Drug Catapult Found At US-Mexico Border 225
suraj.sun writes "According to a Fox News report: 'Drug smugglers trying to get marijuana across the Arizona-Mexico border apparently are trying a new approach — a medieval catapult, capable of launching 4.4 pounds of marijuana at a time. National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station say they observed several people preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence last Friday evening. The 3-yard tall catapult was found about 20 yards from the US border on a flatbed towed by a sports utility vehicle, according to a Mexican army officer with the 45th military zone in the border state of Sonora.'"
Angry Drugs (Score:5, Funny)
This is an iPhone game waiting to happen.
Re:Angry Drugs (Score:4, Interesting)
That's more of an android game ;).
You say "catapult" (Score:5, Funny)
I say "trebuchet"
Let's call the whole siege off...
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Definitely not a trebuchet, this uses an elastic spring as the power source. A trebuchet uses a counterweight.
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For those that don't know the difference, it's simple:
A Catapult uses torsion to impart momentum to a swinging launch arm which flings the projectile.
A Trebuchet uses a counterweight to do the same thing.
And just because there are stupid reporters that can really get things wrong, a ballista or arbalest is a direct fire siege engine sized freaking crossbow! (Ok, there's actual
Re:You say "catapult" (Score:5, Informative)
The height of the "trajectory arc" is completely based on the release angle and force. The method used to impart moment to the swinging launch arm has no bearing on the trajectory. It could be a freaking hydraulic ram swinging that launch arm, so long as the release angle and force are the same, you get the exact same result.
Re:You say "catapult" (Score:4, Funny)
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Either way, its got to beat being stashed up someones a**e.
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This is the internet. We can say ass here. Asshole even, if necessary.
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Instead of mounting it on the bed of a pick-up, you use the pick-up as dropping mass.
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One of these days someone, in the quest to trim federal spending, fight drugs, and patrol borders, is going to go a few steps beyond remotely controlled web cams.
Imagine if you will a parallel universe, where handling crime is a game. There the government sells "hunting" licenses to website operators that provide cameras and weapons remotely operated over the web by paying players. The war on whatever turns profitable?
Not sure what happens to any captured drugs, maybe the government could auction those of
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Imagine if you will a parallel universe, where handling crime is a game.
Oh you mean like the USA currently in the War on Drugs?
Getting High (Score:2)
Next you will see (Score:2)
people being launched using this.. Just wait.
Re:Next you will see (Score:4, Informative)
people being launched using this.. Just wait.
MythBusters already covered that [kwc.org].
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Ok Pablo, just hold this large bag tight; then, once you're over the border hold onto the handles tight.
GOOD LUCK SON!
*pulls lever*
AIEEEE!!!!
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google it. There are already 1 or 2 vids of human trebuchets.
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No...shooting poor people is not funny.
However, shooting invading foreigners while not funny...makes sense I think. We need to do something to protect our borders, hell it is one of the FEW enumerated powers the federal govt. is supposed to have and do per the Constitution.
I have no problem with immigrants who come over through legal channels. Like Dennis Miller once said....I don't care if you want to come over, just sign the fucking guest book on the way in..
We can re
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So you're on the side of the Taliban, then. Good to know...
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Not really, as far as Iraq and Afghanistan...we're still there as legal 'guests' so to speak.
The governments there have yet to tell us to leave.
That makes a difference.
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In the case of Iraq, we did not enter as legal guests but made sure to empower a new government that did feel that way.
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No land mines. Not ever. They don't discriminate, they don't decide, and they don't go away if you change policy or the location of the border or no man's land. As much as I also hate your sharpshooter idea, the sharpshooter in question is at least responsible for his/her actions, and can make a decision based on observable facts, such as "Are these people likely to be drug runners/terrorists/criminals, or are they just people stupidly trying to run the border? Do they have children with them? Should I shoo
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Okay... protecting your border would actually be very easy, you know?
You need to LEGALIZE DRUGS in the US NOW. The groups that "import" mexicans and latinamericans to the US are the very same that have caused oh just about 30,000 dead here in México, and they manage their logistics precisely by coke trafficking in the US.
If you guys were to legalize drugs Mexico would too and we would have a legal export that would be enough to feed everyone here.
Understand the following:
1) Mexico COMPLIES with whateve
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The waiting list for a relative of a legal US resident from Mexico to immigrate to the US is ten years long. For many other categories of immigrant it's essentially impossible. Forgive me if I find claims like yours to be more than a little disingenuous.
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That would be the Mexican Army that you see. The uniforms are slightly different.
Trebuchet (Score:3)
If the video for the story is correct, then that's not a catapult, it's a trebuchet! (Albeit it replaced the counterweight with some sort of elastic cabling.)
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While definitions have varied over time, in modern usage the distinction is: a catapult uses tension, while a trebuchet uses a counterweight. Catapults have used quite a few forms of elastic tension to store energy over the centuries: twisting rope was just the most common.
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(Scientific American, ca.1971 iirc)
The trebuchet we used in SCA combat (I was baron of Stormhold at the time) was a traction trebuchet; instead of a counterweight, it had four large ropes that people hauled down on, on command. Ours had a 6 metre (18') throwing arm. It was fairly well researched, and could throw a couple of kilograms worth of softball
Re:Trebuchet (Score:5, Informative)
Counter measure (Score:2)
What's important is the counter measure. Here is something for the US border patrol to bear in mind:
When faced with enemy trebuchets, cavalry work best due to their high speed and good damage. A small group of Knights make short work of a group of trebuchets. Cavalry archers also work well, especially the Mongol Mangudai due to its bonus damage vs. siege units. Infantry and foot archers are also acceptable but are less desirable due to their lack of speed; this weakness allows the user to spot them early and respond to the situation by unpacking the trebuchets and/or retaliating with an army of his/her own.
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Obviously, the high speed of cavalry, with a base move of at least 7", does help to close the difference. But the main reason knights are more useful against trebuchets is because they have 25mmx50mm bases, so fewer of them are touched by the small blast template. Infantry have either 20mm or 25mm square bases, resulting in considerably more (19 or 13, respectively) being hit.
Flying cavalry or other units of flyers are ideal, though. With their high speed (marching 20") they can get across the field in only
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Your attempt at being pedantic fails. A trebuchet is just a specific type of catapult. The device is in fact a catapult.
You are being insufficiently discriminating, sorry. They weren't classed as such, and medieval distinctions between catapults and trebuchets were quite distinct. You had catapults (also called "Onagers", or "rocking donkeys"), ballistae (God's very own crossbow, generally with two distinct arms, from which we derive the term "ballistics") and the various forms of trebuchets, the largest of which could throw a boulder the size of a small cottage. You would no more call them all "catapults" then you would
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-Medieval Mechanical Artillery [xenophongroup.com]
See also
"The art of the catapult
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If the video for the story is correct, then that's not a catapult, it's a trebuchet! (Albeit it replaced the counterweight with some sort of elastic cabling.)
Get your eyesight checked. Maybe you'll get some of the MJ prescribed...
Anyway, a trebuchet would have a counterweight, not a bungee-rope to pull the arm.
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Doesn't the elastic tension make it an onager?
Can't believe I'm having this discussion on Slashdot in a thread about drug importation.
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Indeed.
In the same way as a tornado is a type of wind.
We do not say "It was windy yesterday" when we actually mean "a freaking tornado leveled my whole town."
Why stop it? (Score:2)
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Ah... but we will be cleverly disguised as Badgers!
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Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers.....
Extra nerd points if you can ID where that quote first came from. No fair using google.
Anyone else have this idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean surely i'm not the only engineer who's joked that all they really need to do is catapult and parachute to get over the border, with no need for a parachute if they're launching hard projectiles. I mean the range on old catapults and trebuchets was quite well, and could be scaled as a simple matter of physics.
So I suppose next we might find a tunnel that is one mile down and 40 miles under the border to breach the "castle walls" of the united states?
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Tunnels have already been found... not a mile deep, but crossing the boarder, yes.
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Perhaps we just found the decoy tunnels meant to get the border patrol wasting it's time with mutual back patting.
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Any organization that can just fling drugs over the wall and hope agents on the other side find most of them can easily afford to stock a decoy tunnel with enough to make it look real.
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Or an RC plane...
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Or a weather balloon with a GPS transponder...
or an air canon shooting small packages onto the roof of a friendly warehouse on the US side...
or autonomous boats/submarines...
I saw an MTV documentary one time where they showed how kayaks and sailboats would carry packages of drugs underwater attached to a weighted rope. If the authorities approach, just cut the line and let it sink.
I think if I were a drug kingpin I'd be paying lots of money to some poor graduate students to investigate modifying some nativ
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Being drug kingpins, they'd likely just kill the researches when they were done, or send them to New Reno.
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Grad students are trained to work extremely hard for little or no pay and even less credit. Perfect hire for this kind of work.
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Re:Anyone else have this idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
As Penn and Teller pointed out on their show Bullshit!, the border "wall" that conservatives keep on talking about building would be completely ineffective. A reasonably enterprising illegal immigrant could breach or bypass said wall in approximately 2 minutes (either climbing over, digging under, or busting a hole in the middle), and given that they've likely traveled for days just to get to the border, the extra 2 minutes aren't going to stop them. Heck, even the Berlin Wall didn't stop people trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin - people got past it with balloons, tunneling, and crashing border stations among other methods.
On the upside, I view those as proof that human ingenuity can beat oppression.
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Heck, even the Berlin Wall didn't stop people trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin - people got past it with balloons, tunneling, and crashing border stations among other methods.
It was not the Berlin Wall that stopped them. It merely slowed them down so the bullets could stop them. The point of the Berlin Wall was not to be an infallible method of keeping people in, but just a to make it incredibly dangerous, time consuming, and generally resource intensive effort to bypass it.
My idea to protect the border is quite, quite, simple:
Snipers - Everybody dies from the smallest, to the largest, from the young to the old. If we can find you in our sights... you die.
That would absolutely
How they found it (Score:5, Funny)
The national started looking for the device when they found a giant baseball glove mounted in the Arizona desert
A friend lives nearby in Bisbee... (Score:2)
....and I've been down to visit a couple of times.
When we go hiking in the Coronado National Forest, it's staggering the number of Border Patrol officers/vehicles/activity we see along 92 between Bisbee and Sierra Vista.
I don't know how you could get away with anything on that stretch of the border, but given the close proximity of Naco, MX and Naco, AZ, maybe just getting over the fence is all that matters, since the fence is pretty much the width of the border there.
Pro-Catipult (Score:5, Funny)
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I think I agree here.... even more so with revelations that it was a trebuchet.
Hmmm you know, it is a siege weapon. Actually, I think they should be charged with waging war on the United States. Why? Because that way they could go down in History as the most recent use of a trebuchet in a battle.
And that... that would almost be worth the time.
I, for one, welcome the invasion of our trebuchet weilding enemies, and tell them to bring it on! We should meet them on the field of battle... and... twist up a doobe
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Yes but, we can totally win the drug war. All we have to do is respond in Kind. We have much better ammo to load into our drug trebuches! We lob over a few bales of the sticky icky from Humbolt county, Vermont, or even some of that canadian shit, and I garauntee, the battle will be over quickly...even quicker if we slip some papers in.
This battle is totally winnable.
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How long until used for immigration purposes? (Score:2)
Must not have been any French in their group.. (Score:2)
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UAVs?? (Score:2)
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That's and idea. How about model rockets stuffed with heroin or cocaine? Elastic launched gliders? Kites? Potato cannons?That may work.
Tunnels and subs are old news.
Those plucky Mexicans are so innovative.
Here's a nice potato cannon link:
http://www.spudtech.com/ [spudtech.com]
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I always wondered why the cartels haven't invested in UAVs. It must be pretty simple now days to build a GPS guided device with enough payload to make the more expensive drugs worthwhile to ship
Might work for cocaine / heroin but marijuana is pretty bulky. You'd want a UAV the size of a DC-3. And it really isn't 'easy' to build large UAVs - even ones with just, say, 10 kg payloads. Easy is a semisubmersible [wikipedia.org]. Interestingly, even though they have capacities of several tons, they appear to be used more for high value cocaine that plain old pot.
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I think Hellfire missiles are a bit heaver than 10 kg...
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/predator/predator5.html [airforce-technology.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_missile [wikipedia.org]
at about 300 to 400 USD per 28 g, it may be feasible.
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Oh, here's a High times price chart....
http://hightimes.com/lounge/ht_admin/6894?utm_source=rss_home [hightimes.com]
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I always wondered why the cartels haven't invested in UAVs. It must be pretty simple now days to build a GPS guided device with enough payload to make the more expensive drugs worthwhile to ship
Especially because many of these cartels have cash and valuables on hand to rival the GDP of smaller second and third world countries. Hire an engineer and use some off the shelf components. GPS is cheap now.
Coming in October (Score:2)
DEA infiltrates annual "Pun'kin Chunk'in" event claiming they traffic in drug paraphernalia Video crew jailed on suspicion of not respecting their authoritay
Catapults are for stones ... (Score:2)
Hah, primitives (Score:2)
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I see they haven't figured out our advanced potato cannon technology yet.
Funny, I wondered why they hadn't tried that. Seems it would be more efficient and quicker. Some compressed air, poof, and voila air mail delivery of the drug du jour.
Railgun! (Score:2)
Pot via railgun, that's the next upgrade....
Mythbusters (Score:2)
In the near future Adam and Jamie will test the validity of catapulting a kilo of actual coke across the border.
Yet another way ... (Score:3)
Obligatory Python quote: (Score:2)
Fetchez la vache!
Re:It's a trebuchet (Score:4, Funny)
Not to mention that catapults are all but medieval.
I'd say that launching rotten tomatoes in a catapult would be mid-evil. Launching pillows would be low-evil, and launching nails and rocks hi-evil. But that's just me.
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I guess then if you launch bad music it would be midi-evil?
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And launching pot is non-evil. Thanks smugglers!
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No, but it's 3 "yards" tall and can launch 4.4 "pounds" or payload. That's pretty medieval.
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A catapult was basically a giant crossbow.
A ballista is what most people think of as a "catapult". IT's where the modern word ballistic comes from.
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You're the one who is confused, FYI. It's the other way around.
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A yard is a perfectly cromunlent extension to the Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight system (the One True Sytem of measurement). While a "link" (or millifurlong) is the preferred unit for formal surveying and land measuement, a "yard" (or 1/220th of a furlong) is fine for casual use.
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Air cannons are a Canadian thing. I wouldn't be surprised if that got built north of the border.
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Man, there is so much unprotected border with Canada they don't need anything crazy to cross. They can just pack it onto ATV's and drive it across at night.
I grew up in Maine and we used to joke that getting drugs across the border was the easy part. The only problem is that once you get into Maine it's still hundreds of miles to get the drugs to anybody that wants it and isn't already growing their own.
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No no, those are _chicken_ cannons! We have chicken cannons up here, not air cannons.
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Damn, drugs are so European.
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not exactly, you will see
weed is usually sold in a multiple of the following quantities:
1g
3.5g (1/8oz)
7g(1/4oz)
14g(1/2oz)
1oz
1lb
500g
1Kg
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The markup for 1 kg sure is steep. 220% the price of a thousand individual grams.
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The markup for 1 kg sure is steep. 220% the price of a thousand individual grams.
Math: you fail it. 1g @ $10 x 1000 = 1kg @ $10,000.
Bulk buy and save!
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