Mat talked to Aludra in TGS (don’t have my copy with me right now so I don’t know what chapter) and was mussing on how a there might be a way to fire arrows faster than his new quick cranking crossbows. On first reading this I immediately thought of the movie ‘Van Helsing’ where Hugh Jackman’s character has a crossbow that has mechanical gears that allow it to fire something like 50 arrows like an assault rifle. I rolled my eyes as I read Mat talking about this and wondered if RJ was going to have something like this appear in the series.

Then I was watching the show Mythbusters the other day and they were testing the myth of a Korean War machine called a ‘Hwacha’ which was said to be used 500 years ago. The device is basically a cart with 200 holes in a vertical wall in which arrows with black powder rockets are loaded into. The fuse is lit and all the arrow rockets fly when their charge is ignited about 500 yards and then explode when the fuse on the second charge ends. They say in the episode that a battle took place about 500 years ago where in 3,000 Korean defenders armed with a few hundred of these defeated an invading Japanese army of 30,000.

Now unlike Aludra’s Dragons these are lighter and don’t require all that much metal or bellfounders to make. All you’d need are lots of carpenters, fletchers and labours to get all of the Hwacha’s and rocket arrows made and unlike the crossbows Mats enemies won’t know how to make them since you need to know how to make black power.

There’s a video on you-tube at the bottom if you want to check it out.