Gravity Alone: Tom Stanton's Trebuchet Breaks the Sound Barrier
Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone
Tom Stanton has achieved a historic first: a trebuchet powered solely by gravity has broken the sound barrier, launching a 4-gram projectile at 776 mph. His innovative design uses a 3:1 pulley system and a carbon-fiber arm to overcome the limitations of free-fall acceleration. After iterative testing and refinements, the machine reached supersonic speeds, confirmed by a sonic boom.
For the first time, a purely gravity-powered trebuchet crossed the barrier.
- sdenton4
Here's a direct link to the video, to avoid the blogspam cruft...
- emptybits
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.
- tromp
His dyneema driven drum is eerily similar to the dyneema driven drum (called "snek") https://rowingbike.com/nl/model/thys-222-revolver#content-7 on the Thys rowingbike https://rowingbike.com/nl/model/thys-222-revolver
- felooboolooomba
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
- daemonologist
Also (mentioned by Tom), this elastic-powered supersonic trebuchet is an excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
- egberts1
Ummmm. In 2007, near a certain defense contractor, we demonstrated a 319'-wire trebuchet mounted horizontally but slight vertical a-skewed for distance/aiming.
Used a gnarly large helical gear but with integral diminishing ratio.
Gravity-powered in same way but with a 20-meter-ish tower. (Cheaper than a standard 800'-tall trebuchet.)
At release time, achieved 10 G-force (payload goal), it's velocity speed was audibly a speed of sound (arguably higher, math says Mach 2.7).
That was our lunchtime project, all started from several stage bets, a napkin diagram, and different loser(s) pay for weekly food deliveries.
Even demonstrated to some brass from an unrelated project.
Fun-time.
Oh, yes, lest I forget, bunker-required for safety (where exactly would you stand?).
- hinkley
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.
- MomsAVoxell
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.