Could you make an effective harpoon/grappling gun, as seen in the movies, with the technology available today?
You see, I’ve run into a multi-billion dollar inheritance and would like to become a superhero, but I haven’t found any contractors for superhero weapons/utilities yet…
Batman uses them all the time. Imagine: You fall off the top of a ten story building, as you are falling, you reach for your utility belt and grab your handy-dandy harpoon gun and blast a projectile into the neighboring building and swing to safety! Woooo!
Problems:
Do they make a wire with the tensile strength to withstand the impact of the force of the acceleration of gravity during the time it takes to shoot the damn thing, or even just regular hanging, that is of small enough diameter to work in such a contraption?
2)Can you get enough “oomf” in a belt-worn utility gun to actually drive the projectile far enough into the wall to support you?
For climbing-type grappling guns (i.e. the type used by Luke Skywalker in his magnet-grappling-wire-climbing-gun in The Empire Strikes Back. You know, when he went up to destroy the AT-AT at Hoth?), can you make a winch strong enough to carry you up quickly? I realize you could do this with a high gear ratio, but it seems like it would take hours with that small of a mechanism.
Gee, it’s threads like this that make me realize that all you city kids never had the fun of experimenting with shooting stuff out of a 12-gauge shotgun.
When friends and I tried to do it, we used a roll of aircraft cable threaded through a hole in the back end of a piece of aluminum tube. You have to take most of the powder out of the shell first, because it will kick too hard with a full load. Even using only about one-fifth of the powder would toss the spear alone about a hundred yards, but the problem is that when the cable was attached, as it was taken out, it would slow the spear down very rapidly until the spear practically stopped in midair and fell straight to the ground only about 30 yards away. We supposed that coiling all the cable on the spear somehow so that it could unravel freely and launching the whole thing would have worked better, but we couldn’t figure out any easy way to do it, and couldn’t think up any way to con any grown-ups into helping us do it. ~ Another career down the toilet.
Somewhat Related: At the grocery store I work at, the storage freezer in back is -20 F. You can get a rag wet and toss it against the sheet-metal cooler ceiling and it will stick, until later in the day when other employees leave the doors open as they’re working and it thaws and melts off. I kinda wanna get a towel and some rope, tie the rope around the middle of the towel (-kinda like a bow tie), wet the towel, throw it up there, wait a few moments and then see if it can support my 260 lbs. I fear that I may never get the chance again. I think the ice will hold but I don’t know if the ceiling will, and I still need this job too much to try to explain to the store manager what happened to the cooler ceiling without laughing. - MC
Umm, the title should read Superhero Grapling/Harpoon Gun Workshop, of course. [note: I fixed that. -manhattan]
MC, did you ever try to shoot your harpoon into something? Did it stick? Would it have supported your body weight?
[Edited by manhattan on 01-28-2001 at 03:33 PM]
When we fired it without the cable attached, it tumbled in midair. With the cable attached, it flew front end first, but didn’t go very far. We didn’t shoot it at anything that I remember. At the time we were trying to launch a grappling hook. The main weight problem seemed to be the cable itself. -And although it would have held our weight (back then) I don’t remember how we thought we were going to climb up a single strand of 1/8 aircraft cable. I don’t know if I knew then. (-we often started out with some cool plan, and ended up just shooting at stuff)
Crossbow bolts worked better than arrows. Arrows tended to break inside or fold in half just out of the barrel.
I would guess that a 12-gauge has enough power to shoot a spear into wood hard enough to support one adult, , -probably. The problem is that shotguns are built much lighter and thinner than rifles, and overloading them with powder or projectiles is a risky business, especially with the $99 guns K-Mart sells. Get yerself a SPAS or something similar; a big & heavy combat shotgun. - MC
I seem to remember that the breaking strength of 1/8 aircraft cable is 625 lbs. Go to any hardware store that sells it by the foot: usually there’s a label on the roll that says how much it can hold. -Good luck! - MC
I don’t think you want to have a Batman (the Motion Picture)-type gappling hook that yoy shoot AFTER you’ve allen, in the hopes of stopping you fall. The odds are that you’d break your back. At any rate, when the James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only” came out, that was the kind of thing they talked about in discussing the rock-climbing stunts. Apparently the guy who did the stunts where “Bond” seemed to fall, only to be stopped by his climbing ropes and pitons, actually had a very elaborate counterweighted system to stop him Gradually, so that he could keep his spine intact. The way I see it, Batman and Vicki were severely crippled, if they survived at all. You’d never catch Frank Millers Batman pulling a stunt like that.
What I’d like to know is whether ou can build a CO2-powered grappling hook just to launch a line for climbing, a la Rorschach’s gimmick in “Watchmen”.
As you start to fall, you whip out your handy-dandy ACME grappling-hook-thrower, aim it at something and fire. The grappling hook travels, loops around whatever you aimed at, and magically your little winch starts hauling you up and/or the brake locks the line.
How long does this take? How far have you fallen by the time the grappling hook catches (and, of course, if you miss, you’re SOL)? I have this mental picture of Wile Coyote swooping onto the ground
As to the OP – the Coastguard has guns which fire grappling hooks and cables from one ship to another, I think. So it can be done.
http://www.mossberg.com/pcatalog/Specpurp.htm
Scroll down to the fifth picture. It’s not a harpoon gun, but it’s pretty easy to picture it with a grapnel portruding from the muzzle, if you use a little imagination.
It just so happens I’ve mused about the Batman grappling hook gun myself. Now, I don’t know about going through walls like you saw in Batman Forever, but I imagine a really good CO2 powered paintball gun could be rigged to propel a small grappling hook several hundred feet. MC has the wire part all figured out. Then, maybe a drill motor on your utility belt would have enough torque to haul you up the side of a building. Taken all together, I would say sure, it’s possible to make one. A home-made version would probably be a lot bulkier and not as compact and elegant as the one Batman has.
“For Your Eyes Only”: -you can fall quite a bit on a climbing rope, and it won’t break your back. Climbing ropes are made to stretch, just in the very common case that this happens. Standard 11mm/5000lb climbing rope may stretch 20%+ with the weight of just one adult on it; it’s woven well, but rather loose and soft. That’s where bungie-jumping “originated”, except that when using rope they would only fall around 50 feet instead of 300. Some people have fallen over 100 feet with no major damage to the person, but it depends what kind of harness you have on, if you hit the rock and if you get tangled in the rope or not. And it’s bad for the rope: after a hard fall, a rope is considered internally damaged and shouldn’t be used as a climbing line anymore. Climbers will often do it one last time just for fun with an old rope, before retiring it. -Or a new rope, if they’re stupid.
And speaking of climbing, there’s a photo in a book (“On Rope” Padgett and Smith - ISBN 0-9615093-2-5 printed:1988) of a gas-operated winch for hauling loads in climbing. It was as big as a large chainsaw engine, and it would only lift an adult at something like half a foot per second, straight up. It didn’t simply spool up the rope, it “climbed” it, so that the rope it had passed hung beneath somehow. I don’t think anybody ever sold them, but apparently a few have been built.
And you cannot kil people by throwing climbing pitons at their chests, but you really can climb a rope using your bootlaces, like Bond did. Most climbing books show how. Use new bootlaces - MC
Do we care about noise, or do we want to shoot a grappling hook and be able to climb it? It would seem easy to have a metal \aluminum hook launched by a 12g shotgun blank that was attached to 500lb. parachute cord, which in turn could be threaded to ascender-thickness climbing rope. Has anyone tried this? I’m just interested in hauling my cooler up into the trees in bear country…
