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.
Or, in other words: There was some text to read and some pictures to look at. For topics in the range of "supersonic trebuchets", I'm absolutely okay with quickly reading some lines of text; dynamically deciding how quickly/thoroughly I read, what paragraphs to skip, etc. What I'll definitely NOT do: Watch a video clip about it.
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 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.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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 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.
It just seems like such an obvious tool, rather than a weapon.
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.
- structural: There are height and size limits on things you can build without a permit
- trespassing: flinging objects onto others people property is illegal
- endangerment: any activity that can endanger other people is illegal
All of these three depend on how rural you live I guess. So in a suburban neighborhood I would assume they get involved very quickly.
https://youtube.com/@SteveMould