Thailand's "Q" Banks on Rubber Bullets

redwolfoz writes "ABC News reports that Thailand's answer to 'Q', the legendary inventor of gadgets for movie spy James Bond, is busy at work at his warehouse on the edge of the country's capital. Workmen inside are trying out the latest inventions of retired Major Songphon Eiamboonyarith, who runs defence contracting firm Precipart Co. The range includes umbrellas that shoot rubber bullets, bullet-proof baseball caps and a hand-held device to fire a man-sized net 10m to stop a villain in his tracks."

Um...

[mike3411]

It doesn't look like any of these inventions are particularly new, the US police force and riot response teams have been using/testing rubber bullet, bean bag bullets, nets, foam, sonic weapons, and other for the past several years. They've started deploying them to more and more officers, apparently it's lead to a number of situations where they were able to incapacitate and arrest someone they usually would have shot. So it sounds like a movement in the right direction, although I think these weapons get used more against rioters, drunks, the mentally ill, etc. I'm pretty sure they still shoot supervillains... or promote them.

Is this guy high?

[thelinuxking]

Songphon says in three months Precipart will deliver to police in the south the firm's first armoured tuk tuk, Thailand's popular indigenous three-wheeled motorcycle taxi.
1. I suppose he is going to cover up the sides of the tuk tuk, because it makes no sense to have just an armored canopy and open sides. If he seals it up it won't even be a bicycle anymore, but will be like an armored car, except with only 3 wheels. How original.

2.In reference to the umbrellas: "They are designed for police use in hostage situations," says Precipart consultant Sanpetch Putarak, a retired wing commander
The prototype umbrella is pink. How many police officers would normally be walking around with pink umbrellas?

3. Police are expected to have things like rubber bullets. Is the umbrella used to surprise the one or people who don't know that police are armed?

4.The armored "tuk tuk" is equipped with a machine gun. Do you really need a web launcher in addition to that?

However he DOES have one good idea. He plans to make walking sticks which fire rubber bullets. I like this idea. When you run out of bullets, you can just whack people with the stick.

Why no pepper-spray paintball guns?

[swb]

Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough, but why not pepper-spray paintball guns for riot control or other situations where you just want to incapacitate? You'd get decent physical range, with an automatic firing version excellent coverage.

Regular mace or pepper spray requires you to be too close, "tear gas" or whatever they shoot in a gasseous cloud is too broad and not specific enough.

Paintballs hurt like a sonofabitch, a repeater could deliver a lot of them at a good distance to clothes, faces, hair, etc, adding some longer-term deterrant effect as well (have to change clothes).

From my experience, though, you'd have to "fix" the firing mechanism, since jams and fuckups with a tear-gas paintball would be a bit more than just an inconvenience. I'd make the paintball payloads more like conventional bullets, cased in a plastic cartridge. This'd solve a lot of feed issues as well as allow for more traditional box magazines. I'd also use conventional gunpowder propellant for higher velocities, larger payloads than CO2 can deliver.

It might actually be possible to make a paintball cartridge a standard weapon could use.

Of course the magic part is probably whatever membrane you use for the irritant payload. It has to be strong enough for firing and to really hurt on impact, but it also has to be soft enough to break on softer surfaces as well as not cause soft-tissue injuries other than bruising.

A weapon like this would really seem to be a natural, especially in situations where you want to deliver a lot of firepower in civilian environments -- think of defending an Embassy with this -- .50s in the windows, guards with M-16s, all putting out 100s of rounds a minute of a chemical irritant instead of lethal bullets, risking a military conflict..

Anyway, why haven't they done this yet?

Re:Why no pepper-spray paintball guns?

[Zrech]

First of all, LAPD has them. They had them before they had bean bag guns. I have seen many demo's of this on a few TLC programs and other programs aswell. And it is not tear gas as those first 2 replys thought. The substance is bright yellow/green in color, and just a little more liquid then the pain in normal paintballs. On a few of the demo's I saw of this, a law officer shot another officer in the chesh from about 60 feet, the officer on the recieving end described it as being pepper sprayed but with more long lasting effects as the substance permiated his clothing.