I Built DaVinci's Machine Gun Crossbow!

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Imagine you're defending a fort against a siege and the enemy brings out this ferris wheel of archery. When they park it, the big man leading this machine's crew turns to face your rampart and belts out "let me show you its features" and lets out a laugh that shakes your bones

Pretty good attempt! A few issues... first, you need to "fire" earlier as the arrows still have the downwards vector from the spinning wheel. You WILL need fletching to stabilize the flight, as you can clearly see that the downwards force makes the arrows tumble in flight. A "real" trigger/lock instead of the "push upwards" system would also increase reliability and flight. My verdict on Leonardo's invention is fairly negative though. It somehow works, but loading the weapon is cumbersome and outright dangerous. It would be almost useless in battle. If all you want is 16 shots in a short time, then it would be much easier to simply mount them in four stacks with four crossbows each, then pull all of the triggers at once.

"Sir, are there any weapons in your house?" "just the casual 16 crossbows mounted on a wheel of death" "....what?...."

Fun fact. The term civil engineer only came in to use to differentiate between military engineers and civilian ones. But both were generalist engineers, sub divisions are a recent, 20th century phenomenon.

That guy was waaaaaaay ahead of his time. If he was alive today everybody will just bash him with "that's too complicated", "that's tol expensive", "that's unpractical", "who are you"

DaVinci's Tank next?

You shoot a crossbow and fire a gun. The distinctive word here is FIRE. From "Give Fire".

I make bows as a hobby out of wood. You are one of the first guys out there I have seen understand the concept of the "loose laminate" where you create the tiller of the bow by using longer and shorter slats. I know Leonardo had some drawings with laminated spring mechanisms, So that's especially great.

I feel like the only practical use for this would be on top of a fortification with several side by side, aiming up 45° or so with heavy headed bolts that can rain down on an attacker. As for the heavy trigger of the original design: wrap a rope around the handle shaft with a heavy stone in the other end, so you just need to kick it over the inner edge of the battlement to shoot it. One crossbow man/ DaVince machinegun that then picks up his normal crossbow. A good first salvo that gives the impression of far many more defenders.

Really neat build. Cool to see the tech tree expanding.

Joerg Sprave and Tod of Tod's workshop made a crossbow with a magazine that would hold 5 arrows. If you collaborated with them you could have a machine that could fire 80 rounds before needing to be reloaded with the possibility of an auto-magazine hot-swap mechanism that could see your creation firing endlessly, or until you ran out of magazines of quarrels.

Loading speed isn't as big of an issue if you look at this as a crew served weapon. You're going to need multiple people to move this thing around, anyway; they may as well be trained to load it. You would need four experienced people who communicate well. Two on each side, with one pulling the string (probably with a lever) and the other setting the bolt in place. As long as they communicate what they're doing and make sure each person is ready to rotate the wheel, they could probably get a rhythm going and load this pretty quickly.

Put paint on the tennis balls so we can see the spread pattern. Or take it to a field and tilt it upwards slightly to give it some arc.

My first thought was to put this in gate houses or to use it to harass people sieging your castle. Basically use it like a booby trap. Even with a low draw weight, it would definitely be a huge problem to deal with, and it would give defenders free time to do all kinds of things. Either way, great job with this one!

This could see this as a interesting trap for D&D. Imagine trying to break into the house of a Artificer and one of these start shooting (1 D12 +4) arrows at a unlucky adventurer.

for a first full fire that worked really well! and it looks cool af

Considering how quickly this came together into a working prototype and the amount of available skilled labourers at the time it seems like you could realistically actually have a working high fire rate self reloading crossbow/Ferris wheel/turret thing. I think you could reach 500+ rounds per minute sustained if you had a internal track that caught the string and drew it right after firing rather than a rope attached to the axel so you are only adding one or two bows draw weight to the resistance rather than 16 and a loading mechanism just after the apex, maybe just an inclined track that slides the next bolt in. I’d love to see these improvements explored

HTME goes full Jorge Sprave!! (The slingshot channel) 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I absolutely love this, I remember seeing you when you just started and I'm so happy to find your channel again! In relation to your video, had a small idea for you to maybe try? Though it will be a pain and need some major work. Instead of 16 mounted crossbows, maybe make 16 housings for single crossbows to sit in? That way, at least in my head, you have one person loading the crossbow "bolts", one person spinning the device and another person loading the device with the loaded crossbows once the crossbows are empty. Higher reload, higher rate of fire(with extended usage), "easier" to use...maybe. Just an idea, but I never said it was a good one 😅