Editing Siege Weapon (section)

===Catapult===
Using weights and levers, ancient and medieval people found they could throw rocks, balls of metal or whatever else they had handy into walls to knock them down. If they had dead bodies handy, they could fling them ''over'' the walls of an enemy city and wait for them to get sick and die, as the Mongols did (as a way of saying FU or to 'return prisoners'. Germ theory wouldn't  exist for quite some time). Alternatively, a pot of incendiary liquid or something soaked in oil being lit on fire and then thrown over the wall to start fires worked nicely, as did explosives.
* '''Mangonel''': One of the more basic types of catapult and probably what you think of when you imagine one. What actually constitutes a 'mangonel' is a little unclear, as there is not set historical definition for the type of weapon the name describes. They had an impressive range, able to hit targets over 1000 feet away.
* '''Onager''': A siege weapon commonly used by the Roman Legions, employing the torsional tension of twisted rope and the whip-lash effect of a sling to hurl very large projectiles. Onagers were mainly designed for attacking fortifications from within the confines of other fortifications (as in Roman-style siegecraft), and thus were quite short-ranged. Confusingly, some onagers are mangonels, but not all mangonels are onagers.
* '''Trebuchet''': The big daddy of catapults, it was the biggest, most destructive and longest ranged catapults in history. This was the go-to weapon for sieges until gunpowder became practical. Unlike most catapults, which used torsion to power their throwing arm, trebuchets instead used a weight and gravity to do the trick.
**'''Floating Arm Trebuchet''': A normal trebuchets when fired has a weight on short end of the throwing arm and a rock attached to a sling on the long arm, both ends swing in Arcs as its fired and the weight and throwing arm both curve. The Floating Arm Trebuchet on the other hand is very different. Unlike a normal trebuchet, the floating arm has the throwing arm attached to wheels that roll freely in a channel. The weight is lifted up, straight up (unlike a traditional trebuchet where the weight is moved along an arc), which pushes the throwing arm back on the channel. When fired the weight drops straight down, the arm rolls forward and the throwing arm is whipped forward as its weight makes it rotate on the axis very quickly. If you're thinking "''Gee that sound complicated for medieval engineering''", then you're not wrong. The Floating Arm Trebuchet is a modern design used mostly as an engineering student project. It may not even be that practical a design on its own merits since '''Yankee Siege II''', A traditional Trebuchet design was the record holder in the 2013 "Pumpkin chunking contest" beating out multiple floating arm designs (although that may be because increasing the range requires a greater drop distance, which then risks damaging the track from the impact of the arm).
* '''Grenade Catapults''': In the first world war (yes we are talking about a catapult designed used in the Great-freaking-war) soldiers had a problem. Namely they did not have any accurate way to deliver explosives. Artillery hit hard but were better at shelling the snot out of an enemy position then hitting one strong point, meanwhile hand grenades had accuracy but only about as much range as you could throw them. To solve this problem the answer was the use of slings and rifle grenades for short (but past throwing range) distances and the invention of small infantry mortars able to lob explosive accurately at a medium range. These however took time to design, test, produce, train with and deploy, and soldiers on both sides needed a solution NOW. The German solution was a weapon called the ''wurfmaschine'', literally called the 'throwing (wurf), machine (Maschine), it was a spring powered catapult that could hurl grenades about 200 m (220 yd) away. In response the British invented the Leach trench catapult (Which was more slingshot then catapult but they called it a catapult so it's going on this page darn it!) which was about as good at throwing grenades. The French took an oversized crossbow, named it Sauterelle (grasshopper) and used that. While phased out as soon as newer weapons arrived (specifically, mortars that could actually be carried by hand into a trench rather than the big honkers seen in previous eras), the various WW1 grenade catapults are a quirky addition in the history of siege weapons.