I am not Yuan Shu

Chapter 258: The Return of the Trebuchet
The academic storm that Yuan Shu had created in Luoyang City did greatly enhance Yuan Shu's reputation. His subsequent establishment of schools and assistance to refugees also made his good name spread throughout Sanhe.

This time, the recruits from Sanhe were called up to go to the battle. When they heard that Yuan Shu would join them, they were very interested. Many of them secretly ran to the cavalry camp to catch a glimpse of Yuan Shu's face.

He looks like a fan who is desperately pursuing his idol.

It can be said that Yuan Shu is a positive character in their hearts. In addition, Yuan Shu had won two consecutive battles and defeated tens of thousands of rebels. This also made the Sanhe recruits respect Yuan Shu more and more willing to listen to him.

But they didn't expect that the first thing Yuan Shu said to them was to ask them to restrain themselves and not massacre the city.

He also said that as long as they did not massacre the city, they would be given generous compensation afterwards.

It must be said that this group of Sanhe recruits have seen the world.

They had been to the battlefield, killed people, and been injured. They had experienced everything except death. However, this was the first time they had seen a situation where generals paid money to buy the lives of soldiers.

Some people found it funny, some were confused, and some outright doubted it.

In order to deal with this situation, Yuan Shu stepped forward directly.

He came to the camp of the Sanhe recruits and swore to them with his finger to the sky - as long as you don't massacre the city, I will definitely give you sufficiently generous compensation, and I will do my best to help you reduce your losses and will not let this city become a meat grinder for everyone.

The Sanhe recruiters had no doubts about Yuan Shu's actions.

He has sworn to heaven, and with his reputation and status, since he said it, he will definitely do it. If he breaks his promise, he will be the one who suffers the most.

Although everyone still thinks that what Yuan Shu did is a bit strange, they are fighting for money. If you can pay the money, then whether to kill people or not can be negotiated.

After making an agreement with the soldiers, Yuan Shu certainly would not do nothing.

Faced with this city that was destined to be defended, in addition to the Han army's usual tactics, Yuan Shu also planned to use some tactics that were less commonly used by the Han army.

For example, using the power of a trebuchet.

The earliest record of the use of catapults on ancient Chinese battlefields can be traced back to the Warring States Period.

When the State of Chu was at war with other countries, it used simple catapults to attack cities. However, the stone bullets and catapults at that time were relatively small. A twelve-jin stone bullet could hit a distance of three hundred steps, which was certainly very lethal, but facing a solid city, its lethality was limited.

In addition, the "hanging door sinking machine" mentioned in "Mozi·Preparation for City Gates" may be a simple stone-throwing device that can be used to defend the city.

However, this technology did not receive further development during the Han Dynasty. Instead, it faced a considerable degree of neglect and even loss. After it flourished in the Warring States Period and even rewrote the city defense theory system, it was recorded in history books again during the Battle of Guandu between Cao Cao and Yuan Shao.

No one knows what happened during this period.

When Yuan Shu was in mourning for Ma Rong in Maoling, he read ancient books and was very interested in this aspect.

After in-depth research, he discovered that traces of trebuchets could occasionally be found in the early and middle Western Han Dynasty, but there were almost no related records in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty. The same was true after entering the Eastern Han Dynasty, with no traces of trebuchets being found.

This situation made Yuan Shu very curious. He checked from many sources and communicated with scholars from various places, but to no avail.

Later he speculated that the catapult was mainly used in sieges and defenses, rather than in field battles.

Since the Qin and Han Dynasties, after the Seven Kingdoms Rebellion, the Han Empire rarely had large-scale internal wars. Later, when attacking the Xiongnu, the entire country's strength was used on cavalry warfare. How could there be room for the development of catapults? From the Western Han Dynasty to the Eastern Han Dynasty, the military power of the Han Empire was mostly deployed outward, fighting against the barbarians in all directions. The places where these barbarians lived were either grasslands, Gobi Deserts, dense jungles, or snowy forests, and there were almost no decent cities.

Their production capacity and technology do not support them having large cities.

Therefore, when the Han Empire fought against these enemies, it did not need to use catapults. Instead, it mainly used cavalry and infantry in field battles. Bows and crossbows and cavalry were well developed, while siege warfare took a back seat.

This led to a situation in which many upper-class people in the Han Empire during his time did not even know what a catapult was. If the Han army needed to attack a city, they would generally use traditional siege methods such as ladders, battering rams, and tunnels, or build earth walls outside the city that were higher than the city walls, surround the city walls, and then have soldiers shoot arrows into the city from above.

Generally speaking, only a large enough fortified city and enough defenders can withstand this series of siege tactics, but most small cities do not need this.

In addition, the number of such wars was too small to allow the catapult, a war weapon that requires high manpower consumption, high technology and high financial resources to return to the vision of the imperial high-level officials.

This situation did not change until the late Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period.

At this time, the main combat occasions of the armed forces of the Han Empire returned from outside the territory to within the territory, and entered a stage of division, pattern and hegemony. During this stage, the army would inevitably face one city after another when fighting. The proportion of field battles began to decline, and the proportion of offensive and defensive battles began to increase.

The number of military campaigns centered on cities began to increase, and the advantages of the defenders in offensive and defensive battles gradually increased. The attackers often faced long siege operations that were extremely time-consuming and exhausting. The huge military expenditures made warlords everywhere miserable.

The reality of war began to force the development of technological capabilities, and the trebuchet, a powerful weapon for offensive and defensive warfare, eventually returned to the vision of the empire's upper echelons during the turbulent times of the Three Kingdoms, was redeveloped, and became unstoppable in the subsequent turmoil.

Yuan Shu was very careful at that time. In the process of building "Yixin Steel Co., Ltd.", he recruited a large number of skilled craftsmen, including blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters and other technical personnel. His original intention was to build standard military equipment and farm tools for the Han army, on the one hand to strengthen his own armament, and on the other hand to sell them to make money.

However, at a certain point in time, Yuan Shu was curious about the trebuchet and had the conditions, so based on the records in some ancient books from the pre-Qin period, he found a group of skilled craftsmen, gave them enough materials, and asked them to try to build the trebuchet.

At the beginning, it always failed. Either it was too short here or too long there, or the wood was not good and the body of the machine always broke. After so many failures, these skilled craftsmen figured out some tricks and spent several months to create the first usable human-powered catapult.

This catapult uses human power to pull the pin connected to the horizontal bar at a distance from the trebuchet. The pintle is placed on a wooden frame, one end is tied to a leather case containing the stone bullet with a rope, and the other end is tied with many ropes for human power to pull, thus throwing the stone bullet out.

Due to the lack of mechanical power, its range is limited, and it can only shoot at a distance of about 150 meters, which is stronger than ordinary crossbows. However, it is very powerful and can fire stone bullets weighing about 30 kilograms, which is much stronger than those in the Warring States Period.

After successfully rebuilding this human-powered trebuchet, Yuan Shu proposed a counterweight trebuchet based on a mechanical principle, hoping that the craftsmen could give full play to their subjective initiative on this basis to make the trebuchet more powerful.

When Yuan Shu dominated Luoyang with his unparalleled mouth cannon and built Luoyang Liangzhuang, the first counterweight catapult was also built in Maoling Liangzhuang. Yuan Shu took the opportunity to take a look at it when he visited Du's father-in-law. It was quite powerful, with a range of about 250 meters.

However, after it was built, Yuan Shu put it aside because there was no place to use it, and did not let the craftsmen continue to build new ones. He then moved the entire technical department to Luoyang to produce more standard equipment and agricultural tools.

He had almost forgotten about the trebuchet.

Until now, looking at the Puyang City with sufficient city defense forces, he remembered that the catapult was a good thing. At the same time, he also understood more deeply why the catapult had been ignored or even forgotten for a long time.

There was really no occasion for large-scale use of this thing. It was very heavy and difficult to move. It was completely useless against the fast-moving Huns, Qiangs and Xianbei peoples. It was only useful when the battlefield was transferred to the territory of the Han Empire.

So when Duan Xing was preparing to attack the city, Yuan Shu sent people on horseback to Luoyang to summon the craftsmen in his own village who were able to make catapults, and gathered them together and brought them to the battlefield.

All the previously manufactured sample machines were disassembled into parts and brought together, and the remaining materials were used directly on site - the forests around Puyang County had been cut down, but there were plenty of them in other places.

Yuan Shu sent orders to the magistrates of Baima and Suanzao counties through Duan Xing, asking them to send some wood and ropes when transporting food and fodder to the army, and to stockpile materials in advance.

(End of this chapter)