It takes a lot of imagination to come up with something pleasingly absurd, I mean absurd enough to be interesting, eye-catching, without being so absurd it's just silly or stupid. That fine area in between is populated by some of the most interesting things in the world.
Lisa Black and her Steampunk Taxidermy fits the bill in my mind. That's all we need, cyber-zombie-bambi. Crossing three genres at once.
Of course you don't have to try to be absurd, magazines like Popular Science and Science and Invention tried their best to actually predict the future. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how truly loopy some of the ideas presented there were.
I'll leave you with this important public service message, you know, just in case.
I have invented steam guns in my head, which I translated to paper but due to safety and practical reasons I have no intention of building in the real world. In the world I have created they are effective weapons but the man-portable variety, with a backpack boiler are only good for short range pummelling attacks. They can break bone but rarely penetrate the skin.
Today I thought I would look to see if anyone else had built a steam powered gun, to nobody's surprise, Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters beat me to it.
They use a different method than I had planned out but the result is about the same, a quick-firing inaccurate semi-lethal weapon.
The video below shows a steam cannon with a barrel being fired, despite the fact that it's a simple garage-built gun it obviously has some power.
If the two could be combined then you might really have something, I think the confederate system they copied on Mythbusters was highly flawed in the way it flung the balls out. A system with a barrel is necessary for any kind of power or accuracy, but I do like the gravity feed system they used. Having watched these two videos I have to say I think my design would be feasible and it overcomes the shortcomings of each design (Mythbusters lack of reliability and massive size, the Archimedes style cannon's unpredictable timing and slow firing rate). I almost wish I had a workshop big enough to build one.
Just for fun, here are Adam and Jamie again, this is a short video of a household water heater with all the safeties disabled.
Steam rocket! That's one of my favourite bits of video from all the Mythbusters episodes I've seen.
