Greek Technology

[Imperator Silas]

Could you perhaps work some of the more advanced(or theoretical) Greek weaponry or other technologies into the mod?

[Sarcasm]

Like what?

[Watchman]

"I call it... 'death ray'." :rockstar:

[Imperator Silas]

All that weaponry and defense mechanisms that Arcimedes(sp?) made at Syracuse for instance.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

If people would make them, we'd love to have them. We have no one who is active who knows how to make the animations for siege equipment work.

[Imperator Silas]

Perhaps you should put out an advertisment for modders that CAN do that?

[Helgi]

They tried to do a Archimedes death ray on some tv show using a brieme as a target, they couldn't get it to work

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Well, we're not interested in the death ray, but other types of siege equipment - yes. Pretty much everyone who mods RTW knows about us, and all the achievements and improvements we've done for in the game. We'd love to have more help from people who are talented in most areas of the game if they are really interested in helping us. Animations, skinning, modelling, traits, whatever.

[Imperator Silas]

I've heard of a steam-powered cannon, proven to work...:egypt:

[germanpeon]

I heard about that ship burning device (mirrors and some sort of telescope maybe) Archimedes designed and the steam cannon. I saw a show on the History Channel that proved the ship burning device impractical because it took them about 100 mirrors and maybe half an hour to set a pieve of wood on fire. I think the cannon was proven to be unrealistic because of the amount of time it would take to heat the water (steam), and because it wasnt powerful enough to deliver a projectile to a long range target.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

They tried to do a Archimedes death ray on some tv show using a brieme as a target, they couldn't get it to work
Yea! Mythbusters!

I've heard of a steam-powered cannon, proven to work...:egypt:
Mythbusters again!

[Brightblade]

Ion Cannon Ready.

*cries tears of nostalgia*

[Spectral]

Originally Posted by Helgi
They tried to do a Archimedes death ray on some tv show using a brieme as a target, they couldn't get it to work
Yea! Mythbusters!

Actually, it looks like their conclusions weren't as definitive as that...

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_ArchimedesResult.html

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_Mythbusters.html


xv) Did it really happen?
We're not historians and cannot answer this question. Overall, there are a number of special conditions and important details that need to be considered to get the death ray to start a fire. However, given the location of the city, the local conditions, the ease of implementing the idea once one has worked out the sensitivities, and the brilliance of Archimedes, my own opinion is that I personally can't rule it out all together (can't say it happened either). However, our goal was to use Mythbusters to motivate doing a quantitative estimation of feasibility, to demonstrate the possibility using a sketch model experiment, and to have some fun in the process.

[Imperator Silas]

but check out the book Barbarians the next time you visit the Library. it contains all the research that proves this and many other weapons existance.

[Foot]

but check out the book Barbarians the next time you visit the Library. it contains all the research that proves this and many other weapons existance.

What? the Terry Jones' book?

Foot

[McHrozni]

Don't use mythbusters as a refference, particularily when they detemine something "couldn't happen". All too often they equate their own incapability in repeating something as proof it can't be done. Sometimes they're right (especially when they take something which is proven to be impossible beforehand), but much of the time it's just juvenile bravado.

I think, though, that most of inventions of Archimedes weren't all that great. If they were, it is very likely that at least some of the better ones would find their ways into the Roman arsenal - this was, after all, how they got nearly all of their military technology.
But do we see a noticable change in Roman siege or missile technology after the fall of Syracuse? Not really. Though Archimedes was killed in the sacking of the city, much of his devices would have remained, as would people who have seen and operated them survive - at least some of them. If there was indeed as much value as believed to recover, it would be unfantomable for the Romans not to copy it.

My guess is that Archimedes and his siege engines weren't nearly as advanced as we would believe. It was probably, in 99% of the cases, just regular contemporary altillery, just more numerus and better utilised, better deployed, better led and used to a greater effect than contemporary altillery. A few extraordinary engines of limited use - like the Claw - probably cemented the myth.
Not an insignificant feat, but not nearly as special as believed.

McHrozni

[Maeran]

I've seen the principle of the 'death ray' demonstrated ('What the Ancients Did for Us'). He used modern flat mirrors, but talked about 'shiny sheilds'. I'd have thought that a modest array of large flat mirrors, mounted on pivots would be easier to aim at one spot and set fire to, maybe a sail.

By and large, such engines would be one offs and in any case, when do you get a ship in a city battle?

I'd like to see an 'earthen ramp' option, possibly based on mines (because they don't move) or siege towers (because they do the same job, but do move). But I know that even if you did a visual model of a ramp, you may still have to push it up to the wall and the look embarrased as the soldiers walk into it and then levitated vertically up near the wall (it's bad enough with a vanilla tower).

[Brightblade]

It would really suck if it suddenly got cloudy when they were gonna use that on the enemy fleet :help:

[Axelus]

I've also watched the BBC Ancients program. The thing is, that experiment is on a much smaller scale. The mirror is about 10 times bigger than the boat, and I wouldnt think they were able to build such a big mirror. It doesnt have to be alot bigger though, but since the ships IRL will be alot more further away, than in the experiment (where the boat was about an arm's length away from the mirror), it is also alot more difficult to project all the mirrors correctly.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

Two problems with a "deathray":
No polished glass mirrors back then.
And it would be nearly impossible to get enough guys holding enough mirrors and get them all to aim a single spot on a moving object far away. Maybe if you drilled a unit for a couple years...

[Spectral]

No polished glass mirrors back then.

What about reading the sites I posted :



ii) Archimedes would only have had access to bronze or silver plated mirrors.
Yes, my impression is that Archimedes would certainly have had access to polished bronze at this time. It is not clear if he would have had silver mirrors. If silver was available, silver mirrors would be about as good as the mirrors we used. Bronze would not be as good. But polished, it is actually a fairly good reflector. Its lower reflectivity can be compensated for by increasing the collector area.

Considering the reflectivity of polished brass/bronze, my initial estimate is that we would need to increase the size of the array by roughly 1.5 times for bronze reflectors to work. The bronze mirror array used for the subsequent test with the Mythbusters was 2.4 times larger, accounting for the bronze and for the shorter time available to heat the wood to ignition temperature (see FAQ iii).

---


And it would be nearly impossible to get enough guys holding enough mirrors and get them all to aim a single spot on a moving object far away. Maybe if you drilled a unit for a couple years...

Who talked about "moving objects far away", or moving ships ? Once again, I think it would be best to read the links I provided, they *show* to within a certain degree of doubt, that an incident like this was not all that impossible to have happened...

[Bonny]

~50 years ago a greek historian tested it and it worked (one time with small boat in a water basin and one time on some wood far away from the people who hold the shields)


And it would be nearly impossible to get enough guys holding enough mirrors and get them all to aim a single spot on a moving object far away. Maybe if you drilled a unit for a couple years...

Syrakus was really big city and i doubt they would have problems to find enough people to hold the shields.

The theory of using sunrays to make a fire is true, but if they were able using this system to make a warship catch fire back in the ancient days of rome and Quart Hadast is still (and imho will be forever) debatable.

[Watchman]

~50 years ago a greek historian tested it and it worked (one time with small boat in a water basin and one time on some wood far away from the people who hold the shields).I saw the film footage on it a while ago. Thought the historian dude was full of it all the time, and almost definitely on the Ancient Greece Iz Kewl trip. Nationalism. :dizzy2:

Shields my arse. Those things were type 1x2 meter flat mirrors; way bigger than even the pavise-type tower shields "sparabara"-school archer-defender spearmen often used, and the Greeks never. Given that the bronze-covered shields the Greeks used were round, about a meter in diameter, and concave, I had sort of major problems seeing what the "test" had to do with proving the death-ray story.

Plus the Mediterranean is not the swimming pool and Roman war galleys not the miniature he did it with.

It's not like you couldn't use focused sunlight to set stuff alight from a distance. It's just that given the circumstances I have sort of difficulties believing the Syracusans had the necessary resources for it, or that the conditions of the siege - particularly on the seawards side - were particularly cooperative. And surely, if old Arch managed to get it to work, it'd have been employed against the rather more static siegeworks on land as well ?

The rest of the weird stuff the old codger reputedly devised during the siege doesn't sound too strange - clever application of machinery was quite popular for that sort of thing where the technical know-how existed. The Chinese regularly used some pretty interesting stuff both on attack and defense, and I've read intrepid engineers and inventors came up with some quite creative ideas during the various Crusades. It's not like the Romans were half bad at it either.

Those sorts of things tend to go under the bonuses given by ancilliaries like Inventors, Siege Engineers and Archimedes himself in RTW though, don't they ? The game engine is really a bit basic when it comes to these things.

[Maeran]

And surely, if old Arch managed to get it to work, it'd have been employed against the rather more static siegeworks on land as well ?


Now here I might have an answer. Looking at Syracuse on Google Earth and various Googled maps of the ancient city (OK, not the most strenuous research, but how much are you really going to do in a few minutes?) it seems that the city had open sea to the east, the harbour bay to the south (wide open, nearly a mile across the mouth today). Behind the city to the north is a gentle hill that may or may not have been occupied. If it was then there was sea to the north too. And to the west a marshy area that gently slopes up into the island of Sicily.

So besieging forces are almost certainly exclusivley west of the city, maybe north and above too. Whereas shipping would approach from the east and the whole of the southern quarter.

So there was more opportunity for using sunlight on ships because you could do it in the morning and mid day (mid day being when the rays are strongest) but you are limited to the evening for the west and can't do the north at all.

I actually see more reason to doubt the claw's existance with such a broad bay. Could it have been a dockyard crane that had stories grow up around it?

[Watchman]

I'm under the impression Roman siege engineering wasn't yet too hot around that time. Syracusan, on the other hand, was. Add in whatever weirdness Archie came up with, and I've no doubt the Italic rustics were generally in awe of actually fairly normal stuff.

Plus claiming the Syracusans had pretty much everything short of a machine gun would have been an useful face-saving excuse for the siege taking as long as it did.

Personally, I figure that if the Syracusans went and burned some Roman warships at range they just used normal incendiary weaponry. I've seen it mentioned fire-hoses occasionally popped up in Greece already before the Hellenic period, and assorted catapults make pretty decent delivery systems for something unpleasantly flaming. Assuming the Romans were unfamiliar with the idea they could right well have attributed it to pretty much anything up to and including divine intervention, or in this case Archie's infernal devices since the guy was presumably pretty famous and everyone knows them Greeks were way too cunning by half anyway.

[O'ETAIPOS]

A secret unit available from Syracuse:

https://img242.imageshack.us/img242/7208/genericshiparchimedeswomj1.jpg (https://imageshack.us)

:yes:

[antisocialmunky]

I've heard of Greek man-portable flame throwers being used in later years by the Byzantines. It was, I believe a simple handheld pump fed with Greek fire with some sort of wick attached to the front. It was said to be used my men in the front rank to strike fear into enemies. The problem with this weapon is that I'm not sure when it was invented.

If you want to add some flavor stuff to the Greeks, you could give them those belly-crossbows. I'm not sure that they were still used in that period though.

Alot of the cool stuff is too anachronistic to use like Dendra Panapoly. It would be cool to see guys running around in full bronze plate armour.

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/Walpole.jpg

I wouldn't mind seeing some 'what if' type units for the Koinon Hellenon since they were a historically adaptive people. It would be interesting to see some Hellenic Legionaire events happening at the very least.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

"Incendiary gernades" were invented as early as the Achamenid Era.

[CaesarAugustus]

What about those handheld ballistas that the Greeks and Romans supposedley had?

[Fondor_Yards]

"Incendiary gernades" were invented as early as the Achamenid Era.

:inquisitive: Really? I find that really hard to believe.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

:inquisitive: Really? I find that really hard to believe.
They had small clay spheres that would be filled with something like "greek fire" that could be thrown after a fuse was lit. They would break on people or siege equiptment and catch them on fire. More of a Molatov Cocktail, I guess.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Why?

[Watchman]

Because fire's scary and does bad things to people and animals. And burns stuff. The Middle East had enough oil in the ground for the stuff to seep up on its own in places if nothing else, and I'd be surprised if the odd flame-pillar created by gas exhausts didn't have something to do with the way Iranian religions tended to be so preoccupied with fire.

Dunno if they'd figured out how to filter the crude oil into rather more incendiarily useful napht by Achaemenid times though. One does get the impression incendiary weaponry only started getting (relatively) common by Late Roman times or thereabouts, "Greek fire" nonwithstanding.


Alot of the cool stuff is too anachronistic to use like Dendra Panapoly. It would be cool to see guys running around in full bronze plate armour.Eh, that's Late Bronze Age chariot-warrior gear. You sure as heck didn't "run around" in it. AFAIK there's a fair bit of debate if the thus far solitary Dendra harness find was combat gear to begin with, and not just a sort of show-piece for some magnate to look impressive in...


A secret unit available from Syracuse:

:yes:~:thumb: ...and it comes with steam-powered oars, right ?

[Zarax]

Gastraphetes could be plausible but they might have been phased out by ballistas and other siege weaponry by the game starting date...

[Kralizec]

About the death ray...

It does certainly sound unplausible that they were able to set fire to ships with it.
But there's another, much more practical use to such mobile mirros: suppose they used it to blind sailors on deck?

[antisocialmunky]

That's what I was thinking, but it would be hard to accomplish keeping a beam still on a person like that. It would be really annoying though. There are records of Roman ship-to-ship beehive catapults. So the whole idea of messing with enemy crews was experimented with.

[Fondor_Yards]

That's what I was thinking, but it would be hard to accomplish keeping a beam still on a person like that. It would be really annoying though. There are records of Roman ship-to-ship beehive catapults. So the whole idea of messing with enemy crews was experimented with.

And didn't the people of Hatra shoot vases of scorpions at the romans?

[Kralizec]

I think I read somewhere that once the Romans invaded Crete, they used sling stones incripted with insults against Cretans...but we're drifting off topic.

It would be dificult to aim at a specific person if the area of focus was only the size of a single person.
I'm guessing that the ideal distance was considered that distance wich allowed them to shine a larger area, around half of the front deck, for example.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

And didn't the people of Hatra shoot vases of scorpions at the romans?
Scorpions in breakable clay pots had been, theoretically, around for a while. There is a theory that one of those got Achieles, and is the basis of the myth (or just a posioned arrow :juggle2: ).

[antisocialmunky]

Wouldn't it be fun to see units in RTW run around in circles going "Get it, off get it of!!!" ?

[hoom]

The thing that bugs me about attempts to recreate the Death Ray is this assumption that Archimedes would use flat mirrors/the lack of funding that results in use of flat mirrors for the recreations.

Archimedes was a geometer & wrote a book on conics, so he well knew parabolas and calculating focal length of concave mirrors & lenses.
Therefore, he would have used concave mirrors (at least with spheric sections if not parabolic).
The city was under siege so there were a large number of soldiers at high readiness kicking around.

So we have mirrors that would focus properly, a designer able to determine the shape needed for an appropriate focal length and ample disciplined labour = entirely plausible to do much better than any modern reconstruction has done.

Whether it actually happened, I'm personally doubtful since its not mentioned in the closer to contemporary chronicles & only appears later.

[Tellos Athenaios]

The thing that bugs me about attempts to recreate the Death Ray is this assumption that Archimedes would use flat mirrors/the lack of funding that results in use of flat mirrors for the recreations.

Archimedes was a geometer & wrote a book on conics, so he well knew parabolas and calculating focal length of concave mirrors & lenses.
Therefore, he would have used concave mirrors (at least with spheric sections if not parabolic).

So we have mirrors that would focus properly, a designer able to determine the shape needed for an appropriate focal length and ample disciplined labour = entirely plausible to do much better than any modern reconstruction has done.

Methinks that Archimedes - if he actually did design & use such a thing - would have used hyperbolic mirrors. The dimensions of an hyperbolic mirror allow for relatively large mirrors on a small area. Next, he would only have needed the lower half - provided that he got his geometry properly applied to the mirror - and thus could have made even larger mirrors. Apart from that: these mirrors allow for "idiot friendly" use, plus they don't require much crew to operate them, and are also relatively easily designed.

Parabolic mirrors would have required more crew - because of the horizontal dimension of the thing and are much more difficult to design and hold into place. (Again because of the horizontal dimensions)

As for the material involved: something based on mercury would have worked fine as well.

[hoom]

Hmm, I think we have a cross talk issue here.

I don't understand what you mean by
relatively large mirrors on a small area. Next, he would only have needed the lower half - provided that he got his geometry properly applied to the mirror - and thus could have made even larger mirrors. and
Parabolic mirrors would have required more crew - because of the horizontal dimension of the thing :inquisitive:

My image of the setup is like this:
A bunch of soldiers deployed along the wall holding circular mirrors.
The mirrors would be something in the region of 2.5ft diameter, most likely polished bronze and slightly concave.
The cross section probably doesn't matter much between parabolic, hyperbolic and simple circular segment, it doesn't need to be a perfect image, just needs to keep it relatively focussed to about bowshot distance. (as opposed to the 1ft*1ft flat mirrors that made a 3ft*3ft image on the ship in the mythbusters version)
The soldiers all aim the image from their respective mirrors at the same point of the ship with constant adjustment keeping the heat on the same part of the ship. (again as opposed to only a handful of people between a couple of hundred mirrors in the mythbusters version)