It is Sunday. That means at some point tomorrow you’ll probably fantasize about taking a piece of artillery to your office, the boss’s car, a customer, or the guy who takes too long to order at the coffee shop. The bad news is that if you actually did that, the rest of your life would be spent in the grey-bar motel. The good news is that we’ve got some video that will satisfy your need to see a cannon tearing stuff up…and that stuff is an old sad sack Saturn coupe.
This video proves a few points. The first is that cannons are awesome. The second is that if the fledgling United States had designed the Saturn for use as a weapon of war in the 1700s to fight the British, we’d all be into drinking tea and have bad teeth right now. The third is that we’re easy to entertain. The cannon is fired at the car both at the doors and head on. The real neat stuff happens when they fire at the car from the dead on position because you’ll see what a 12lb iron ball fired at extreme speed will do with a block, transmission, interior, and body of a modern car.
This video is professionally shot and there’s some great slow motion replay action involved. You need entertainment on a Sunday and this certainly fills the bill for us!
Press play below to see a Civil War-Era 12-pounder Cannon Kick the Dookie Out Of A Saturn Coupe –
Should have fired “grape shot” (canister) in comparison. Lack of recoil shows a minimal charge (1/2 lb) of gun powder. During the CW the powder charge would have been 2-21/2 lbs. What that would have done to men and horses was devastating. Always fun to watch controlled destruction.
Grapeshot on a Saturn would’ve required popcorn for proper viewing, though…
A couple of thoughts: (1) I didn’t expect the cannon ball to go all the way through the car (although going through the side of an I-4 is less of a challenge than going through-and-through in a longitudinal direction. (2) This video makes me a little sad because this is one less parts car for the dude with the red sleeper Saturn… 🙁
Something I found interesting – on the frontal shot, watch the ultra slow mo video and watch the reflections in the windshield. The windshield doesn’t break, but the glass is flexing in waveform like a piece of sheet metal. Safety glass works.
I noticed the same thing, Jeff. That was some pretty awesome slow mo.