Posted by When you see claws and poison stingers on a scorpion, or rows of razor sharp teeth on a great white shark, you can sometimes wonder how we humans made it this far. The answer has been hunting strategy, and of course, weaponry. Even more important than just weaponry, humans have developed ranged weaponry, giving us the advantage of attack from a safe distance.
Once you’re wondering about physical human abilities, you’ll be pleased to know that not only are our opposable thumbs the key to important weapon grips, but we actually have the most accurate throw in the animal kingdom (elephants are actually pretty decent with their trunks, too). Of course, an advantage of range works fine against animals, but against other humans, you can suffer the same death-from-a-distance fate.
Below is an infographic to give you a sense of the distances some of humanity’s most famous ranged weapons could reach, and below that, a bit of a tour of what they do and what they’ve done. I’ve left out a lot of very cool ranged weapons like the shuriken, the dart, the throwing axe, guns, cannons, and others, but I think the ones I chose cover a nice range of… range.
Javelin/Spear
Although a projectile classic, the javelin is the only weapon on the list that doesn’t need to go airborne to be useful. It is indeed a nicely-ranged melee weapon, but with a good throw a javelin can pierce an enemy 30m away. We know the javelin more familiarly as an Olympic event, as part of a decathlon. Of course, the overwhelming majority of -athlon events are derived from their respective military histories.
English Longbow
The bow and arrow has been a go-to ranged weapon for thousands of years, touching hunting and warfare all over the world. But when you think of the bow and of range, nothing is more iconic than the British longbow. Made most famous at the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years War, it was most effective with a mass of longbowmen raining arrows over an advancing (in this case French) army. It was decently accurate at shorter ranges, but accuracy was and could be sacrificed when thousands of arrows were involved.
It’s hard to know exactly how far they could shoot, since none survived from the Hundred Years War until today. Indeed, despite taking up to four years to make, they weren’t designed to last, and were rather disposable, intended to be replaced. While archers are often seen as the pussies of the medieval battleground, firing a longbow wasn’t easy, and typically an archer would shoot a maximum of four arrows per minute, and you’d have to be in good shape to be effective.
Trebuchet
If you’re ever looking to launch 350 lbs in style, look no further than the trebuchet. Probably the classiest of the catapult family, the launcher works by the dropping of a counterweight that whips the launching arm forward. Catapults do come in many shapes and sizes and with different ranges, but the trebuchet is one of the most famous due to its mechanisms that allow greater range, and its ability to launch objects as huge as used trucks.
Not as much designed to land on people (wouldn’t that suck), the trebuchet was mainly a siege weapon, designed to launch over stone walls as opposed to onagers that would try to knock down the walls. Other uses involve launching corpses over the wall to spread plague, and, presumably, creep the crap out of enemies.
Here’s a video of some rich English jackass wasting pianos by setting them on fire and launghing them with a trebuchet:
Sling
The sling is probably the most underrated projectile weapon in the list. While it can’t keep the size or shape of projectile of some of the others, it gets fantastic range. Essentially, the sling acts as an extended arm, so when you think of it launching, imagine a massive dude with arms as long as a normal person’s arms plus the length of the sling. Get your technique down, and you can coast with your old-school rock launcher. It’s also pretty low budget and doesn’t take a genius to fashion.
Here’s a pretty cool video of a sling in action, though not nearly at the max range:
Ballista
While longbows replaced the piercing target aspect of the ballista, and trebuchets and other catapult-like weapons replaced it on the siege front, the ballista remains a rather hardcore piece of ranged weapon history. Ancient Greeks were the first to make good use of them, and use continued through the Roman Empire, fading as the empire faded.
Paris Gun
The Paris gun was used by Germans (in Germany) during World War I to shell Paris. Based on naval guns, the range was so unexpected that the French were convinced they had been bombed by a zeppelin or something, even though the skies were empty.
The gun was dismantled before allies could capture it, so don’t expect to see plans for how to build one yourself. After the Paris Gun’s era, longe range warfare switch from big guns to rockets.
Surface-to-Surface Missiles
The first surface-to-surface missile was the German Fieseler Fi 103, or V1, used in the Second World War, although rocket technology did exist as early as the 13th century. Since then, they have evolved to the globe-spanning monsters of projectile mayhem that they are today. It’s one thing to dominate a battlefield with range, but the word “intercontinental” in the name of a weapon brings up a whole new kind of fear.
Of course missiles come in air-to-air, surface-to-air, and other place-to-place combination forms, but to keep on an even playing field with the other weapons for range’s sake, I’ve limited the scope to surface-to-surface alone.
Some surface-to-surface destruction:
There you have it. So the next time you hear of psychoboy Kim Jong-Il testing out a new missile, shudder as normal, but do remember how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve launched.
