Get The Protractor
Irradiated by LabRat
Today, Peter links to an attempt to get drugs into a prison via carrier pigeon. (Hint to would-be narcomillionaires: pigeons are good at carrying *short* messages, in very small print. Packages, forget it.)
Somewhat more ambitious traffickers up by the border made an attempt via catapult, which evidently failed, at least for that attempt. Several things come to mind.
1. Of all the methods used to get drugs across the border listed in the article- vehicles, horseback, tunnels, microlight aircraft- a catapult has to be the most conspicuous possible method you could ever come up with. Legitimate things move across the desert floor, tunnels are hidden, most flights are legitimate and even if they weren’t microlights are quiet- but absolutely nothing, let alone something weighing 45 pounds, moves in large parabolas through the air following a loud “TWANG-CHUNK” noise.
2. Dear border patrol agents: no medieval siege engine of any kind was metal-framed and powered by elastic. This is a very modern catapult.
3. Would YOU count on the elementary physics equations and precision engineering of traffickers to accurately place your drugs in a location easily findable on the other side of the fence? Or is that simply going to make for interesting habitat features for the local wildlife?
4. In ten years, are we going to see this technology refined and employed by coyotes for the “discount trip”, possibly with parachutes obtained by the same looting of military stores as most of the guns?
5. In the interim, we should probably keep a weather eye out for the disappearance of the Punkin Chunkin participants, who are probably the world’s current leading engineering experts for the fast, accurate, long-distance placement of objects of known weight via modern siege engine.
6. Am I the only one who can’t read this story without thinking about these animations? Guaranteed I won’t be after you click on those.
January 27th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
The footage I saw showed the siege engine in question to be a trebuchet not, as reported, a catapult. (understanding of course that trebuchet is to catapult as square is to rectangle)
January 27th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
I don’t know if it is as unfeasible as you think. I remember that when I got a golf ball launcher attachment for my SKS, the damned things were nearly impossible to track once they were up in the sky. Paint the packages blue, and if you don’t know about where they are supposed to land, you might never see or find them.
(I know I lost a LOT of golf balls.)
January 27th, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Time to dig out Mythbusters #35: Border Slingshot!
As for the packages being conspicuous… I’d think small, round, non-conductive objects wouldn’t show up real well on radar, so unless somebody happened to be in the right place to notice the launcher or the impact, they might well go unobserved.
On the other hand, finding them after they’ve landed remains problematic.
January 27th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Re pigeons: very light yes (even attempting that weight is the first dubious factoid). But: to HOME!- you can’t SEND them!!
Unless drug guys in prison are allowed to keep and breed lofts of homing pigeons this widely circulated story reeks of bullshit.
Finally: the bird in the YouTube is an obvious common street pigeon not a racing homer- as much like one as Kang and Kodos are to pound mutts.
Bullshit & hidden agendas or stoners trying to persuade a “street rat” over the walls? You decide…
January 27th, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Cover the packages in shoot-n-see type stuff, so they’re blue while flying, but turn fluorescent on impact?
January 27th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Model Airplanes.
Maynard Hill (remember him and his records in the 60s?) Got a mostly-autonomous 20-pound model airplane across the Atlantic a few years ago, and had it home in on a particular place.
It is an official FAI record. They gave him a nice gold medal to add to his other four or five.
January 27th, 2011 at 8:09 pm
Thank you for the hearty belly laugh for the animation link. I haven’t thought of them in years.
January 27th, 2011 at 10:37 pm
They never thought of doing this at very least at night?
Jim
January 28th, 2011 at 12:16 am
They should have used a giant ACME inc. anvil as a counter-weight.
Nothing could have possibly gone wrong then.
January 28th, 2011 at 10:20 am
To be fair to the would-be catapultists, while a catapult is not remotely inconspicuous, conspicuousness isn’t really that big a problem for it. The conspicuous part, after all, stays in Mexico, where it’s out of reach of US authorities and the local authorities that aren’t on the smugglers’ payroll are outnumbered by those that are. It’s the part that actually crosses the border that needs to be able to avoid detection, and that’s an easier problem. (Well, it’s easier as long as the payload is drugs, or something else that won’t be unduly damaged by a hard landing.)
February 4th, 2011 at 12:20 am
Assuming the payload is of sufficient value, couldn’t an inexpensive GPS device be attached to it to facilitate retrieval? Even if the device has a relatively large level of inaccuracy, narrowing it down to 50 square yards would still make finding it much easier.