I was wondering when something like this was going to happen.
Not that anyone has disbelieved this or that it’s a myth, but is there footage (HA!) of them or anyone testing this out with a cannonball and a dummy’s leg? I’d like to see that in action.
This sounds like a job for Mythbusters. Except make sure they don’t test it around your neighborhood.
No, but the house was.
Tory Belleci just tweeted:
I can imagine being the guy at the insurance company who has to vet all of their proposed experiments. “You want to try what? No way are we going to allow that.”
I suspect that this is very bad news. No one was hurt but they could have been. I hope this doesn’t mean everything gets toned down due to risk aversion.
I don’t think it will. They had insurance for a reason. I think their insurance costs will go up and they’ll have to spend some more time making sure big stunts don’t go wrong. In hindsight it does sort of sound like they should have considered this possibility ahead of time: “OK, we’re shooting this cannonball at a bunch of water barrels in front of a wall, and combined, they should stop the cannonball. What happens if we miss the water? Could the cannonball go through the wall? Do we need another barrier?”
I think the show’s going to go on. I hope this doesn’t cause a bunch of problems for J.D.
My guess is we’ll see more testing done out in the Mojave Desert and less at local quarries and bomb ranges. The show’s travel expenses will go up but their insurance rates should go down.
I think it depends a lot on who loaded the cannon and what precisely went wrong.
I was under the impression that when they went to a bomb range or target range, their on-hand expert was the one who set the charges and loaded the weapons and so on. Then the team would go into the bunker and pushed the button. I could be wrong but if it was the bomb range employee who loaded and aimed the cannon - then I don’t see how it’s fault of the guy who pushed the button.
They were using one of Mythbuster’s home made cannon’s, according to the article. I wonder if the tube split throwing the trajectory off. Or maybe it was just mis-aimed.
Remember when they launched the car over the hill by accident? The first thing Tori said was “Does anyone know what’s on the other side of that berm?”
Seems like every once in a while they forget to do their due diligence.
I see the braking system failed, but it still might have been nice of them to make sure it wasn’t, say, a preschool on the other side.
I wonder how far a cannonball wouldl travel in the Mojave Desert?
Any…does anyone have any REAL idea as to what myth they were busting?
This article says they are going over to appologize in person. Apologetic 'Mythbusters' talk about cannonball accident
They usually don’t explain until they’re promoting the episode. What I didn’t see before is that they were trying to get the cannonball to go through the water and the wall and keep rolling, so John DiFool’s guess seems reasonable.
I didn’t see in the articles, nor has it been clearly asked or answered in this thread either that I can see –
Just what myth were they trying to bust here, anyway? All I see is vague guesses about maybe those water barrels were supposed to stop it?
I would just like to say that if it resulted in Jamie, Adam, et al, coming to my house, this would be so totally worth it. Also, I’d wanna hang out on the set for like, a month. And an hour or so somewhere private with Tori…
They usually don’t reveal the myths they’re working on until the screening date, so I imagine it’s not been shared. They’ve used water as a buffer for various other projectile myths, so I don’t think it’s necessarily relevant.
Kari posted some images on Twitter the other day, but they’ve since been taken down, of an antique style cannon alongside Tory’s own cannon he made a couple of years ago. No conclusion can be drawn from that, I don’t think.
According to this link
“Sgt. JD Nelson from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department tells ABC, hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were trying to figure out how effective a cannon is at firing non-cannonball objects … but first, they had to test the cannonball itself.”
Er. It was Kari, Grant, and Tory, so I’m not sure if that’s reliable info.
And it seems they have:
‘MythBusters’ hosts: Sorry about that cannonball
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/07/BAN31M9Q81.DTL
FTA