Quote:
Originally Posted by TheAzn
Hey Ozban and Jallanite. Ozban, Jallanite is right about this. The physics of Arda is, as far as can be discern, practically the same as that on Earth today.
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One difficulty is that the
physics you showed in your original diagram is
nonsense. Galadriel55 produced a much better image and your new image does little more than copy it, without acknowledgement that you were very, very, very
wrong.
Claiming that criticisms of your arguments have been disputed without indicating where doesn’t work with me. Mostly you appear to just ignore criticism and jump to irrelevancies that a falling palantír would almost certainly kill a man if it hit him straight on.
You are only
assuming that Minas Tirith even had siege engines. The text doesn’t back up your assumption anywhere. Quite likely it can be taken as something that should go without saying, but in medieval accounts of siege warfare that I have read almost all the siege engines were in the hands of the attackers, not in the hands of the defenders.
Seemingly siege engines were far more useful for attackers to use against fortress walls than for defenders to use against moving targets, as seems reasonable to my thinking and to those of some others here.
Diagrams of siege engines on the top of Minas Tirith don’t prove anything when an accurate diagram shows that a siege engine lobbing a rock would lob it just as far if the siege engine was on an outer wall. The first throw might well kill 10 or 20 of the foe at most. Then the foe would see the stones were coming and get out of the way. When using a catapult to lob stones at the walls, walls don’t run away. The foe can find somewhere they think there is a weak point, and keep lobbing at the same place, hoping that the stone will crack there.
But Tolkien explains clearly why this tactic is not used at Minas Tirith. Here the walls had been built too strongly.
It seems to be a fact in medieval and older battles that siege engines were not greatly used by the defenders in a siege.
If you think I and others are wrong, and in theory we might be, then point out historical counter-examples. Just saying Tolkien was wrong in his writing, was horrendous beyond words, doesn’t convince me at all. Those are only the empty words of someone who has provided no evidence that Tolkien was wrong.
That historically defenders of a besieged fortress didn’t greatly rely on siege engines seems to be the best evidence that siege engines were less useful in the defense of a fortress than you imagine.
Claiming that your posts support your arguments when they don’t doesn’t strengthen your arguments.