A properly made spud cannon could be made to look like
a 1920’s style “death ray” gun! Bit of tinfoil and some spare
nuts and bolts glued to it. Silver colored paint if you got it.
It will put the whomp on yah too! 
Welcome to the Boards ChadHammer.
Now never try and pass off a spud cannon as a death ray again.
its just wrong, and tin foil is just not gonna cut it. It’s lacking the flash and flair of a REAL death ray. Anyone who’s read this thread will not so easyly be fooled.
My First welcome.
yay
::does dance of joy::
For the love of Og, can we please have this thread commit suicide with its own weapon already?
Do we have any cites on suicides with Death-Rays?
Why do that? Why not just keep reaching for that 1000th post? Which is actually exactly what you did - your post counts too. 
Why do you think I keep replying? I’ve been hoping it would get locked since the early single digits.
Ah, they’re 1920’s style
“DEATH RAYS.”
I thought this thread was a bunch of crapola, but I actually learned something from Brutus’s link to Frontline article. It is an interview with US Special Forces soldiers about how the Taliban in Afghanistan actually thought the US had Death Rays. Fascinating read, I highly recommend it (thanks Brutus!). Excerpt:
(Just last week I was patting myself on the back for resisting the temptation to post in a 1920’s Style Death Rays thread… )
I bet that woman is being called the Angel of Death now. That would be super cool.
It would be supper cool if she were hot.
I don’t know why, but it just would
Hey, maybe it’s Scylla’s wife.
I think this thread has passed the point where it becomes self-sustaining. The only thing that could possibly stop it now would probably be…
A moderator locking it.
What? Did you think I was going to suggest some form of exotic weapon?
Has anyone here read ***Girl Researcher Observes Strange Scientists*** by Suzy Derkins, Dr. Calvin and Prof. Hobbes former research assistant? It’s a rather interesting read, to say the least. Let me quote from a particularly fascinating passage
She goes on to describe not only the other experiments they did together, but also how she became pregnant by Dr. Calvin (he always refused to claim paternity, claiming that Hobbes was the father of Ms. Derkins six illegitimate children, however Dr. Calvin did provide financial support for Ms. Derkins and her children).
Fascinating read, I highly recommend picking it up.
Ahh, it’s finally been reprinted. I’ve seen copies before (and read a little from one), but there hadn’t been an edition of it since 1968, when the publisher tried to make money off the information about Dr. Hobbes.
Did Watterson use any of the information in it for his biography of Prof. Calvin and Dr. Hobbes?
Watterson seems to have used only slight portions of her work. He doesn’t go into as much detail about the research Drs. Calvin and Hobbes did, nor does he cover the personal relationship between Dr. Calvin and Ms. Derkins very much. He limits her to being little more than the victim of Dr. Calvin’s childish pranks, but even in that you can tell that Dr. Calvin had a great deal of affection for Ms. Derkins.
However, unlike Ms. Derkins, he does focus a great deal on Drs. Calvin and Hobbes childhood years.
Thanks for the information. My copy of Waterson is missing the index and bibiliography.
In addition to all the pages on Calvin’s childhood, it appears that Waterson (unless it was also torn out of my copy) ended the story after the death of Dr. Hobbes.
Wonder why he didn’t use the sory about the blimp.
Forgive an ignorant question - IANA high energy physicist, but aren’t 1920’s style “death-rays” either electrostatic discharge or particle beam weapons?
You must also be missing some of the end-notes to the book as well. In one of them Watterson states that there’s a lot of sordid stories surrounding Dr. Calvin that he felt didn’t need to be rehashed as they weren’t really pertinant to Dr. Calvin’s work and that many of them didn’t involve Dr. Calvin, but Dr. Colvin, who greatly resembled Dr. Calvin, but was involved in such things as automotive research and theological studies. I find this totally baffling.
First of all, Dr. Calvin had six illegitimate children, that he denied were his, and yet he supported them for the rest of his life. There’s got to be some kind of weird psychology going on there, ya know? Next, is that it is screamingly obvious that Dr. Calvin mainly did death ray research because it helped to fund his work in transmorgrifiers, superluminal travel and time machines. Dr. Calvin was an irrepressible prankster and such things were vastly more important to him than death rays. (After all, how good can a prank be if your victim isn’t there to see you laughing at him?) Third, as this thread so obviously illustrates, there’s tons of misperceptions about death rays, their inventors, and so on. To allow a great mind like Dr. Calvin to be confused with a tenth-rate automotive engineer (who specialized in automotive accessories) and crack-pot theologian who expoused beliefs that even 99% of fundamentalist Christians would have a hard time following (that the Pope was a reptillian anti-Christ who worshipped the Whore of Babylon to name but one) is a disservice of the highest order, IMHO. It’s like saying the only innovation the Tucker 48 had was an extra headlight (it wasn’t, not by a long shot)!
Watterson’s book is great in that it does shed some light on a forgetten subject of history, but it’s almost completely overshadowed by the things that it doesn’t cover.