"Ancient military engineers on The Military Channel™" Topic

I have been doing some painting, cleaning and priming this afternoon, with The Military Channel on as background noise.
There were some shows, along the line of Mythbusters, where some engineers set out to duplicate the feats of such as Archimedes and his claws.
I believe the show is called "Superweapons of the Ancient World".
There is a gimmick. All the engineers, blacksmiths, farriers, etc are supposedly strangers to each other and have 7 days to build this stuff from scratch. They are not supposed to use techniques unknown to the Ancients, but there are holes big enough to drive a quadriga and pentekonter through. They use chainsaws and bandsaws, but had to justify using a truss on a beam from the texts. .

It's the kind of show for those who enjoy seeing a trebuchet hurl a Buick across Salisbury Plain. Meaning, I like it.

Yeah, they do it the lamest way possible, but they ARE building ancient superweapons… essentially "Mythbuster Do Ancients"…

What's not to like? You get to watch a trebuchet hurl a Buick, AND feel superior because they cheated!

Doug
(who cherishes the memory of the SCA ballista he saw at Gulf Wars one year that was powered by a leaf spring from a Chevy Astro minivan)

Well, using power tools makes up for not having a pile of apprentices..

There was a series on British TV a couple of years ago that got a dozen modern builders – rusty Transits, arse cleavage, "get the kettle on, love – I'll get that finished a week on Tuesday", the lot – to build a Roman Villa in the Midlands somewhere using Roman techniques. Cue much swearing about not being allowed to use modern tools, and friction between the builders and the expert on ancient Roman architecture over what was allowed and what wasn't – there was a stand-up row over the illicit use of a wheelbarrow at one point, and one guy turned out to be a surprising dab hand at frescoes.

This brings to mind a cartoon I saw years back. The label was 'the King began to argue with the moat contractor'.

The drawing showed a man in a crown going ballistic, while the contractor was digging a ditch inside the castle walls.

…the contractor was digging a ditch inside the castle walls.

"But your Royal-ness, if you leave it outside the walls, the barbarians might sneak up in the night and STEAL it!!!!!"