COBI Roman Scorpio Set 20079

COBI's Roman Scorpio is built from 113 blocks: the machine itself with three bolts and a quiver, a legionary in full kit, and a small diorama of sharpened stakes driven into the ground to protect the position. All markings are printed; the set contains no stickers.

Not a crossbow

The scorpio looks like a mounted crossbow and works on an entirely different principle. There is no bow. Each arm sits in a vertical skein of rope — sinew or hair, twisted to enormous tension — and the energy is stored in that twist. Torsion gave far more power for the size than any bow could, which is how a machine one man could carry put a metre-long bolt through a shield at a hundred metres.

A legion carried around sixty of them. At roughly four shots a minute each, a battery positioned on rising ground could put well over two hundred bolts into a small area in sixty seconds, aimed rather than lobbed. It was the one ancient weapon that could reliably kill a specific man at distance.

The technology did not survive the empire that used it. Torsion artillery needs sinew rope kept at exact tension, specialists to build it and a supply system to maintain it, and when those went, so did the machines. Western Europe had nothing comparable again until gunpowder.

In the COBI range

The scorpio is the precision weapon of the range; the Catapult (20068) is the onager, a heavier machine for throwing stones at walls and formations. COBI's own copy sometimes confuses the two names — they are different machines and COBI makes both.

Specifications

Pieces: 113 · Figures: 1, with accessories
Model dimensions: scorpio 8.5 × 8 × 4 cm (3.3 × 3.1 × 1.6 in), stake obstacle 12 × 12.5 × 3.5 cm (4.7 × 4.9 × 1.4 in)