Death by human catapult...

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Preacherman

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Well, this is certainly shooting-related - but not gun-related...

From Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle....RQECT0CRBAEKSFEY?type=topNews&storyID=3090457):

Two Charged After Human Catapult Death

Tue July 15, 2003 07:10 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - British police charged two men with manslaughter Tuesday following the death of an Oxford University student who was flung from a giant catapult.

Bulgarian Konstadin Yankov, 19, died last November when the stunt near the West Country town of Bridgewater went wrong.

"He had been thrown by a replica medieval catapult and failed to reach the landing net," said a police spokeswoman.

Yankov was on an outing with the Oxford Stunt Factory, an unofficial club at Oxford University where he was studying biochemistry. He had been the sixth person that day to be launched from the "trebuchet" catapult.

Organizers said at the time Yankov had been properly weighed and that the machine had been correctly calibrated before he was fired in a 30-yard arc. They did not know what had gone wrong.
 
Isn't there some pesky concept called aerodynamics that affects the flight of a projectile? A flopping man in mid-air is less stable than a howitzer shell. Ahhh, college.
 
Call it sad, stupid, whatever. I feel bad for his family. If I were to lampoon it in a paper the headline would be on the sports page and read:
Thrown for a huge loss!
 
Well, the first five made it. Gives them about an 85% hit ratio. And then
there's a "flyer" in every group......:neener:
 
I saw a TV show a few weeks ago about a similar undertaking in the UK. A bunch of snob-geeks wearing tuxes were out in a field to launch the designer's GF into a target net. It was a direct hit, but the net threw her back into the air about 30 feet and she came down hard on the ground. She was not moving and had broken her back and many other bones (thank God for socialized medicine!). When the ambulance came, they got her strapped onto a back board and loaded up. Then the ambulance was stuck and all the snob-geeks in tuxes had to push it! The follow-up report was that she recovered but was no longer his GF.
 
Actually, the woman who bounced out of the net in England was thrown by a trebuchet, not a catapult.

They're very similar, but instead of being placed in a basket or cup on the end of an arm, a trebuchet has a hook, and the payload is dragged backwards along the ground from underneath the trebuchet, then flipped over the top.

Thereoretically it has a bit more mechanical advantage because the trebuchet has a "wrist" action throughout the swing of it's throw. You can feel the principle in action if you throw a ball with a cupped hand and your wrist immobile, and then just throw it normally with a wrist snap at the end.
 
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