The Helepolis was but one siege tower, but it was the mightiest and
most fearsome siege tower of the ancient world. Many stories tall,
plated with iron, full of catapults and archers. The rolling
tower of death.
It gave rise to one literary trope:
The terrifying moving battlestation-slash-wonderweapon of the enemy, a
symbol of the resources the enemy can muster for its forces, a visceral
symbol of how much the enemy outweighs our plucky little heroes. Accompanied by a sinister fanfare in the soundtrack. Oh no,
it's the Death Star! Oh no, it's the battleship Yamato! We're in for a fight, boys!
Didn't exactly work as planned. The Helepolis was defeated either by
Rhodian forces taking off a few armor plates and spooking Demetrius into
withdrawing it, or, depending on which ancient historian you believe, the Rhodians managed to stop the thing by flooding
the ground where it would come to rest against the wall. The giant rolling tower of death ruined by a patch of mud. What a way to go. But hey, once that thing gets moving it doesn't turn, so you know exactly where it's going, and you've got plenty of time because it sure doesn't move fast.
This gave rise to another trope:
2. The battlestation-slash-wonderweapon that falls apart in an anticlimactic farce because
it actually has some critical weaknesses the designers never addressed
because they thought the whole thing would simply crush their enemies and they didn't think anyone would be brave enough to get near it, and as it so happens the enemy forces effectively put
too many of their eggs in one basket by building it, so once it's lost the
morale of the enemy is broken, and what kind of moron would design
something like this anyway, not that I'm naming names, Palpatine.
This came to mind when I was reading a book in the Edge Chronicles, a series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddel that features lots of flying wooden boats. Ships, really. Merchant ships and pirate ships. Naval warfare in the air. Long story. Ten or eleven books by now.
The climactic battle of this particular book had a great pirate fleet arrayed against a great merchant fleet, and the merchant fleet had a Secret Weapon in play. A wonderful weapon. A Wonderweapon, you might say.
It was a ship. A real big ship. The biggest flying ship ever seen. Able to smack all the other ships right out of the sky. Sent a couple pirate ships spiraling down to earth in flames. Made it look like the merchants would smash the pirates like bugs on a windshield. The pirates could not vanquish this might foe, and soon they would have to run. All would soon be lost.
The thing crashed to the ground within ten minutes of opening combat because it was too large to be stable using the airship technology of the setting.
A fantasy version of the Helepolis, with a similarly farcical battlefield performance. Except even worse, because nobody even needed to dent the thing for it to fall apart.
Even Palpatine's dumbass Death Star could survive normal operations.
But whatever the Wonder Weapon looks like, I keep thinking it's doomed to fail even if it does work, because it demonstrates that the enemy thinks you win wars by winning battles. Which means they're probably not thinking as much about the operational and strategic level of warfare. Or, even worse, that they took resources away from operational and strategic functioning for the sake of building a single vehicle. Even if it doesn't crash, it's already crashed the economy.
Kinda makes me wonder if Demetrius had enough money left over to pay his soldiers when the siege of Rhodes failed.