Robert, having shot good long bows I assure you the catapult would have to have considerably more range than 100 yds. for the operators to be safe from the English longbow dudes. When I was 7 years old I could stand at the goal posts of the High School football field across the street form our house and shoot arrows past the goal line at the other end. My bow was so long, compared to me, I couldn't hold it near vertical and shoot near horizontal, had to lay ir over many degrees.
When I was a senior in high school in eastern New Mexico, a friend and I built a catapult of sorts, not the twisted rope kind but really a sling shot on steroids. We made our rubber bands out of inner tubes.
(For the under 30 set, tubes were air bladers put inside of tires before tire technology was improved enough to essentially obsolete them.)
We used a multi-part block and tackle to pull it back and a pin to pin it to a line connected to sort of anchor in the ground (To quote the crock hunter, "danger, danger, danger") a dumb idea but we lucked out and lived. We could launch rocks between fist and bowling ball size variable distances depending on rock size, age and condition of rubber bands, angle of elevation, and azimuth. Direction mattered a lot as we used a living mesquite tree for our main frame "Y" structure. Rocks about the size of two fists seemed to work pretty good and had much more range than we anticipated but we narrowly missed the steer and our lives and reputation were spared. We were just shooting in his direction Mr. Rancher we weren't shooting at him, we didn't know it would shoot so far, etc. We would have taken our meals standing up for a week.
Patrick
