Late at night, the protagonist still hasn't gone to bed.

Even these days, he has to observe the battle situation during the day, organize repairs and forage at night, and can only sleep four or five hours a day, extremely lacking sleep, and extremely eager for sleep.

You know, in the previous life, the protagonist was an otaku who had to sleep for 8-10 hours a day, and for him at that time, apart from games and novels, there was no better entertainment than sleeping.

At this time, the protagonist finds that he seems to remember a little bit of his past life, but it is vague, like a cloud of mist, which clearly exists and can be seen, and wants to reach out and grab a handful but finds nothing.

This feeling is very uncomfortable, the protagonist simply shakes his head, and no longer thinks about it, anyway, many things will come to mind naturally, just like the protagonist's military literacy, and the "inventions" that pop up from time to time.

The protagonist returns to focus on the work at hand.

Outdoors in [Everglades], on a small platform on top of a large rock, protected by an air defense net, the protagonist and a swarm of ants are busy around a pile of spare parts.

The moon shrouded in the fog that gradually condensed in the night emitted an obscure light, and the heavens and the earth were dark, and when the light was just right to print everything in the corridor.

The protagonist is busy with a swarm of ants around the parts of the ballista. This ballista was made by the research team in [Dongyang City] based on the design information package provided by the protagonist, and the research team has been developing long-range weapons such as ballistas before, but the lack of guidance from the protagonist has been slow.

War is the catalyst of science and technology, and this time to deal with the urgent need of parasitic war beasts, the protagonist plays at a super level, and soon uses the memories of his previous life to make a design information package, and entrusts the bee flying knights to pass it back.

The scientific research team made the accessories according to the gourd painting scoop, but these accessories were never assembled in [Dongyang City], let alone experimented, but they were made and loaded before the fleet set sail.

Whether it can come in handy or not, the protagonist doesn't know, so he can only assemble the ballista first.

Assembling a ballista is similar to an otaku assembly model, and the protagonist feels a touch of familiarity. It's just that this "model" kit is too rough, and many parts can only be reprocessed on site during assembly to fit together.

But in half a night, the two ballistas were quickly formed.

This is a torsional ballista similar to that used by the Romans, and does not have the huge bow arms of the giant crossbow or bed crossbow commonly found in the East, and the overall appearance is very slender.

The ballista in human history is said to have been invented by Dionysus based on the study of mechanics, using the torsion generated by two bundles of tensioned horsehair, leather rope or animal tendons as the power to drive the crossbow arm to drive the bowstring to throw projectiles or arrows.

The Greeks improved the ballista with a sturdy bracket on which the main beam rested on it, and its front end was flanked by two torsion spring sets, each of which drove a crossbow arm with a bowstring attached to the center of which was a braided mesh bag for the projectile.

Balistas are powerful, and a well-performing ballista is capable of throwing 1 tarrant (an ancient Greek unit of weight, about 26 kilograms) of stone projectiles 300 yards (1 yard equals about 0.9144 meters) away.

In human history, ballistas have always been a very important long-range heavy firepower before the invention of artillery, but due to the lack of siege capabilities, they were replaced by more massive trebuchets in the Middle Ages, and then the era of artillery.

In 332 BCE, when Alexander the Great of Macedon laid siege to the Persian possession of Gaza, the defenders used ballistas to fight back, and a spear fired from a ballista even pierced Alexander's bronze shield, piercing his ornate cuirass and bruising him.

During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 63 C.E., the Jewish general Josephus recalled that one of his companions, who was standing side by side on the wall, was knocked off the head by a projectile fired from a Roman ballista! A pregnant woman in the city was hit by a stone bullet and her baby was thrown 100 feet away! The Romans' giant ballistae could crush enemies up to 400 meters away, and their spears could pin two or three enemies to the ground in a dense formation.

In addition to this, the accuracy of the ballistas is also breathtaking, they can even hit the same spot repeatedly, and there have been records of ballistas firing spears that split the spears that had already hit in front of them into two pieces.

The protagonist's barely restored ballista from memory, coupled with the ants' poor finishing ability, certainly can't make a ballista that has been quite sophisticated and perfect like the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The ballista in front of the protagonist can only be said to have the characteristics of a ballista.

The ballista consists of a simple three-legged pyramid bracket and a ballista girder, which is connected by ropes and simple mortise and tenon joints, which allows the ballista girder to rotate up and down, left and right, but there is no fixture that allows the ballista girder to maintain a fixed orientation without the help of external force.

The main beam of the ballista is made of a whole piece of wood, with a groove dug in the middle, and the front end of the charging device is a torsion spring, and the storage material used is the sun-dried tanned locust tendons.

Human ballistae are generally made of animal hair, leather rope or tendons, while ant ballistas are reduced in equal proportions, but in order to maintain considerable lethality, the elasticity of the charging material will be relatively higher.

The locust tendon chosen by the protagonist is the most flexible and desirable raw material that the protagonist can find in this world. Imagine the amazing bouncing power of locusts, and you will know the quality of their tendons.

Of course, tendons such as fleas may theoretically be more elastic, but their small size determines that their tendons are not very useful.

The ballista uses two locust hind tendons, which the protagonist personally assembles in the charging chamber and rotates them to tighten them.

Attaching the two pieces of sticks inserted into the torsion springs is the strongest piece of hemp rope, and now, even the protagonist has to pull the bowstring with great effort.

A suitable crossbow machine is also a must-have for a ballista, and the protagonist knows the structure of many fine ballistas, such as Qin's bronze crossbow machine, but the processing technology of the ants is a great constraint, and the time is too late.

Today's ballistas use a very primitive crossbow, which is a thick wooden stick inserted into a groove, which needs to be pulled out hard to make the bowstring eject.

Because these two ballistas are too rough, they require a lot of power to aim, wind, or fire, and it is a bit difficult for the protagonist who has not entered the state of "Celestial Descending to Earth" to operate.

In other words, these two ballistas are basically only able to be operated by the protagonist himself.

But at least, the protagonist has a powerful weapon that can attack from a distance, and as for the miniaturization and refinement that will need to be done to popularize the whole army in the future, let's talk about it later.