10 thoughts on “Increasing the ammo consumption at Boomershoot

  1. You’d have to have pretty big balloons to hold up that amount of weight… and hydrogen would be better. For a number of Hindenburg related reasons. Although apparently they explode better when you mix the oxygen with the hydrogen IN the balloon.

  2. Just make sure that the anchor lines don’t get shot off. If the ballons go into orbit with an explosive payload, it could get interesting when they come back down.

  3. I’m thinking the Boomerite explosions themselves might sever the support cords.

    But why not use Acetylene? Lighter than boomerite, can be put in a balloon, and my friends all say it explodes just as well as boomerite.

    I haven’t tried it, of course, and maybe it requires an ignition source other than simply a bullet, but tracers should work great!

    Bill

  4. DeFens, I thought of that too. I have a couple of tweaks to Ry’s idea to take care of that as well as the issue of an adequate backstop for shooters from all the different angles.

    Bill, an oxygen acetylene mix detonates quite well with even subsonic .22LR. I suspect even ordinary air guns can detonate it. But a balloon the size of a two pound box of Boomerite will be a mild pop compared to the same size Boomerite. The energy density is much lower.

  5. I proposed mounting some targets on long poles, the idea being that it would be more difficult to call the missed shots. Your spotter would have to read the bullet trace, and even then he’d be interpreting in three dimensions– not easy. The balloon idea would be more interesting in that the targets would be swaying more in the wind. I don’t know what the shock of the explosions would do to the balloons, but the idea seems plausible to me, so long as some smartass doesn’t target the balloons.

    Targets flying off into the blue wouldn’t be particularly dangerous. It takes a supersonic impact to set them off and they lose sensitivity with age, IIRC. They’d eventually drift slowly to the ground as the He leaked through the membrane but as Joe says, loose targets can be avoided anyway. Backstop would be an issue, but there is plenty of room to position them correctly, methinks. They don’t need to be terribly far off the ground to have the desired effect.

    Now; if there is adequate backstop for suspended targets (Joe, you know where this is going) then it would be at least conceivable that targets could be launched into the air (using a ballista, trebuchet, air cannon, etc.) such that there would be a similar backstop…

  6. I’m thinking using long strips of lath as poles to give the support rather than ballons. Go ahead and suspend them by a long string so they will “dance” in the wind and make spotting by dirt impact impossible.

    They should be close to the hillside rather than at the tree line to make sure they have a backstop.

  7. How about just mounting a few boxes of Boomerite in the center of a few old tires? At random times roll one off the top of the hill and let everyone cut loose on it.

  8. This gets better and better!

    Thanks, Joe, I should have thought of the energy density thing, I know better than that!!

    Bill

  9. they won’t drift off. I didn’t want to disclose my fix for this, but if the line segment from which the explosives dangle is knotted, and the balloons are free to travel on the support legs (but blocked from traversing past the knot), the support leg being severed leads to the loss of a balloon. If the segment between the balloons is severed, it just drops to the ground. The balloon isn’t strong enough to pull the stump (or tree) out of the ground, and it can’t get past the knot.

    furthermore, there’s another line that goes from the knots to the drop lines down to the tie-off points. The picture was a schematic diagram of the idea, not a complete blueprint for construction.

Comments are closed.