Light jazz probably wasn’t the best choice for background music, so you can turn that off if you want to. Otherwise, it’s entertaining enough (and possibly educational – who knows if they have those dates right).
[A Brief Visual History of Weapons] (Viewer #28,328)
I think the dates are in the ballpark; I wouldn’t have guess that matchlocks or tasers were quite that old.
For the more or less historical stuff, I mean; for the pre-historic stuff, I have no idea if the dates are good.
They left out particle weapons. But if they told us, they’d have to kill us.
Not a ballista pictured, that’s a Scorpio. A ballista uses a single arm as a spring, exactly like a large crew served crossbow. The Scorpio uses two arms and rope torsion springs, like two catapults in tandem. Same principle of operation between the two, but the construction and maintenance is very different.
The PIAT anti-tank weapon predates the Bazooka by a few years, at least.
Mostly pretty accurate ballpark figures for the sword, and the halberd (in Europe at least, China had their version at least back to the late Han Dynasty, pre-196 A.D. Long pole weapons dominated the battlefields in the early days of gunpowder in Europe, after centuries of mostly spear and bow, with armor and horses being the real prized pieces of equipment. China, in a reverse, moved from using a cutting pole weapon as their primary arm to a simple thrusting spear, like they completely forgot for a few centuries to put a point in line with the stick… weird place, China.
Also, no mention of the shield? The first thing any good Roman, Greek, or even Norse warrior would write on a “must-have for making death” list wasn’t their sword or spear, but the shield. A massive impact weapon that doubles as a portable wall.