this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
105 points (95.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43159 readers
1559 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Chu Ko Nu was more of a party-trick than a real weapon though. The amount of power behind each bolt was miniscule.
The actual "rapid-fire warbow" the Chinese used was the lol rocket-launcher. (Or really, Koreans did it first, strapping Chinese rockets to a bunch of arrows and lighting all of them at the same time, causing devastating effects on the battlefield). See Hwacha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha
Zhuge Liang's biggest battlefield contribution in practice was probably the popularization of the "Ox Cart", aka the Wheelbarrow. The Shu's army could march further since they had such contraptions powering their logistics. Kinda funny to think that things like Wheelbarrows were still the stuff of sci-fi in the year 200 AD, but that's where technology was in practice.
EDIT: The fact that Zhuge Liang's lanterns (aka: hot air balloons) got practical usage back then is incredible though.
Yeah true. The Wikipedia page for zhuge nu actually mentions that it was primarily a self-defence weapon for women, not a battlefield weapon.
I find it amusing that the Wikipedia page for Huo Che makes no mention of the Korean Hwacha, other than in its "see also" section. That said, which one was done first seems...debatable, I wouldn't feel comfortable coming down too strongly in favour of either one being the first.