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The folks at Perception Builder reconstructed the path of the Mythbusters cannonball misfire from last week on this map. You can clearly see the area that was intended to contain the firing, and the incredible distance it actually went. See a larger map at the website. Link -via Fark
How fast can a cannonball travel? Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were tackling this question yesterday for an episode of their TV show Mythbusters when things went completely wrong. The cannon misfired, and the cannonball went up into the air over Dublin, California. The next question they will probably tackle is whether the footage will be used on TV.
“This cannonball was supposed to go through several barrels of water and through a cinder block, and then ultimately into the side of the hill,” said J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.
Instead the cannonball flew over the foothills surrounding Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation, before spiraling back toward Dublin like a cruise missile.
It flew straight though the front door of a home on Cassata Place, and bounced around like a pinball, flying up to the second floor before blasting through a back bedroom wall.
The wayward cannonball then blasted across a busy road and through a second home some 50 yards away, demolishing roof tiles.
The story doesn’t stop there, and neither did the cannonball. It finally came to rest inside a minivan. The driver had just left the vehicle minutes before. Incredibly, no one was injured in the incident. Ta da! Link -via reddit
Tired of having to leave the couch to get beer, Ryan Rusnak came up with a way to have the fridge send it to him with the push of a button.
Working with a pal he turned a fridge in a basic vending machine which dropped chilled beers — and then added a compressed air cannon, web server and iPhone interface.
Now when he wants a beer, he uses his phone to log into the fridge, picks what sort of beer he wants and fires it over to where he is sitting.
The folks at Springfield Arsenal in Lorton, Virginia acquired a 16th Century cannon that would be fitted onto the end of a pole. It has three barrels. Presumably the musket nipple on the side of each barrel would be slapped against a hard surface, causing the gun to fire. At 2:55, they fire it with 75 grains of black power and a .69-caliber musket ball in each barrel.
via Make
The robot-building team at Bellarmine College Prepatory School in San Jose, California built a t-shirt cannon that can fire 200 t-shirts before reloading. It can spit them out as fast as three shirts per second.
Link via Make | Photo: Team 254
Prevously: The T-Shirt Cannon
We’ve previously featured T. Shamir’s tiny cannon. Since that time, he’s added a peep sight for precise aiming. Again, he’s smashing household items, including vodka bottles and computer monitors. The Orff music in the background adds to the dramatic tension.
Question: how long will it take Hollywood to turn this into a feature-length film?
via CrunchGear
YouTube user 43287633 made a tiny functional cannon. It fires a little steel ball. The cannon is pretty effective, demolishing light bulbs, glasses, and punching holes through soda cans.
via Geekosystem
Mounted on a 9″ marble base is a small brass cannon, and above that a magnifying glass. The positioning and focal length of the lens would be designed to light the cannon’s fuse. The placement of the sundial suggests that the device was used to mark the arrival of the noon hour (on sunny days).
This intricate device was custom-made for someone living at a latitude of 59 degrees, 55 minutes, 20 seconds. My guess would be that the recipient lived somewhere in St. Petersburg, but other locations are possible.
Link.
Addendum: Some additional searching has revealed that devices such as these were known as “sundial cannons” or “noon cannons.” The best description/photos I’ve found is at this pdf by the British Sundial Society.
John Gill and Gary Arold of Hurley, New York built a compressed air cannon in 2006 that can fire a pumpkin (but they prefer squash as ammunition) up to a mile away. Adam Bosch writes in the Times Herald-Record:
The cannon is mostly used on weekends to attract people to Gill’s Farm Market on Route 209 in Hurley, but sometimes the guys get together at the 1,500-acre farm and blast it when nobody’s around. Just for fun.
They’ve shot pumpkins, scuba tanks and a basketball filled with corn and foam insulation. They once scattered some geese by accidentally shooting into the flock. Then there’s the time they shot a bowling ball more than a mile.
“The first time we shot a bowling ball, that’s was probably the worst thing we ever did,” Arold says. “It kept going and going and going.”
Link via CrunchGear
Physicist John Hunter has proposed the construction of a 1.1-kilometer-long cannon that could fire a 450 kg payload into orbit. David Shiga writes in New Scientist:
The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second.
Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun.
At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.
Pictured is a HARP gun, a Cold War-era device used to fire instruments into the upper atmosphere.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
