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.

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.

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.

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

Projects like this are inspiring. Love it.

I should build something this weekend…