Ok, sending a couple of Lenovo laptops into the sky via a trebuchet may not be anywhere as cool as doing so with flaming bowling balls, but this is still a pretty interesting experiment.

At Gadgetoff 2009, a team of tinkerers used their trebuchet to launch two ThinkPad laptops, with the benediction of Lenovo of course, to see how they would fare after the test. The result? Well, they were pretty thoroughly destroyed, but apparently, when taken off the systems and installed in a new one, the trashed laptop’s hard drives booted just fine.

For those of you who haven’t been with us for long and are interested in medieval siege engines, you might want to check out our exclusive HD video report on Mongo the trebuchet, a full-fledged trebuchet that can launch 20-pound projectiles (including fireballs) at around 250 meters.

[Via Gizmodo]