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."

Comments

Why no pepper-spray paintball guns?

[swb]

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.

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 -- .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..

Anyway, why haven't they done this yet?