Weapon Masters

[mwerner]

Anyone else watching this Discovery Network offering that's currently showing on the Military Channel?

Elements of Mythbusters and perhaps even the old Junkyard Wars... The idea is that each week they examine some sort of ancient weapon, and then the demented engineer/hippie/nutcase guy tries to build a better version.

The history bits are actually quite good; on the Katana episode that aired first, they went into great detail on the steel production techniques of the feudal Japanese, the forging, tempering, and polishing processes.

Last night, they did the Chinese repeating crossbow, complete with a trip to one of the few traditional bowyers left in China. Then "Chad" built a pneumatically-drawn version that worked quite well after much tinkering.

It's fun for the weapon/technology crowd.

Link:
http://military.discovery.com/tv/weapon-masters/weapon-masters.html

There are some streaming videos on site.

 

[savagesicslayer]

I love that show.The .44cal atatle was a instant classic.But my favorite was the chariot with the gyro-stabilized,free floating,gas powered repeating crossbow.That was cool stuff.

 

[mwerner]

I missed the atlatl episode, which is annoying since I have actually built one and occasionally haul it out and chuck some darts. No doubt it will re-run.

 

[Guntotin_fool]

I wish they would cut down on the yelling and yippee, pow and kaboom stuff and show the real fab work and design stuff that makes it work.

The one episode with the torsion bar springed cross bow was silly, a good set of truck leaf springs welded up to a frame would have worked much better, and with a good engineer, one could get some really high response times if you then tied it to a compound bow. you could shoot truck axles thru stone walls pretty easy.