Merlin in First, Medieval Postal Service Breaks 900 Feet
Posted Nov 06, 2009 by Matt | Tags: launches, WCPC
Day 1 is in the books with some very interesting results. First Yankee Siege only shot around 1295 feet after some very impressive-looking test shots yesterday. Pupmkin Hammer fired as a standard HCW as expected and went 1100 feet or so. Hokie Hurler followed up with an OUTSTANDING 1187 feet! Great Gourd Experiment bombed one out around 600 feet or so, and First in Fright had a massive pop up that netted them 350 feet roughly. Then Medieval Postal Service shot one out there to 916.04 feet, but it was a very flat trajectory and our sling may have rotated in midflight causing the pumpkin to come out slightly sideways, likely robbing us of some distance. Unfortunately it is not clear in the video if this happened for sure or not. What is known is that our trajectory was fairly flat, though not terribly so. We can only try again, we know we have much more distance. Morganna shot a decent shot, but only 500 feet or so probably and Fred the Treb was in roughly the same range, maybe a bit shorter even.
Then Shenanigans 2 was up, another FAKA roughly the same size as Medieval Postal Service, and they also shot very well despite the many issues they have had in testing, putting one out at 1125 feet or so. Then it got REALLY interesting. Newcomers American Chunker (I believe that was their name) and their pretty large and very well made F2K put one way out there at over 1400 feet! Merlin followed soon after with a MASSIVE pop up that took forever to come down over 1500 feet away. King Arthur followed with a solid 1287 feet, leaving Merlin in first and King Arthur in 4th, only 10 feet or so behind Yankee Siege.
There are two more trebuchets that did not get to fire as the air cannons took an insanely long time to fire, even more so than ever before, they were firing for over 6 hours!!! None of the catapults, torsion, or human power got to shoot, and they will have to make up their shots at dawn tomorrow. One can only hope that the air cannons can pick up the pace quite a bit for tomorrow. And hoepfully we will figure some things out and get Medieval Postal Service out in the 1100-1200 foot range and get ourselves back in line to finish 4th or 5th. We think 1200 feet or maybe even more is attainable for us, whether that puts us up in 4th or 5th is unknown at this time. We do know that we have broken 1000 feet no problem in testing this fall, so don't count us out yet!
