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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

What's extraordinary about this? You can get any amount of energy from gravity and transferring it to a small object doesn't sound like an especially complex feat. It's one of those influencer videos in which someone devotes a disproportionate amount of effort to accomplish something pointless- Mr. Beast does the exact same without any pretense of showing something useful.

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You sound fun...

This is HN. The trip is the destination, bla bla.

No, I understand, it's the claim from the very first sentence that "gravity itself seemed to forbid" (reiterated later in the text) that annoyed me. It's just making up a non-existent obstacle to hype up the result.

It's a bit clumsily written, but I'm pretty sure that's a reference to what Tom mentions in his video, that since g = 9.81m/s^2 you're not getting close to the speed of sound just from falling from a reasonable height, even ignoring air resistance.

Thus a traditional trebuchet design cannot reach that speed.

But since potential energy from gravity is mgh and kinetic energy of a projectile is 1/2 mv^2, calculating height and mass of a weight to power the projectile is absolutely straightforward. The terminal velocity of a falling weight has nothing to do with it (even historical trebuchets used a leveraged system in any case).

The point was the leverage can't be simple, like in a traditional trebuchet. Tom ended up with a rope pulling on a cone, with the arm being accelerated over many revolutions before the projectile is let go.

Tom explained it much more straight forward in his video, the blog author tried to be fancy and made it worse.

Mate, you are on HACKERnews. We are all about this.

Of course, but there is a continuum between "I spent years tackling this complicated problem and the solution will benefit us all" and "I've entered the same McDonald's drive-through 1000 times in one day to order always the same thing". Some achievements are closer to the first end, others lie more somewhere in between.

You will hate his stirling bike.

I love his entusiasmen for engineering and having the drive for a multi year project, even when the result is just another trebuchet. All while teaching physic in an entertaining way.

I don't get how this is close to driving through a drive through.

What a sad and pathetic opinion, especially when targeted towards such an incredible contributor as Tom Stanton, a true educator and an energetic and excited engineering mind.

Yes right ?

How dare someone build something entertaining and tell about it.

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