The Factory Floor

1:31 PM

@Secespitus, thanks for fielding those Sandbox questions.

Secespitus

@Green No problem, but what exactly does "fielding" mean?

hey there @Secespitus

Secespitus

Hey there @Shalvenay

how're things going?

@Secespitus in this case, 'fielding' = 'handling'.

Secespitus

1:35 PM

@Green Thanks

@Shalvenay Alright. Playing some Final Fantasy right now. Maybe I'll go jogging in an hour or so. The weather is relatively good and the last week was very rainy

ah. we're the ones getting the rain this week

Cloudy for me and rain late in the week. It's a good week for me.

1:49 PM

so yeah -- how practical would a telescoping blowgun be?

would there need to be any...tricks in its construction?

I'd guess tight seals between segments

a design that gets wider to narrower might actually make sense there

yeah, tight seals would definitely be needed (I'm thinking some sort of soft leather material myself)

I'd almost think you'd want to go narrower to wider to avoid problems with the internal ballistics of the projectile (i.e the projectile off-centering in the wider part then striking the end of the narrower part at the joint)

2:11 PM

You blow on a wide end, it comes out the narrow end

logically at least.

I wonder if you could machine it

that still raises the question of how you keep the projectile centered in the wide part

hm. I'd assume the fletching

most blowpipe darts are smaller than the blowpipe, no?

I believe so, yes

(I'm basically brainstorming anyway. I know very little of blowpipes, and I preferred paper launced with rubberbands to spit-ball pipes ;p)

hey there @Bellerophon

2:23 PM

@Shalvenay What ratio of elongation are you looking for? 1:2, 1:3?

@Green 1:2 is adequate I think -- a 9 to 12" object should be concealable enough for most purposes

@Shalvenay I think that's very manageable.

What does it need to be made out of?

Is metal allowed?

I'd say metal would be allowed but wood or bamboo would be much easier to work with

you could machine metal tho

Here's my idea then: Instead of each tube being larger than the tube with in it (classic maritime telescope style)....hang on let me draw a picture.

2:29 PM

@JourneymanGeek yeah, machining metal has only become easy in the past couple hundred years though xD

lol

true

While it's more complicated, you don't have the same kind of blow-by losses with my idea that you get with a normal telescoped blowgun.

@Green yeah, that's a good point re: blow-by losses. some of the fletching styles depicted on blowgun darts would help minimize them anyway, but still...

how feasible would it be to do in lacquered wood or bamboo? or would it require machined metal?

@Shalvenay machined metal is just super duper precise (I've been watching a lot of metal machining videos on YouTube recently so I'm aware of how precise those can be.)

@Green yeah -- I think you could get good enough precision out of other materials though

2:40 PM

With wood or bamboo, you could make it just fine, but things like humidity will have an influence on fit. Say, the humidity is really high that day and the wood swells, does that make it harder to pull apart?

@Green yeah -- you'd need to seal the wood for sure to keep it from doing that

I've seen Japanese carpenters get accurate to the fraction of a millimeter.

I'm not saying that it can't be done in wood or bamboo, just pointing out some things that would need to be accounted for. :)

From a detection standpoint, wood/bamboo would be ideal since they won't trip metal detectors. If this is pre-metal detectors, then they could be concealed inside a cane or staff.

It's a fun idea to work out.

yeah, cane/staff is too easy though ;) you could probably hide a 9-12" object on your person though unless you were being searched fairly thoroughly

how would the thing be held together when extended?

2:49 PM

@Shalvenay Friction. I wouldn't want anything else. I'm assuming this is an assassin style weapon. You would want the total time that the blowgun is out and deployed to be less than 5 seconds; the quicker the better. If there are latches between tubes, that can slow things down, say if one of them gets stuck or jammed.

you could have a flange at the narrow end which stops it from moving past some point.

I think that the "blind" flange system would be the best albeit a bit on the tricky side to assemble. friction could work as well, but raises the risk of having it come in two when you're trying to get it out, which'd be equally as bad as a stuck latch

Humans only exert +1.4psi/ 9.8kpa with their lungs. This blowgun doesn't need to be super strong.

@Green that is very true

@Shalvenay Let me draw another picture. )

@Shalvenay, wait, wait. I've got it. You don't make the blowgun rigid at all, and no sliding in and out.

You make it like a Chinese finger trap. When squashed down, it's fairly short but pretty big around. When extended, may two long thing sticks to hold it extended, it's long and thin. Since the bamboo makes a fairly airtight tube, you can maintain pretty good pressure while blowing.

And if you're captured, you'll only have sticks and a weird bamboo weaving to explain instead of a long extending wood thing.

3:08 PM

that's...an intriguing idea. so for assembly, you'd basically slide loops woven into the finger-trap barrel onto the stick, where'd they engage with notches to stretch it to its extended length? or how would that process work?

@Shalvenay Weave in small loops at both ends. For extra rigidity, you might wrap the sticks around the tube in a very long helix.

I think that's about it. I have ideas of sleeves that the sticks would push down so that the assassin doesn't have to worry about fiddling around with getting a stick in two pockets, just once into the end of the sleeve.

yeah, I think the woven-bamboo idea could be made to work, but the blind-flange restrained rigid telescope would be quicker to set up and tear down

@Shalvenay True.

Either way, now you have at least two ways to do it. :)

3:25 PM

4:00 PM

You know, walking through Wikipedia's Orders of Magnitude series is really interesting. For example, yottascale computing (10^24 instructions per second) is the estimated computation required to simulate 7 billion human brains in real time.

I think that sets the lower bound on the size of the computer our simulation is running on.

...assuming of course that our universe is a simulation and not "real".

Bellerophon

@Green I think that is a pretty safe assumption.