The Romans used a number of artillery devices during the Punic Wars, and this set includes the 'scorpion', an arrow-firing machine, plus its crew.

The majority of figures are of hastati and velites, and were first released by HaT in set 8018 (see review for details of these figures). The remainder of the poses are a trooper wearing an animal skin and three crew.

The man with the animal skin has a ring hand into which can be plugged a vexillum, an aquila (both types of standard) or a horn. The peg method means he is not really holding the device at all, which may be adequate for wargames but looks odd on close inspection.

The three scorpion crew poses are all bare-headed and wearing mail shirts. One is carrying a supply of arrows, another is intended to be putting tension in the machine and the third is directing operations. Since this type and size of machine only required two crew to operate it, these figures are sufficient for the job, though one might have expected them to be wearing their helmets as they would still have been on the battlefield.

Finally we have the catapult itself, the scorpion. It comes as three pieces that fit together very well without recourse to glue. The resulting machine is very nice and authentically recreates the machine as we currently believe it appeared.

One interesting feature of this set is that it is marked as '25mm' on the box. In fact it is the infantry figures from other sets, as shown on our top two rows, that are 25mm tall, making them noticeably taller than the rest of the HaT range, and taller than the scorpion crew. The crew are about 23mm tall, which is fine for 1/72 scale. It appears the rest are taller by mistake, and the '25mm' label was an attempt to accommodate this. Though the set has been padded out with figures from a previous set, the four new poses are very well done, and the catapult is excellent with simple construction and a very attractive end result.