Siege Weapon

Let's say you're a medieval lord with 5,000 knights, men-at-arms and peasant levies you've decided to attack and conquer a lesser lord who has 1,000 fighting men of similar abilities. If you line your guys up and fight out in the open, you'll crush him. But the coward/sensible leader does not do this and instead holds up in his castle, which has high walls and heavy gates to keep people out, a large supply of rocks to drop on the heads of people trying to climb said walls, safe vantage points to shoot at attackers before they get to the walls and graineries, larders, wine cellers an cisterns which can keep his troops fed for months. You have several options available to you. You can try to storm the castle while your guys are shot and get rocks and burning sand dropped on them. You can try to starve them out, which is going to take months, suffer casualty's from raids and camp sickness, lower morale as people are away from the friends and family and incur massive opportunity costs as the peasant levies could be farming, or you could employ Siege Weapons.

Historic

Battering Ram

One of the oldest and simplest siege weapons, the Battering Ram is, at its most basic, a log that men use to try and break down a door or section of wall. Over time people got ideas like swinging it from ropes to make it easier to smash into enemy fortifications and strong roofs to keep the men inside from being crushed by falling rocks, scalded with boiling oil or shot by arrows. Notably under Roman law, any defenders who failed to surrender after the first ram touched their wall were basically fair game. You could throw in the towel before then, but after words if the Romans won they would kill you, enslave your wife and loot everything you owned.

Ballista

One day a Greek man looked down at his crossbow and thought "what if I made it bigger?". They came with two designs: "fuckhuge crossbow" oxybeles, later known as a scorpion (commonly used as anti-siege-weapon weapon mounted on fortifications) and "even bigger crossbow-looking thing" ballista. Contrary to popular belief ballista is not an oversized crossbow - as powers, energies and material resistances scale differently huge wooden bows would break and huge metal bows would deform under such pressure. Thus Greeks devised a system that uses twisted ropes in which bow arms are fixed to store energy to the point it can hurl spear-sized bolts with enough power to break gates and warship hulls. Serving as highly accurate artillery (multiple stories exist of single soldiers getting sniped by bolts), Ballista was used by both the Greeks and Romans and later through Medieval, for along time coexisting with early gunpowder artillery until development of cannon technology made it obsolete.

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.

• 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 it's 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 it's weight makes it rotate on the axis very quickly. If your thinking "Gee that sound complicated for medieval engineering", then your 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 it's own merits since Yankee Siege II, A traditional Trebuchet design was the record hold in the 2013 "Pumpkin chunking contest" beating out multiple floating arm designs.

Siege Ladder

Sometimes the best answer to a large wall is to simply go over it. The siege ladder was invented with this in mind, allowing men to climb over the walls.

• Sambuca: Like a siege ladder, only built for D-Day. They let roman soldiers on ships charge up onto the walls of enemy citys.

Siege Tower

If a Siege Ladder didn't work, the solution was to make it bigger and with protection. Siege Towers allowed men to climb up without having to worry about anyone attacking them from the sides or simply knocking the ladder over. There were also platforms on top to allow archers to fire at the defenders.

Sappers

A good way to weaken enemy walls was to dig under them, weakening the foundation and making them more prone to fracturing and collapsing. What sappers would usually do is once they were certain that they were directly underneath the enemey’s walls, they’d stash a whole lot of flammable materials and douse it with pig’s fat (not live pigs, they’re significantly less flammable and more prone to running away) then set everything on fire to collapse the supports and cause a cave-in. It was a dangerous job, but it was effective, so long as the enemy didn’t catch on and start counter-mining. Would-be attackers would oftentimes be smoked-out and suffocate if they were discovered.

Petards

Before people worked out how to make cannons that were better at killing the enemy than whoever was using them, they would sometimes use Petards. Their job was to run up to enemy walls with barrels of gun powder or other primitive bombs, light the fuse and run like hell, letting the explosion take down the wall. Most of the time this ended up killing the Petard as well, hence the phrase "hoisted by his own petard"

Named Historic siege engines

Warwolf: Thought to be the largest Trebuchet ever built, it took 30 wagons to transport it, putting at between 300–400 feet tall and it took over 50 people over three months to build it. Used in the Siege of Stirling castle by king Edward the scotts were so scared of the thing they tried to surrender, but the king was like "nope" and he wanted to see his weapon at work. Records show it threw over 300 pound stone balls and leveled a section of the castle's wall.

Helepolis: not to be confused with "Heliopolis", or Suncity, the Helepolis was a greek seige engine who's name means "Taker of Cities". Actually it was a type of siege engine, but it was more then just a siege tower. It was tank! It was built like a siege tower only with multiple catapults at each level of the tower, it could roll up to a castle wall, firing all the while, while solider manning dart throws on top could clear the walls for soldiers in side to jump out of the moveable tower.

Modern

Seige Weapons are still useful into modern times. However they are used a bit differently than their middle age counterparts.

Howitzer

Originating in the 17th century. The Howitzer is still the go to indirect fire weapon for infantry in the 21st. When Railguns become smaller and more portable. It will also remain so well into the 22nd and beyond.

Bangalore torpedo

These were explosives in a tube used mainly to clear obstacles such as mines, barbed wire, and barricades. They came in handy if you couldn't otherwise dismantle said obstacles properly, such as if you were storming an enemy position under fire and needed to create a clear path very quickly.

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Vehicle Warfare
Combat Aircraft - Siege Weapons - Tank - Warship