Even so, users swear by their hail cannons. Meteorologists dispute this claim, pointing out that the vortex ring from even a very large hail cannon dissipates after 650 feet or so-hardly range enough to reach even low thunderheads. Operators claim the discharges disrupt storm clouds and prevent hail from damaging valuable fruit crops. Aimed to fire straight up, they are fed a mixture of air and acetylene, which when detonated, generates a powerful, high speed vortex of air. Hail cannons are large devices, standing about 20 feet tall. The Air Blaster was declared a no-no and taken off the market.Ĭuriously, one branch of the vortex cannon family predates the windkanone and yet survives today, even flourishing after a fashion. Experimentally minded kids discovered you could shoot objects shoved into the muzzle, and from that moment the Air Blaster was doomed. With a few pumps you could knock down houses of cards, toy soldiers, or unsuspecting Barbies. I never had one, but some lucky friends of mine did. When I was a kid in the 1960s, the American toy company Wham-O marketed a hand-pumped vortex gun called the Air Blaster. Smokers have done this for centuries, blowing carefree rings of carcinogenic fog. In three-dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle.Ĭommon objects with this shape: ring, donut, tire inner tube, life ring In geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle The windkanone expelled a torus of air at high velocity. Some writers describe the device as firing "plugs of air," but in fact something much more complicated (and interesting) was happening. The windkanone was powered by an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. According to author Rudolf Lusar, tests of the windkanone at the Hillersheim gun range resulted in the breaking of 25 mm (1 inch) wooden planks at a range of 200 meters. The windkanone interested me particularly because it had actually been built, tested, and installed by a bridge over the river Elbe.
In addition to such classic secret weapons as the V-1 and V-2, Ford's book revealed a whole panoply of bizarre devices ranging from vicious poison gases to miniature exploding tanks. Ford's 1969 book German Secret Weapons: Blueprint for Mars. I remember first reading about the mysterious windkanone in Brian J. The biggest and baddest member of the vortex cannon family was the World War II Windkanone. The same can be said of air guns and gunpowder-fired weapons, but the Vortex Cannon is unique in all that it fires is air-swirling donuts of air. They have been marketed in the thousands as a child's toy, yet versions were built as anti-aircraft guns. The Vortex Cannon is a strange, diverse device.
0 kommentar(er)
