Monday, July 13, 2009

The Gyrojet pistol

One of the pleasures of books (as opposed to Al Gore's Intarwebz) is flipping through them to discover random finds. The late, great Ian Hogg's The Illustrated History of Firearms showed me this, which is simply insanely cool: the Gyrojet rocket pistol.

Instead of a conventional round, the Gyrojet fired a 13mm rocket. This gave it some interesting characteristics:
  • It had essentially no recoil.
  • You could fire it under water (or in Outer Space; just remember Newton's 3rd Law ...).
  • The round accelerated until the propellant was burned up; if you shot someone at very close range, the round might not be going fast enough to hurt them.
Probably most of y'all have run across this before, but this was new and insanely cool to me, enough to go looking for (and find!) videos from the History Channel about this. Perhaps an episode of Tales of the Gun I haven't seen?

3 comments:

  1. noneJuly 13, 2009 at 8:06 PM

    Ian V. Hogg is one of my favorite writers. Better snatch up anything you can by him because prices are going through the roof.

    The gyrojet pistol is one of those fascinating footnotes in firearms history.

    Great video find!

    ReplyDelete
  2. PaladinJuly 13, 2009 at 9:13 PM

    "or in Outer Space; just remember Newton's 3rd Law .."

    Cool.. you can attack and retreat at the same time :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. BorepatchJuly 13, 2009 at 9:19 PM

    Hammer, I picked the book up at a Gun show. I tried to talk the seller down, unsuccessfully.

    Paladin, heh.

    ReplyDelete

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