Tom Stanton has a raft of cool videos, I like the engineering iterations he often goes through to find a working prototype.
At least this is a direct link to the video and not blog spam
Great video.
Other trebuchet fans who dream of building one some day may be interested in googling "walking trebuchet" for a surprisingly high complexity/results ratio.
I would love for this to be optimized to the point that its portable and can be carried around, assembled on the side of the mountain, and used as a low-cost, efficient way to throw things from one mountain to another, maybe for avalanche control, or cloud seeding, or indeed for seed bombs intended for re-wilding hard to access places, or something.
It just seems like such an obvious tool, rather than a weapon.
You'd probably be better off using a rail gun if you want a carriable launcher
So, a firearm?
Why move gun, when gun can move bullet?
Interesting that his spool goes bigger at the end...?
I would think you want it decreasing to near zero to extract all the kinetic energy from the mass, leaving the mass stationary as it hits the ground.
I think the idea is that at the end the sling starts to unwind too, increasing the effective arm-length (that non-linearity is one of the reasons trebuchets are so efficient to begin with). As a result it's possible that decreasing the spool to near zero is like putting the gears of your car too high. Reducing the spool size ensures there's enough torque left to put more power into the final swing.
Really wondering up to what point I can build a trebuchet in my backyard before the authorities start to complain
I suspect that with a little iterative modelling of the whole system with derivatives, efficiency could be bought from ~40% to ~80%, giving you an extra few hundred mph...
I wonder if Claude has guardrails against hyper optimizing a trebuchet projectile into a proper bullet
I'm pretty sure the only reason the video trebuchet wasn't a proper bullet is because it's made out of plastic instead of a ball bearing. Aren't most handguns subsonic?
How would you even get Claude involved in that? This isn't your git repo that a language model can scrape for textual content.
Convert the model to OpenSCAD, put it in a repo, and off you go. OpenSCAD is very LLM-friendly.
A LLM may produce OpenSCAD compliant syntax, I don't doubt that, but how do you make it produce designs that fit engineering constraints? How do you even express those to a LLM? How do you validate those? How do you iterate upon them?
The domain of ML-driven design optimization isn't exactly new, is quite specific, and I would need convincing that Claude has anything to contribute to it.
It could make simulations and read the CNC templates and the files for the 3D printed parts.
It could come up with design adjustments and measure their impact in the simulation. But the sim2real gap may be too large.
Fuckin love this guy
Agree!
He has some great videos. I watched this one and was impressed at the calculations, the transparency and the celebration at the end when he reached supersonic speeds.