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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather build my own. Mountable weapons are a bitch in the USA, the BATF gets all up and over people for making anything with real destructive potential.

Spikes and saws and shit get the cops excited too, out on the roads.

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And the NTSB doesn’t look kindly on having your passengers swinging from 40-foot poles, either. Oh, the nanny state!

Would you mind endorsing me on LinkedIn for "having dudes on bendy poles"? [0]

0: https://youtu.be/7Nj9ZjwOdFQ?t=291

There used to be a place just outside of Las Vegas proper called "Buck's war surplus" that the teen version of me would go to and imagine what I would do with all that neat stuff. They got the top turret from a B17 once which I thought would make a nice addition to a large car. Nothing like pointing twin 50's at the traffic jam to encourage it to move along. Alas, I did not have the means to convert such speculation into rolling hardware.

These vehicles aren't suitable for street use. In the making of material they discuss building these and a good number are absolute deathtraps that the stunt people didn't feel safe in. (They were used for non-action shots.)

I've actually put a flamethrower on a car, long ago. Not a very big one; alcohol injected into a bypass exhaust pipe. It was a bitch to get it to wash the road and not set the car on fire; and there was a narrow window of speed where it was effective. too fast and it would self extinguish; even with naptha... faster than that by 3x and naptha would be a fine enough mist for an FAE pop, if we could get it to light.

Very, very much "not suitable for street use" :)

Not with that attitude!

I've wondered about the legality of the spikes I see on semi trucks in the US. I can't imagine these spikes veering into the rubber of another vehicle's tires would end well. Though based on some cursory searches, it seems many of these spikes are made of plastic [0]

[0] https://bigrigpros.com/why-do-semi-trucks-have-spikes-on-whe...

Those are cosmetic plastic caps.

And even if they weren't they wouldn't be much more damaging to anything than normal semi truck lug nuts.

Think of those like the rumble strips on the side of the road: they're loud and flashy but wont do real harm, and may give you the fraction of a second warning that enables avoiding more serious contact.

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