Not your average party tank.
"A man can only swing a sword as hard as man can. A goblin behind a machine can pulverize a fortress."
— Senior Sapper Pickler, A Practical Guide to Evil
Siege engines are huge war machines used by attacking armies to help them win a siege, whether by destroying enemy fortifications, helping to bypass them, or attacking enemy forces through or over the walls. They’ve been common in Real Life from ancient times until the end of fortresses as major military factors in the early 1900s, and are as a result well represented in fantasy works, alternate history and Historical Fiction. Often used during The Siege or when Storming the Castle.
Defending armies may use siege engines as well, usually to repel enemy attempts to breach or scale the walls or attack the enemy without having to leave the safety of their fortifications.
Siege engines can come in various types for various tasks, with the more common variations including:
- Catapults:note Simple torsion-powered constructions designed to fling projectiles, which can be pretty much anything (or anyone).
- Ballistae: Have the appearance of a giant crossbow but use torsion rather than tension energy to power their missiles. Often lit on fire. Invented by the Greeks, but most extensively used by the Romans.
- Trebuchets: A giant, usually non-portable sling weapon with a very long range that can throw much bigger projectiles than catapults do. They operate by pulling the opposite end of the catapult downwards and back, typically by dropping a counterweight, causing the sling to shoot up with great force. (Not Tree Buchets.)
- Siege ladders: Large, heavy ladders built to allow attackers to climb the walls. Advanced versions may take the form of giant ramps, allowing the attacker to walk onto the top of the wall.
- Siege towers: Large wheeled and armoured towers with ladders or stairs inside, designed to provide access over high walls.
- Battering rams and screws: For knocking down or breaking through gates, and less commonly used on stronger points in the wall.
- Vats of boiling oil or molten lead: For countering enemies climbing the walls.
- Galleries: A portable roof to protect attackers (sappers) undermining a wall with picks and shovels.
- Mantlets: Large mobile shields.
- Tunnels: Used by sappers to dig underneath walls, either to let soldiers enter from the inside or to fill with fire or explosives and undermine the walls.
- ... and many other variations.
Historical accuracy varies and the Rule of Cool rules. Depending on the setting, cannons may also appear, making knocking down thinner walls in a realistic fashion an option (other siege weapons almost always rely on bypassing the wall or attacking those inside from range rather than knocking it down). Starting from the 20th century bombs dropped from planes and later missile strikes have become more preferred methods of attacking fortified positions, though ground-based artillery pieces remain in many militaries' stockpiles due to lower cost and relative ease of use.
They accentuate the menace of an approaching army and their appearance in a siege is often closely followed by a crisis point for the defenders. Siege engines give potential for great visuals, such as the straining muscles of the attackers working their dire engine, or the horrified defenders watching an incoming payload and then the explosive impact. Also expect Arrows on Fire, and if there are siege towers, expect them to catch fire and topple. See Catapult to Glory for when people are used as ammo. See also Anti-Structure, which is about weapons that are effective against structures. And if someone wields a ballista as a handheld weapon, it may overlap with Great Bow.
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Advertising
- An ad for Kit Kat features a pair of Medieval Morons attempting to assemble a catapult from a set of IKEA-style instructions with no words.
Anime and Manga
- Berserk features relatively little in the way of siege engines (Griffith and the Band of the Hawk specialize in high-speed cavalry strikes), but early on we see massive cannons.
Comic Books
- Whenever the Romans pull them out in Asterix the village is going to be thrashed... Immediately followed by the Romans themselves-hence why they usually do it only when they believe the Gauls are without their magic potion that makes them invincible, with the one exception being Brutus' men who didn't know what would happen.
Comic Strips
- Hägar the Horrible and his horde make frequent use of rams and catapults. In one strip he fills in for the catapult while his men assemble it, until his arms get tired. And on occasion the French or English follow them home, in which case Helga's cooking makes an apt substitute for boiling oil.
Fan Works
- Equestria Divided: House Earthborn makes extensive use of these, including large cannons, enormous battering rams moved by teams of earth ponies, heavily armored bomber helicopters, and the Fortbusters/Beastbusters, powerful war machines designed to take down enemy fortifications, constructs and monsters.
- The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf has an enormous Battering Ram built for the siege of King's Landing, using a sorcerer to conduct rituals to improve it like smelting the iron using driftwood from Daenerys' ships that were massacred at Dragonstone by Euron. It turns out to be for nothing as Drogon just blasts the gate open.
- Saruman of Many Devices:
- Isengard's new gunpowder weapons are able to make short work of the simple curtain walls used in most fortifications, unless they are very thick indeed.
Central had not been able to render fortresses of the Vauban type obsolete with the weapons Saruman was capable of reproducing in quantity. But this hardly mattered. Only the great walls of the Black Gate, the Twin Cities of Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul, or of Isengard itself were any true problem for the artillery he could provide.
- The city of Dorwinion has supplies of hot oil in the gatehouse, to greet anyone unwelcome who tries to run through while the gate is open. It's taken over by Rhun forces, and turned against the original occupants who try to reclaim the city — and to atone for their earlier cowardice in surrendering the city, they endure the oil and suffer the necessary casualties to take the gatehouse back.
- Isengard's new gunpowder weapons are able to make short work of the simple curtain walls used in most fortifications, unless they are very thick indeed.
Films — Live-Action
- The 7th Voyage of Sinbad: Near the end, Sinbad's sailors use a giant ballista to kill a dragon.
- 55 Days at Peking (1963). The defenders at the Peking legation watch in horror as a huge siege tower is hauled out of the darkness by hundreds of Chinese soldiers. Then it starts shooting rockets at them.
- The Court Jester had a small one used to launch the villains over the battlements.
- Gladiator: The Romans use ballistas against the [[Germanic army]] at the beginning, as well as some sort of Greek Fire in pots they catapult at them.
- Gladiator II: The Romans use ballistas and siege towers mounted on their trireme ships to attack the Numidian city at the beginning. The Numidians respond with some catapulted Greek Fire in pots.
- It may have been the fact that they were too stupid to use other ammunition, but the Krug army from In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale end up using catapults. First with flaming boulders, then with flaming Krug.
- In Ivanhoe, Locksley's Men of Sherwood storm the castle of Torquilstone with a Rain of Arrows, portable wooden bridges to go over the moat, ladders to use for the ramparts and a tree trunk turned Battering Ram.
- Kingdom of Heaven: Saladin's Muslim army brings a Battering Ram, ladders, trebuchets and siege towers to assault Jerusalem. The ram plan is quickly torched (so to speak) by Balian's forces using flammable oil, the ladder soldiers don't stand much chance on the ramparts (or against the flammable oil) and the siege towers are brought down using a clever contraption with ballista harpoons and counterweights. Saladin's success chances improve when he focuses his forces on the weak postern part of Jerusalem's walls, so much so that it's where Balian's forces make their Last Stand.
- The Lord Of The Rings:
- In The Two Towers, the assault on Helm's Deep shows suicidal berserker sappers deploying explosives against the weakest point in the outer walls to devastating effect. Earlier in that same battle, multiple siege ladders (including large ones with ballista winches) were used to attack the walls.
- In The Return of the King, trebuchets are used to defend Minas Tirith's walls, and catapults are used by Sauron's forces to weaken Osgiliath, and a huge ram was brought to bear against the gates of Minas Tirith, in addition to siege towers pushed by trolls and full of angry orcs.
- The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc has a multiple arrow launcher.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
- The French knights presumably used some kind of catapult to fling the cow and giant rabbit.
- Several are seen amongst Arthur's army at the end of the movie, probably to be used against the Castle Argh.
- In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Inspector Clouseau is accidentally propelled up and through a castle window by a catapult.
- In Prince Caspian, the Telmarines utilize some sort of perpetual motion trebuchets. Needless to say, any one with any grasp whatsoever on physics will be irritated by these monstrosities.
- Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. The human enclave in a tower in Racoon City uses a trebuchet to throw flaming barrels of oil at a horde of attacking zombies. Alice makes sure to paint aiming points on the ground beforehand so they can adjust their fire accordingly.
- Robin Hood (2010) had mantlets used during the siege on the French castle that King Richard is killed in, along with bags of oil that were set on fire to burn the gates down.
- Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had Robin and Azeem being launched over the castle walls by a catapult (landing safely on a pile of hay). The unlikelihood of this working is lampshaded.
Will Scarlett: Fuck me, he cleared it!
- The Prince of Thieves example received a Shout-Out in the form of a throwaway gag in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, with the Sherrif of Nottingham demonstrating the Stealth Catapult.
- Kaamelott: First Installment: There's a Running Gag with the Burgundians being too moronic to properly maneuver their siege engines. At least until Arthur Pendragon finds a way to coordinate them.
- The War Lord: 11th century Norman warlord Chrysagon de la Cruex is besieged in his tower by Frisian raiders and the very angry villagers he ruled over. Frisians build a Battering Ram with nearby trees, use mantlets when trying to burn down the tower (and get repelled when the besieged Normans pour oil on the drawbridge) and eventually build a siege tower. The siege tower then gets destroyed by a catapult using flaming and non-flaming boulders brought there by the reinforcements Chrysagon's brother Draco went to seek.
- Young Frankenstein: At one point the villagers use Inspector Kemp as an impromptu Battering Ram to knock open a door.
Literature
- The Belgariad: Siege engines appear often in the prequels, particularly the war to recover the Orb from Torak and the Battle of Vo Mimbre. In the main stories, the Mimbrates regularly use siege engines in their internal wars, and Mandorallen can build them quickly when needed.
- The Lord of the Rings: Sauron's forces use catapults to attack Minas Tirith with shells that exploded in flames, as well as the heads of those who had been killed in earlier fighting. Also of note is Grond — named after Morgoth's warhammer Grond, Hammer of the Underworld — the most badass Battering Ram ever conceived, with a head shaped like a wolf's and enchanted with "spells of ruin", drawn by great beasts and swung by trolls, which was used to break the gate of Minas Tirith.
- Kushiel's Legacy: In Kushiel's Dart, the Skaldi build siege towers for use during the siege of Troyes-le-Mont.
- Found in the Historical Fiction Romance of the Three Kingdoms written in 14th century about events in the 2nd and 3rd.
- Battles between city-states of Gor regularly employ siege weapons.
- In High Citadel by Desmond Bagley, passengers from a crashed aircraft build an improvised trebuchet from abandoned equipment in a mine, in this case to fend off communist guerillas who are trying to repair the bridge across a ravine in order to attack them.
- Mainly a forgotten art in Codex Alera, since when it comes to breaking down walls furycrafting is much more flexible, powerful, and does not require a gigantic supply train.So when the catapults are essentially reinvented in First Lord's Fury and are then loaded with the local equivalent of cluster bombs, allowing the equivalent of a village full of peasants to deliver the collective power of several High Lords... let's just say Made of Win and leave it at that.
- The bad guys in Mogworld have a trebuchet, although everyone keeps calling it a catapult.
- The GrailQuest trilogy by Bernard Cornwell, set during the Hundred Years' War, features both traditional catapults and trebuchets as well as the earliest cannon that were just being adopted by the English at that point. His better known Sharpe series includes several attacks on fortresses with cannon, creating a breach to be stormed.
- Gaunt's Ghosts: Along with more modern equipment such as tanks and artillery, the Chaos army in Necropolis use a variety of baroque siege weapons, such as massive mechanized siege ladders with flamethrowers and cluster grenade launchers, and enormous spike-wheeled vehicles designed to crawl up the city's shield wall. The enemy's fortress is a massive crawling thing with a gigantic Wave-Motion Gun attached nicknamed "The Spike". In fact, the Imperials identify Heritor Asphodel as the enemy leader because of his notorious love for bizarrely overcomplicated siege equipment, which he refers to as "woe engines".
- In the Inheritance Cycle, trebuchets are used for a battle in a plain. Considering that your average trebuchet can fire something like two shots per hour (if you're lucky), this isn't the wisest of choices.
- Siege engines of all kinds are used in the Redwall books. In the original Redwall we get a battering ram and a siege tower, as well as a tunnelling attempt. That last is foiled by several gallons of lethally scalding-hot water being dumped down the tunnel. Ouch.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- In the second book, A Clash of Kings, three huge trebuchets are used in the defense of King's Landing against Stannis Baratheon. They're also used to hurl traitors in a gruesome form of execution. Scorpions and spitfires are mentioned, implied to be ballistae and catapults respectively.
- When the forces of Daenerys Targaryen are besieging the city of Meereen in A Storm of Swords, they lack trees to make siege weapons thanks to a scorched earth policy of the defenders, so they break up the only ships they have to make a 'turtle' covered in horse hides (against burning oil) protecting the battering rams (made from the masts) they use to break down the gates.
- Many descriptions of the Wall mention old, derelict catapults and trebuchets stuck into the ice on top of it.
- Siege weapons come into play heavily in The Sapphire Rose, during the Battle of the Basillica of Chyrellos. They are mentioned and utilized throughout the series however, notably by the Arcian armies, which are often commented on as specializing in siege warfare. Unlike the Thalasians.
- Discworld:
- The Piecemaker was originally a cart-mounted ballista intended for knocking down city walls, before Sergeant Detritus realised it was the perfect size for a troll to wield as a hand weapon. At first it fired a six-foot-long steel arrow, but is now modified to fire a huge amount of arrows in the general direction it's pointed at (and by general direction we mean standing directly behind Detritus is the only safe location... most of the time). The enormous forces the arrows are exposed to mean that after being fired they promptly turn into an expanding cloud of flaming shrapnel of incredible destructive power, to the point that Detritus isn't actually allowed to fire it at people — generally, the Piecemaker gets employed when the Watch needs a gate or a wall to not be there anymore.
- In Night Watch, Big Mary is an ox-powered wall with grappling hooks, designed for pulling down barricades.
- In David Drake's Ranks of Bronze a Roman legion abducted by unscrupulous alien merchants are once made to siege a fort held by aliens who have invented Greek Fire and pour it down murder holes. To get in they invent a gallery and a flamethrower made from a 150-foot log and a giant bellows, which they lean against the top of the tower with the enemy's Greek fire and shoot their own Greek fire up at them.
- In A Practical Guide to Evil, the Praesi Legions' sapper corps often build ballistae or small catapults when they have a large battle ahead. It's a mark of how advanced the modern Legions are that they construct their own siege engines from their own blueprints, while almost everyone else buys theirs from the Kingdom Under.
- In The Sun Eater, the human Sollan Empire have the colossi. These are Giant Robot plasma artillery cannons that are either bipedal or multilegged and are heavily armored and shielded. When first made, they were quickly seen as Awesome, but Impractical since they're extremely expensive for intra-human warfare. However against the alien Cielcin, they prove invaluable in destroying massed Cielcin onslaughts, especially when the traitorous human technologists, the Extrasolarians, gave the Cielcin the Chimeras, Super-Soldier cyborg Cielcins with built-in guns, adamant armour and Deflector Shields.
- The Accursed Kings:
- The novels see the introduction of gunpowder artillery in Western Europe. One siege has the seneschal complaining about these newfangled technologies when catapults worked just fine, as the town walls prevent him from seeing just how devastating the bombards are.
- Much later, King John of France has a massive siege tower built to attack a minor city despite everyone telling him it's a bad idea (except the guy being paid to build it, who knows it but takes the king's money anyway). The tower is pushed to the walls, where it is promptly blown apart by cannons the defenders had wisely refrained from using until then.
Live-Action TV
- Masada featured a variety of Siege Engines — siege tower (with a Battering Ram at the top), onagers, and ballistae.
- The History Channel built a replica of an Indian cannon designed to be mounted on an elephant and a primitive Chinese landmine. Surprisingly, both turned out to be disturbingly effective, though the operator would have been vulnerable to arrows. Flamethrowers are another weapon that may be Older Than They Think.
- Game of Thrones:
- In the Battle of the Blackwater ballistae and an improvised mantlet are seen, the latter made by turning a boat upside down; the boat has already been fitted with wooden supports to hold it above the ground so as to protect those manning the battering ram.
- In the Siege of Meereen, the invading fleet have ship mounted trebuchets to destroy the city.
- Ship-mounted scorpions are responsible for the death of one of Danaerys' dragons in the final season (which attracted a lot of derision for the sheer Hollywood physics involved). Against the final dragon, they're completely useless.
- House of the Dragon: The Green army brings some siege engines like a Battering Ram and ballistas at the Battle of Rook's rest, but many of them get torched by Meleys, who's ridden by Rhaenys Targaryen.
- Catapults are a Running Gag on Kaamelott: Leodagan holds them to be the ultimate weapon in defense and offense and is forever trying to convince Arthur to buy more while remaining blind to their Awesome, but Impractical nature. He once had one built in the castle courtyard without thinking of how to get it out (he wanted to bust down the castle wall), and as a result it can't even fire since the castle is in the way, and in a later episode built a second one that could fit through the gate and fire from inside... if it weren't for the first catapult that's still in the way.
- MythBusters proved you can make a fully-functional trebuchet out of lumber and duct tape that launches flaming projectiles (if you have Greek Fire or a suitable substitute, that is).
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron himself uses the term in universe to point out how the Orcs are using their catapults. Beside catapults, they have the ravager, an engine built specifically to destroy walls.
Tabletop Games
- Crossbows and Catapults
provides a wargame-lite version of siege warfare involving cannons and ballistae.
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Advanced D&D included rules for the use of siege engines including the gallery, hoist, mantlet, rams, sows and ram catchers.
- Basic D&D had a magical bench that could act as a Battering Ram to open doors.
- Spelljammer used catapults and ballistae as standard artillery on magic spacecraft.
- The 3.5th edition book Heroes of Battle had rules for magical siege weapons and artillery, such as ballistae that fire lightning bolts, catapults hurling enchanted ammunition, or self-loading trebuchets.
- The 5th edition adventure Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen has the boilerdrak, a gnomish war machine used by the Dragon Army in their attack on Vogler. It resembles a mechanical dragon on wheels and functions like a cross between a cannon and a flamethrower, in that it must be lit and aimed each time the crew wants to fire it. It also has a 1 in 6 chance to explode each time it fires, killing its operators.
- Games Workshop games:
- In Warhammer, most factions have access to some sort of catapult or bolt thrower, so rules for their use are included in the core book rather than an army book. The Warhammer: Siege supplement naturally expands on this even further, with rules for scaling ladders, siege towers, mantlets, battering rams, and boiling oil (or, for certain armies, cauldrons of boiling blood). Each faction also tends to have its own characterful or fantastic siege units:
- The Empire is known for its love of blackpowder, and thus sports Great Cannons, Helblaster Volley Guns, even simple rocket launchers. Their Steam Tanks are also quite capable of battering or blasting down castle doors.
- The Dwarfs have smaller cannons, but also Organ Guns and cantankerous Flame Cannons. They tend to be traditionalist, however, and often fall back on reliable bolt throwers and catapults, though occasionally put a Dwarf-y spin on them. The Grudge Thrower is a catapult whose boulders have been carved with runes detailing specific greivances against the enemy army, while the "Gob-Lobber" makes a novel use of goblin prisoners of war.
- The Chaos Dwarfs are even more artillery-heavy than their kin, and not only field devices like Earthshaker Cannons, Deathshrieker Rockets, and Magma Cannons, they also invented the Helcannons subsequently used by Chaos forces, Hellfire-spouting artillery pieces that are part-machine, part-daemon.
- The Bretonnians are stuck in Medieval Stasis, so their most sophisticated siege engine is a trebuchet, which the knights will reluctantly use if a foe can't be defeated by a glorious cavalry charge.
- The High Elves and Dark Elves make heavy use of repeater bolt throwers.
- The Skaven have some Warpstone-powered siege engines, such as the Warp Lightning Cannon.
- The Lizardmen have giant bows and magical superweapons mounted on dinosaurs.
- The Orcs are mostly stuck with "Rock Lobbas" and "Spear Chukkas," though they have invented the Doom-Diver Catapult, which launches a Goblin wearing a metal helmet and some stick-and-cloth "wings." It doesn't do quite as much damage as a normal payload, but the "ammunition" is capable of steering itself to some extent, so it can be surprisingly effective.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- With the strength and agility to climb sheer walls, and short ranged weaponry powerful enough to melt through even the thickest fortress wall, the daemon engines known as Maulerfiends make excellent siege weapons, capable of silencing any stronghold should they make it to their walls.
- The Imperium and their Chaos counterparts share a variety of vehicles armed with powerful siege weapons, from Dreadnoughts to superheavy tanks to Titans. One of the more iconic vehicles is the humble Vindicator of the Adeptus Astartes, effectively a powerful, short ranged Demolisher Cannon carried on an uparmored Rhino chassis with a dozer blade, designed to power through enemy fire and rough terrain to pummel their fortifications with high explosive shells. It has an equivalent in the Leman Russ Demolisher, which is employed by the Astra Militarum instead.
- The Epic scale Death Dealer daemon engine of Khorne is a mobile siege tower with a mechanical torso fitted to the front. The daemon engine is designed to disgorge hordes of fanatical warriors straight onto a fortresses walls while the daemon's robotic body uses it's deadly close combat weapons to slaughter the defenders.
- Other examples from Epic include the daemon engines of Nurgle, the Contagion and Plague Tower, which look out of place in the sci-fi setting, being a medieval trebuchet and siege tower respectively, made of rusting metal and rotting wood and presumably held together by dried snot and unholy magic.
- As if to make up for the sillyness of the Contagion and Plague Tower, the forces of Nurgle eventually received a unique siege engine in form of the Plagueburst Crawler, best described as a mechanical slug with a giant mortar on its back.
- Early editions of the Epic scale version of the game had the Corvus Assault Pod. A specially designed arm mount that combines a Power Fist and Boarding Pod, the Corvus allowed a Warlord Titan to transport a detachment of Space Marine Terminators or other forces and deploy them directly into the upper floors of enemy held buildings and defensive walls by punching them, turning the Titan into a massive, walking siege tower.
- Tyranids rely on various bioforms of increasing size to wage war, from the hound-like Hormagaunts to massive Biotitans. Their most iconic linebreaker is the Carnifex, a living battering ram that plows into enemy lines and fortifications with a heavily armored carapace and powerful talons. In particular is the Stone-crusher variant, which is armed with a Wrecker Claw (a diamond-hard crab claw) and Bio-Flail (an organic wrecking ball).
- Orks have an assortment of crudely assembled siege vehicles and Humongous Mecha that rivals the Imperium, but special mention goes to the Squiggoth, a cross between a mammoth, dinosaur and fungus bristling with guns and improvised armor. Besides functioning as a battering ram and mobile artillery battery, Squiggoths can also carry a mob of Ork boyz looking to get into the thick of battle.
- In Warhammer, most factions have access to some sort of catapult or bolt thrower, so rules for their use are included in the core book rather than an army book. The Warhammer: Siege supplement naturally expands on this even further, with rules for scaling ladders, siege towers, mantlets, battering rams, and boiling oil (or, for certain armies, cauldrons of boiling blood). Each faction also tends to have its own characterful or fantastic siege units:
- The board game Gondor, set during the siege of Minas Tirith, features siege towers, catapults, the Battering Ram Grond, and vats of boiling oil.
- A wide variety of siege weapons appear in GURPS: Low-Tech along with rules for picking them up to use them as sidearms.
- In Kings of War, most factions have bolt throwers as their siege weapons. The Dwarfs and the Abyssal Dwarfs are the only ones with cannons as siege weapons.
- Legend of the Five Rings includes rules for siege engines in its Emerald Empire supplement. With the notable exception of the Crab Clan's Kaiu siegemasters, they are uniformly terrible, as Rokugan looks upon them with a combination of incomprehension and derision. This explains why The Siege is the primary way to deal with fortresses despite its innumerable drawbacks.
- Weapons & Warriors: Castle Siege was a kid's game marketed which involved miniature siege engines that launched marbles, with the attacking side having the goal of breaking down the walls and the defenders aiming to take out all of the siege engines. The siege equipment included cannons, a trebuchet, a catapult, and ballistae.
- Battle Masters had as one of it's most iconic, and powerful, pieces the Mighty Cannon, capable of firing a shot clear across the battlefield and generally obliterating any enemy units in its path.
- Catapult Feud is much like the above examples. A game that focuses on siege warfare and uses of catapults in the base game to overwhelm enemy forts. There are a couple of expansions that introduce ballistas and plungers into the game to push the trope further.
Webcomics
- In The Order of the Stick, Redcloak's hobgoblin army employs catapults in their attack on Azure City. Notably, rather than simply launching boulders, Redcloak summons titanium elementals (since classical Earth Elementals would be too heavy to use in the same way) and launches them instead, as these would be able to continue attacking even after the impact of their landing.
- Erfworld, the Battle for Gobwin Knob: The titular battle included siege towers pushed by 20m tall Cloth Golems and Wiener Rammers: living battering rams in the shape of elongated wiener dogs with rams horns. Upon striking the gates of Gobwin's Knob they invoke "YTMND!": they are drawing their striking power from the "You're The Man Now, Dog" meme.
- Parson correctly sees the siege weapons as Ansom's army's weak point, and uses skirmishers to selectively attack the siege engines, withdrawing from combat with anything else. In this way, he destroys so many siege engines that Ansom is forced to wait another day for reinforcements.
- Siege towers are kind of weird in this setting, since their purpose is to wheel up troops who hack away at the actual wall with picks and spades until it collapses (rather than simply surmount it), with the relative strength of a wall being determined by the number of units stationed atop it. This is par for the course of the RPG Mechanics 'Verse setting.
- The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Seeing snow for the first time, Molly runs out to play in it, and builds a steam-powered snow ballista. That transforms.
Molly: "Snow is awesome!"
- In The Senkari ballista bolts go through armour and kill a dragon.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Gulliver (1968). Miniature Vikings use ship-mounted catapults to attack the city of Lilliput.
- Galaxy Trio: Normal-sized Vikings use ship-mounted catapults to attack a small village.
- Jonny Quest episode Monster in the Monastery. Catapults flinging flaming missiles are used to attack a small town.
- In the Bugs Bunny short Knighty Knight Bugs, the Black Knight (Yosemite Sam) uses a catapult to try to launch himself into a castle window.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Fire Nation army devises an enormous mechanised drill as a way of breaching the walls of Ba Sing Se. Their ships also employ trebuchets to launch flaming projectiles from, which they use as their standard attack. The live action adaptation, for all of its faults, does have a somewhat creative new weapon: giant siege cannons that the Fire Nation troops bend through amplifying their fire blasts in order to melt huge holes in the wall of ice protecting the Northern Water Tribe.
Real Life
- Believe it or not, ants can combine this trope with Human Ladder, creating a bridge with which they attack a wasp nest.
