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.
> 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.
> They set up 5 targets at 90 yards (82 m) and brought in professional archer Brady Ellison to provide a benchmark for comparison. He hit the targets in 2 minutes, using 11 arrows. After further breakdowns and repair work, Adam and Jamie accomplished the feat with 15 arrows in 1 minute and 50 seconds.
Certainly sounds like a win to me, if it was faster and just as accurate as the worlds number one ranked recurve archer :-/
You can train a man to turn the windlass in about an hour. It takes years to get an archer to the same accuracy and speed.
> He hit the targets in 2 minutes, using 11 arrows. After further breakdowns and repair work, Adam and Jamie accomplished the feat with 15 arrows in 1 minute and 50 seconds.
Faster, sure, but not more accurate--10 seconds less but 4 more arrows. Faster itself is also debatable, depending on whether or not you factor in the breakdowns.
Breakdowns aren't relevant, as Mythbusters slapped it together over a few days, and are uncertain of the design. The Greeks had years to perfect it, and great knowledge and expertise building with these materials.
As another poster mentioned, the time comparison is unfair too.
In terms of accuracy, how many days or weeks did they spend learning the tool?
From wikipedia it sounds like the advantage is not really speed of recharging but just that it will repeatedly fire for as long as the lever is turned without any other actions or pauses needed in between. Maybe not losing 10% (or whatever?) of the time on bolt feeding was sufficient advantage? Maybe the ease of operation in a hectic battle situation was advantage enough? Or maybe the continuous power requirement made it more feasible to use multiple soldiers at once working at higher speed, without them having to synchronize starting/stopping/waiting every x seconds?
Full auto would require charging a huge version of a similar mechanism for a single volley and as a non-actual-engineer, I do not know that it is possible to output the torsion energy in a controlled manner preventing the gun from exploding violently.
edit: But, yes. This is more akin to a revolver than to a machine gun(or even chain gun as Wikipedia implies).
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybolos, at least some of these used a windlass to rearm. That may explain part of the speed difference over one using a separate lever or one that’s rearmed purely by hand.
These weapons also may have given up on some firing power for firing frequency.
I'm not even considering the magazine reload time, just the time between shots assuming a full mag. That's 10 recharges either way, as shown in the videos. It's not like a machine gun where the energy is in the powder.
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
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