Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-15888551-20130819093722/@comment-4057437-20130825063042

ZakMarcus wrote: VAULTEER wrote: How'd they use catapults on a ship floating on water? Wouldn't the ship rock so violently due to the force of the launch? And how would it fit on to the boat? Pretty sure the ones at the Siege of Windhelm were longer than the ship was wide.

Not to mention I didn't see any.

And there were no islands nearby. In real life, before cannons, catapults and bastilas were common place on the deck of a ship. especially in large battles and/or sieges.

Not many people know, but the bottom of a ship where it tapers to a point, the last 3 to 10 feet of that (depending on the size of the ship) was filled with solid lead all along the length of the ship to stabilize it.. Otherwise no ship would be stable no matter what weapons they had on board. So it wouldn't be a problem. In reality cannons were more challenging to have on  ships in their early days because of the amount of force exerted on the recoil.

So yeah those were probably small catapults and/or bastilas. Yeah, ships used ballast during the age of sail, but nobody ponied up for tons of expensive lead; they used stones. The Spanish used to sail empty ships to Florida (which they owned), ballasted with large rocks which they dumped next to the dock when they took on their cargo of indigo, tobacco, or whatever.

The rocks piled up at St. Augustine, Florida turned out to have a few with rubies in them. There was a brief ruby rush and some tried to trace the rocks to their orign, with no luck.