Hmm, interesting question! Suppose you sprayed the (paper) kite well with hair spray or varnish to make it more flammable, and put in a long firecracker fuse, which you'd light when you launched the kite?
If you wanted a really spectacular (though brief) effect, you could make the kite out of flash paper.
That's what I had been thinking, too. Soak it in gas(?), and attach a firecracker with a long fuse, then light the fuse and get it into the air. Though maybe the gas fumes would make it catch fire (explode?) from the firecracker fuse being lit?
Haha, yea, I thought about this too. But even a assuming they have a bow lying around for sport or something, I'm not sure how they'd manage to make the flaming arrows.
Tar is the traditional stuff, but hitting a piece of paper or thin silk on a string in the wind is not like hitting a thatched roof. Most likely the arrow would just tear right through, damaging the kite without setting it on fire.
Any reason not to have a dual line - a cord that's the source of tension /connection to the ground, and an attached fuse? It'd weigh more (and I have no idea how much fuse cord weighs), but with a good strong wind and/or not flying too high the physics ought to work.
I was thinking fire arrows too. But there's actually nothing in the given dialogue that says they light the kite on fire in the air, as opposed to before launching it.
A person would have to be pretty good with a bow, to hit a flying kite. Also, where would these arrows be coming down, tipped with flaming tar or whatever?
A three-minute fuse would not be too heavy, and would give plenty of time for the kite to get altitude before it caught fire. I've been presuming the old-fashioned bamboo-and-newspaper kind of kite, which would flare up beautifully if freshly spray-painted, and would probably be light enough to stay aloft while it burned, even after the kite-string was burned through.
I think a store-bought nylon kite would fall right out of the sky as soon as the string detached, and then there's the question of where that little fire-bomb would be landing.
Use cane or laths instead of bamboo, then, and thin silk instead of nylon or paper. The Prussians did have both turpentine-based paint and lacquer-based hair or wig products, but they also naphtha, and a silk kite painted in that would make a glorious blaze. If you had the kind of burning fuse called a 'slow match', you'd have as much time as you needed, and not much fear of it going out before it reached the naphtha-soaked silk.
No idea whether such a kite would burn out fast enough to not set the Prussian forest on fire when it came down. Maybe fly it over a lake at night; that would be pretty as well as prudent.
I've not tried it but I seem to remember a friend commenting that they used to send messages up a kite string to the kite when he was a child. Something about fastening a paper loosely to the string and the wind sliding it up.
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If you wanted a really spectacular (though brief) effect, you could make the kite out of flash paper.
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Interesting question!
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A three-minute fuse would not be too heavy, and would give plenty of time for the kite to get altitude before it caught fire. I've been presuming the old-fashioned bamboo-and-newspaper kind of kite, which would flare up beautifully if freshly spray-painted, and would probably be light enough to stay aloft while it burned, even after the kite-string was burned through.
I think a store-bought nylon kite would fall right out of the sky as soon as the string detached, and then there's the question of where that little fire-bomb would be landing.
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No idea whether such a kite would burn out fast enough to not set the Prussian forest on fire when it came down. Maybe fly it over a lake at night; that would be pretty as well as prudent.
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