Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

Here's a direct link to the video, to avoid the blogspam cruft...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co57SfcT-h0

His trebuchet launched a 4 gram projectile at 776 miles per hour.

That's obviously extremely lightweight for trebuchet payload, but for comparison, his projectile is approximately 62 grains so approximately twice as heavy as 30 grain high speed 22LR rounds. And approximately 1.5 times as heavy as 40 grain subsonic rounds.

His dyneema driven drum is eerily similar to the dyneema driven drum (called "snek") https://rowingbike.com/nl/model/thys-222-revolver#content-7 on the Thys rowingbike https://rowingbike.com/nl/model/thys-222-revolver

This guy absolutely amazing to watch. He also has a 2nd channel that I only found out a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/@TimStation

Also (mentioned by Tom), this elastic-powered supersonic trebuchet is an excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus

How do you responsibly test something like this? The payload isn't going to follow a ballistic trajectory, it's going to follow an aerodynamic one. You'd probably have to design something special to load into it to aim the damned thing.

Which is a road trip to some place very empty in something like a 180º arc. Maybe 225º.

Seems like such an advance in this ancient technology. It would be really cool to see it applied in interesting ways.

I really wonder just how effective this could be as a defense system .. the mind wanders with every update Tom makes .. I imagine an aiming/targetting system would make this an effective, easily replenished, low-resource weapon system for some applications. Attacking feral animals, perhaps?

How could an auto-loader work for this .. I'm sure there's a means.

Another thing that I keep thinking about, is whether this would be an effective way to launch seed-bombs, or deal with avalanche conditions on a mountain without requiring fire-arms training.

A truly fascinating bit of engineering. I hope to see it evolve into an effective delivery mechanism.

I thought it was neat that the dyneema string he used is the same stuff they use on new (expensive) bike spokes

There were designs to hurl masses from the Moon also with a sling. Massively less infrastructure than a linear mass driver.

Projects like this are inspiring. Love it.

I should build something this weekend…

This is awesome! I wonder how far can you get with a wood and iron build

It would be interesting to scale this design up. Not necessarily in terms of velocity--supersonic velocity for a large trebuchet munition isn't necessarily desirable. What I mean specifically is scaling up the multi-revolution arm and sling release technology to be capable of launching a ~1 ton projectile.

Could it be done reliably with traditional construction techniques (wood, treenails, lashings, minimal metal hardware)?

AFAIK these are innovations that were not explored historically. It would be interesting to see if they would have been viable. It seems like you could probably achieve a lot more downrange energy using the same amount of materials this way.

A whip's end also breaks the sound barrier. It's not at all hard to do.

Not to be that guy, but this recent XKCD is suspiciously relevant: https://xkcd.com/3276/

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What's extraordinary about this? You can get any amount of energy from gravity and transferring it to a small object doesn't sound like an especially complex feat. It's one of those influencer videos in which someone devotes a disproportionate amount of effort to accomplish something pointless- Mr. Beast does the exact same without any pretense of showing something useful.