_A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano_ Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers And Scaring the Sheep By Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal ACTON ROUND, England--With surprising grace, the grand piano sails through the sky a hundred feet above a pasture here, finally returning to earth in a fortissimo explosion of wood chunks, ivory keys and piano wire. Nor is the piano the strangest thing to startle the grazing sheep this Sunday morning. A few minutes later, a car soars by - a 1975 blue two-door Hillman, to be exact - following the same flight path and meeting the same loud fate. Pigs fly here, too. In recent months, many dead 500-pound sows (two of them wearing parachutes) have passed overhead, as has the occasional dead horse. It's the work of Hew Kennedy's medieval siege engine, a four story tall, 30 ton behemoth that's the talk of bucolic Shropshire, 140 miles northwest of London. In ancient times, such war machines were dreaded instruments of destruction, flinging huge missiles, including plague- ridden horses, over the walls of besieged castles. Only one full-sized one exists today, designed and built by Mr. Kennedy, a wealthy landowner, inventor, military historian and - need it be said? - full-blown eccentric. At Acton, Round Hall, Mr. Kennedy's handsome Georgian manor house here, one enters the bizarre world of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. A stuffed baboon hangs from the dining room chandelier (`Shot it in Africa. Nowhere else to put it,' Mr. Kennedy explains). Lining the walls are dozens of halberds and suits of armor. A full suit of Indian elephant armor, rebuilt by Mr. Kennedy, shimmers resplendently on an elephant-sized frame. In the garden outside stands a 50-foot- high Chinese pagoda. Capping this scene, atop a hill on the other side of the 620-acre Kennedy estate, is the siege engine, punctuating the skyline like an oil derrick. Known by its 14th-century French name, trebuchet (pro- nounced tray-boo-shay), it's not to be confused with a catapult, a much smaller device that throws rocks with a spoon-like arm propelled by twisted ropes or animal gut. Mr. Kennedy, a burly, energetic 52-year-old, and Richard Barr, his 46-year-old neighbor and partner, have spent a year and #10,000 ($17,000) assembling the trebuchet. They have worked from ancient texts, some in Latin, and crude wood-block engravings of siege weaponry. The big question is why? Mr. Kennedy looks puzzled, as if the thought hadn't occurred to him before. `Well why not? It's bloody good fun!' he finally exclaims. When pressed, he adds that for several hundred years, military technicians have been trying fruitlessly to reconstruct a working trebuchet. Cortez built one for the siege of Mexico City. On its first shot, it flung a huge boulder straight up - and then straight down, demolishing the machine. In 1851, Napoleon III had a go at it, as an academic exercise. His trebuchet was poorly balanced and barely managed to hurl the missiles - backward. `Ours works a hell of a lot better than the Frogs', which is a satisfaction,' Mr. Kennedy says with relish. How it works seems simple enough. The heart of the siege engine is a three-ton, 60-foot tapered beam made from laminated wood. It's pivoted near the heavy end, to which is attached a weight box filled with 5 tons of steel bar. Two huge A-frames made from lashed-together tree trunks support a steel axle, around which the beam pivots. When the machine is at rest, the beam is vertical, slender end at the top and weight box just clearing the ground. When launch time comes, a farm tractor cocks the trebuchet, slowly hauling the slender end of the beam down and the weighted end up. Several dozen nervous sheep, hearing the tractor and knowing what comes next, make a break for the far side of the pasture. A crowd of 60 friends and neighbors buzzes with anticipation as a 30-foot, steel-cable sling is attached - one end to the slender end of the beam and the other to the projectile, in this case a grand piano (purchased by the truckload from a junk dealer) . `If you see the missile coming toward you, simply step aside,' Mr. Kennedy shouts to the onlookers. Then, with a great groaning, the beam is let go. As the counter- weight plummets, the piano in its sling whips through an enormous arc, up and over the top of the trebuchet and down the pasture, a flight of 125 yards. The record for pianos is 151 yards (an upright model, with less wind resistance). A 112 pound iron weight made it 235 yards. Dead hogs go for about 175 yards, and horses 100 yards; the field is cratered with the graves of the beasts, buried by a backhoe where they landed. Mr. Kennedy has been studying and writing about ancient engines of war since his days at Sandhurst, Britain's military academy, some 30 years ago. But what spurred him to build one was, as he puts it, `my nutter cousin' in Northumberland, who put together a pint-sized trebuchet for a county fair. The device hurled porcelain toilets soaked in gasoline and set afire. A local paper described the event under the headline `Those Magnificent Men and Their Flaming Latrines.' Building a full-sized siege engine is a more daunting task. Mr. Kennedy believes that dead horses are the key. That's because engravings usually depict the trebuchet hurling boulders, and there is no way to determine what the rocks weigh, or the counterweight necessary to fling them. But a few drawings show dead horses being loaded onto trebuchets, putrid animals being an early form of biological warfare.Since horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s, the engineering calculations followed easily. One thing has frustrated Mr. Kennedy and his partner: They haven't found any commercial value to the trebuchet. Says a neighbor helping to carry the piano to the trebuchet, `Too bad Hew can't make the transition between building this marvelous machine and making any money out of it.' It's not for lack of trying. Last year Mr. Kennedy walked onto the English set of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie, volunteering his trebuchet for the scene where Robin and his sidekick are catapulted over a wall. `The directors insisted on something made out of plastic and cardboard,' he recalls with distaste. `Nobody cares about correctness these days.'' More recently, he has been approached by an entrepreneur who wants to bus tourists up from London to see cars and pigs fly through the air. So far, that's come to naught. Mr. Kennedy looks to the U.S. as his best chance of getting part of his investment back: A theme park could commission him to build an even bigger trebuchet that could throw U.S.-sized cars into the sky. `Its an amusement in America to smash up motor cars, isn't it?' he inquires hopefully. Finally, there's the prospect of flinging a man into space - a living man, that is. This isn't a new idea, Mr. Kennedy points out: Trebuchets were often used to fling ambassadors and prisoners of war back over castle walls, a sure way to demoralize the opposition. Some English sports parachutists think they can throw a man in the air *and* bring him down alive. In a series of experiments on Mr. Kennedy's machine, they've thrown several man-sized logs and two quarter-ton dead pigs into the air; one of the pigs parachuted gently back to earth, the other landed rather more forcefully . Trouble is, an accelerometer carried inside the logs recorded a centrifugal force during the launch of as much as 20 Gs (the actual acceleration was zero to 90 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds). Scient- ists are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more than a second or two before his blood vessels burst. The parachutists are nonetheless enthusiastic. But Mr. Kennedy thinks the idea may only be pie in the sky. `It would be splendid to throw a bloke, really splendid,' he says wistfully. `He'd float down fine. But he'd float down dead.' ---- cut here ---- Here's another long one, but it's okay. This should increase my average word count. ---- cut here ---- Please note! The following new computer viruses have been detected. Please be alert for them when you scan your computers. OPRAH WINFREY VIRUS: Your 200MB hard drive suddenly shrinks to 80MB, and then slowly expands back to 200MB. POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS: Never calls itself a "virus", but instead refers to itself as an "electronic microorganism." PEACE CORPS VIRUS: Toughest virus you'll ever love. AT&T VIRUS: Every three minutes it tells you what great service you are getting. MCI VIRUS: Every three minutes it reminds you that you're paying too much for the AT&T virus. PAUL REVERE VIRUS: This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack---once if by LAN, twice if by C:>. RIGHT TO LIFE VIRUS: Won't allow you to delete a file, regardless of how old it is. If you attempt to erase a file, it requires you to first see a counselor about possible alternatives. BILL CLINTON VIRUS: Promises to save your disk, then once installed, does what all of the other viruses tell it to do and ignores its installer. GEORGE BUSH VIRUS: It starts by boldly stating, "Read my docs....No new files!" on the screen. It proceeds to fill up all the free space on your hard drive with new files. ROSS PEROT VIRUS: Activates every component in your system, just before the whole damn thing quits. AL GORE VIRUS: Indistinguishable from the directory tree. MARIO CUOMO VIRUS: It would be a great virus, but it refuses to run. TED TURNER VIRUS: Colorizes your monochrome monitor. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER VIRUS: Terminates and stays resident. It'll be back. DAN QUAYLE VIRUS: Prevents your system from spawning any child process without joining into a binary network. GOVERNMENT ECONOMIST VIRUS: Nothing works, but all your diagnostic software says everything is fine. NEW WORLD ORDER VIRUS: Probably harmless, but it makes a lot of people really mad just thinking about it. GALLUP VIRUS: Sixty percent of the PC's infected will lose 38 percent of their data 14 percent of the time. (plus or minus a 3.5 percent margin of error.) TERRY RANDLE VIRUS: Prints "Oh no you don't" whenever you choose "Abort" from the "Abort" "Retry" "Fail" message. TEXAS VIRUS: Makes sure that it's bigger than any other file. ADAM AND EVE VIRUS: Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple. CONGRESSIONAL VIRUS: The computer locks up, screen splits erratically with a message appearing on each half blaming the other side for the problem. AIRLINE VIRUS: You're in Dallas, but your data is in Singapore. FREUDIAN VIRUS: Your computer becomes obsessed with marrying its own motherboard. PBS VIRUS: Your programs stop every few minutes to ask for money. ELVIS VIRUS: Your computer gets fat, slow and lazy, then self destructs; only to resurface at shopping malls and service stations across rural America. OLLIE NORTH VIRUS: Causes your printer to become a paper shredder. NIKE VIRUS: Just does it. SEARS VIRUS: Your data won't appear unless you buy new cables, power supply and a set of shocks. JIMMY HOFFA VIRUS: Your programs can never be found again. CONGRESSIONAL VIRUS #2: Runs every program on the hard drive simultaneously, but doesn't allow the user to accomplish anything. KEVORKIAN VIRUS: Helps your computer shut down as an act of mercy. IMELDA MARCOS VIRUS: Sings you a song (slightly off key) on boot up, then subtracts money from your Quicken account and spends it all on expensive shoes it purchases through Prodigy. STAR TREK VIRUS: Invades your system in places where no virus has gone before. HEALTH CARE VIRUS: Tests your system for a day, finds nothing wrong, and sends you a bill for $4,500. CLEVELAND INDIANS VIRUS: Makes your 486/50 machine perform like a 286/AT. CHICAGO CUBS VIRUS: Your PC makes frequent mistakes and comes in last in the reviews, but you still love it. ORAL ROBERTS VIRUS: Claims that if you don't send it a million dollars, it's programmer will take it back. RETURNED PC VOLUNTEER VIRUS: Still the toughest virus you've ever loved. Use your virus scan, don't let any of these viruses happen to your PC!