just a thought about an airsoft mortar...
 

I was thinking about an airsoft mortar and i saw a lot of peoples ideas and they were really complex and it required fuses, fins, bottles, CO2 and pyrotechnics

and i thought...

maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated

so what i was thinking is
if you buy one of those $2 fireworks that shoot a shell up into the air and just make a loud noise, ("airbombs") and fill it with some 50-100 bb's

you have a mortar shell right there

then you can light it and drop it into a pipe that's about 1 inch in diameter

that way when the firework shoots the bbs and the exploding shell with it, the exploding shell explodes and scatters the bbs and could have an pretty good area effect

iam guessing



it should be safe...

as long as you don't shoot it at people
but then again a mortar doesnt shoot directly at a target

and you probably shouldnt use it in wooded areas



P.S. Canada Day is on July 1st or something so pick up some fireworks


:)

Ideas for grenades and mortars have been thrown around already on these forums and pyrotechnics is usually frowned upon for airsoft.

woodland areas+anything with the word pyro in it=a very angry bowers

This is probably a better idea....

YouTube - Airsoft Mortar

Yeah that really doesn't sound like a good idea.

not the video... but the pyro stuff... >_>

It's a good concept but one of those "should be safe" fireworks has enough explosive content to remove your fingers. Modifying fireworks is also illegal and dangerous. Having been a professional pyrotechnician for twelve years I've seen a LOT of accidents from things more benign than these so I would definitely not recommend it.

to me "airsoft mortar" sounds like something that wouldnt work or is done better by the airsoft grenade
like basically youre launching a grenade into the air?? why not just throw an airsoft grenade into the air?
or throw a handful of loose bbs into the air so it rains bbs

no need to modify if you tape the bb's to the outside of it, lol. all in all i think it is a bad idea.

the taped bb's may effect the flight of it

One of our local guys had one of the airbomb grenades (loaded with dry peas) explode in his bare closed hand end of April. His fingers were numb for about 15mins after, but otherwise he was fine. Fine enough, in fact, to participate in a kickboxing tournament that evening. Lol, fucking guy. At least he busted the myth pretty damned good (should say that the airspaces in among the peas compressed and softened the blow though, wouldn't want to see anyone hold the charge itself in a closed fist and have it go off).

Anyways, Blastyman has made some very nice mortars in the past, that look real and launch Nerf footballs (the kind with the shaft and fins on them, forget the name) a good few hundred feet. They don't explode at all, but the entire thing is very cool.

I also built a tennis ball one. Its my main one now cause tennis balls are cheap and I can still shoot a few hundred feet. The nerfs can go like 400 or 500 meters though.

I played a game with blastyman's tennis ball mortar shooting at us. It was pretty intense.

dude...pm me I am working on a spring design as well.

Dug around a few videos of airsoft mortars, found this interesting concept, using a M203 type grenade as a means to propel the "object". Actually is quite brilliant, have a fixed firing at the bottom of the tube, make a sabot to fit both the grenade and the "bomb" into one tube, drop it in, firing pin releases the gas and POP!

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=WYsVtZ9ieK8

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=YBIZZ1r-8-g

Damn, that's the most realistic airsoft mortar I've seen. How does he get the grenade back out, though?

flip the mortar upside down?!?!

That'd be my assumption as well.

I was hoping that with a clever discharge design, it might have a reload method that's slightly less awkward than turning it upside down...

And the thing about that is you need a shitload of rounds to actually be effective with a mortar.

Having a mortar and 4 rounds doesn't cut it. It might take all 4 rounds to get on target and then you got nothing.

I have over a hundred tennis balls and with a 2 man crew I probably can do 10-12 shots a minute provided I have it hooked to a compressor or other airsource.

Only when you can fire alot of rounds in a reasonable short period of time does a airsoft mortar really become effective in my opinion. You got people dying all over the place and they start focus on the sky looking for incoming rounds and it really starts to effect the combat effectiveness of an team under mortar fire.

Would give the guys that are afraid of covering the frontlines something to do while they are hanging out in the back hoping the players up front can do their jobs. Lol

For those interested, I'm currently seeking funding to produce an airsoft mortar that runs off of the AI Propane adapter, and propane as a source of propellant.

I've made compressed air ones and they are extremely successful, but the problem being bike pumps take too long, and air compressors aren't exactly the most "Mobile" things.

hehe True, Mortars don't really go were you whant them to go but is a good weapon to scared the enemy so allied force can do their jobs.

Mortars in airsoft might be cool but you would need to be close to the enemy.
But i like the idea of Mortars for when you are in deep s**t and you need quick support :P

One thing I should mention about mortars.

They are a crew served weapon. To be safe they can't hurtle anything heavy, which means their range is limited. They need to have no overhead obstructions to shoot so they're usually set up in open areas. They are also distinctly noisy. So that means you have a stationary weapon with multiple targets noisily broadcasting their location to all enemies in the area, making them excellent sniper fodder. We have several mortars locally and I haven't seen them deployed in games more than a half dozen times, and their effectiveness was questionable. Our local snipers like it when the mortar teams show up in fact because they know it means easy kills.

How about a ball of paper with BBS in it held to together with some loose tape so that it breaks apart in flight. I'm not sure if that would break on launch or not. Or maybe something like this grenade http://airsoftcanada.com/showthread.php?t=47191 that springs open on a timer but with a less deadly material for when it comes down.

Problem with mortars is, how often do you want to make 100 rounds for a game?
Takes alot of time and patience, even with 3 guys and a super simple ammo design it took us 4 or 5 hours to make enough rounds for an hour of shelling.
And once again: "Just keep in mind that sooner or later someone WILL get hit in the head with one of these rounds, it's your job to make sure it won't kill them"

Amos, I gonna say it before Zero Delay does

Propane + PVC/ABS don't mix!

PVC/ABS is plastic. When something made out of foam runs down plastic at high velocity it produces static.

Static = Source of ignition

Propane is a compressed combustible gas

Do I need to spell it out any clearer for you?


Me and a bunch of the guys here did that once, it wasn't pretty and luckily we didn't have any explosions. DON'T BE STUPID

An air-compressor is cheap and we have plenty of power at our fields.

And you could setup a Co2 setup just as easily as propane.



We've made several highly successful mortar design here in Winnipeg that run on plain old compressed air. The big issues we had were:

A: consistency - its very hard to get any kind of consistent launches due to the types of materials used, propelant pressure and wind (yes wind, airsoft munitions are too lightwieght and slow moving to have enough kinetic energy to fly straight and consistant)

B:speed - propellant is a big issue. Bike pumps work but they are too slow. Unless you can fire off a round every 20 sec or faster a mortar in airsoft its pretty useless. The only thing we found fast enough is compressed gas (ie Co2) or an aircompressor (needs power) propane or other combustibles work but are too dangerous in the quantities you need.

Believe it or not the biggest problem we ran into was overheating bike pumps! Because the excessive pumping would actually cause the plastic and rubber they are made of to warp and shrink and cause air leaks. We had had to use 3 bike pumps in rotation and as they would overheat (the metal would actually get too hot to touch) we would throw them into the shade and douse them with our canteens to cool them off!

C: ammo - ThunderCactus already said it. Ammo is either expensive (vortex footballs) or time consuming to make (custom ammo) We found that it wasn't even worth bringing a mortar unless we had 50+ rounds. You go through them that fast.

D: Reliability - I've seen a number of mortars that fail after 4-5 shots. After that you have to lug it back home to fix it because you need a grinder and a welder. What good is it then? If it can't fire more than 10 shot without breaking its useless. We built our specifically so that they could be fixed in field and carried spare parts and tools accordingly.

E: team effort - 1 guy to lug the mortar, 1 guy to lug ammo, 1 guy to lug propellent and all three are needed to set it up, spot, aim, load and fire. It was fun at first but after showing up to a bunch of games where we basically sat there and lobed shells it got boring so we left the mortars at home. Let alone the hours of prep time making ammo :S Then on top of that we absolutely had to have a radio in the field because most of the time we couldn't see where the shots were landing and couldn't adjust our fire.


Overall it was a cool effect and we scared a bunch of noobs when shouting "INCOMING" but it was too cumbersome, slow and inaccurate to be anything more than a gimmick.

We must have lobbed 500+ rounds at the field last year and I think we killed 2 people.

Just a thought, why hasn't anyone made a definitive "airsoft mortar FAQ" for ASC yet? This comes up what once every two weeks with the exact same answers?

If a FAQ was created, it would never be read.

Yeah but it would be a great flame for the potential Greylock's out there.

I killed about 10 guys last week with mine. It was cool! hehe