Torsion catapults based on the design in the picture were a big part of warfare in the ancient world, with some classical Greek and early Roman models hurling arrows the size of large javelins or large rocks to a distance of 100m or more.
However, as you can see from the picture, this is a complex and intricate piece of machinery, and the Romans eventually scaled it down to the "Onger", a single armed throwing engine which was cheaper and easier to operate. (Some things really are the same through the ages).
By the middle ages, tyhe skills needed to make such machines had long dissapeared, but people are quite clever, so a different engine called the trebuchet was introduced, using the principle of "counterpoise", where a large weight was used to move a beam (sometning like a see saw), and the largest of these could hurl dead horses over castle walls to induce plague, or really massive stones against the walls to smash them. A modern reproduction (which looks to be built out of a telephone pole) shot an Austin Mini about 300m if I remember the Scientific American article correctly.
