Paintball Sticky Sensors

Eddy_D writes "The EETimes has a story about a group of undergraduate students at the University of Florida (Gainesville) that have developed a sticky sensor, fired from a paintball gun, to sense explosive compounds in suspect objects at a distance. The project is funded by Lockheed Martin (Missiles and Fire Control group), who is rushing to deploy this new technology to soldiers in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Comments

Think about it

[Pi_0's don't shower]

Although you've obviously intended to be funny, it is a common misconception that elaborate explosives can usually be triggered by a "nudge". This is hardly the case -- think about nuclear weapons, which require an elaborate creation of slow neutrons, or even simple explosives that require the mixing of two compounds.

The force of a missile blast with compounds inside will be sufficient to mix the two compounds (usually, but even then, not always, as plenty of missiles are "duds" for this reason). Shooting a golf-ball sized detector-weapon at this is hardly dangerous. The reason they build explosives so that they're hard to set off is so they DON'T accidentally detonate while being constructed or transported.

That said, this is an extremely cool invention (and maybe I'm biased considering where I'm based...)

Re:Paint Check!!!

[cornjchob]

We chrono at 280fps...I'm wondering why they said in the article "A paintball gun can still fire at up to 235 feet per second" when APL rules are 280 and most places used to chrono at 300. Most guns are capable of more than 300; though we only set them that high when a group divides into parents vs kids :)