Ravenwood - 08/17/05 06:45 AM
British crimefighters have tried some pretty strange less than lethal alternatives to guns.
The branch once worked on a special gun that blasted a toffee-like foam at a suspect. Although it was effective in immobilizing suspects, the project was abandoned when researchers found the sticky goo blocked people's airways.Still better than perforating someone's chest when you don't need to. I'd bet it's less lethal than TASERs too.
A supercharged water gun, complete with a strap-on water tank, was also among the list of failed inventions. The portable water cannon did not make it past trial stage because the pressurized stream of water knocked users off their feet.Isn't that the idea?
Another idea was a cannon that fired tennis balls at high speed - notably less lethal than a gun, but lacking in accuracy.DUH! The conical shaped Minie Ball has been around since before the Civil War. They also tried to use foxes as sniffer dogs, but discovered (the hard way) that the fox is really hard to domesticate.
The idea was shelved when the foxes kept biting their handlers and eventually chewed through their enclosures and escaped.
Category: Oddities
Comments (5) top link me
Asking the British to engineer anything is not a good idea; I used to work with motors, generators, and power systems when I was younger; the British designed stuff was the worst engineered I ever encountered, and I have worked with stuff from all over the world. Most of the stuff is designed as if by a teenager working in a basement.
Posted by: Robert Garrard at August 17, 2005 11:18 AMNote that the water gun knocked the USER down -- which I doubt is the idea. I would think the idea would be to knock the target down.
Posted by: Zerin Hood at August 17, 2005 12:01 PMEvidently the inventor of the water cannon has forgotten Newton's law about equal and opposite reactions. If it's forceful enough to knock your target down, the reaction is forceful enough to knock you down - probably before you even manage to get the stream on target.
Of course, firefighters struggle with this reaction issue all the time. Their larger nozzles (called "monitors") have stands to transfer part of the reaction to the ground, and also have wide enough handles that two or more men can hold onto one nozzle. All this would make it harder to swing the nozzle around to deal with unruly humans, but it's necessary.
Posted by: markm at August 17, 2005 12:41 PMRavenwood, I don't understand your comparison between tennis balls and Minie "balls". The Minie projectile was a soft lead bullet with a conical hollow in the rear, and it was as lethal as any other large caliber bullet. (Muskets ranged from about .60 to .80 caliber.) The conical rear was so it could be made smaller than a rifled barrel, to easily drop into a muzzleloader, and then be expanded to fit the barrel by a hard tap with the ramrod. Earlier muzzleloading rifles required pushing hard with the ramrod all the way down to get a tight-fitting lead ball and cloth patch combination past the rifling. It took minutes to reload them. With the Minie ball, a rifled musket was almost as fast reloading as a smoothbore, and much more accurate.
Posted by: markm at August 17, 2005 12:50 PMIt's all about shape and rifling. Minie balls were head and shoulders above smoothbore muskets shooting round balls because they were more stable in flight and thus more accurate. Shooters could accurately hit targets hundreds of yards away.
Thus it should come as no surprise to any gun owner why accuracy would be a problem with a gun that shoots round tennis balls.
Posted by: Ravenwood at August 17, 2005 1:41 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
