We’ve been following Jörg Sprave of The Slingshot Channel‘s work for quite some time.  You may remember him as the smiley German behind the machete slingshot, the Gatling gun slingshot, the 6-shot slingshot, and a slingshot which launches circular saw blades.  We’re totally team Sprave when the zombiepocalypse happens.  The video below shows off his newest build, which shoots 0.75″ wide lead musket balls with 38 foot pounds of energy, achieving speeds of 177 feet per second.  With big, weighty musket balls.  Dayum.

He calls it the “Medieval Style Musket Ball Shooting Slingshot Crossbow”.  I know what you’re thinking: they didn’t have muskets in Medieval Times.  Clearly you didn’t hear about the time the Uproxx Musket Club had dinner at Medieval Times.  And I’m going to tell you what I told the judge: the Black Knight never said we couldn’t take a musket to a joust fight.

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We’ve already covered Jörg Sprave’s other awesomely-safe slingshots, including his machete slingshot, his Gatling gun slingshot, and his 6-shot slingshot.  Now he’s built a slingshot to launch sawblades, because f–k watermelons.  If when there’s a zombie apocalypse, you want this guy on your team.

Circular sawblades are about as dangerous to be shot from a slingshot as it gets. Heavy. Sharp. Unpredictable in flight.
Seems like the perfect challenge for us here at The Slingshot Channel! [YouTube]

He discovered that rotational speed was what he needed to build into his slingshot design.  There’s something unsettling about a guy wielding a deadly weapon while saying with a German accent that he’s found the solution.  My spidey sense is tingling.

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Ruth Schulz and her colleagues in Queensland, Australia, are teaching a set of robots to create their own language to communicate directions to each other.  That couldn’t possibly end poorly for humans.   These “Lingodroids” are a mobile platform with a camera, sonar, laser range finder, microphone, and speakers.

To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let’s say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who’s in the exact same situation as you. What do you do? [IEEE]

Well, rape them obviously, but for some reason these Lingodroids tried to establish a common language instead.  Weirdos.

If one of the robots finds itself in an unfamiliar area, it’ll make up a word to describe it, choosing a random combination from a set of syllables. It then communicates that word to other robots that it meets, thereby defining the name of a place. [IEEE]

After awhile the robots developed very specific names for directions and locations, agreeing within 10 degrees for directions and within 1.25 feet (0.375 meters) for distances.  This comes as no surprise.  I frikken KNEW the toaster was trying to tell the roomba where I keep the sharpest knives.  And don’t even try to look innocent in all this, refrigerator. You could make ice faster if you wanted to.  You’ve been holding out on me for years.

Researchers at UPenn’s GRASP Lab taught quadrotor helicopters “precise aggressive maneuvers” then gave them claws and programmed them to lift objects in unison and recover from violent throws.  Then they taught them how to play hacky sack and keyboard just to mock us; it’s not bad enough they can destroy us but they also know how to loiter on our street corners like hippies and buskers?  Damn you, quadrocopters.

Not happy with the quadrocopters’ reliance on an outside computer and external sensors to coordinate their movements, Nathan Michael, Matthew Turpin, and Vijay Kumar are now teaching the quadrocoptors how to more effectively create a self-regulating robot swarm.  STOP THAT.

Just like with a formation of fighter jets, there’s a leader robot in each squad along with several follower robots. The followers have just two jobs: follow the leader, and preserve the shape of the formation. [IEEE]

They left out the third job: exterminate humans.  I’m sure they just forgot to mention it.  Anyway, the quadrocopters are able to stay within 2 centimeters of where they are supposed to be 50% of the time.  When they fail, the quadrocopter is supposed to move away from the swarm without interrupting the formation, allowing the swarm to be terrifyingly maintained as shown in the video below.

They plan to take this self-regulating swarm out of the lab soon and test it in an outdoor environment, which couldn’t possibly go wrong.  One thing is certain: we’re going to need a lot more crowbars.

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We wrote about Jörg Sprave of The Slingshot Channel when he made a machete slingshot and a Gatling gun slingshot.  Now he’s built a 6-shot slingshot that is not only more powerful than the Gatling gun slingshot, but also shoots all six 20 mm (0.79″) steel balls at the same time because why not?  It’s called The Avalaunche and it has a 1.3 meter (4.25′) draw length, allowing each ball to hit with 60 Joules of energy.  For comparison, 60 Joules is about one-tenth the energy of a standard-issue police 9mm handgun.  We wouldn’t recommend being shot with either.

Sprave says it takes 40 seconds to reload, and he also says this in the video below:

“So this is probably the most powerful slingshot/crossbow I ever ever made, simply because it fires six balls at the same time, so the energy that lands at the target is enormous.  It’s a fun thing.  Well, that was it for today. Thanks and bye bye.”

Is it wrong that I get scared when someone is being super polite in a German accent?  No, it isn’t.  I don’t ever have to forgive that country for telling David Hasselhoff he could sing.  NEVER FORGET.

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When last we mentioned slingshot maker Jörg Sprave of The Slingshot Channel he had built a machete slingshot / crossbow measuring more than six feet long, for when you absolutely, positively have to shoot a machete into your neighbor’s second-story window (“If only there were an easier way!“).  Now Sprave is showing off his Gatling gun slingshot, with eight metal balls blasting awesomeness and wreaking mayhem for cardboard boxes along sides of roads everywhere.

Sprave’s slingshot has both a one-shot-at-a-time mode or he can use the handy handcrank to spray eight shots at a rate of 960 rounds per minute (half a second for the eight shots, in other words).  There’s also something oddly disturbing yet amusing about how he keeps swaying from “serious dude wielding a deadly weapon” to “jovial toymaker showing off the new wooden toy he built in his workshop”.  I want his post-shooting smile as my screensaver and him saying, “Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.” as my ringtone.

The video of the slingshot in action is after the jump.  Man, it’s a great time to be alive.  Finally, the Gatling gun slingshot exists.  My neighbor’s second-story bedroom ceiling needs to know about this.

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