16 thoughts on “Don’t Bring A Rock”

  1. The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper says his injuries are not life-threatening.

    Yeah, a hand crossbow only does 1d6+DEX damage, so…

  5. Titus, you absolutely must be a play tester for me when my s/w is ready.

    I saw a mean potato air gun the other day made from PVC. Rate of fire not so good and not quite as deadly as other types of projectiles.

    Sling shots are actually quite deadly with a better rate of fire than crossbows. Large ball bearings being the munition of choice.

  6. The comment I left over there:

    Many moons ago, when I was a Yellow Cab driver, two girls around 10 years old were throwing rocks at passing cars, including mine. There were dozens of rocks in the road, so they’d been at it for quite some time. They missed me, but I whipped a U-turn at 35 mph, squealing to a halt right in front of them. THEY squealed and ran into their apartment building, with me hot on their heels. I paused, heard feet pounding down the 2nd floor hallway, ran up, and caught them pounding on a door, “Mommy, mommy, let us in!”

    As the mother opened the door I stopped ten feet away, clasped my hands in front of me, and gravely said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m afraid your kids were throwing rocks at cars. You may want to do something about that.” She grabbed the kids by their ears while shouting at them, and kicked the door closed with her foot. Mission accomplished.

    Of course, I probably scrubbed $20 worth of tread off the tires in that U-turn, but hey, it was a rental cab. Fun times.

  8. Years ago some brats were hiding in bushes at night inside their front yard fence throwing rocks at passing cars. The third time my car got hit, I parked, walked out to the road and found a spot where I could watch without being seen.

    A car went by and I saw a rock bounce across the road in its headlights. As soon as that car was past I threw a rock into the bushes.

    I heard a door slam a few seconds later, and the nighttime rock-throwing stopped.

  13. “I saw a mean potato air gun the other day made from PVC. Rate of fire not so good and not quite as deadly as other types of projectiles.”

    I used to have a potato gun made out of PVC. Was about 4 1/2 feet long so you could hold it like a bazooka. If you fired it around dusk you would be able to see a fairly large and bright muzzle flash from the hairspray propellant. I never shot anybody or anything with it except for a friends metal shed one time. The crack of the sheet metal definitely let you know you didn’t want to stand in the way of that thing at close range. If you arched a shot it would easily go 100-150 yards. I figured if you wanted to be really devious one could use the potato as a sabot for a penetrator of some kind.

  14. My Poppa worked as a civilian contractor on sabot and other tank-gun ammunition in collaboration with the Army.

    If he were only alive today, that I could make his day telling him about “the potato say-boh” . . .

  15. use the potato as a sabot I almost mentioned that in my comment above. Somehow I thought that would be giving out an idea that shouldn’t be made public. The real question is what kind of muzzle velocity could you get. The one I saw was using compressed air with a quick release.

  16. You peaked my interest and so i poked around a bit and found a forum thread where someone did the math and figured the muzzle velocity of a potato cannon came to about 150 ft/s. I thought it would be closer to that of a paintball which are usually adjusted to 300 ft/s. But considering the mass of the potato even at 150 fps that would bring a lot of energy to the target; by their calculations 184 ft/lbs of muzzle energy. That might leave a bruise. 😀

Comments are closed.