Who
I’m Dilan Singh, an aerospace engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I grew up in New Zealand. It started with a question I was curious about and wanted to answer using actual physics and historical evidence rather than just relying on online discussions: how far could the best possible stone-thrower launch a stone, and could it have brought down a city wall?
My interest in medieval warfare goes back quite a while. In 2017, when I was ten, I spent a lot of time playing Age of Empires, which inspired me to build small catapults out of popsicle sticks. Eventually, my dad and I built a car-sized catapult and a trebuchet during the holidays. We even put a video of it on YouTube, which has over 40,000 views.
How this website was made
I built this site with Claude, Anthropic’s AI, working from my ideas and instructions. I chose the research question, Jerusalem in 1187 as the historical setting, what counted as “optimal”, and which designs to compare. Claude handled most of the technical work, including researching open-access sources, expanding my original physics python model, checking its results against published models and real trebuchets, optimizing the designs, producing the figures, and coding the simulator and website. I made the main decisions throughout, including what to include, what to remove, and how the site should look and work. I also designed the opening animation, every small detail of it, scene by scene, with Claude writing the code to bring it to life using the motion calculated by the physics model.
The sources behind the historical claims are listed and graded on the Sources page, and results from the physics model are linked to their runs. Both Claude and I used Python to check the calculations, although this does not guarantee that every assumption or result is correct. Comparisons with real trebuchets suggest the model overestimates range by around 10 to 15%. I also haven’t yet independently verified all the historical facts and references against their original sources, so I’ve included this warning throughout the site.
Get in touch
If you want to learn how to use AI to do work like this, whether a research project, an engineering model, a simulator or a site, I’m happy to show you how I went about it. The same goes if you have found a mistake, have a source I should see, or want to talk trebuchets.