Trebuchet

A trebuchet is not a catapult. But it's close. If the trebuchet were a black box, and the catapult were a black box, the results of the 2 would generally be the same. In essence, they fling stuff. A catapult is like a piece of wood that is bent back, and the energy in the bent wood flings something as far as you can make it go. The trebuchet is like a seesaw with one side cut down and a real heavy weight dropped on the short side so the long side flies up really fast and flings something. I think you can find more on trebuchet.com. These are very minimalist descriptions.

Woody, Cliffy, and I built a trebuchet this past weekend. It's what we do when we get together, stuff like this. We got it to essentially fling a snowball as far as we could if we were to throw it. The trial and error phase was fun, and finally we got it to perform consistently the next day when we made adjustments to the way the string is released. In fact, we let the whole string go with the projectile. Thankfully, it did not sail 100 yards, thus we didn't need to chase it that far. In a warfare setting, it wouldn't really work all that well.

I recommend it, very fun. But better with more than 1 person.