On Deadliest Warrior, they had a show of French Musketeers vs. Ming Empire warriors. The Ming had a very interesting weapon called the Nest of Bees.
The Nob is 32 rocket-powered arrows in a wooden basket. Uncap the end, light the fuse, aim, and wait. Suddenly 32 arrows going 220 mph are heading downrange.
They aimed this thing at mannequins representing about twenty soldiers with one officer on a horse mannequiin front and center. Six of them were hit, with three of them being kill shots. The targets are unarmored, and the penetration is good. The officer in the center is not even touched.
The speed of the arrows is about twice that of a hand-drawn bow.
I consider that making the effect of this something like a grenade with a great deal of range. I'm going to suggest Fatal damage.
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Sun Tzu vs. Vlad Impaler
I liked Sun Tzu's trick of soaking the bushes of an approach to his line with sesame oil, and then shooting a flaming arrow into the bushes to light the area on fire.
One point the show made was that with the flaming wad of stuff on the arrow was that it limited the penetration on the target.
I'd drop the damage level on an ordinary arrow by one. I'd probably call the fire Damaging per each turn, and some sort of chance to beat the fire down one or two levels depending on effort and skill, and a chance for the fire to rise in damage to Dangerous and to top out at Fatal.
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One thing I don't like about Deadliest Warrior is that sometimes they match up a barbarian vs. a soldier one on one. The Romans knew, I think??, that one on one, the Celt could clobber them. That's not the point.
With a disciplined force, the soldiers would have won the case study of Roman Centurion vs. Rajput (who was reminiscent of the wild ways of the barbarians). Or like the recent fight of Sun Tzu vs. Vlad the Impaler. I thought Sun Tzu was an actual accomplished general and not just a philosopher. But it is indeed possible that Vlad one on one would have killed Sun Tzu. That's not really the point again.
Its a bit annoying.
Tad - That's been one of my complaints about that show from the very beginning, is that they negate some of the defining advantages of certain warriors.
Ninjas do not shout to get a Spartan's attention, they shank him in the kidneys while he's polishing his armor.
Spartans do not go ninja-hunting one-on-one - they're an army of guys five rows deep on every side with spear and shield.
Vikings don't go pillaging alone - they take their entire city with them in a veritable armada.
Knights can, in fact, fight and move in plate armor, not lay there like saps while a pirate can-openers them for a flintlock to the face (although that was suitably badass for a pirate victory).
etc. etc.
When I saw the title, I was half expecting it to be dropping a wasps' nest into a catapult and firing it over a castle wall. That could make life interesting for the people inside.
Indeed, when the Persians were invading Greece, they had an elderly Spartan warrior prisoner as an adviser, and he told them that one-on-one the Spartan warriors were no better than any soldier in the Persian army, but that their ability to fight together was what made them formidable--and The 300 has made that battle something more than a bit of geek esoterica.
--M. J. Young
Has anyone ever heard of that? Firing a wasps' nest from a catapult into a castle? Probably wouldn't be lethal unless someone had an allergy, but that would certainly disorient and confuse the combatants. As long as the people firing the nest were fairly gentle with it, the wasps wouldn't attack them. Being fired over the wall though....
(Doing Therapy)
It's the sort of thing I could see someone like Genghis Khan attempting. You know, the man who invented biological warfare by catapulting three-day-old horse carcasses over the walls of enemy cities to spread pestilence among the ranks, and once burned down a city by tying cotton to rats and then lighting the cotton and letting the rats loose into the city. I could see that man attempting this.
the problem I foresee with it? Wasps generally go squish when slammed with, say, the force of a catapult against something solid (kindof like castle walls). So you might get a stinging cloud of insectile doom... or you might get a waxy ball of impact-liquified chitinous goo. Try it next time you're in a medieval-ish Verse and let me know.
I think I saw something like it in a movie, once, but don't remember where. Harry's right, though--you can catapult the heads of the slain, rotting carcasses, but catapulting a hornet's nest is stirring up a hornet's nest. How do you get it in the catapult without a lot of people being stung? How do you lob it over the wall without the impact on the other side killing most of the wasps? Are you going to leave a trail of angry wasps who escaped the hive in flight? Effective if you can do it, but a teleport of some sort is the more effective tool, and if you've got teleport capabilities you probably have better uses for it than moving hornet's nests.
--M. J. Young
How do you lob it over the wall without the impact on the other side killing most of the wasps? Are you going to leave a trail of angry wasps who escaped the hive in flight?
The second is why you don't kill all of the wasps in flight. They DO leave the hive. Instinctively, they also go back to it. If the hive is now in the enemy castle, you now have a swarm of pissed off hornets going that way.
Ah, but my experience with wasps (we have paper wasps) is not that they follow the nest, but that they return to the place where the nest was, looking for it. So I'm not sure they would follow the nest as it's flying through the air so much as abandon the nest and return to the nesting site.
Not that I'm interested in testing this theory....
--M. J. Young
Well, it WAS a cool idea.
Sure--and maybe you can try it sometime. Set up a catapult, find a hornet's nest that is removable (paper wasps and mud-dauber wasps build external nests which usually don't get larger than a fist; yellow jackets tend to make nests inside rotting objects like tree trunks and carcasses, or sometimes holes in the ground; I don't know what kind of wasp it is that builds the sort you see in cartoons--never saw one of those in the wild, perhaps fortunately). Then use a P10@1 Force Field generation to surround the hive, and then while maintaining the force field move it, maybe with a P4@1 Simple Telekinesis, to the catapult, and hope you can maintain the forcefield while allowing the catapult to hurl the nest over the enemy wall, at which point you can release the forcefield and so release the wasps.
Or you can just use the psionic abilities against the enemy directly.
--M. J. Young
It suddenly occurs to me that I once saw a paper wasp nest the size of a cauliflower, so that might work. However, paper wasp nests contain eggs and larvae; the wasps themselves cling to the outside. So that might be a tad more difficult to manage.
--M. J. Young
I was thinking more along the lines of putting the hornet's nest in a lightweight wooden box. It has to have some weight before it will fly properly in the catapult. That contains the wasps whilst you prep it for launch. Then, on impact, the wooden box shatters and the wasps are released. "It's so crazy, it just might work."