Castles are Engineered to Kill You

ah the castle is there any structure that evokes more whimsy more wonder oh knights kings queens dragons dying under the age of 45 oh delightful but to me castles do not give me the warming fuzzies because culturally we've forgotten about why castles look like this and what they're designed to actually do today we're not going to get whisked away by whimsy because everything about a castle is engineered to kill now entering the facility wow remember being outside and around stuff the image of a medieval castle is iconic and it brings with it a lot of pleasant peasant imagery and cultural cachet but like i said before i think we've lost sight of what a castle is actually engineered and designed for and so today being an engineer and a fan of cool layers myself i'm not a super villain i wanted to take back and reestablish what should really be evoked when we see one of these castles because everything in a castle is designed to kill you to the observation deck very basically a castle is a construction meant to endure attacks protect nobles that are inbred with wigs and defend and hold some position while maximizing the damage done to an enemy attempting to siege the castle because of this focus many of the whimsical elements you might be imagining on a castle are actually very clever ways to maximize that damage done to anyone sieging the castle so let's start very basically the castle's overall shape now the shape of a castle you're probably imagining your head is like a big square with some circles on the edges now this isn't just built by someone who loves circles and squares and other basic shapes no these are designed with archers sat atop the walls in mind such that they would have lines of sight and lines of fire to cover as much ground around them as possible to maximize damage to a sieging enemy in fact you may not know this castle design evolved even further than this with the help of legendary tinkerers like michelangelo into so-called star forts using many many vertices around the castle all these little star shapes they would minimize the dead zone for the archers such that there was no area that a line of fire couldn't hit in this way castle design as it evolved over the centuries traded in dead zones for death zones arya are you doing that yeah metal rules because you are nailing it kevin hold the elevator i'm gonna be i'll be right down speaking of overall shape another fortification you'll see in many medieval castles is a secondary wall beyond the first this created an area in between the two walls where any enemy that happened to breach the first wall with cannon fire or ladders would immediately run into the second wall bunching up with their friends and arms and making themselves available for a tasty crossbow shot to their likely unmaintained heads this area created by engineers with intention was called the killing fields yeah it's getting less whimsical by the second isn't it you've never heard of killing fields of robin hood have you nay nerium when you picture a castle though you're probably not thinking of its overall shape in general you're more likely imagining the most visually distinctive part of a classic castle the towers now these are just fancy towers crafted by some designer engineer that love rectangles right wrong these are archer towers again crafted with killing in mind for example see those fancy little tiny windows they got going on well probable religious iconography aside these are actually arrow slits carved out of the material of the castle with the intention of giving the arrow wielder behind them a complete field of view and fire while offering basically zero percent of their very squishy and stinky bodies up to enemy bowman and those rectangular outcroppings weren't just for show either on top of these archer towers these crown-like elements allowed defenders to expose as little of themselves as possible phrasing you see it's much easier to just lean out with your bow and arrow from a rectangle than it is to stand up and present your boy prince-like mane up for an easy shot these battlements and the crenellations on them look nice to us today but to a soldier in 1357 they look like damn all right you are nailing those music hits metal also castle expert and goatee enthusiast shadowversity is hailing us fantastic patch them in baby [Music] greetings kyle you know what one of my favorite castle death traps are well you can actually see them in the video right here they are the mighty the glorious the unstoppable matriculations but some of you might be wondering what matriculations are and i said you can see him on my castle here and uh these things right up the top here you see back in the day when people were assaulting castles some people kind of noticed something interesting that if you ran up really really close to the castle wall like this okay the archers and defenders atop the castle wall would have difficulty hitting you in fact the only way they could shoot down at you was to lean in between the crenellations specifically the gap in between which is the cornell and the truth being the merlons after leaning between lean out over to see the people down at the castle wall to shoot down but that exposes them and if they were doing that any of the attackers who had you know buru scenarios or crossbows could shoot back and kill them so that was a problem but they came up with a very creative solution not my favorite thing first not matriculations the first iteration of them were called hoardings which were wooden constructions that they built to top castle walls that gave you the ability to step out in front of the castle line because you know you're above it and you can see below to shoot down so hoardings did the job for a while but then they realized hang on we could actually make these things out of stone and integrate them permanently into the castle structure and that's exactly what they did here and so how they work is they have these things which are called corbels corbels are these stone supports that are sticking out of the wall and to bridge the gap between those corbels they make arches or larger stones that bridge the gap and then they build the battlement on top of that and the corbels extend the battlement so far out that there are holes in between each of the corbels behind the battlements but in front of the wall which enables the defenders to look down directly at the line of the wall beneath and still be behind the defensive battlements and they can shoot down on any cheeky you know attacker who tries to get too close he's like i know there's articulations out there matriculations show the ingenuity and genius that went into castle design and what i find amazing about it is that they also look incredibly cool and you'll actually find that with a lot of castle aesthetic elements all the things that make them look fancy actually come from very functional defensive elements which were put on castles intentionally for their defensive capacity so that is one of my favorite elements in castle design indeed one of the coolest death traps that you will find so i'll hand it over back to you kyle at your facility and as a matter of fact where on earth is that thing that shad is a nice guy asks way too many personal questions but he's a nice guy if an enemy happened to make it past the castle walls past the archers past the killing fields past the murder holes that shad just explained they'd only then start getting to the really devious stuff for example just think of the doors that you would have to breach with your swords and axes just to get into that sweet sweet king flesh well many castle doors were studded with metal and studded outwards not for looks but to intentionally blunt the weapons trying to chop through those doors making it harder to slice that sweet sweet fleshy flesh and before you even got to those doors you'd have to run up and around the stairs engineered to trip you now look at these castle stairs notice how they are uneven in their heights and their orientation and their spacing this isn't a mistake this is very intentional imagine if you were an enemy soldier on unfamiliar ground and you had a big protective bucket on your head and you're sprinting around trying not to get horribly murdered more often than not if you encountered trip or stumble steps like this you and your buddies would trip and bunch up and oops you're decapitated these are brilliant little bits of defensive engineering but maybe my favorite [ __ ] it appears that we are under siege what by who by you oh hmm arya on screen okay who are you buddy what's up what do you want who what what a what dude i'm you man you took a closed time-like curve and you came back to 2020 and took over from me during the andromeda paradox episode remember oh right i guess i guess that is canon okay so what do you want well i want the facility back you fool and i have a katana how did you get past the automated steel bullwhips well the the katana of course of course it makes total sense that a katana can do that well you can't come in i'm administrator now me capisce oh come on man 2020 is depressing enough already isn't it no can do but i do like the man bun aria close the channel all right can you believe that guy he was a real andromeda queen nailed it you nailed it you're on fire today girl nailed it what were we doing again you know after the siege oh yeah my favorite castle death trap has to be a very clever exploitation of human physiology and statistics 9 out of 10 human beings would say that their right hand is the dominant one and so most medieval soldiers would also be wielding their sword in their dominant or right hands now look at these staircases these spiral staircases in different castles if you peep them long enough and look for examples you notice something curious from the bottom they all spiral up into the right or clockwise now this could be just for looks or coincidence or it could be a brilliant little piece of defensive engineering put yourself in the place of some attacker with you know you're very smelly and you're wearing a whole suit armor and you got a sword put yourself at the bottom of this staircase would it be easy to swing your dominant hand with a sword no because the sword is immediately going to hit the wall on your right and you have all the space over on the left now conversely put yourself in the position of a defender if you're looking downwards on this spiral staircase going clockwise your shoulder is on the left and you have all this room to stabby stabby murder murder downwards this as history has proven is a tactical decision by castle designers and engineers to maximize the defender's advantage here yes castles are pretty and they're whimsical nowadays but with the help of this video i want to make sure that you know exactly where they came from murder maximization until next time oh man can we make that like a thing like if i ever just do that that's just gonna happen kevin now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for the direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially i want to recognize research assistant crazy batman like how crazy and visiting scholar blade row awesome name if you want to get on the staff of the facility if you want to join the nearly 1200 nerds who are every day talking with me on discord giving me episode ideas seeing episodes of date early getting behind the scenes content you can go to patreon.com kyle hill right now and get on the staff today and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm going to pass the you know the base of the statue of liberty it's fort wood the base of it and if you look at the shape it's curious it's a star fort it's a star fort that was fort wood and it has many little tips and vertices that would allow archers or more likely you know rifleman cannon fire to cover all the ares to make sure no one could siege the fort which doesn't sound very welcoming on liberty island and i don't actually don't think it was very welcoming for a long time after that to everyone but fun fact kind of thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 1,122,171

Rating: 4.9118166 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, castles, tower, medieval, history

Id: jmklaR6dBVI

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020