The polybolos was an advanced ancient Greek repeating ballista, often described as a "machine gun of antiquity," invented in the 3rd century BC by Dionysius of Alexandria. It used a unique chain-drive and gravity-fed system to fire bolts in rapid succession
Matches the name of episode 152[1] the Wikipedia article cites for the info. Seems the classification of seasons and even the season's episode order on Wikipedia differs from the one in the Youtube title.
I've heard of this, but what's the advantage? They still need to recharge the torsion the same way, which must've taken longer than someone manually feeding the next bolt.
Slightly off topic, but when I read about these archeological discoveries being made thanks to custom software, ML or the like - Who is writing this code?
To me these projects would be so fun to work on, but this domain seems so far out of a tradition SWE track. Are the researchers just cobbling the code together themselves? Cross department collaboration within the university? I'd love to have a hand in things like this.
likely would have had tactical utility to take out one select high value target especialy against an oponent who had not encountered it.
so more of a battlefield assination weapon.
it also decouples the need to have great physical strength ,and visual acuity
I not often cynical, but I confess to being uninterested in the "dead ends" of history. Perhaps these are areas though where a historian (or layperson) might find rich for "what if" speculation. For me it's more like if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it…
The Antikythera mechanism is another one that is uninteresting to me because, whatever it is, it seems to have been a one-off.
Maybe, like James Burke's obsession with "connections" in history, I am drawn instead to historic through lines.
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Apparently it was on MythBusters, but I don't remember that one.
[1] Text-based summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2010_season)#Epis...
To me these projects would be so fun to work on, but this domain seems so far out of a tradition SWE track. Are the researchers just cobbling the code together themselves? Cross department collaboration within the university? I'd love to have a hand in things like this.
How was discarded that the impact were simultaneous instead? Like spreading from a catapulted bunch of pellets?
The Antikythera mechanism is another one that is uninteresting to me because, whatever it is, it seems to have been a one-off.
Maybe, like James Burke's obsession with "connections" in history, I am drawn instead to historic through lines.