Steampunk Weapon

Water cannon?

I think a taser would be reasonable, and you get bonus points for actually calling it "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle." Very steampunk, I think.

A steam powered crossbow that fires weighted nets.

FictionChick said:

Ooooooh! Cool ideas, guys! I was wondering if stun grenades would have been realistic?

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If you write them that way, yes, they'll be realistic.

I vaguely recall that one variant on the medieval crossbow bolt used a large flat lump rather than a point -- the object was to be a non-lethal weapon for crowd-control, but with enough punch to put the target out of action. Essentially the pre-gunpowder equivalent of rubber bullets.

Now, it occurs to me that in a steampunk world, there might be a variation that delivers a serious static shock, so you wind up with what amounts to a taser. How you retain the static on the bolt as it's delivered is your problem.

And there's this, already invented for ya!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_ball

Reziac said:

And there's this, already invented for ya!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_ball

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...aaaaand run with it!

FictionChick said:

Ooooooh! Cool ideas, guys! I was wondering if stun grenades would have been realistic?

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Flash-bang grenades have been around as long as gunpowder. But you could also use something like tear-gas (straight ammonia would do) in glass bottles that break on impact... of course you'd have the side effect of people getting cut up. That's the sort of thing that can illustrate how concerned the cops (or whoever) are about injuring the target -- with a glass grenade, not at all, serves 'em right.

Well, if you just want to incapacitate or drive people out of the area, an ammonia bomb or smoke bomb would be easy enough -- the main problem, I think, would be getting it to vomit forth its payload reliably. (Which could be a useful story point at times.)

The trouble with chloroform is that without controlled dosages, it's easy to wind up with some dead people and a bunch who didn't inhale enough to have any effects. Movies aside, it's not fast-acting. Plus it's known to cause birth defects. And it's explosive. And unless stabilized, it degrades to phosgene (think rat poison). I think it's the sort of thing such a tech-level, desiring non-lethal crowd-control, might experiment with a few times, then discard as being too randomly hazardous.

I'm reminded that chemistry students are a suicidal lot... at my university, we thought the way you "air conditioned" yourself in the Chem lab was to dump a bottle of acetone over your head. Stores never did figure out why we used so much acetone during the summer.

What about electric nunchucks?

Already some awesome ideas on here, but I'll give you a couple more. All of these are real weapons that can easily be steampunked.

Pepper spray/balls/bombs
Airfoil gun (shoots a rubber/leather ring that does impact damage)
Rubber bullets
Beanbag gun
Heat ray gun
Rocksalt
Impact Taser (works like a taser, but the charge is administered by a projectile)
Equilibrium-disrupting strobe weapon

What about a crowd control gun that has a little oven in the back where you load coal, and when you pull the trigger it sprays out hot steam.

okay, okay. I'm moving on

ave said:

What about a crowd control gun that has a little oven in the back where you load coal, and when you pull the trigger it sprays out hot steam.

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LOL!! Oooh, the image... coal-fired steam gun... <cackle>

Can you imagine lugging that thing around on your back, not to mention the padding to keep the firebox and boiler from burning your butt?? "Everybody run -- here come the king's dragons, with their tails on fire again!!"

Actually... I used to heat my trailer with a coal stove. Sometimes the coal fire would get out of hand... and to throttle it down in a hurry, I'd dump a pitcher of water onto the fire... producing the most appalling cloud of steam and ash.

Reziac said:

Can you imagine lugging that thing around on your back, not to mention the padding to keep the firebox and boiler from burning your butt?? "Everybody run -- here come the king's dragons, with their tails on fire again!!"

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*disclaimer* until we iron out all the bugs Its recommended you operate the boiler gun with oven mitts

Reziac said:

Actually... I used to heat my trailer with a coal stove. Sometimes the coal fire would get out of hand... and to throttle it down in a hurry, I'd dump a pitcher of water onto the fire... producing the most appalling cloud of steam and ash.

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lol hey fictionchick can you use Reziacs stove?

How about a subsonic disruptor? It's basically a 10-Hz steam whistle with a parabolic reflector that you point at someone whose chest and guts you want to pound into a jelly. It would be non-lethal and incapacitating with just a couple seconds of exposure, but its disadvantage is that it can be used on only one person at a time, making crowd control more problematic.

FictionChick said:

How do you guys come up with this stuff?

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There are two primary methods. One involves Reziac's Patent Medicine. The other uses unpublished authors as target practice test subjects.

Thanks to this thread, I have spent the past forty-five minutes looking up info about the Leyden Jar and various steampunk weapons. I've never read a steampunk novel, but this is definitely sparking my interest in the genre

Reziac said:

LOL!! Oooh, the image... coal-fired steam gun... <cackle>

Can you imagine lugging that thing around on your back, not to mention the padding to keep the firebox and boiler from burning your butt?? "Everybody run -- here come the king's dragons, with their tails on fire again!!"

Actually... I used to heat my trailer with a coal stove. Sometimes the coal fire would get out of hand... and to throttle it down in a hurry, I'd dump a pitcher of water onto the fire... producing the most appalling cloud of steam and ash.

Click to expand...

Well, I would assume it would be loaded on a paddy-wagon.

What about a lightening gun using Nicoli Tesla's tesla coil deathray weapon concept. It could have two settings, stun and kill. Plug it into your vehicle's flywheel generator to recharge it's capacitor and you are good to go.

Somewhat related, here's a steam-powered computer:

http://inhabitat.com/uk-campaign-aims-to-build-legendary-steam-powered-computer/

If you have complex weapon systems, such a gadget could be your control setup. (I wonder how far a steam-powered missile could reach??)