My first thought when I saw those going viral on imgur was "The internals on those would be a mess, half of those designs look like they couldn't be held at all, and only one of them looks even slightly comfortable - and even then I'm not sure how you'd aim it." My second thought was "Wait, WHO post...

I'm going to hazard a guess that the diaphragm in a sprinkler valve doesn't weigh nearly a pound and a half... Personally, I don't think GGDT's optimiser is fantastically useful, except in fixed overall length mode (maybe). It's perhaps an interesting lesson in efficiency, but trying to eke every la...

The best dart fletching design I've come up with so far is a three finned dart with angled leading edges. It's intended more for air cannons than blowguns, but it's possible it might be of some inspiration to you. I don't seem to have a picture of the current version, but this is an older prototype ...

Some silliness from Valentine's Day: https://imgur.com/fA4MsLK.jpg The slightly less silly stream of thought that came with it: The development of powered exo-skeletons naturally meant the possibility of a whole new generation of infantry weapons. Athena was a natural candidate to field test many o...

- that part could be mitigated by physical restrains that protected the gunner from sticking parts of the body in the way of the recoil on real constructions. And the rest lies in the training. And in the fact that the recoil won't be nearly as aggressive as in the real life. Far from that. I'm ver...

... right, I've gone back and looked through your posts. If this is for paintball, the performance of the design is probably not a major concern. I do have two concerns though: -If such a light projectile and low velocity is involved, the pressure and the time the system is under pressure simply may...

Just to make sure I got it correctly, Ragnarok: by tapping gas off the barrel you mean to put something like a T-piece in the hose that currently leads the air into the barrel and connect in to the cylinder? Not exactly, because that's not how I was expecting the launcher to be laid out. It would h...

From what I saw (and I admit this tech is new for me), cylinders didn't seem to have any perceivable acceleration time in the beginning. If they're trying to shove a 45kg launcher about, they are going to be slowed down quite a bit. Then the piston reaches the exhaust and the air rushes to the barr...

There's still a minimum standard for faking it.

Even the less conversant are likely to spot that something is off if the carriage suddenly lurches forwards under "heavy recoil".

Faking recoil with a pneumatic cylinder is one of those things that doesn't work all that well (particularly with such a heavy cannon). True recoil is a very sharp impulse, with all the acceleration happening over a distance of just a few millimetres and then everything after that being deceleration...

I haven't, no. (Although looking at reviews and extracts, it does look like it could be interesting). I have to say though that one of the things about my influences in this project is that often it's cases of things I don't want to do. For an example, the moment robots are introduced into most stor...

A couple of weeks ago, I threatened to talk about this (seeing it is slightly related to the prototype military tech much beloved by the forum), so here we go. "Fracturing Veil" is a sci-fi/fantasy setting I'm working on, set in an alternate modern day where computing and robotics have made great le...

jackssmirkingrevenge wrote:I could, however IIRC he's still limited to same 1,000 frames per second cameras that we've been using

I'm guessing it's a while since you last watched. This is what he uses now: http://www.krontech.ca/

jrrdw wrote:If you don't feel safe you are not.

Indeed. With spudguns, airguns, firearms or any other such things, if you're not sure if it's safe, check, check again, then still treat it like it's dangerous.

Unless you're actually having to seriously force a projectile down the barrel, the frictional forces are probably pretty small compared to the pressures involved. Obviously though, you do want any launcher to be safe even in a worst case scenario such as a blocked barrel - if the construction leaves...