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A connection option for mobile home park dwellers that would allow all the trailers in the park to be connected together. Offering some feeble protection against tornados and the like.
Hot Air Balloon Harpoon
http://www.halfbake...20balloon_20harpoon
One at each corner. [8th of 7, Oct 17 2004]
[link]
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Are you from the Gulf (US) States or Mid South by any chance? |
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Arkansas. I keep thinking of all the trailers in the park, connected into a honeycomb type shape. Seems like it would be stronger to me? |
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use the steel lego as mentioned on farmerjohn's steel velcro idea. |
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You don't really get tornados there, do you? Mostly encroaching hurricanes, I thought. |
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Tornados do occur here. The hurricanes that make it this far north are usually running out of steam. Though, they do bring alot of rain with them. The super high gale force winds that they see on the Gulf coast generally play out before reaching us. |
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Well, Ezra, that's a pretty good idea, but better to have snap-together components in general. A trailer owner could expand the homestead a little each spring, growing the trailer like a snail. Newlyweds could snap their trailers together. Families with new kids could snap on a room. |
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But have you thought maybe of basements for trailers? A trailer park could offer a simple concrete bunker for each lot over which you would park the trailer. Either make a hatch down through the floor or through a small above-ground vestibule that would also connect to the normal trailer door. Use it for storage most of the time, but use it to hide in when it gets a little too windy. |
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I liked that trailer basement. Sometimes one almost thinks that an anno should switch places with its idea. + for a twister buddy. |
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Why not attach a Rocket Harpoon at each corner of the trailer ? When danger threatens, just pull the firing lines .... |
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It occurs to me that a lot of stuff gets picked up and trown around by tornadoes. Such items could be fitted with parachute packs to bring them gently to earth. See also my "cat ejection pack" idea. |
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I wonder if anyone has ever tried BASE jumping into a tornado funnel ? |
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8th: it's not as though items picked up by tornadoes are vacuumed into the sky and released. It's as though they were picked up and put in a blender with all the other things, then spun out at high velocity and low altitude. In any case, the weird winds around the funnel would not let a parachute deploy properly. |
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O.K., O.K., the extra G is ggone. |
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[Nick@Nite] hat was pretty much my assumption; it would be sick, but also strangely compelling, to watch some idiot do this. |
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You could put a dummy on the ground with a parachute attached and let the tornado pick it up, then fire the 'chute by radio, and see what happened ..... |
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How much would it cost, I wonder, to produce a trailer park with "basements"? My understanding is that in many cases a large part of the cost of a basement involves paying for the work crews to get to the site; if a crew were doing a large number of nearly-identical basements in the same area I would think there could be a certain economy of scale. To be sure, most trailers aren't really designed for basements, but there'd be ways around that. |
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After a while the wheels get dug into the mud pretty good. It's pretty hard to lift a trailer into the air unless the twister comes right over you. That's why twister drill in gradeschool comes in two parts: 1 assume the brace position and 2 run like hell boy. |
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Arkansas? Tornado central. Must be that -kansas thing in the name. |
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I'm afraid this won't make them stronger, all it will do would be to gather the toothpicks into one big pile, instead of several little ones; only this time, the people stuck in the middle brick can't escape. |
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As far as a bunker goes, it'd be much smarter to have one central bunker with no building overhead, instead of many individual ones. That way people won't be trapped individually by house debris and scattered all over a park, making rescue operations much more confusing. |
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My dad sometimes talks about the Palm Sunday tornado incident back in the 70's that did so much wide-spread damage. 'Round here, twisters practically have their own primitive religion. They do terribly weird things sometimes. Telephone poles, still standing, looked like porcupines with little blades of straw shoved 2 inches deep into them. In one park, where a line of trees stood, one out of every 3 trees was 'unscrewed' out of the ground, while their immediate neighboring trees still had their leaves on 'em. I've seen vehicles stripped clean of their paint; sandblasted by the dust picked up, right down to the metal, but without breaking any of the windows. |
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Makes you wonder what the indians used to think about 'em. |
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combine this with binary's pneumatic idea, and I'll give ya a croissant. |
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There's a joke : Whats the difference between a tornado and a divorce in Arkansas ? |
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Either way, someone is about to lose a trailer. |
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Um... but that's not a difference. |
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The materials used to build mobile home just don't snap together easily. Half the doors to water heaters and furnaces enclosures of the mobiles I service are mangled to the point of needing hammer and pliers to open and close them. |
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//Telephone poles, still standing, looked like
porcupines with little blades of straw shoved 2
inches deep into them.// I think I've mentioned
this before, but I just plain don't believe this idea
that a piece of straw can be driven into solid
wood, tornado or no. |
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If a piece of straw hits a telegraph pole at any
speed you care to think of, the straw will come off
worse. This is one of the main reasons they don't
make bullets (or nails) out of straw. Equally, if I
stand a piece of straw on end and hit it with a
telegraph pole at 100, 200, 300mph, I will produce
a very flat piece of straw. |
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