Clearly a tank
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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According to the documentary Futurama it is a tank with crab legs!
And ice cream is just a byproduct
A tank pre-steam power. The force of steam was known about long before, but not utilized. Maybe because the metals weren't good enough yet to hold pressure? Imagine a steampunk Rome.
Yes, the metal wasn't good enough, and the manufacturing tolerances weren't small enough to hold pressure.
Hero (a dude) of Alexandria made some steam powered stuff around the dawn of the 1st millenia, and some roman dude put steam powered doors in his house, I think some temples had steam powered doors to.
The emporer, I think Augustus the first one, had it presented to him to develop it further and he decided he didn't want to take jobs from the plebs or whatever, had to keep the beggars busy with something. So they dropped it.
Hundreds of years prior, a couple of hundred maybe, Archimedes theorized a steam cannon.
The principle of steam power was known, but the ancient steam engines could only move stuff against little resistance once, while releasing all steam.
It wasn't possible to build a steam engine that could build up pressure and do actual work, until metallurgy and precision machining were developed.
I think the first major application for a steam engine that could do real work was way into the 18th century or something, with the steam pump, to access coal seams deeper in the ground by pumping water out. Not sure entirely though.
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Wild, I watched my wife playing assassins creed last night while holding the baby, this machine was in the game
Never seen it before and now twice in a row.
Damn Baader-Meinhof
Maybe you should help her with the baby so she can game.
Nah if i hold the baby while she games it's to easy for her, she needs an extra difficulty level /s
I was holding the baby. Probably could have worded it better
I like how this ended out, though... Well played
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Probably never see it again either
I've seen this thing at least 500 times in my life, not sure how folks haven't seen it as many times. Did you all not spend hours pouring over Da Vinci's drawings as a kid? As a teen? As a young adult? Yesterday?
Nah, but i did buy a cool book you might be interested in if you like that kind of thing.
The books all illustrated on different survival things.
I bought it and inscribed it for my son hoping he learns from it but never needs it.
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Given a translator, can you even imagine Leonardo da Vinci and Hideo Kojima in a room together?
A weapon to surpass Metal Gear...
Wood gear
Solid
Second floor basement?!?!!
No, because Da Vinci died in 1519, whereas Kojima was born in 1963.
Yeah, hence "a translator". You didn't think I meant from Renaissance-era Italian to modern Japanese, did you? No one person could probably do that. I meant a translator from this plane to the next.
My dude the other guy was being facetious......
So was I. "Yes, and", as we say in improv. (I've never done improv.)
Yes and me either
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He would have loved battle bots.
I love he was inventive enough to design a tank a couple centuries before anyone actually built one, but couldn't piece together a better idea for aiming in any direction than "cannons pointed in every conceivable direction."
That's how ship cannons worked too, at the time. Powerful but heavy to move, slow to reload, not very accurate.... having more of them was the only way to have sustained firepower.
But Leonardo also left a lot of these sketches that look less like actual projects and more like the superhero fantasies of an extremely gifted six years old. "And look, this shit has cannons... Cannons EVERYWHERE! Bam! Kapow!". I guess it's what happens when you're so great at drawing that even the doodles you do when bored look like masterpieces.
Old man Da Vinci furiously scribbling while also delivering the overexcited stream-of-consciousness babble of a little kid with his favorite thing
They used muzzle loaded cannons at his time, so it makes sense. It's not only for direction, but for faster rate of fire.
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Yeah, he designed these things for Sforza because designing war machines pays money.
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The machina magnifica!
Imagine paying for a weapon design only to end up with two incomplete designs and one being a stupid flying thing that will never work and a bunch of naked people pictures that are at least finished, but kind of useless because doctors continued to just poison people anyway
He is one of my favorite historical figures, but he must have been absolutely infuriating to deal with.
I bet he had ADD with all those hobbies he collected.
If only we could have gotten Da Vinci and the Hussites together in order to build a wooden mech covered in cannons.
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No don't do this. You're giving gaijin ideas.
It'll be the next tank on Warthunder, under the Italian tech tree.
It's a panzer.
"Sorry I couldn't work on your commission, I was busy trying to land a job with the Duke"
I too have dozens of unfinished projects, so me and Leo are basically the same. /s
Dude definitely needed adderall
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