Chapter 8: Boy Scout Projects

While we were walking back to the shop with everything we had bought, Eric told me “Guns aren’t allowed here on Chaos. I told you that. People have tried to make gunpowder, but it didn’t work. No one knows why, but it didn’t. It’d be nice to have guns, or even just gunpowder bombs, but they don’t work here.”

“I got that, but I wasn’t asking about guns. I asked Minter about artillery. Large crew-served weapons with area effect. Catapults or torsion engines. Arrow-engines. Trebuchets or counter-weight engines. Didn’t you ever see any movies about the Middle Ages? They always showed catapults and stuff like that.”

“Nobody here on Chaos has anything like that.”

“Why not? They are easy to build and devastating to an unprotected target. Didn’t you build one as a kid?”

“No. Who does that?”

“All us kids did.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure! My Boy Scout council had contests at the summer Jamborees. Everyone built them! I won’t say my patrol ever won, but I’ve certainly built a few.”

“You’re serious? You’ve built them before?”

“Sure! I’m surprised that you didn’t. Where did you grow up?”

“Oneida, in New York. I was never a Boy Scout, so I don’t know what they did.”

“You missed a lot of neat stuff. We built rope bridges, we built treehouses, we built catapults. We could use tools and rope that we brought, but everything else had to be made on the spot from local materials.”

“Do you think that you could build some of that stuff here for the town?”

“Sure. I mean, I think so. I’d need some materials and some workers. If it’s big enough to be a real weapon, it’ll be too big for one man to build. Trebuchets can get really big.”

“Would it be worth the trouble? I mean, how useful would it really be?”

“I don’t know, but all the medieval armies built them, so they must have thought they were worth the trouble.”

“Right, if you’re trying to break down a castle wall, you need something to throw stones at it. The pirates won’t have stone walls, though.”

“No, but I’d bet that a hundred-pound rock lofted a couple of hundred feet up would go right through one of their wooden ships.”

We’d been down to the docks. We hadn’t walked around down there, but we’d seen the docks, the river, and the ships. To the locals they were big ships, but to a 21st century Earthman they weren’t ships so much as big wooden boats and they looked pretty fragile to us.

“Oh, yeah. Okay, listen. Jason, I don’t really need you to go with me to rescue Leslie Clerk. I really just brought you here to get your arm and knee fixed up, and see if you had what it takes to be a Hero. Why don’t you stay here and try to build a couple of catapults and that other stuff, while I go get Leslie Clerk?”

“You think we’ll both be safe?”

“Honestly, if I have to sneak around I’m better off without you. No offense, but you aren’t very quiet.”

“That’s okay. I never claimed to be a SEAL or a sniper. I was an Engineman. OSHA regulations insisted that we wear double hearing protection when our big diesel generators were running. What’s the point of being quiet, when you’re babysitting a huge engine that loud? Okay, will I be safe here, without you watching my back?”

“You should be. You have a secure place to sleep. Just make sure that you take Jim or Henry with you whenever you go out. You shouldn’t have any trouble. Everyone in town knows that you beat Aaron with a saddle. With two swords, or with a sword and a shield, no one will want to fuck with you. Just don’t go out alone or someone will sneak up and stab you in the back. You’d hate that.”

“I’d hate that. Okay, sure. I’ll sit around on my ass, playing with Boy Scout projects while you go rescue your Damsel. Um, didn’t Shelly say that if you get killed, I’m stuck here?”

“Yeah. You need a Hero to drag you through the portal. If I get killed, you’re stuck here until another Hero comes by. I’ll try to not get killed, okay?”

“Yeah. We’d both hate that. I’m good with consoling Shelly, though, if anything unexpected were to happen to you.”

“Fuck you. Become a Hero and get your own Caretaker.”

We both laughed.

Millie had given us one of the rooms upstairs. She got the big one, Jim and Henry shared another one, we got one, and the last room was Weldon’s locked storeroom. After we got back to the shop, Eric and I spent a while talking about what I was going to try to do before we snuffed the lamp and went to sleep.

The best answer to massed infantry or cavalry is a group of catapults firing baskets of loose rocks. Of course, to get them to mass up and not move around, we would really need some strong walls to hold them out, but the town was working on that. And, to take out pirate ships before they land their troops, the best tool is a catapult or trebuchet throwing a heavy-duty barrel full of hot oil followed by an arrow-engine with flaming arrows.

I knew I could build a trebuchet. They were simple; they just had to be huge to do any good. The counterweight had to be enormous in order to lift the payload against the leverage. And the counterweight had to move through as long a drop as possible, to let gravity accelerate everything enough for the payload to go flying.

The recreations at the European castles had pivot points 20 or 30 feet up in the air. The counterweight could easily be a couple of tons, and the launcher end could be 30 or 40 feet long. Build it that big, and whatever was launched was going to go flying several hundred feet or more. Build it solid enough, and it would be consistent in that the same weight would land at the same place every time. Changing the range would be as simple as changing the counterweight or the payload weight.

On the other hand, changing the direction it faced would be miserable. A trebuchet would only be useful against a fixed target like a castle wall. Or, a fixed location like a mountain pass or a particular location on a road. Or, a restricted shipping channel.

A large arrow-engine would be easy to build. The only issue would be the spring, but we could use steel for the spring on an arrow-engine. It was just a larger crossbow. Or, since it wasn’t going to be portable and it didn’t matter how heavy it was, we could make the spring out of wood.

I wasn’t so sure I could build a good catapult or torsion engine. Again, what would we use for a spring? A catapult needed something to twist and untwist, like rope or hair. Well, this was a seaport, so maybe we could make a spring out of enough rope.

Before I went to bed I started to build some models. I had to do that first, just to ensure that I knew what I was doing. They didn’t have to actually work, as long as they illustrated the final product and I could use them to show what was needed.

We got up with the sun and Millie made us all breakfast in her new kitchen. It didn’t have everything arranged quite the way she wanted, but it had better tools and better supplies so she made do. I was wondering how long it would take her to hire a maid and cook, if she was really that rich.

We didn’t bother building a model of the arrow-engine, since we had about a half-dozen crossbows just laying about waiting to be sold. Any of them could be used as a model for the larger version.

For the catapults and the trebuchets, the shop already had just about everything I needed to build small demonstrators. Small discarded pieces of wood, only fit for the cooking fire, became the massive structural members. Twine and thread and glue became the huge ropes that held everything together. A small shopping basket became the trebuchet’s huge counterweight holder.

The only design issue I couldn’t solve on my own was the catapult’s torsion collector, the thing that you were supposed to feed work into to create stored energy, which when released made the arm slam forward and launch your rock, gravel, or dead cow. We needed to store twisting force. Supposedly, the best thing for that was rope made from human hair, but I couldn’t see collecting enough to do the job.

For everything else, I could look people in the eyes and say “It’s hard to demonstrate with a small model. It’ll work a lot better when we scale it up to full size.” but for the catapults I frankly wasn’t sure how to do it.

After two days of shopping, playing with models, and swordsmanship lessons, our new armor was ready and Eric wanted to go. He was taking the best four horses, leaving me the two nags since I wasn’t supposed to need any of them. If I needed to move a lot of stuff, we’d use Jim and Henry as labor and take the shop’s cart. Or, pull one of the nags out of the stable and make it do something useful. If it got too heavy, we’d rent a real draft horse from the stable down by the docks to pull the cart.

“Eric? Why don’t we just sell those two horses, if we have to pay to stable them? They are still at the same place we bought them from.”

Eric said “If we were farmers we would do that. Someone else who might want or need to move around might have an emergency. It is worth the expense just to have two horses available immediately if you happen to have a need for them while you’re staying here in town. When I get back, we’ll sell them before we return to Crossroads.”