to be strengthened significantly
I mean, if you hit deep into the city at random buildings, 100% of the energy of your trebuchet is wasted. Hitting the top of the wall is a little better, but only if you are specifically trying to suppress the defenders as part of a broader attack.
Even cannons are never going to turn a city wall into a flat walkway, so even if you are trying to knock down the wall the main value of doing that is that it breaks the path on top of the wall. The field of rubble created by the breaching of the wall does create a place that needs extra defenders, but you wouldn’t want to fight there, you’d just threaten to have your troops clamber through if it becomes undefended. You do want to increase the number of places defenders have to be, but mostly you want to make it hard for them to move defenders in response to you moving your forces.
Other than knocking down the wall, you can do a lot of worthwhile damage to the wooden stuff that a besieged city normally builds on top of the wall at the last minute, and if there are permanent stone merlons it’s a lot easier to break those off than it is to damage the main body of the wall.
Re high firing arcs, there’s also the (potentially small) factor of a higher firing arc providing more time for aerodynamic drag to sap energy from the projectile compared to a more level direct shot.
Unlikely to a huge factor provided your projectiles are reasonably aerodynamic, but not a non-existent one.
That’s a big factor for light projectiles that move quickly (arrows, bullets), but negligible for heavy things that move relatively slowly (massive rocks). That’s because drag scales as velocity^2 x area, while the momentum it’s eroding goes as mass x velocity. So far a heavy, dense projectile not moving particularly fast, there just isn’t enough drag for the momentum to be meaningfully affected.
By “a coincidence” in physics and math, this isn’t a consideration at all.
Both kinetic energy and air drag are proportionate to the square of the velocity, and anything that goes with a square can (by Pythagoras) be separated into perpendicular components. Furthermore, energy is force*distance (your physics book probably calls it “displacement”). (Force*time is momentum. Note that the development towards higher projectile speeds means less momentum per each Joule of energy, showing that energy is what we care about.)
Thus for a fixed projectile (your standard ammunition) and a fixed distance (from the firing position to the target), air resistance will always consume a fixed proportion of the horizontal component of the muzzle energy, independently of the muzzle velocity. This is rather unintuitive and not really applicable to trebuchets (you always want to shoot with maximum counterweight height), but it is interesting for cannons, where you might want to use reduced charges to decrease barrel wear, and where the compensation (slightly increased launch angle) needed to hit the target doesn’t take much from the total energy available (and where cannonballs reliably penetrate into the wall, thus the vertical energy component gets to be useful anyway).
And of course as holdthebreach pointed out above: air resistance goes as the area (square), energy&momentum go with the volume (cube), thus the bigger the rock, the proportionately less the air matters. If we ignore the shape, what matters is the length of the projectile and the density of the material it is made of.
Classic “tunnel then collapse/explode the tunnel” attacks were used repeatedly in the Syrian Civil War with video evidence, which is “more recently”.
I believe that a trebuchet was used in the 2013 siege of Aleppo (you really do have specify the date of sieges of Aleppo; there have been more than a dozen).
Also during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
I recently saw a Chinese movie (Creation of the Gods) featuring traction trebuchets. I didn’t know what they were until I read this post.
As seen briefly in https://youtu.be/0ucTl-cxIjc?si=Rju8hRHkDrIfUd8L&t=82
Could not find the full scene using English search terms.
If it helps, it’s in the first or second scene. (Not sure if the opening narration should count as a scene.)
The respawning city almost reminds me of a video game cut-scene; yes there’s a lot going on but once we get back to the game, it’s all just the same models that were there before with maybe a fire effect thrown on. All the money in the world for this, and they couldn’t even find a showrunner with object permanence. Sad stuff!
my understanding is that large scale hydraulic engineering has been used in stage warfare for a long time. The example that leaps to mind is Cyrus diverting the Euphrates in order to attack Babylon through the streambed. General Pope built a canal to get around the Confederate fortress at Island Number 10 during the American Civil War.
But normally, I believe you do this by building a diversion canal and not by damming the river. This feels like another example where the writers made up something that won’t work instead of borrowing from a nearby historical example that would have been approximately as cool.
Yes, I considered bringing in canal diversion when writing this, but figured it was long enough as is, so I moved that to next week’s commentary on the ‘ground assault.’ But yes, if you were going to do it, you have it exactly right how you would do it.
I am also reminded of the 1629 siege of ‘s Hertogenbosch (or Den Bosch for short or ‘the Swamp Dragon’ for cool) where the attacking Dutch troops not only diverted two streams that fed the swamps *but then engineered the actual draining of the swamps*, because just stopping the water going in is not enough!
Fun fact, the last name of the engineer leading this effort was Leeghwater, which means Emptywater in Dutch.
In “Destiny’s Shield”, the third book of the Belisarius series by David Drake and Eric Flint, Belisarius builds a dam which is just overtopped until he blows open an old canal. And then later reverses both changes to kill the enemy in a flood. Thought the main idea both times is to destroy the shipping and ruin the enemy’s logistics.
This sort of ‘engineering the enemy to death’ approach is very common in science fiction and fantasy, I suspect due to both the personal proclivities of many of the authors and because it’s an easy way to give the main characters all of the agency in a large battle instead of boiling success and failure down to whether a bunch of faceless soldiers keep it together.
I associate this kind of battle writing most of all with Code Geass, which never could find a decent way to write ‘genius rebel defeats huge imperial army’ that didn’t involve having the battle on top of some terrain feature or another that was ready to catastrophically collapse.
This sort of ‘engineering the enemy to death’ approach is very common in science fiction and fantasy, I suspect due to both the personal proclivities of many of the authors and because it’s an easy way to give the main characters all of the agency in a large battle instead of boiling success and failure down to whether a bunch of faceless soldiers keep it together.
It’s used several times by Iain M. Banks – including in “Use of Weapons”, where it provides a couple of examples of the main character’s skill at using literally anything that comes to hand as a weapon. But it’s fairly realistically treated – blowing a dam to flood out an enemy’s attempt to cross the river downstream of the dam, that sort of thing.
Worth noting that, under current LOAC, it is actually a war crime. (Installations which contain “dangerous forces” may not be attacked – the two examples normally given are dams and nuclear power plants.)
Use of Weapons guy was all about war crimes…
Gives me flashbacks of King of Thorns, which was part 2 of one of the more notorious “ASOIAF clone” series (basically imagine having Joffrey as an outcast protagonist in a modern-day world which collapsed to medieval tech levels and fiefdoms after magic (re)emerged decades/centuries ago). There, the final battle was about the protagonist’s mountain fiefdom getting stormed by a massively numerically superior army and featured the following stratagems:
* Feigned retreat from the battlefield through mountain paths, intended to enable as many of the pre-stocked rocks to be dumped onto the pursuers’ heads as possible;
* After the above wasn’t enough; some weird “bamboo tech” (I think it was sheep’s bladders rigged to explode somehow (possibly tied over campfires or something?) which then proceeded to trigger an outright avalanche.
* A bunch of other stuff after he and his troops retreat to their castle: the one I vaguely recall was a magical ruby of his child bride which absorbed heat energy, so it was tossed into a fire, and then thrown from the battlements to explode with approximately the power of a modern artillery shell.
* Calling a duel with enemy leader and bringing a gun to a swordfight.
* Finally, just the protagonist exploiting his preceding magical infection by both shards of a necromancer and a top pyromancer (both now attempting to bind his spirit to serve through those footholds) to blast waves of those energies from his hands until those two burned each out – while killing thousands in the process.
In contrast, the previous book resolved the question of “how would the protagonist and his few followers take on a large capital city” by…having him discover a “Builders’ Sun” (that is, a nuclear warhead, still-functional after all those years.) Up to you whether that counts as better or worse, I suppose. (Earlier in the second book, the necromancers pursuing him also summon ghosts of that bomb to haunt him, but as their killer, he manages to claim control over them and turns them to kill the necromancers and their zombie army.)
For what it’s worth, that book was rated 4th for “Best Fantasy” by users of Goodreads in the year it came out, with over 4,000 votes. I guess we can draw our own conclusions from that.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2012#74614-Best-Fantasy
The City Wissenbourg in the French Elssac region was taken in the late 15th century, by daming the river Lauter and flodding the city with an deliberate breach of the dam. In fact that event even influenced the design of the parts of the Maginot line close to the city.
And flodding the city with a artificial flood, would probably still have been a better idea for Adar, as he planned to slaughter the inhabitants anyway, so taking the city intact was no priority.
ISTR a few historical examples of engineered flooding as well. That is, dam a river below the target of the siege and take advantage of the new lake to isolate or damage it. Probably not useful given a target built at the foot of a mountain, but honestly… having the Elven-smiths mysteriously choose to put all their fortifications and/or sources of drinking water below the potential flood line makes no less sense than a bunch of other issues Bret has pointed out.
Mountainside: they evidently thought about the destructiveness issue. It didn’t help.
If you look at the shot demonstrating the preposterous range, and perhaps freeze-frame while the projectiles are still in flight, you can see that at the bottom of the massive boulder(s?) there is a smallish rock, and the projectile(s) hit that. Thus they knock out (demolish?) the support against which the massive boulder sits, and it simply tumbles down, in the process dislodging further, similarly loosely supported massive boulders.
Which is not how mountains work. I suppose it’s par for the course after season one’s volcano? Though I must remark that unlike a volcanic eruption, one can just — whenever one wishes! — go and look at what mountainsides look like, because for the most part they tend to remain unchanged for a long time.
Furthermore, this introduces the question of how the orcs hit the smallish rock. The vicinity of the massive boulder is lacking in reliable size cues, but my impression is that the smallish rock is not much bigger than the projectile itself, which would imply that they scored a direct hit on a perhaps human-sized target from several miles away. Which is not even tube artillery, but homing missile levels of accuracy.
I found myself wondering why the heck there were all these carefully propped up rocks on top of the mountain in the first place. Wouldn’t simple erosion, let alone an earth tremor, have dislodged them long ago?
My working fan theory is just as some humans make rock pile sculptures, way back in the First Age some elf or dwarf with delusions of grandeur created Middle Earth’s most humungous balancing rock structure, on top of a mountain. Ost-in-Edhil has some kind of cultural preservation committee that checks and re-props the rocks on a regular basis.
And as much as that explanation would fail to solve all the other problems, it could at the very least have been easily set up. The show has been to this city multiple times before. They could have spared a few lines of dialog where, if nothing else, a main character excuses themselves to a secondary character (or Celebrimbor) because, unfortunately, they will not be present at the yearly celebration/remembrance/whatever at the Balancing Rocks Monument because their urgent Sauron-hunting duties interfere with that. If they had even a minute to spare, they could have reused a “Galadriel and others stand motionless on the ship’s deck”-style arrangement for a somber occasion, right next to the Balancing Rocks Monument, with a brief but anvil-droppingly obvious reference to what the background is. (“Just as these stones are [held] in precarious equipoise, the soul…” / “Our ancestors carefully balanced these stones to remind…”) It isn’t even necessary to change the renderings to something more like an obelisk, rough-finished megalithic monuments exist from the stone age (though it would be weird, given that the elves build cities from nicely carved masonry).
That would have turned Adar’s demolition of the site into a desecration, adding poignancy or some other emotional beat to the act, which would make audiences much more forgiving of all the related unrealism. Alas, setup is like city walls.
Or, instead of balancing rocks, make them huge statues like the Argonath in LotR. That would add a hint of desecration to their destruction.
Man that idea was *right there* and they didn’t take it.
A whole bunch of other things could also have been set up by repeatedly referencing an Elvish penchant for naturalistic megaconstruction. That is how the elves are shown in the Middle Earth books, and while the Simarillion seems to focus more on handicrafts it would not be out of place to depict the entirety of Eregion as a designed space full of paved riverbeds and rooftop agriculture and impossibly grand balanced standing stones.
In the European Alpes, we have an increasing number of rock slides / rock falls / mudflows due to climate change – the material was loosened during the ice ages, mostly by frost splitting / weathering, moved around by glaciers (sometimes left quite high above the valley floor) and often stabilized by permafrost. Higher temperatures – permafrost thawing – higher chance of mass movements and higher danger for human lives.
And no – I do not think the showrunners ever asked anyone with even a basic knowledge of geomorphology about this scene. When I was watching it for the first time, I couldn’t look away – the stupid, it hurts.
If those orcs ever decided to turn to less murderous pursuits, they could probably find excellent employment in either construction or some kind of stunt show.
Or showrunning for Amazon Prime, apparently.
Do you know where such conveniently precariously placed rocks are common? Cartoons! Maybe the comparison with the Wiley Coyote catapult in the first comment is even more apt for this scene.
Dangerously balanced giant rocks are something of a normal hazard in the American Southwest.
“Fortunately for ancient and medieval pyromaniacs”
Lol! Loved this line, was a complete surprise!
A few corrections:
study → sturdy
Maiar-disguised-as-an-elf → Maia-disguised-as-an-elf
darken the sky with for his army → darken the sky with smoke for his army
I’m curious, why “Maia” instead of “Maiar”? They seem to be used pretty much interchangeably in Tolkien, unless there’s a euphony condition I missed, or something like that?
“Maia” is singular. “Maiar” is plural. Same with Vala and Valar.
Sometimes it’s the simplest things…thanks.
A terminal “r” as a plural marker is found in some (many?) Teutonic languages, so it would have come readily to Tolkien.
“I suspect in actual practice, it would violently wash those stones away – or at least enough of them to force a passage – and Adar would have succeeded in creating rapids, not a dam”
This is largely correct. Dam failures of this nature tend to be extremely rapid and absolutely catastrophic for everyone downstream. The only error is just how bad this would be for the orcs trying to cross the stream; it would absolutely kill almost if not all of them.
Dams are ENGINEERED, not simply dumped in place. This is because there is a LOT of water behind them. This creates several problems. First, at the base there’s a lot of pressure–which, if your dam is shoddy and consists of a single rock dumped into a river bed, is going to mean you have a lot of leaks spraying water like fire hoses, undermining your dam. Second, the water at the top of the dam really, really wants to be much lower than it is (gravitational potential energy). Once a dam starts overtopping it can erode astonishingly quickly. Remember, this isn’t going to be a still pool slowly draining; once it starts flowing it’s going to churn up mud and debris, which means it’ll be sand-blasting and power-washing this rock at the same time. This tends to end badly for anything downstream. And by that I mean, towns downstream would very quickly STOP EXISTING. And the plan is to march the orcs through the absolute worst possible area in all this….
But it gets worse. Rivers are only a portion of the equation. A river is, fundamentally, groundwater that’s been exposed–the area AROUND the river is often quite wet, for quite a ways (see the Colorado River Authority if you want a good lesson in this). And that water really, really wants to go somewhere. Saturated soils can easily give way; this is in fact how earth dams often fail. So you’d see the river rapidly remove the mud around the rock. You can also get groundwater to leach out of the ground in unexpected places (like where folks have dug holes to camp in) when you pile a bunch of water on top of itself. Not necessarily gushing springs, but those trebuchets could easily discover that their ground is no longer stable, and your camp could turn into a pond real quick.
Real dams deal with this in a few ways. First, they are massive undertakings; the scale of some dams is simply mind-blowing. Second, they curve, with the convex side facing towards the reservoir. This creates an arch, which supports the massive pressures generated by the water. They also have spillways and other control measures to prevent overtopping and other failure states. And they extend a fair way beyond where you’d think they’d stop, anchoring the dam in relatively dry soils. They deal with groundwater popping up around the river by extensive surveys and analysis (we’re talking years), and simply accepting that a certain amount of this will happen (which is probably part of the reason why a lot of reservoirs have recreational areas around them).
What I’d expect to see is that the rock would fall and temporarily reduce stream flow. But the stream flow near the rock would rapidly accelerate, creating a tremendous amount of mud and debris right where the orcs want to walk. if they’re too close to the dam they could also be caught in eddy currents that are certain death; between the eddies, the sand-blasting, and the mere force of the water I’d be astonished if there was enough left to find any bodies. If they’re further away, they’re still dealing with thousands if not millions of tons of water, rocks, bits of orc, and other material hitting them in the face. All while literally drowning in mud (I measured mud with cheesecake consistency to 4 feet once, couldn’t go deeper because of OSHA excavation requirements.)
This is, to be clear, not an out-of-context problem for the producers. This happened in material they had the rights to. The Nine were wiped out by a MUCH smaller flood, one that Gandalf was worried would destroy Frodo, Aragorn, Glorfindel, and the rest of the party. This is also literally how the Ents wiped out Isengard. THEY KNEW THIS IS HOW FLOODS WORKED.
If they were going to drop this rock a better plan would be to block the river with branches, logs, and mud (from the forest they went through), and then ferry the orcs across UPSTREAM of the temporary dam, where the water is more placid for a while. But even that is a stupid plan because they could just skip the rock and ferry across the river, like Sauron’s army does in Osgiliath!
Hydraulics are arguably one of the hardest fields of applied physics. There is a reason why one of the biggest contributors to the field was the literal son of Einstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Albert_Einstein
“All while literally drowning in mud (I measured mud with cheesecake consistency to 4 feet once, couldn’t go deeper because of OSHA excavation requirements.)”
When Hoover Dam was constructed, after diverting the Colorado River through four tunnels, the next step was clearing the river-bottom debris. I don’t recall the exact figure, but it was something like 60 feet of mixed boulders, rock, and silt before they hit bedrock.
Hearing how much engineering goes into a dam, I’m kind of amazed that beavers manage it all the time with logs.
It makes you think: if Gandalf could have giant eagles rescue Frodo from Mt Doom, why can’t Adar just have giant beavers dam the river for this assault?
Mostly they build in relatively small streams. The mesh-like network of branches and twigs and logs acts like a filter, allowing a lot of that stuff that rivers carry to get caught and actually strengthen the dam (when it doesn’t plow through it and destroy it). In contrast, if the dam is hard a bunch of small hits can build up into a large one; a rock doesn’t care if the force is one giant thing hitting it or ten thousand small things hitting it, it cares that the force is great enough to pulverize or move it. (Which one it does is a whole thing in geology; check out the Beer Can Experiment if you want the details!)
And beaver dams fail fairly often; videos of these are a good way to see some of the processes I mentioned. Sometimes it wipes out the whole dam, sometimes it damages individual sections that are rebuilt, sometimes it hurts the dam but doesn’t break it. I’ve been able to watch a few beaver dams over the course of several years and they are a surprisingly dynamic hydraulic feature.
Plus, beavers have a major advantage over this army: dedicated maintenance crews. You can paper over a lot of engineering sins by constantly repairing/replacing components. We tend not to do this as humans because holy cow does that cost a lot (fences being a notable exception), but what else do beavers have to do with their time? I suppose an army of orcs could in theory constantly patch up a poorly-built dam (the image of a thousand orcs sticking fingers and toes into cracks in the dam springs to mind!), but you need the dam to be built of a bunch of individual components for that to work well. You can’t do that with a dam consisting of a single rock; once the rock breaks, any orcs in or near the rivered are going to quickly become undifferentiated organic matter!
Yep, a local place where I live had an old mill with a millpond and dam just for demonstration. Like three decades or so there was a huge storm and the thing burst and it was a complete disaster, swept a way houses, etc. And that was just a very tiny pond with some actual flowthrough, etc.
These considerations are all very interesting. What is alarming though is that, for a pretty good understanding of the first-order effects here all the experience required is to have built a sandcastle on the beach. Was this show written by lizard people?
Modern dams are hopefully engineered and hopefully well inspected and the workers hopefully paid enough not to do a half-assed job. Older dams have been made by more or less dumping things into place. The Edenville Dam comes to mind; that dam was built in the 1920s and lacked various modern practices that help reduce the odds of failure. The Taum Sauk Dam may also have had poor compaction of material.
Not-so-modern dams can be made by dumping in place, likely a landslide that carries quite a lot of stuff into the river channel. “Quite a lot” may sometimes come with labels such as the “Bridge of the Gods”. The resulting lake formed by the Columbia River was estimated by a research geologist (Jim O’Connor) to take about six months to form, or plenty of time for a siege, assuming you can cause a sufficient landslide, or summon glaciers, and can traverse the resulting river channel well enough.
These things can occur, sure. This is how a lot of glacial lakes form, for example–stuff piles up and blocks the flow, creating a bunch of water behind it.
There are some significant differences between these (and the early earthen dams) and what happens in ROP. These all involve dirt, not a single rock–and that makes a tremendous difference! Dirt is a pile of stuff, often with a wide range of grain sizes–one way you can identify glacial material is that the grain sizes are absurdly variable, for example. And this matters, because of that filtration thing I mentioned above with beaver dams. If you have a variety of grain sizes they act as nets between one another (the actual processes are a lot more complicated, but that’s the simplest way to think about it). The material interlocks in complex ways, mitigating forces applied to any one area.
There are also issues with how the material is put in place. How sediment moves through the water, for example–heavier stuff will settle out first, creating a fairly solid core that’s then filled in and surrounded by smaller material (it’s called normal bedding for precisely this reason). It’s not going to be perfect, of course, and you don’t want it to be if you want the dam to remain in place, but generally that’s what’s going to happen. Likewise, the angle of repose will result in the natural dam having a broad base, maximizing the amount of material precisely where the pressures will be maximum.
In contrast, a rock is either going to stay in place (causing the water to flow around it) or break apart (causing the water to flow through it). It MAY allow for a buildup of material behind it, but it’d have to be a particularly muddy river to do that–and then you have to deal with the fact that mud and debris have mass, which needs to decelerate as it hits the dam, meaning the rock absorbs that force. The rock is unlikely to land broad-side-down, meaning it’s going to be weak where pressures are maximized.
Also, note that the river is curving. This matters, because it’s going to be depositing material in some areas and eroding them in others. Put a big rock in and you’ll decrease the area through which the water flows, increasing pressure (unless you completely stop it), maximizing erosion. Or you create a new erosional feature as the water flows around the dam. Not such a big deal toward the city, but that right-hand bank (in the photo in the post) is going to be pretty rapidly removed. That material is mud deposited by the river from upstream–firm enough to stand on no doubt, but hardly well-graded and compacted, or Class A soils. The river already wants to bend in that direction, it’s just going to bend a lot faster than the orc army wants.
Finally, there’s volume to consider. A landslide can move a tremendous amount of material–enough that it becomes visible on geologic maps. This boulder simply isn’t going to have that much material in it. And given that this rock is on a fairly craggy surface it’s not going to generate the sort of landslide necessary to do so–you really need loose material to generate large landslides of that nature, and the process of generating that material precludes having spires of rock like this (those spires would become loose material very rapidly). The difference is likely on the scale of an order of magnitude or more (I’d have to do some serious calculations to figure that out, and not enough info is given in the photos to do more than a rough guess), which has profound implications for this assessment. A million tons of dirt simply acts differently from a ten thousand ton rock.
The trouble with trying to surprise the audience, is that the audience generally expects the characters to behave sensibly. So the most reliable way to surprise the audience is to have the characters behave senselessly.
Personally I would have thought that the obvious way to handle a siege by the villains is to have it advance with an awful inevitability, so that the good guys can see what is going to happen, they just cannot do anything about it.
I feel like this could really work with a ramp assault. Have characters engaging ladder attacks, rams, catapult fire, etc. and periodically cut to the ramp growing ever taller, arrows sweeping the battlements it’s being built towards.
That does sound like a good way to do it. For a gunpowder age siege, I suppose you could replace the ramp with earthworks getting ever closer, and the siege guns being emplaced in closer batteries.
Typos as well as a few other suggestions:
“They’re built, for some reason, from unsawn, unplaned timber rather than planed wood, lashed together with rope” / “…planed wood and are lashed together with rope” would make it clearer that the “lashed together with rope” goes with the “unsawn, unplaned timber” part and not the “planed wood” part.
“…well-constructed and study.” / sturdy.
“Catapults were precision machines, the height of engineering in their day and they needed…” / Comma after day.
“…the beam (that is, the firing and counterweight arms) are…” / beams (alternatively, is instead of are).
“…a large, top-topped wooden box…” / Not sure, but not “top”-topped.
“Making the sling longer so that it can rotate around the end of the firing arm even as that rotates around the axle of the trebuchet, allows for…” / Comma after longer (or none after trebuchet, but having them helps break up the long sentences a bit).
“…distance in front of the catapult as rather than getting a nice…” / I would stick a comma after catapult as well.
“…caused by the bucket decelerating due to the counterweight…” / bucket’s (strictly, although I feel like my correction is slipping out of common usage, so take it or leave it. But strictly, it should be the same as e.g. their being/them being).
“…standard in video games, but were relatively uncommon historical and…” / “…standard in video games but were relatively uncommon historically, and…”
“…on that communicates the power of the orcs in raw numbers…” / one. Also, “the power of the orcs in raw numbers” required a second look and then a little scrolling up and down for me to figure out the meaning.
“…developed from two-arm ancient torsion designed…” / designs.
“Part of this error, I think, goes into assuming first incorrectly that catapults were essential for sieges (they were not) that therefore every era after their invention must have some sort of common catapult.” / I think this was meant to be “incorrectly assuming first that A and therefore that B,” in which case move “incorrectly,” reverse the order of “that” and “therefore,” and add the missing “and.”
“Now, there are two sets of problems here: a tactical problem and a munitions problem. Let’s start with the tactical problem.” / tactical problems and munitions problems. (since they’re sets)
“…waits for the river to subside, by which point presumably the fires have largely burnt out and then launches his assault.” / comma after out.
“You might, for instance, smash up building and light fires…” / buildings.
“That’s not a factor here: Adar has committed himself to a strategy of killing everyone in the city, so there’s little to be gained from surrender and thus little to be gained by trying to demoralize the defenders.” / Not a proofreading comment, but e.g. negotiating in bad faith with enemy leaders or inducing a demoralized wall guard to treachery could still shorten a siege even if the attacker actually intends a massacre. I presume though that the actual point is that Adar doesn’t attempt such things.
“If Adar wants to darken the sky with for his army…” / Missing word, presumably smoke.
“…the showrunners have a had time keeping track…” / hard.
“…wrap or cord soaked in something flammable oils or pitch…” / either delete something or, e.g., add a such as with a comma.
“Note the catapult to the left and the counterweight hanging down from the rigid coil of ropes”
Not a typo, but I spent too long staring at the counterweight hanging in the upper left of the shot, trying to figure out what you meant, before realizing which one you were referring to.
“was in theory designed to throw projectiles up to 150kg up to 300m; its record shot was a 13kg projectile hurled 249m”
I’m assuming 13kg is meant to be 130kg, because otherwise that doesn’t seem terribly impressive.
No, the 13kg appear to be correct. However, it’s in the context of setting a world record for long distance, meaning that they deliberately chose a projectile optimised for range.
On trebuchet with wheels:
NOVA did a special on medieval sieges and built a couple of full size trebuchet:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/trebuchet/builds.html
They built 2 designs. The first was the standard weight in a swinging box design you described.
The second had the counterweight wrapped around the bottom of the swing arm. (Somewhat like the trebuchet in the Seige of Gondor) They found that when they put wheels on this design range improved. Apparently the wheels let the frame move back and forth giving the same advantage as having the weight in a swinging box
That seems terribly hazardous for an operating crew in a battle situation trying to rapidly operate the machine.
Are the actual operating crew, as opposed to the builders, going to be anyone the commanders would actually care about though? I can understand that it’s harder to apply slavery to catapult winding than it is to galley rowing, but would the people providing the muscle ultimately have a social position more like a porter or more like an officer?
In the original Rome: Total War, siege weapon crews (via bug maybe?) had double HP and double morale so they made excellent holding infantry while you lined up flanking attacks, especially on the walls. Please tell me that’s not how it actually should work.
Yes, but is it more dangerous then a 36-pounder, rolling and bouncing backward, in some field work battery?
Or a 24-pounder on a truck firing in the Roaring 40s, with the deck going through something like 60 or even more degrees due to pitch, yaw, and roll?
Or sitting in a tank surrounded by explosives that’ll blow your turret off like a jack-in-a-box?
Or charging first into the breach of a wall during a siege?
The reality is that “This is dangerous for the crew operating it” has never been a limiting factor in war. War is INHERENTLY dangerous, and some necessary tasks are going to have associated body counts, that’s just how it is. It’s an issue that’s generally resolved via training. The threat area is pretty limited, and when the thing’s being fired there’s nothing you can do in that area anyway so there’s zero reason NOT to pull your people out of that danger zone. Accidents happen (any record of naval history shows that!), but it doesn’t take much to teach people not to be directly in the line of fire of the large, heavy weapon of death and destruction while it’s dealing death and destruction.
Yeah, wheels make the fixed counterweight trebuchet much more efficient and even help a little with the swinging counterweight.
Major disadvantage with wheels is that now all the weight goes onto the axles. The counterweight for a big trebuchet is a ton or more all by itself. If the frame is resting on the ground the stress/pressure is distributed fairly evenly. With wheels, there’s now enormous pressure from the frame down onto the axles, and most trebuchet builders didn’t have access to modern ball bearings. If the axles jam or break, you’re no better off than before. If the ground isn’t flat and even, or one wheel jams but the others don’t, the weight will twist the frame and weaken or break something.
The swinging weight is also under considerable stress, but it’s still simpler and more reliable.
The show is here on youtube, youtube.com/watch?v=QVO8VznqMeQ (no idea about links marked as spam, so type the www. stuff yourself if needed.) TL:DR fixr counterweight, wheels good.
I once saw a (small, 3 feet high) demo catapult built by a middle school science club. It was a design I’ve seen before but can’t seem to find now–I hope I’m going to describe this in somewhat comprehensible way–
The counterweight was on a somewhat elaborate pulley (?) system, whereby it was drawn back beneath the catapult almost to the point where the counterweight was beneath the bucket (in this case containing a tennis ball). On firing, the weight whipped forward, up, back and down and finally tripped the arm, shooting the tennis ball into the air.
I think there was some experimental aspect to it, where the interested public could test different pull-back points for the counterweight to see what that did to distance and trajectory.
Can anyone tell me what the hell I’m talking about?
This sounds like a somewhat confused description of a floating arm trebuchet, which is a popular modern design that gets crazy range with relatively small projectiles. The design is basically to have a directly vertical drop path for the counterweight, and the axle that the arm pivots on is moving along a _horizontal_ track. When set up to fire it’s arranged with the arm basically entirely vertical underneath the counterweight, and it snaps out and around and down again to launch the projectile.
Fun, works well and gets super high velocity, probably doesn’t scale to real siege use, not really practical without modern bearings and materials.
Dr. Devereaux, please spare the Wheel of Time your savage pen. If that (book) series is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
The old TV miniseries “Masada” (1980?) actually may have done the best job of showing how an ancient siege might have played out in historically accurate terms. Should be revisited!
Trebuchets being one of the more advanced siege engines of the Middle Ages, I’m surprised the Orcs even have the smarts to build one in the first place, no matter how sloppy.
In the context of the books, the orcs have the smarts – they are the imperialists and industrialists. The “crude-looking weapon” aesthetics of the films are basically a Peter Jackson/Weta invention at odds with the implications of Tolkien’s words.
But in the context of the series, we do seem to have a severe case of Bamboo Technology going on, where highly technical and carefully engineered devices relying on very specific material properties can be created by the orcs with nothing more than mud, untreated timber and some rope. This isn’t even the first instance – the mud tunnels of the first season would not have been able to stand up to the flood released from the spillway.
I wouldn’t say it’s purely a Peter Jackson invention. The books establish that Elves are aesthetes and that Orcs are antiElves, so the films’ overall presentation of Orcs as anti-aesthetes is supported by the books.
All the features of a trebuchet that make it “advanced” are the exact same features that require it to be made finely and precisely engineered by skilled artisans. Things like being made of precisely cut timbers whose joints are designed to withstand large pressures. If you’re willing to accept that your trebuchet design is crude and probably won’t work, the design itself doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the concept of.
The orcs are inventive engineers even without a Sauron or Saruman behind them – the epilogue of LotR, I believe, notes that many of the most terrible weapons that Middle Earth would see in the ages to come would be orcish devisements.
That’s in Chapter IV of the Hobbit.
“They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.”
Orc and goblin are two names for the same people in Tolkien, but two very different peoples in post-Tolkien fantasy. And it’s the post-Tolkien goblins that look like Tolkien’s version; post-Tolkien orcs are basically the Romans’ idea of barbarians.
If you look at the screenshot of the projectiles being fired on the river, you can also see that the CGI team just did not bother to make realistic trajectories at all (despite the fact that the smoke trails make all the trajectory shortcuts extremely visible). None of them move in a parabola, and the angle at which they are launched varies a ridiculous amount for trebuchets that lack any adjustable components. Most impressive is the projectile in the back – it levels out into horizontal flight just a few meters above and in front of the trebuchet. If those were real projectiles with real trajectories, that stone would just splash into the river not even halfway across.
But apparently Adar’s exploding stone rocks are capable of self-propelled and guided flight like ICBMs and therefore don’t care at what angle and with what force they’re launched.
Since pedantry *is* the name of the blog here…
ICBMs don’t have guided flight, not really. That’s why they are “ballistic.” They have one short boost phase after launch, and then they are just flying in a parabola to their target. Though the warheads may maneuver at the end of the flight.
Cruise missiles are a better fit here. They fly themselves and hold courses or maneuver as programmed. They are really just planes without human pilots.
(I’m not sure what the distinction between drones and cruise missiles is. That drones are actively guided from the ground? That they can come back and to be reused?)
Right, cruise missiles. When writing, I was aware that “ICBM” couldn’t quite be right because of the “B”, but I didn’t manage to remember what the right term was and didn’t bother googling.
I think the main distinction between kamikaze drones and cruise missiles is that the drone can hang out in the air over the target for a while; a cruise missile is going to spend its entire flight going very fast and you can’t have it circle for an hour while you wait for the right target to show itself.
I think any unmanned aircraft that isn’t otherwise labeled is a drone. Several “central examples” of the drone “concept” are:
– any electric quadcopter in military use;
– any piston-engine-powered thing, whether single-use (e.g. a Shahed) or hoped to be reusable (e.g. Bayraktar TB-1);
– a civilian light aircraft expediently adapted into a low-performance not-a-cruise-missile (e.g. the one that was caught on video blowing up a barracks in Grozny);
– an MQ-9 Reaper;
– the junior partner in manned-unmanned teaming (several are under development worldwide);
– a perfectly typical cruise missile that was developed at a time where it ended up being called a drone (the Palianytsia).
On the other hand, anything that was classified into a category before the drone mania broke out retains that label and isn’t a drone:
– an IAI Harpy is a loitering munition;
– a glide bomb, a cruise missile, a surface-skimming anti-ship missile and a balloon are not drones;
– an MQ-8 Firescout is an unmanned helicopter;
– the ADM-160 MALD is …I have no idea what it is, but it isn’t a drone (except if used as a target drone for training friendly AA).
Nope. A drone is anybody who can successfully mate with a queen bee.
To go one level deeper (higher?) in pedantry:
The parabola we’re all taught projectiles fly in in high-school physics is actually an approximation to the end of a long, skinny ellipse with one focus at the center of the earth. If a projectile could somehow phase through the ground instead of hitting it and stopping, it’d end up in orbit around the earth’s center, eventually returning to where it was released from.
I first saw this in a simulator for space launches, where it would plot the trajectory of the launch vehicle at every instant as if the engines were to cut off and it were to continue on its trajectory. As the rocket was gaining speed and height, the parabola of its projected path gradually flattened out and rose until suddenly it emerged from the surface of the ground as the rocket achieved orbit, revealing it was actually an ellipse all along!
The parabola is a pretty good approximation for most human-scale projectiles, though, as long as air resistance is negligible.
Ah, but it isn’t quite an approximation — it is the mathematically exact solution, given that you take the other approximation, namely that the earth is flat.
(With celestial mechanics, you also get a parabola if your spacecraft is moving at exactly the escape velocity. Slower, and it’s an ellipse, faster, and it’s a hyperbola.)
If I remember my physics classes correctly, a parabola is in fact the exact trajectory, *assuming a uniform gravitational field*.
As you are saying, once the length of your trajectory becomes non-negligible compared to the size of the planet, that assumption breaks down. A real planet’s gravitational field does not have a uniform strength (it gets weaker the further from the center you go), nor direction (gravity points towards the center of the planet, which is a different direction depending on where on its path the projectile currently is).
However, as other comments have pointed out, at this point in time, Middle-Earth is not (yet) a spherical planet, but a flat plane. The gravitational field of an infinite flat plane is in fact uniform, both in direction and in strength. The plane being finite complicates things; but I wouldn’t be surprised if the approximation is still good enough unless you are trying to launch a projectile from one edge to the other.
The other problem is, as you mention, air resistance. And this is in fact a meaningful factor even at human scales. The actual trajectory that a projectile takes flying through a medium is a so-called “ballistic curve”, which is distinct from a parabola. IIRC, even medieval engineers knew about this difference and had to take it into account when aiming catapults.
The actual trajectory that a projectile takes flying through a medium is a so-called “ballistic curve”, which is distinct from a parabola. IIRC, even medieval engineers knew about this difference and had to take it into account when aiming catapults.
how did medieval engineers figure out ballistic trajectories before calculus was discovered?
I think it’s less that the medieval engineers knew the exact curves and the mathematical expressions that describe them (Given that the first real treatise of this was in 1537 and described the curves as two straight lines connected by a circular arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolo_Tartaglia#Ballistics), but that they had good rules of thumb and approximations to know how the range was impacted by the mass ratios and launch angle.
“The gravitational field of an infinite flat plane is in fact uniform, both in direction and in strength.”
I assure you that people who sincerely consider themselves to be scientists of a present reality wherein the Earth is flat do have explanations for why Earth has gravitational variances even though it is (obviously) flat, and since these are the only scientific authorities we have on such matters I must disagree with your assertion.
@Endymionologist: That is actually fairly easy to explain. A uniform gravitational field only arises when the flat plane has uniform density everywhere. You could easily imagine a flat Earth which is denser, or thicker, in some places; or even some large concentration of mass underneath the plane (for no particular reason, let’s say in the shape of a tortoise), and that would do all kinds of crazy things to the gravitational field.
“The gravitational field of an infinite flat plane is in fact uniform, both in direction and in strength.”
Only if the plane is uniform. Since we know Middle Earth isn’t (mountains exist, oceans exist, caves and giant mines exist), this is not true. On Earth oceanic crust is much denser than continental, for example. Those variations can have significant local impacts. How much of an impact is going to be purely speculative. It’s Tolkien, we can assume impacts will be the same as Earth unless stated otherwise, but Tolkien didn’t exactly work with ICBMs or the like; gravitational anomalies aren’t enough to be noticed by Medieval siege engineers (variances in equipment dwarf any variances from gravity).
The other consideration is that most of the planet isn’t natural, it’s manufactured. The Misty Mountains, for example, are a defensive structure created by Morgoth. This is going to impact assessments of gravity, though it’s unclear how much.
Well, just we’re clear on how bad this is, I found a python script to fit a conic section through a set out points and asked it to fit the trajectories of the stones in the screenshot (thankfully, we have a viewing plane perpendicular to the trajectory and conics are pretty resilient in regards to perspective transformations), and, well, this is the result:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/83x0xb1gkelx1wobvkpc2/Figure_1.png?rlkey=s720qsw6yzyfecs2bomcgzi9z&dl=0
One (blue) is very clearly not a conic section, two (yellow and green) are *hyperbolas* that are not aligned to the direction of gravity and if they were to predict the trajectory, the stones would *overshoot* the city. Two (cyan and red) are somewhat aligned with gravity, but if the prediction is correct, the stones would fall far short of the city.
In total, my point that these stones move like missiles and not thrown stones does stand.
“Or, in a piece of the show’s tremendously bad writing, a “ground assault” (Sauron’s words) which raises the question of what other kinds of assault are there in Middle Earth?”
If the show was in a setting more high fantasy than LOTR (Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Wonders, Drakengard, etc.) an aerial assault would have been a real possibility. Here, though, the only theoretical possibilities are dragons, Nazgul’s beasts or Eagles, and all of those are either too temperamental to cooperate or too few for the term to work in any practical sense.
As an aside, I obviously realize Eagles would never assist what is apparently intended to be a premeditated massacre, but trying imagine what it might have taken for an Adar to get them to agree actually opens up a whole range of intriguing narrative possibilities. i.e. perhaps Adar explicitly earned their loyalty in the past, by finding ways to help them far more than the elves in general – not even due to self-interest, but out of the same nurturing drive which led to him creating the Orcs in the first place. When he embarked on this campaign, his goal was, as suggested above, simply to intimidate the city into searching for and giving up Sauron and he promised the Eagles they would only need to be there to watch for anyone trying to escape the city and deliver them to him, on the assumption it’s going to be Sauron fleeing. (Thus also covering the whole “how do they know Sauron hasn’t escaped already/will not escape soon?” plot hole.)
But then, as Sauron used his evil vizier powers to tell the city to hold firm, though (perhaps even preceding that by feigning reasonableness and “giving up” a stalking horse elf, which instead convinces Adar Sauron is in the city’s leadership and he needs to take it over and go through all of its leaders to find him) the conflict escalates, Adar’s army are driven to commit more and worse acts (hence the trebuchets actually ARE used to start fires and demolish buildings in a failed attempt to spur surrender like this post suggests) and the Eagles find themselves being asked to do more and more. By the time the siege ends, they are in fact complicit in a massacre because of the one they thought to be their friend. Yet, once Adar is killed (by Sauron or whoever) his “children” are also his only legacy, and so that’s another reason the Eagles are notoriously reluctant to intervene in wars between Orcs and the other Peoples of Middle-Earth.
Finally, this all reminds me of a work which DID have a decent fantasy aerial assault scene. It’s called A Shadow in the North/A Flame in the North, and it’s an choice-based text game strongly inspired by the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (which were split into 400 numbered sections placed out of order, and you read them by flipping pages to whichever number was associated with a choice you made in a previous section (i.e. to give a simple example if you had to turn left or right from 1, you flipped to either 117 or 324, etc.) and you also rolled dice against your stats to fight or pass key checks) although NOT set in the same DnD-esque world as the original books and most of their fangames. Instead, it’s a dark fantasy with a premise which is clearly very derivative (the world was sustained by a divine flame but a necromancer had corrupted its power to raise his undead armies and is making good progress in taking over the world with them – so, that’s ASOIAF/GOT’s Night King plot and Dark Souls mashed together – not to mention that it seems to follow the same structure as The Banner Saga) but it’s executed surprisingly well.
Not perfectly (i.e. your character is a mage whose spells are quite powerful (though cast from life force), but are not always available when you would expect – so that you can briefly levitate with a word, but somehow not at the time when Patches’ expy pulls a trapdoor on the bridge), but a lot better than you would expect. Magic is cool when it works (one example is the scene where you have to disrupt a revenant summoning by taking out the right rune in a magic circle – but can also hit any of the four wrong ones, or even attempt to take a bow shot and miss, and live with the consequences) and the writing is quite grounded, with many really cynical yet completely plausible scenes.
Part 2, which I link below (though you should start with 1) is ENTIRELY a massive siege sequence where you have a strict timer and have to find the best possible ways to allow the city to survive a massive undead assault, with a great number of plausible-seeming yet wrong options available alongside the right ones (there are also two ways to escape and leave the city to die, though they are ironically harder to do than to just win normally). An attack by flying undead constructs is one part of a multi-phase plan – which also involves sappers (parties of bloated undead with shovels replacing hands led by junior necromancers), traitors in the city and more. And again, the numerous ways you may end up cheated by the people who don’t believe you’ll succeed in saving them (although “cohesion against existential threat” scenes exist as well) are quite something – especially for a completely free work.
http://www.ffproject.com/flame.htm
I was going to comment on the air assault. Dragons were a thing–at the Council of Elrond Gandalf certainly implies that dragons still exist, they’re just much weaker than they used to be (the old fire no longer burns hot enough). And Sauron didn’t create the Fell Beasts, he merely corrupted them. (As an aside, they are based on pterosaurs, which is a gross injustice to the taxa; pterosaurs are some of the most diverse, weirdest, and honestly most beautiful critters of the Mesozoic!) And Sauron would have been very much aware of vampires and the like, having both commanded them and been one for a while himself!
The Eagles weren’t really a possibility. They are servants of Manwe, and not entirely independent entities. That’s why it’s so significant when they do show up; the Vallar in the Third Age don’t take direct hands in the fate of Middle-Earth, but they certainly meddle a number of times! (Legolas’ sea longing is Ulmo’s doing, for example.) And I just can’t see Manwe being okay with wholesale slaughter of a city like this, nor him siding with the creations of Morgoth.
There are also the Maia to consider. Sauron and the Wizards are the best-known (well, after the Sun and Moon anyway), but there were plenty of others running around. I think the Second Age the Balrogs were more or less gone, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of others.
As for sieges my favorite is “Kingdom of Amelur ReReconing”. You don’t actually see much of the siege itself; you’re playing the part of besieged, and are tasked with taking out a high-value target so that everyone else can break the siege. It allows for high stakes and the type of excitement that games and TV want, without overly stupid mistakes with the siege. The problem with sieges is that typically they’re going to be extremely boring; there’s not a lot of daring-do or heroics involved, it’s far more calculated and methodical. Which means that it’s boring for folks watching. A group given a specific, highly dangerous task, however, makes things MUCH more exciting!
Not a day goes by when I’m not disappointed that pterosaurs didn’t make it to the present day…
Yes, Dragons were a “thing.” Even Smaug was enough of a danger that Gandalf arranged to take him off the board years before the War of the Ring (see LotR Appendix A RE: “a chance meeting” and Unfinished Tales, “The Quest of Erebor.”)
The “prepare for ground assault” isn’t even the only movie quote Rings of Power ripped off. In Season 1 Galadriel responds to Isildur’s father’s counsel with “Who is this man who speaks to me as though he had the slightest idea who I am?” parphrased from Braveheart. And somebody (I forget specifically who) says, referring to the potential threat of Sauron’s forces” “The armies of darkness will march over the face of Middle-Earth” paraphrasing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Any others that I missed?
As a tangent, I find the nature of siege warfare in Star Wars interesting. While it is also an allegory for nuclear weapons, the Death Star is also the ultimate siege tower and cannon rolled into one.
While it is rarely explicit in the films, by the time of the Empire full scale planetary shields mean that wealthier worlds like Alderaan or possibly Mon Calamari can do things like openly support the Rebel Alliance and still be safe indefinitely as long as they don’t import food, which is why the Emperor didn’t disband the Senate until after they finished the first Death Star and then why he was was so quick to build a second one.
Earlier with the Clone Wars, the Outer Rim Sieges were all about cutting off the supply lines that kept the droid army operational. It’s why the CIS was losing by the time of Revenge of the Sith despite what should have been impossibly superior numbers. Even if the CIS had the shields they couldn’t keep their droids operational without logistics, something of an intentional flaw.
Has the Expanded Universe ever given shield technology as an explanation for the utility of the Death Star? I don’t remember seeing that before.
And I’m not sure the DS battle station actually qualifies as a siege weapon. The whole point of a siege is to control the locale afterwards, and the Death Star seems rather explicitly to leave that option off the table. Even the ‘low-power setting’ used in *Rogue One* on Jedha results in what can only be described as a mass extinction event. Maybe there is an even lower setting for its main battery that would make it a useful siege weapon … but at that point you should probably have built a far smaller and vastly different weapons platform at a fraction of the cost.
TBH I don’t think there’s really any “saving” Watsonian explanation for the Death Star. It’s a weapon of mass destruction wielded by the Tarkin Doctrine as a tool of intimidation. But the whole point of having your Galactic Empire is that you control the stuff afterwards, and after the Death Star is used you’ve not only destroyed the population as a source of military recruits and taxation, but any natural resources, arable land, and heavy industrial plant they might have. Of course, the in-universe justification is that you only have to use it once or twice before everyone submits … but if you’re going to construct a artificial moon at prodigious cost when you only plan to use it once, why bother? Wouldn’t an asteroid be far cheaper and at least leave you with the possibility of extracting valuable subsoil minerals from the wasteland afterwards?
I think from a Doylist explanation the frankly untenable reasoning for the Death Star’s existence is clearly a relic from George Lucas’ writing process. In the first draft there’s a big Imperial battle station, but it doesn’t have the ability to destroy celestial bodies at will; it just bombards Aquilae until the government submits. In the second draft the super weapon evolves to blow up planets, but the conflict is described in much more even terms: the roll-up declares that it “is a period of civil wars” where the Empire is “crumbling into lawless barbarism” and that “seventy small solar systems have united in a common war against the tyranny of the Empire”, led by a incredibly powerful Jedi. In the third draft this existential framing in the roll-up is even more explicit: “Rebel Armies” strike from multiple fortresses inside the Great Rift to deal the Imperial forces a major defeat, and “the Emperor knows that one more such defeat will bring a thousand more solar systems into the rebellion, and Imperial control of the Outland systems could be lost forever”. This is one of the ways in which I think the third draft of Star Wars improved over the shooting script; it makes far more sense for a sclerotic fascist regime to build crazy *Wunderwaffen* while its authority is breaking down as a desperate last resort (“Our hammers aren’t working and now there’s too many nails. Clearly what we really need is a super-duper hammer to blast these nails to smithereens!”) than for a very confident one to waste a lot of time and money building a super weapon to intimidate people when the opposition consist of one small and not very significant Rebel base on Yavin IV. (The Expanded Universe does fix this by showing the Rebel Alliance as being far bigger than just the Yavin base, but the movie has no hint of this and creates the laughable suggestion that a vast Galactic Empire is existentially threatened by what amounts to a couple of guys in one (1) jungle on a not very big moon in the middle of nowhere.)
The text of the movie is very clear that it’s a terror weapon. “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.”
It should be noted that line is in response to concerns about the dissolution of the Senate, which is the sort of thing likely to touch off a general result. Also, Aldaraan is explictly destroyed as a demonstration, because Dantooine is too remote.
I’m not contesting that the Death Star is meant to be a terror weapon, I just think that when you work through the implications it’s not a terribly useful one. There are other ways to decimate a planetary or lunar population that would cost far less to develop and deploy, and which would not require you to blow up a interstellar body and potentially throw an entire star system (which might otherwise be comprised of Imperialists) out of whack.
The Senate being an issue is one of the things that arise from the inconsistent writing that plague Star Wars, because in the very next installment if anything the Empire is in a even better position once the Death Star gets blown up! They chase the Rebels off Yavin IV, and by the end of Empire Strikes Back the Rebel fleet is forced to hide in the void outside the galaxy. If anything, then, the text seems to imply the Emperor could disband the Senate without needing a terror weapon to maintain the New Order.
The destruction of Alderaan is another pet peeve of mine – while we don’t have a lot of context within A New Hope, I don’t think we get any information showing that Alderaan was in actual open revolt, or in danger of being so – if anything the Rebel network seems to be limited to the royal family – and the Prequel Trilogy and Expanded Universe show that Alderaan is an essential and powerful part of the Core, which is the Old Republic and Empire’s metropole. Blowing up Alderaan is therefore as if, at some point, Nazi Germany wanted to demonstrate a new weapon’s lethality and somebody went “I know! Red Wedding has so many filthy Communists! Let’s blow up Berlin! That’ll show them!” It’s not that I dispute the oppressiveness, stupidity, and cruelty of fascist states, but I think the whole episode is an over the top cartoonish “evil for the sake of evil” moment that even most fascists would recoil from.
Hmm, that reminds me of a paragraph in the book ‘Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics’ in which it was noted that an explosion which would ‘only’ melt a planet into lava would take much less energy. As was to be expected from the book it was buried between complaints about such things as ‘film makers should be well aware that gigantic explosions should look more like smaller explosions in slow motion*’.
* The author had also estimated that the pieces of Alderaan were travelling about a thousand times escape velocity of the planet when it blew up, clearly much faster than necessary.
> but if you’re going to construct a artificial moon at prodigious cost when you only plan to use it once, why bother?
Hydrogen bombs are expensive, and no one has ever used one. But we keep spending the money because the *threat* of using it is worth it.
I don’t think the analogy with nuclear weapons works all that well beyond the obvious (and important) symbolic resonance. For one thing, the opportunity cost for the United States to build and maintain not just one, but hundreds or thousand of warheads is low enough that we can, and have, maintained substantial arsenals of these weapons. While there’s no way to tell how much time and money would have to go into building a Death Star for a soft science fiction galactic civilization, it must without saying be a much higher cost than nuclear weapons, and the movies imply this; considering that its large enough to be mistaken for a moon, there’s no way the expenditure is remotely close to maintaining a nuclear deterrent. ICBMs don’t have their own gravity wells! All things considered, if you did want to send a maximalist military message to an inhabited world, why not find a suitable asteroid and drop it on their heads from outer space? For the people living on the surface a K/T level extinction event and a giant laser beam won’t be much of a difference when they are equally dead. You’d end up devastating the same amount of living beings, send a more or less equivalent message, and all at a tiny fraction of the cost a Death Star would require.
It’s obvious the Emperor didn’t consider the expenditure too big, and what else could he have used the resources for? Build an hundred Super Star Destroyers? But then the Emperor would have to find hundred generals to command them and can he really trust that many of them. They would be just as likely to execute a coup or join the rebels. For a dictator his armies are always one of the biggest threats and need to be weakened to a state where they are just enough to handle external threats. There’s a reason why Stalin was still purging the Red Army while Germany had already attacked.
Any dictator would jump to the chance of building a single MegaTank that they could personally command and that was invulnerable to any external and internal threat.
> Any dictator would jump to the chance of building a single MegaTank that they could personally command and that was invulnerable to any external and internal threat.
Thing is, that goal would be far more consistent with fitting Death Star with a dozen or so faster-firing lasers, every one of which is just strong enough to immediately wreck a Star Destroyer-sized target (and to take out a city-sized target on a planet’s surface), rather than a single planet killer which takes a massive amount of time to charge up. If the biggest threat to Palpatine is an internal goal and Death Star is meant to be the coup-proof residence, then it doesn’t actually appear to be designed all that well to repel a fleet of Star Destroyers turning rogue.
And a historical aside: the purges which have occurred after the invasion in 1941 have mostly already been set in motion on the basis of the “confessions” obtained in the main set of purges from 1936-1938, and which have already taken out over half of commanders from brigade/divisional level and above. The exception was the execution of commanders who received popular ire for the easy victory promised by propaganda turning into catastrophe. Below is a 1938 Soviet film which depicted an invasion getting repelled with the existing border forces alone and then the march into the invader’s territory once the bulk of the country is mobilized. With the numerical superiority of the USSR, Stalin expected that to be true, which was the main reason he treated reports of the upcoming invasion casually, assuming Hitler wouldn’t dare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NidxI8xyaPk
Of course, Hitler reportedly used Stalin’s own purges to justify invading when he did, arguing that there would be no better time then when “80%” (exaggeration, but not by much) of the Red Army officers have been purged. (We may also add that 1941 was the most advantageous year for Germany relative to USSR in terms of military equipment; before, the USSR had large stocks of early/mid 1930s vehicles and weapons where Germany had none due to Versailles restrictions, and if the 1940s phase of the Soviet rearmament had proceeded as planned, then even by 1942-1943 the obsolete vehicles and systems would have been replaced far faster than the German military industrial complex could have kept up – but this is all hindsight.)
Either way, troops who saw their commanders executed in peacetime were practically baying for blood once they were hit with the full might of Wehrmacht while much of their equipment was still locked away in warehouses – while the general commanding the entire Western Front happened to watching a play on the night Army Group Center cleaved through it. Ironically, that General, Pavlov, was formerly the top commander of Soviet tank forces fighting in the Spanish Civil War and whose reports have been integral to the design of T-34 – yet that didn’t matter when he lost Minsk in a week.
The Death Star is coated in anti-capital weaponry; the rebels use only fighters because the defenses aren’t designed to repel them.
I’d say the Death Star makes more sense as a conventional weapon against peer adversaries. It is, after all, a very strong concentration of force- the natural result of people building ever bigger and more powerful space warships.
“The whole point of a siege is to control the locale afterwards, and the Death Star seems rather explicitly to leave that option off the table.”
Does it, though?
What, specifically, is “the locale” in question? If you’re talking about the planet, yeah, that’s gone–at least for a few hundred thousand years, until it re-congeals and cools. But in the Star Wars universe systems where the planet is both the seat of government and the entire extent of that government’s territory are relatively poor and isolated. Tatooine, Dagoba, places like that. Most of the groups you see (at least in the pre-Disney books) include a much larger territory, their system at least, and often multiple systems. Nal Hutta, for example, exerts direct control over multiple planets in its system and direct and indirect control over a much wider area.
If you wipe out the planet that functions as the seat of your territory’s government, it’s going to cause some pretty dramatic restructuring of your political systems. And if I watch your organization get its head cut off in such a dramatic fashion, and know that that same weapon could appear above my planet any time, it’s also going to have a significant impact on my strategy. Goal 1 is “Keep the state alive”, which now means either killing the Death Star (as the Rebellion did) or appeasing it.
On a different note, I have always rather liked the idea that the Emperor foresaw the Vong Invasion. They crossed intergalactic space in ships the size of planets, which the Death Stars (the first, second, and prototype) would have been ideally suited to fighting.
This is one of the uses of Colossi in Stellaris – you can use them to blow up a heavily fortified planet that’s in your way, so that your fleet doesn’t have to stay and fight a lengthy siege and can just move on to conquering the rest of their planets.
That might be the case if, as ad9 pointed out, the Galactic Empire had peer states that posed a meaningful threat to it – but it doesn’t, at least insofar as the Original Trilogy is concerned! I’m not terribly familiar with the lore, but as far as I understand it the only comparable polities are some of the criminal syndicates, like the Hutts and Crimson Dawn – neither of which should be able to pose a meaningful threat to an actual state. (To be fair, such organizations are often depicted defying the Empire quite easily in stuff like the Solo movie, but I think this reflects less a coherent attitude towards the world building on the part of Lucasfilm writers than the relentless application of the Worf effect to the nostalgic antagonists who keep showing up even as they grow less and less intimidating in each new tale – in some of the Marvel Star Wars comics I have read it is genuinely impressive how quickly the Empire will show up, since a lot of these stories take place during the OT, only to be easily and mechanically defeated by the simplest of story beats so that the plot can move on the villains it presumably finds much more interesting and threatening. It really makes you wonder how these geniuses managed to run a galaxy for two decades when they apparently find the concept of a “secure perimeter” or “basic bureaucratic procedure” a challenge!)
I kind of like it too, but I also understand the criticism that it whitewashes the bad guys. Sure, a Death Star might have been a useful tool in fighting the Yuuzhan Vong … but why blow up your own planets with it? I think the main issue is that George Lucas always envisioned Star Wars as being a revival of the Flash Gordon-type adventure serials of this youth, which, while I am not familiar with them, I get the distinct impression they are stories that don’t rely a lot on things like ‘hard’ world building, moral nuance, and narrative consistency – so there was never supposed to be a lot of thought or background put into why the Death Star exists other than “the Empire is bad and blowing up planets is the kind of thing bad guys do”. to paraphrase George R.R. Martin, nobody cares about Ming the Merciless’ tax policy, they just care that he is threatening world domination. this isn’t a criticism of Star Wars or those kinds of stories, but I think the franchise has been a victim of its own success insofar as people want to return to the Star Wars galaxy as a much deeper, lived-in place than Lucas intended it to be, and which conflicts with the style and tone of the stories he wants – from what I’ve heard he has a low opinion of Andor, even though lots of people love that television show.
“…but I think the franchise has been a victim of its own success insofar as people want to return to the Star Wars galaxy as a much deeper, lived-in place than Lucas intended it to be, and which conflicts with the style and tone of the stories he wants…”
Oh, absolutely! For me growing up the films were fantastic, but Star Wars was really the extended universe–the books, in other words. That was part of the fun of it. Lucas put enough in to suggest a lived-in universe, which means there are all kinds of stories that could be told! And I’ll certainly admit to the charges of post-hoc justification here. The reason the Death Star exists is, fundamentally, Lucas thought it would be cool. But it’s fun to speculate on the in-universe justification.
I disagree that the Death Star would be most useful against peer or near-peer adversaries, though. The reason for this is being demonstrated in Ukraine right now: Having a tremendous concentration of force in modern battle spaces just isn’t a good idea. Modern tanks have a tremendous amount of firepower, but that also makes them quite vulnerable. Wipe out a tank and you wipe out a very large, expensive piece of machinery critical to your tactical doctrine. Similarly, if the Empire had a peer or near-peer it would be much more likely that the Death Star could be exploded–after all, if the Empire can build one (well, three, really, plus the superlasers on the Eclipse class SDs), so cold someone else!
Where the Death Star would shine is in creating an environment where conflict doesn’t occur. It is, essentially, infinite force; non-peer adversaries have practically no capability of resisting it (the Rebels only succeed by Deus Ex Mechina plus suicide missions plus “the plot says they win”; hardly a reliable strategy!). Since the Death Star can decapitate even a multi-system polity the odds of a peer or near-peer arising internally is essentially negated.
I’ll be honest, I did give up on the novels when the Vong invasion occurred. The books never shied away from grim themes, but the Vong books were far too close to brutality for the sake of brutality. And I agree that justifying the Death Star by Palpatine sensing the Vong is a bit too easy; Palpatine was Lawful Evil in the worst possible sense, and really should stay that way. But it WOULD justify the creation of such a device. And the idea of using force and even terror to consolidate various groups against an external threat is hardly unique to Star Wars.
Hmm, I did not knew that the earlier drafts of Star Wars had been so much different.
However, I do agree that makes much more sense.
If you ask me the only way a specialised anti-planet super weapon like the Death Star would make sense is if the Empire needs a way to deal with worlds protected by energy shields strong enough to shrug off orbital bombardments of fleets of Star Destroyers and self-sufficient enough to survive blockades. However, even then it would make more sense for a weapon only strong enough to pierce the shield and then do enough damage that a few dozen shots would already finish most industrial civilization. Then it would also have other uses than solely being a weapon of terror aimed at worlds beyond the one it targets; for example, as you mentioned it could also attempt to bombard a single world into submission.
I’ve got a question about this sentence: “armies might use catapults to fling diseased or decaying corpses over the walls to demoralize defenders and potentially spread plague”
I’ve read Marie Favereau’s The Horde some time ago, where she suggested that mongol armies, like all ancient and medieval armies, didn’t actually flung corpses inside besieged cities. On the one hand, they treated their own dead with respect, while prisoners were more useful as live workers; on the other hand, they understood well enough that a diseased body spread diseases, so they tended to stay away from them or bury them quickly, rather than hauling them around a siege camp, inside a hauling machine etc, all of which could very well spread the sickness inside their own camp.
She quotes a paper titled “Laying the corpses to rest: Grain, embargoes, and yersinia pestis in the black sea, 1346–48” by H. Barker but i didn’t get my hand on it yet.
I’m also thinking about that scene in RoTK where orcs throw gondorian soldier’s heads to demoralize the enemy.
So, my question is: what was the actual rate and effectiveness of slinging diseased corpses or dead bodies inside a besieged city?
Thank you in advance!
AFAIK even in the narrative that we had the flinging diseased corpses was a final “fuck you” more than anything else: The siege had alredy failed (and plague had broken out among them) and they were leaving.
It’s funny, I’ve been familiar with siege mining for a very long time now, but I’ve never really considered what it would look like to depict it on film.
I’ve got to say, the idea of an action scene based on people trying to build tunnels, and dealing with opponents attempting to counter them, feels like it would be remarkably and uniquely tense (I’m thinking about how much The Great Escape did with similar for other purposes). And, properly framed and with the correct build up, the image of a grand wall collapsing from its foundations to provide a ruinous breach looks pretty badass.
(Also, having now learned what traction trebuchets are, it feels like a waste for there to not be more fantasy media that involves some superhuman character operating one single-handedly)
Reminded me of one of the weirder stratagems in the old Wargames Research Group ancient/medieval rules. According to the historian Appian, the city of Themiscyra was besieged by the Romans during the Third Mithridatic War, 73-63 BCE. The Romans dug mines (tunnels) under the city walls, the defenders retaliated by countermining and releasing angry bears into the tunnels to kill the Romans.
OK it does sound a bit unlikely (eg where did the bears come from?) but it’s a great example of how history throws up wonderfully strange and interesting material for stories.
Unfortunately capturing live bears for entertainment, and starving them to make them scary, are both practices that humans seem to have figured out in prehistory.
“Engage the troll-a-pult!!!”
> (Also, having now learned what traction trebuchets are, it feels like a waste for there to not be more fantasy media that involves some superhuman character operating one single-handedly)
If the character is that strong, why not just throw the projectile by hand? Or use a sling?
Longer lever-arm, maybe? People can throw javelins by hand but the atl-atl is still useful for more leverage. Though getting a proper sling representation on screen would be amazing.
Well you wouldn’t design it to *only* be usable by the superstrong character, you just slot them in for a dramatic moment. Or, if this is more like a mecha anime, the trebuchet model is a failed prototype that cannot be used by normal people but resonates in some way with the superhuman to multiply their strength.
The movie Alatriste (incidentally with Viggo Mortensen as lead) has a bit of mining footage when depicting the siege of Breda. It can definitely be done, and to great suspense at that.
When i think about it, what a waste of opportunity and resources for the showrunners, spending all that money on wildly expensive (amateurish) battle sequences with landscaping, props, cgi, extras and the lot, when they could have just dug a hole and made a couple of actors do some close combat dancing.
> I’ve got to say, the idea of an action scene based on people trying to build tunnels, and dealing with opponents attempting to counter them
The text game I linked to in another one of my comments, A Flame in the North, did have such a sequence, although it’s quite brief and optional (well, in the sense that failing to do it would likely force you to combat the infiltrator force bursting out of such tunnels later on.)
Furthermore, the 2nd one of Bazil Broketail books (how’s that for something obscure?), A Sword for a Dragon, concluded with about two dozen dragons (very downplayed in this setting, where they are bipedal rhino-sized talking lizards who are all sapient and can talk, but generally don’t breathe fire or fly, AFAIR) and their handlers (who collectively make up a dragon legion) having to defend a city under siege. Multiple attempts to tunnel beneath the walls are made; dragons, including the titular character, are forced to wield wide knifes instead of their usual weapons to fight in the narrow confines – where they face not just humans but also mud golems of about the same size as them, animated with blood from local cult’s sacrifices.
The Broketail books are possibly the best fantasy depiction of any number of things covered by ACOUP, from legionary camp fortification to relative metal values to expeditionary logistics.
It’s a pity I read them so long ago I barely remember details like this. (Not to mention I largely took them for granted back then and didn’t really have the contrast like above to appreciate them for what they were.)
Funnily enough, the author of the series, Christopher Rowley, actually DOES have TV experience, having apparently written six episodes of…this. (And 9 episodes of the apparently better-known The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112131/
Yet, it appears he’s never attempted to bring any of his own works to screen (that we know of). With Broketail books specifically (since he did write others, not that I’ve read them), I wonder if the main reason might have been the difficulty of depicting the origin of Padmassa’s (?) army rank-and-file in any visual medium without turning off a critical mass of the audience by doing so.
IIRC Detritus, the troll policeman in Terry Pratchett’s City Watch series, has a favourite weapon known as the ‘”Piecemaker” and described as a “siege crossbow”.
“I think the show’s suggestion is that the purpose of this barrage is actually to create lots of smoke in order to darken the skies, though this is never communicated by anyone.”
Maybe they expect people to remember hat orcs don’t like sunlight from LotR movies.
If they had remembered that, they should have had the orcs attack during the night, when there is no sunlight anyway.
They did show orcs despising sunlight in the first season, when they sensibly set the orc battles at night. Which seems like it would be Adar’s move; he’s not aware of being on a clock, so there’s no real harm in waiting sixteen hours and assaulting the city on the second night.
“Now, launching a 150kg projectile at 70m/s is quite impressive. If that hits you, it is going to hurt quite a lot.”
But only briefly.
That’s a topic that could fill up an entire post, I’m sure – how people react to being shot with arrows (or bullets) in TV and movies, versus reality. It reminds me Peter Jackson’s story about Christopher Lee saying “I’ve heard the sound a man makes when stabbed in the back, I know how to react.”
“assemble it on site like a giant Ikea War Engine” —
Now, what would Ikea’s pseudo-Swedish product name be, for a catapult? Flingklop? Boingsmush? Pingdong?
Alas, boringly enough it’s just Katapult, though occasionally Kastmaskin (“throwing machine”) is used)
My 1998 norwegian schoolbook termed a trebuchet «blide». You guys don’t have that word in your language?. Anyway, I’d throw my vote for Flingklop!
We do, funny enough it derives from greek, and is a cognate of ballista.
On the wheeled Catapult failure, the fact that they failed is made worse for me knowing that Ranger’s Apprentice didn’t, and note that this is a series that has archers capable of firing six arrows in six seconds that kill six people. But the one time that series had a wheeled catapult it’s explicitly stated to be a mistake on the part of the person who had the catapult constructed, and that when made properly there would be no wheels involved at all.
I’m beginning to understand why I keep seeing articles that suggest that the show-makers of Rings of Power used ChatGPT or some other similar large language model to write their show or come up with the plot.
One of the great weaknesses of LLM is that they often don’t have very good object permanence or cohesion. By nature, they are incapable of doing the higher level planning of “gee, I want to have something cool happen 100,000 words from now, how can I foreshadow it?” And they are generating text based on the idea that they want it to resemble other text that’s gotten good feedback in the past, not on the idea that it reflects real objects that are immutable until acted on by an outside force. The LLM can construct a succession of ‘cool scenes’ that look more or less right, but the more you zoom out, the more it looks like aimless rambling with a constant stream of internal contradictions racking up with every passing chapter.
And it sounds like the plot for Rings of Power has that same weakness.
Even ChatGPT’s shorter works have something of that aimless rambling with constant internal contradictions.
That would be more fun, but sadly I think the real explanation is the modern show-writing method of breaking a plot down into emotional “beats” that are justified by sudden events, rather than constructing a coherent series of events that the characters drive and respond to. Which is how you get long, long, long stretches of Sauron seducing and manipulating Celebrimbor on the one hand and “an orc army suddenly surprised elves in a forest” on the other.
I wonder how much is also caused by the season-by-season nature of modern streaming shows. Like, if you got some writers to sit down and write out, say, seven seasons of Rings of Power upfront, then (assuming they’re competent at storytelling) they could plan and pace things out and realize that Ost-in-Edhil is going to need a wall in season 1 even though it doesn’t become important until season 3. But if you only hire writers to write two seasons at the beginning (because no one knows if it’ll be renewed for a third season), then those writers don’t seem to have much incentive to look beyond the end of the second season; nobody’s paying them to think that far ahead, there might not be a third season to hire them back for, or there might other writers hired instead (I’m not sure how prevalent this is, but it seems like it does happen sometimes?). Either way there’s a decent chance it’s not going to be their problem.
It seems like it’d make sense to hire writers to plan out an entire sequence of a fixed number of seasons in advance (even if only the first X are guaranteed to be made), but I suppose that would also remove the possibility, if the show becomes wildly successful, of milking it until it dies off by perpetually renewing it for additional seasons.
Apparently they hadn’t decided that the wizard was Gandalf when they wrote the first season.
That seems like a pretty important thing to have decided!
speaking of Star Wars, I would be really interested to see more of the Professor’s thoughts on it if he ever wanted to do a collection about it!
In the first year of ACOUP, he did do a Collections on starship design, which talked about Star Destroyers a lot. (And which was also a follow-up to starship weapon arrangement Collections that was almost entirely Battlestar Galactica.) That same year also had a Miscellanea devoted to The Last Jedi. Most recently, there was a Fireside which went into even more depth on Star Destroyer design from a strategic perspective.
https://acoup.blog/2024/05/10/fireside-friday-may-10-2024/
This might already give an idea of his attitude towards the setting, but just in case:
> For this week’s musing, over the last week, as part of my May the Fourth celebration (and some enforced post-semester relaxation), I went and built the Lego Star Destroyer my better half bought for me (about a year ago – the space for building it got consumed by other things in the intervening time). This is not the very old (2002) Star Destroyer kit, nor the very newest (2024) kit, but the finely aged (2019) ‘Ultimate Collector’ set, coming in at a massive 4,700 pieces. It was fun to build and there’s actually a lot of kind of neat engineering and design that clearly went in to making it work. With so many pieces, the set is so heavy that it needs a whole reinforcing frame (also made of legos) to hold it together internally.
And from the starship Collections (no link, in case it throws the comment into spam filter again);
> I want to contrast that with the scale of a Star Destroyer’s main armament – you will need to excuse the poor picture, I took it from my copy of Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections (I told you, I am that kind of nerd – I’ve had this book, along with the Essential Guides, since I was in high school, much of it even back before the Dark Times, before the Prequels), the book is quite large and scanner-unfriendly, so I had to use a camera:
It might even be a fair bet to say he likes (original) SW more than we in the core of active readers do. At least, I’m unsure how many of us would sign up to this.
> But without the magic – that mix of tone, style and plot that makes Star Wars or Star Trek what they are, which lies at the core of the debt – all you have is ‘generic sci-fi.’ As a fan of Mass Effect, BSG (original and re-imagined), Dr. Who, Warhammer 40k, and too many space video games for me to count – I like generic sci-fi. But I like Star Wars more.
(From The Last Jedi Miscellanea, which condemned it/Disney films in general for failing to live up to the above.)
While I am deeply skeptical of self-identified “fandoms”, I can say with confidence I would be far more likely to “go to the mat” over 40K than over any and all piece of Star Wars’ media. I could bring up plenty of reasons for that as well, although others might say it is simply generational difference (I was born well after the Original Trilogy, the Professor would have seen it for the first time at around the same age as when I discovered Warhammer lore). I don’t know about Mass Effect (especially in recent years) and BSG, but I am sure there must be enough Who fans who would declare it superior to Star Wars – it’ll be interesting to see whether any are also reading this blog!
Speaking as a Who fan more than a Star Wars fan, comparing them is apples and oranges. Yes, Doctor Who is sf by any reasonable definition but sf is pretty capacious and one of the things Doctor Who generally does poorly is straight guns and spaceships sci-fi.
Sure; my point here was specifically to draw attention to Devereaux’s description of it as “generic sci-fi”, to be compared with the NewSW and NewTrek and Mass Effect and 40K (?), and to be contrasted against the classic SW (and Trek), whose “mix of tone, style and plot” make them different. The lack of qualifiers (like those with BSG) suggests this is in reference to its entire history too, rather than, say, the Moffat/post-Moffat era specifically. Somehow, I doubt you would agree with that!
Traction trebuchets make an appearance in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) on the Jerusalem side.
If Adar flooded the valley and the city by damming underneath, would that really have made a ground assault easier? Lessons from Ukraine is that after the Nova Kakhovka dam was blown by the russians, the left side of the river became pretty much intraversable. Mind, this was in the context of 40 ton wain wagons, but i’d wager bringing medieval wall breaching equipment across a drained lake would also have its challenges?
Magic can potentially add new options for stuff like siegecraft or create challenges that wouldn’t be possible for a historical army to present, but in such cases somebody has to actually be using magic for something relevant (and one should generally respect Sanderson’s First Law). A Practical Guide to Evil has a few cool moments of this, such as one in which someone realizes that portals to the Fae realm can be placed from the bottom of a lake to a point above an enemy army. Granted, I felt like from a physics perspective that was unrealistically mild in its practical impact (it threw the force into disarray, ruined their supplies, and created a messy swamp they couldn’t fight from, but didn’t kill from the impact), but it was still a cool moment and did make sense in context.
There’s a related XKCD (but isn’t there always): https://xkcd.com/969/
I feel like that would cause problems for a lot more than just the white witch. Amusing though.
>By which point, yeah, if Adar has shown up with the main battery of HMS Majestic (1894), I think he may be able to bring down this mountain but also at that point, probably doesn’t need to.
Worth pointing out that I don’t think this would have been possible with the actual main battery of Majestic, as she was limited in elevation to 13.5 deg, as were all of the British pre-dreads. And naval fire control didn’t get passable at dealing with targets at different elevations until quite a bit later.
In the spirit of pedantry, note they were able to modify the BL 12-inch gun turrets that the Majestic had used to fire at up to 30 deg elevation during World War I.
During D-Day the battleship USS Texas transferred ballast water to one side of the ship to tilt it and aim the main guns higher for extra range.
Since the target is a stationary mass of rocks that can’t shoot back, the problems of naval fire control are significantly reduced; you can just keep adjusting the point of aim until you hit the target without having to worry about it zig-zagging out of the line of fire the way enemy warships would.
You have heightened my frustration with a show I never watched by off-handedly bringing up a real world tactic that would have considerably enhanced the thematic resonance of Adar’s character, of the story of the rings, of the whole dang show: traitors. If Adar’s strategy had been centered around finding and recruiting people to open the gates at an opportune time, this would have created an appropriately dramatic moment AND reinforced Adar’s plan as reliant on treachery AND reinforced the broader theme about the costs of selfishness in moments of communal need.
We could see him focusing on demoralizing defenders, while giving speeches emphasizing the mercy and favor he would show to those who turn coat, we could have minor plots of the besieged discussing their fears and how much they trust Adar, could even do the stupid mystery stuff they seem to love by having a cast of people who all seem to be weighing options and seeing which one is the one who does turn the city over. A watchman, posted on the walls? An aristocrat, able to go where he pleases? One of the little people, not formally of the guard but given access to the right place in order to deliver food or munitions to the soldiers? A machinist tasked with servicing the gates? There’s so many dang options and they don’t involve writing CGI checks they can’t CGI cash.
Even better, Sauron could have been the traitor, and escaped the mass murder targeted at him by his treachery.
” Adar has committed himself to a strategy of killing everyone in the city, so there’s little to be gained from surrender and thus little to be gained by trying to demoralize the defenders.”
In the spirit of pedantry and technicalities: however little Adar and his orcs care about own loses, it’s still easier to execute prisoners after the city surrenders than storm the walls and fight the defending population, so there is a plausible reason for demoralising defenders into a surrender.
That being said nothing in the show points to that option being as much as considered.
That’s because it doesn’t make any sense. A surrender happens if the defenders consider the terms they are offered in return for stopping to fight to be better than continuing to fight. But in your scenario, the terms offered would be “You hold still while we kill all of you”. It’s just objectively, rationally and indisputably a worse option than the not surrendering, which is “You don’t hold still and might manage save at least some people or at least kill a large number of those monsters trying to genocide you.”
In principle, at least, Adar does have the option of lying to them.
As ad9 pointed out, Adar can lie, and it doesn’t matter whether he gets orcs behind the walls by force or by deception, either way the extermination can start.
He also as the option of presenting terms as “bring the head of the shapeshifter and I’ll go away or I’ll level the city”. This would either solve his problem (elves find and kill Sauron for him), make it easier to solve (infighting and witch hunts start among the elves) or does nothing (which also costs him nothing and neither interferes with nor delays his plans), but demoralised defenders would be more pliant to act according to Adar’s wishes.
As all tools, demoralisation has it’s uses even when your objective is to exterminate the demoralised.
I haven’t seen the “show” (and never intend to, thanks to Bret’s sacrifices of going through it methodically!), but just going by the screenshot, the whole mountain-dam scene is just totally preposterous.
TL;DR: A Hiroshima-sized nuke would be needed, drilled into the rock instead of just impacting it. The mentioned HMS Majestic (1985) cannons wouldn’t have even make a dent in it.
A bit back of the fag packet mix and math: Looks like semi‑weathered granite. For modern explosives, the likely powder factor WAG is 0.5-0.8 kg of HE per m3 of rock (we still need to fracture the big boulders into smaller rocks to create a dam, and not just a few rocky islands). That’s obviously with some proper blast hole drilling et cetera.
The rockslide volume would have to be on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of m3 of rocks to effectively dam such a big river.
That’s a magnitude of at least tens of kT TNT equivalent, aka a city-killer nuke…
Sure, permafrost thawing and freeze-thaw cycles or earthquakes can initiate even bigger slides, but these are either very slow (until they aren’t, in the case of permafrost failure’s final moments) and exploit existing internal weakness lines, or several magnitudes more energetic than even nukes (in the case of earthquakes).
Since the lead baddie seems to have access to magic catapult nukes now, why doesn’t he just nuke the city outright then?
You can certainly try whipping or catapult-bombarding the sea or the mountain, but the results will still be the same…
something I suspect about Traction Trebuchets is that you don’t see them in media because they’re kind of hard to believe. They might be very real but ‘a bunch of guys pull on ropes to lever a rock at a fort’ just doesn’t feel plausible to me.
It also didn’t look plausible when I saw it in a movie. I didn’t know they were a real thing, and it was a fantasy movie, so I chalked it up to that.
I wonder if they feel hard to believe because we rarely see them in media. A counter-weight trebuchet also looks weird – a slow moving box of rocks throwing another rock hundreds of yards is really odd. For that matter so is a battering ram – how can a wooden tree truck swung by some guys bring a large stone wall down? We don’t question those because we’re so used to them.
This catch-22 is probably why so much “historical” media relies on tropes built up by previous media. Adhering to what most of the audience believes is historical (or expects in such shows) is a higher priority than authentic accuracy.
You’re right. As a pedantic side note, battering rams in fictional media are almost always used against gates, and hardly ever against stone walls directly. This probably helps the reader/viewer “feel” like the battering ram has a chance of working.
Visually, the gate is usually made of wood and on a gut level it makes sense that a big wooden weapon can knock down a big wooden door, whereas knocking down a big stone wall might trigger more people’s low-level disbelief (“wood cannot break stone, silly!”)
Yes, you’re absolutely right. Astute observation and interpretation.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
But you could have the door backed by a metal portcullis or some similar obstruction, and have one character reassure another that no battering ram could get through. And then have the ram attack the wall…
as a guy living in Asia the first time I saw catapults is in a Chinese television series about Three kingdoms and they used Traction Trebuchets and it made sense to me: basically counterweight stuff. Then I learnt about Roman catapults and they were hard to believe more: using some twisted ropes to throw a rock?
I can do you one better than just “hobbyists” building trebuchets Brett. As a 14 year old boy scout my troop put up FOUR trebuchets in about 6 hours (a month of 1ish hour troop meetings plus two hours “on the day” during a campout) from scratch. Cut down trees, tied together, the works. Granted the youngest patrol (10/11 year olds) built one that broke on its second firing. But my group of barely-teenagers with 0 adult input and 0 engineering training built a trebuchet that could chuck a 3-5lb cantaloupe over 100 yards and did it a couple dozen times. We were not the winners of the contest either! God knows what ACTUAL ENGINEERS with a grand and a chainsaw could build if they actually wanted to
We needn’t wonder. We’re putting it to the test. With gourds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punkin_chunkin
The adult trebuchet record is a bit over a thousand yards, with torsion coming in a bit longer. Adult catapult record is 4,091 feet. Youth 10 and Under (for what it’s worth–how much parents contributed is always a question here) is 418 ft for trebuchets and nearly 1,300 feet for catapults. (I’m excluding air records because they don’t bear on this discussion.)
I imagine that if a fantasy film maker wanted a bunch of trebuchets, catapults, and the like, they could ask that group. It’s worked in the past–“Timeline” used the SCA for extras (that’s why the knights have gold chains and white belts), and I’m reasonably certain, but can’t prove it, that “Eragon” used the Tuchux (group parallel to the SCA).