[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj-CErr0VOY"]MythBusters Cannonball Experiment Gone Wrong... Hits Houses and Car in Dublin, CA - YouTube[/ame]
Here is the story that accompanies the above photo...oops!!! Failure was definitely an option for the "Mythbusters" team Tuesday: A ballistics experiment for the Discovery Channel show went awry and launched a cannonball into a nearby neighborhood, damaging a house and a car. "Mythbusters" -- the show that tests whether legends and common assumptions hold up under scientific scrutiny -- was using a cannon at a police firing range in Dublin, 35 miles east of San Francisco. A stray shot somehow bounced off a safety berm and careened into a residential area, where it hit the parked car and tore through the home. No injuries were reported, according to Discovery. Contrary to a report on TMZ, the experiment did not involve "Mythbusters" frontmen Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, but rather their colleagues Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, who were present for the filming. Discovery said an explosives safety expert for the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was on hand at the time of the incident and that "all proper safety protocol was observed." The network is also apparently settling up with property owners for the damage. Maybe part of the compensation could be one of those souvenir "Mythbusters" T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: "Failure is always an option." I want one of those Tee Shirts!
I kinda think they need to beef up the bomb range! It is no longer a range that can handle ANY weapon. If the test was to find alternatives to things to shoot, what were they shooting, bowling balls! I guess we also used just a little too much gunpowder! If 50 grains is good, 500 grains out of be much better!
My Mom knows I've had a puter since the Altair 2600... She also knows I am an avid hunter, and that she was a better shot than my Da... My Mom also wouldn't have liked me firing a cannon in town (we have kin in Kentucky with a 3" Ordnance Rifle that they use in several events/re-enactments during the year)... do you think the folks Moms from Mythbusters would have approved of them shooting a cannon in town... even with a built up berm to "catch" the expended rounds... And my Mom would have made ME go over to their houses and cars to fix em up if it did get away from the range... and of course made me put the weapon away until I was off restriction, and she heard from the neighbors that I made it up to them... but that's just me... Ummmm... should we ask their Mom about this...
I saw this preview on the news last night but flipped the channel before watching the story. By the way they previewed the clip I didn't think of MythBusters...I thought it was like Jackass or something. They made it sound like punk kids from a TV show did it. Guess they were sorta right. LOL. Except these punk kids sure are SMART. SCIENCE BABY!
Here's a little more detail from the SF Chronicle. The writer almost makes it unreadable with efforts to make it more dramatic, but you can see that the projectile was really moving. "...the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb disposal range. The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m., authorities said. There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all - only awakening because of plaster dust. The ball wasn't done bouncing. It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family's beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive. That's where Jasbir Gill, 42, who had pulled up 10 minutes earlier with his 13-year-old son, Manvir, found the ball on the floorboards, with glass everywhere and an obliterated dashboard."
Depending on your target stopping the round is a cardinal sin on a firing range, at least it is on any professionally run range. Whoever was responsible for allowing that canon to be fired with only a cinderblock wall for backstop needs to be permanently removed from range duty. Shit happens, that's why you never depend on the target stopping or slowing the round. You always have an adequte backstop or enough empty real estate that there is nothing in the range of fire.
The Army has some firing ranges in California that would handle that little toy, but they don't let just anyone use them. I've been involved in test work as a civilian on a few of them, but you just about need to be working on a gumnt contract to get you permission to use one of their firing ranges.
