Trebuchets: The Fun Answer to Crime

Trebuchets are cool.

I would like to see a trebuchet work that is 1000 feet tall.  OK.  OK.  Maybe that is too much.  How about 500 feet ?

How big would it have to be to launch somebody I didn't like into space ?  Hmmmm.  I guess that wouldn't work.  The G forces would turn them into pudding before they saw the blackness of space.  Somehow that feels less poetic.

Well if we can't use it for capital punishment maybe we can use it for launching satellites ?  Nope.  That is boring.  We should definitely use it for capital punishment and charge admission and make a fantastic spectacle about it.  Advertise for days beforehand about the upcoming launch.  Maybe broadcast it so our wimpy foreign neighbors get all lathered up to bring in even more publicity.  Yes, definitely let the wimpy press know about it way ahead of time.

Ok.  Ok.  This has possibilities.  I like it.  We could do some launches at night with special materials that burn up in the atmosphere as they skim the upper air like a shooting star.  Awesome.  Makes me almost want to hitch a ride myself, or at least for my ashes as a last wish kind of thing.

Don't tell the foreigners that though.  Tell them we are executing criminals for every launch, no matter now mundane the real reason.  The first step to solving crime is scaring the turds out of any foreign bad boys looking at us as easy pickings.  Yes-sir-ee.

Now where to build it.  What would have the most spectacle ?  A fireball flying across the continental US or one flying deep across the ocean ?  Got it.  Let's launch from Las Vegas and fly it over California into the Pacific.  Perfect.  The liberals in California will mess their pants with every launch.  And Las Vegas will cement itself as the center of the worlds spectacle universe for decades to come.

From a Texas point of view I would have really liked to launch from here and fly it over California, but the catch with that is by the time it got to California it would be a tiny dot and they wouldn't notice.  Maybe in Las Vegas we could get a little more sparkle in the sky above California.  Yep.  Definitely Las Vegas.  It just feels right.  No question.

If only I were king.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trebuchet

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35921/could-we-make-a-trebuchet-that-could-launch-objects-to-a-stable-orbit