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Thailand's "Q" Banks on Rubber Bullets
redwolfoz writes "ABC News reports that Thailand's answer to 'Q', the legendary inventor of gadgets for movie spy James Bond, is busy at work at his warehouse on the edge of the country's capital. Workmen inside are trying out the latest inventions of retired Major Songphon Eiamboonyarith, who runs defence contracting firm Precipart Co. The range includes umbrellas that shoot rubber bullets, bullet-proof baseball caps and a hand-held device to fire a man-sized net 10m to stop a villain in his tracks."
The force of the shot would give you brain damage
I wonder if that spiedy-net would work in an office environment. Would make dealing with the boss MUCH easier, I think. That and Herf wars go to a whole new level.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
It doesn't look like any of these inventions are particularly new, the US police force and riot response teams have been using/testing rubber bullet, bean bag bullets, nets, foam, sonic weapons, and other for the past several years. They've started deploying them to more and more officers, apparently it's lead to a number of situations where they were able to incapacitate and arrest someone they usually would have shot. So it sounds like a movement in the right direction, although I think these weapons get used more against rioters, drunks, the mentally ill, etc. I'm pretty sure they still shoot supervillains... or promote them.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I think I can make a potato gun do that.
Man in tuxedo walks up to the bar, orders:
...the name is Band...Rubber Band..."
"...Vodka Martini, shaken, not stirred...
Yeah, so i'm a dork. Join the club.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
I'd rather be dead than severely brain damaged, but that could just be me.
The article wasn't so much about how it's new and cool, but how they're new to Thailand, and very cheap and effective for the task at hand (mostly, training). Rubber bullets don't fly as far and are thus effective for training exercises in Thailand, where space is at a premium. The Howitzer shells they used to use cost over $200, but now they use rubber shells that are under $10.
I mean, just looking at the "armored tuk tuk"...it's not like anyone's saying this is something amazingly cutting edge. Though it did remind me slightly of the "elite military vehicle" from Stripes...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
why should a rubber-bullet gun be disguised as an umbrella ??
A rubber-bullet gun is for deterrence, and should look like a shotgun, or something even more evil.
An advancing police line armed with umbrellas will most likely not cause a crows to disperse.
More likely, the umbrella is quite lethal, in the assassination meaning of the word, but since this is a PG rated story, it's been modified A-Team style.
Everyone's gotta have a hobby.
Mr. Songphon's happened to be killing.
o well.
Bullet-proof is rarely what its called, a standard kevlar bullet-proof vest will stop many smaller caliber shots, but you can still get killed, even if the vest isn't pierced, if your hit in the chest with a powerful enough shot, even if the vest stops the round you can still die from hydrostatic shock, the same goes for the kevlar vests with metal inserts, they my stop powerfull rounds, but if u look at the after photos from testing, you can see the plates of metal with large(2 or more centimeter) deep depressions, it may not penetrate, but that much force hitting you in the chest is enough to cause quite a bit of damage
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"My father was a soldier. He used to give me manuals on explosives and guns."
Talk about the gift that keeps on giving, "hey what did you get for x-mas??" "My dad gave me that new transformer!" "That's nothing my dad gave me books on how guns and explosives work! I cant wait too try them out!"
In the future, can the story submitters actually make up their own headlines instead of using the exact same one as the story being linked to?
Thanks
Songphon says in three months Precipart will deliver to police in the south the firm's first armoured tuk tuk, Thailand's popular indigenous three-wheeled motorcycle taxi.
1. I suppose he is going to cover up the sides of the tuk tuk, because it makes no sense to have just an armored canopy and open sides. If he seals it up it won't even be a bicycle anymore, but will be like an armored car, except with only 3 wheels. How original.
2.In reference to the umbrellas: "They are designed for police use in hostage situations," says Precipart consultant Sanpetch Putarak, a retired wing commander
The prototype umbrella is pink. How many police officers would normally be walking around with pink umbrellas?
3. Police are expected to have things like rubber bullets. Is the umbrella used to surprise the one or people who don't know that police are armed?
4.The armored "tuk tuk" is equipped with a machine gun. Do you really need a web launcher in addition to that?
However he DOES have one good idea. He plans to make walking sticks which fire rubber bullets. I like this idea. When you run out of bullets, you can just whack people with the stick.
Now maybe we can finally get someone working on the tuxedo from the Jackie Chan movie.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
If he was called Ng and drove a tank.
Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough, but why not pepper-spray paintball guns for riot control or other situations where you just want to incapacitate? You'd get decent physical range, with an automatic firing version excellent coverage.
.50s in the windows, guards with M-16s, all putting out 100s of rounds a minute of a chemical irritant instead of lethal bullets, risking a military conflict..
Regular mace or pepper spray requires you to be too close, "tear gas" or whatever they shoot in a gasseous cloud is too broad and not specific enough.
Paintballs hurt like a sonofabitch, a repeater could deliver a lot of them at a good distance to clothes, faces, hair, etc, adding some longer-term deterrant effect as well (have to change clothes).
From my experience, though, you'd have to "fix" the firing mechanism, since jams and fuckups with a tear-gas paintball would be a bit more than just an inconvenience. I'd make the paintball payloads more like conventional bullets, cased in a plastic cartridge. This'd solve a lot of feed issues as well as allow for more traditional box magazines. I'd also use conventional gunpowder propellant for higher velocities, larger payloads than CO2 can deliver.
It might actually be possible to make a paintball cartridge a standard weapon could use.
Of course the magic part is probably whatever membrane you use for the irritant payload. It has to be strong enough for firing and to really hurt on impact, but it also has to be soft enough to break on softer surfaces as well as not cause soft-tissue injuries other than bruising.
A weapon like this would really seem to be a natural, especially in situations where you want to deliver a lot of firepower in civilian environments -- think of defending an Embassy with this --
Anyway, why haven't they done this yet?
...."Q" is dead.... Desmond Llewellyn (sp?) passed on....
Whatever you do, don't push it.
Why not?
Because you'll activate and fire the passenger side ejector seat.
Ejector seat? You must be joking!
I never joke about my work.
On the same page :
... wearing his latest invention, a lightweight bullet-proof vest able to stop a round from a .357-calibre Smith & Wesson.
Major Songphon tests his latest invention - a net-shooter to entangle would-be agressors
I can accept that he's working on two things at once, but they can't BOTH be "his latest"
I'm trying to think of a situation where an oficer using rubber bullets would need to disguise his weapon.
The thing about rubber bullets is they are generally used in riot control by police, and usually the officers are not covert about their attempts to stop whatever riot has erupted. Seem moot, IMHO.
Villain Supply is the answer
Sounds like Korea needs this guy!
We have tested the rubber bullets on dogs. It cannot kill the dog, but the dog is stunned and can't run away.
I'd like to see PeTA protest this guys work, hah.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I quess that generally the idea of riot cop equipment and uniforms is to frighten the rioters. Therefore, the more visible the gun is the more intimidating it is.
So why not manufacture very visible and frightening weapons for these purposes? And why not dress up riot police like Darth Vaders?
I don't know whether rioters would be intimidated by or filled with more rage when they see a Darth Vader-lookalike riot cop wielding a five megaton Riot Stun Gun though.
If somebody looks more like a robot stormtrooper than a real human being he is most likely psychologically an easier target to fight against. Dehumanization is the name of the atrocity game.
I quess that we are going to see interesting robocop appliances in the future, as this riot-thing is very likely to become huge.
Err... no.
Sometime ask the Second Chance company for one of their demonstration videos. You can see the founder of the Second Chance corporation put on a Second Chance armorvest and then take multiple 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds to the chest.
Given that the 7.62mm is just about the most powerful round anyone is likely to encounter, I have to say you're full of crap. Even a 12-gauge shotgun offers less momentum and kinetic energy.
Because when fans start sneaking guns into baseball games, you'll have protection.
Screw the occasional assault and battery of some 1st base coach.
I am a meat popsicle.
Clearly the color of the prototype is the most important part. I mean, modifying a black umbrella to shoot rubber bullets would be easy, but making a pink umbrella black? That's crazy talk.
Once again, cleary apearances are the most difficult thing to change. Which is easier, dressing a policeman in plain clothes (hey, maybe they could call them "plain-clothes policemen", what a novel idea), or disguising a gun to look like an innocent item?
Good point. I mean, I sure can't conceive of a situation where police would want to capture someone instead of gunning them down.
Due to all the unruliness of people especially in the US to law and order. The police will be able to switch over to using these rubber bullets (with real bullets as backup) when they finally get smart and ban the private ownership of all guns in the US. Time to be civilized, yanks.
Not that I recommend you actually *try* anything in it unless you're faced with an occupying army, but it was fascinating stuff.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Body armor and helmets are only legally available for purchase to law enforcement/military. They're tools for resisting arrest and have been outlawed in Chicago, New Jersey, etc. Citizens need not apply.
GOD BLESS AMERICA, THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE
Am I the only one that gets the feeling that they will be seeing some /and/ the the nets?" kind of way.
of these items at his next [A-Z]* protest?
Don't get me wrong. There is something very fun about this in that
"we will laugh about this when we are done with our court mandated
volunteerism. But for right now I am in a lot of pain. Did they have
to use the tear gas
Ascii artist &
You lucky bastard!!!!!
Yes you heard me right. Paintballs with LSD in them. The PEOPLE need to defend themselves from the fascist police.
We'll introduce these cops to a whole new form of fear. >:-)
All this feel good bullshit about non-lethal means of controlling people being nicer and show that the authorities are really nice guys is a trick.
More non-lethals controls are still controls and actually lead to an increase in the state powers and ability to surpress protests and dissent!!
The easier it is for them to package it to the masses as a good, nice, humane thing, the easier it will be for them to get away with putting down people and their voices.
As if we need more that these days.
Wax on, wax off baby!
If he's anything like this Q, he'd just stop time, arrest the criminals, put them on trial for the crimes of humanity, and be done with it.
Standing silhouetted in the doorway through which they had entered the vault was the man who wasn't pleased to see them. His displeasure was communicated partly by the barking hectoring quality of his voice and partly by the viciousness with which he waved a long silver Kill-O-Zap gun at them. The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
What's so special about this? All you need is a zip gun stuck inside the shaft of an umbrella, firing a standard metallic cartridge. Now, if the umbrella were a semi-automatic, I'd be really impressed.
Isnt interesting that when these methods are used in 'evil' countries, our honest media always take
the side that democratic countries dont condone the wanton use of force but when its in your own back yard, its always acceptable.
Having been in Quebec city in 2002 with a documentary crew (Im the dork with the big ten foot pole mic who makes a great target), I can only guess what police does in third world or 'evil' countries.
Seeing cops scoping a 70 year old woman in a wheelchair or a cop shoot tear gas cans directly
in the chest of a seated protester is as vad as running over someone in a tank.
Yet Tianamen square is always mentioned
as brutal. Hell, I remember a few years ago when protesters where blocking some yugloslaivian city's downtown core for OVER a month, our Canadian government was shocked at how violent the response was. They meant water canons.
I knew that if downtown Toronto or Montreal were closed down for over one day, they'd have used real canons.
Hell, we filmed about 30 Montreal cops on horseback running throught a peaceful demonstrations of a few thousand to arrest
5-6 hooded hooligans.
All this to say that no country has the moral upper hand, brutality, killings, bombings and murder are always justified. All governments will use it; but somehow we always think the others are wrong and we are right when we do it.
How long before PETA begins an ad campaign against Thailand for animal cruelty by testing weapons with animals? Will this lead to labels on weapons in the same vein as the cosmetics industry such as "This weapon not tested on animals?"
Have you ever been around Bangkok in a tuk-tuk? They are incedibly unstable and the extra weight high up would make them so dangerous to the occupant that no one would need to do anything extra to hurt the occupants.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
The first known issue of helmets to troops was to prevent death from being hit on the head with swords, maces, and other hand-held objects. Thousands of years later, the idea came back to life in order to protect skulls from rocks and debree thrown up by artillery. Grazing shots to the head are actually not all that common as a cause of death.
What would be useful is to have a range of over 30 meters, not 10m. If someone is running, you need time(distance) to choose and aim the weapon -- whether they are running away or toward you.
I can stop someone at 30m with an Argentine bola, but that requires a little elbow room for the swing. Technically, you need a boleadora for humans to avoid breaking legs, as a cattle bola has way too much power.
...but I don't think the LAPD fire their baton rounds from an umbrella. That's where the 'Q' bit comes in to it, see?
for real protection,if your life is threatened,use a real gun and real bullets,bigger than .38 or 9mm. .45 with rubber bullets(anyone here actually ever clean a gun?) or pepper or some backwoods asian badguy net invention.take care of your weapon and it'll take care of you.
dont take chances on anything less.you can hope in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.dont take chances with your life or those you love.shoot to kill.Remember if that bad guy is threatening your life to begin with,theres no reason for him to change his mind just because you have a weapon too,USE IT.Never shoot to wound.A wounded animal is the most dangerous.
Theres no way im gonna gum up the barrel of my
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Amnesty International (2002/06/11)
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
That's why helmets came back into vogue during WWI.
Soldiers spent the vast majority of their time in trenchs where the only danger (bar poisoness gas) came from air-burst explosions & shrapnel being blown in from near misses.
Hence the shape of British helmets with the broadlip all the way round, that gives as perfect protection a helmet could in regards to the danger of airburst & shrapnel wash to a soldier in a trench.
That's why it the US military's obsession with helmets amazes me. It's ridiculous the way their troops in Vietnam, Iraq 'n Afghanistan are virtually always wearing helmets.
Someone ought to tell them that slouch-hats (like the Brits wore in Burma, & the Aussies wore in North Africa & New Guinea) or Bush hats (like the Aussies wore in Vietnam) are much better protection from the elements (shading the face, keeping rain 'n sleet out of the eyes, etc) for jungle, dessert, bush & mountain warfare.
Bulletproof vests that stop .357 Magnum bullets is no big a deal.
The problem comes with stopping smaller high velocity rifle ammunition.
A level 3 Kevlar vest won't even stop a 7.62x25mm Mauser/Tokerov pistol round. The standard soviet pistol/sub-machine-gun round from WWII, which is bottlenecked & has a velocity of 1400+fps (the Chech CZ52 loads do 1600fps)
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