Suranis wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:32 pm
Gregg wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 1:43 am
Somewhere in the bronze age someone invented a catapult. Walls have been obsolete since.
Not quite. Walls as a defense lasted until the Middle Ages. It was actually the invention of the Cannon that did them in. Stone shatters when hit by a Metal ball. If you catapult a rock against a wall it will generally bounce or shatter itself, particularly when the target wall is reinforced internally.
Of course that applies to circular walls that are a self reinforcing structure. Catas and Trebuchets would be a lot more effective against a straight wall that would not have that self reinforcing factor involved, so the invention of the Catapult did end those kind of defensive walls.
Good point. The most important thing about leveling castle walls is the ability to get repeatable placement of a projectile, whether it comes from a catapult or a cannon. Certainly, the muzzle velocity of a cannonball, much higher than the velocity of a catapult projectile, is important. But if you had the ability to lob multiple projectiles into a fairly constrained area with a catapult, you could eventually take out a weak point in a castle wall, typically an entry gate or, as you note, a section of straight wall.
As I recall, trebuchets were a significant improvement over most other forms of catapult for repeatable fire. Catapults were often used more as a terror weapon, lobbing diseased (i.e., bubonic plague) riddled corpses into the castle keep, or lobbing flaming rags to light the wood floors of the upper levels or the thatched roof of buildings within the castle keep on fire.
Interestingly, when castles were made obsolete by weapons that pierced the walls, that created the need to build large countries where in the past you could get by with endlessly feuding nobles who all happened to speak the same language. You needed to fight on open ground and the winning factors were mobility and the size of the army you could raise. The bigger the territory, the safer you were.