What do you get when you cross a NASA engineer with a NERF gun? A really big NERF gun.
Mark Rober, a NASA engineer who was part of the team that put the Curiosity rover on Mars, said that from time-to-time he and his hardworking scientists take some time off to have a NERF gun war in the office.
WATCH: World’s largest NERF gun
Maybe Rober wasn’t too good at it with just an ordinary-sized weapon: so he decided to give himself an big advantage.
“In an effort to keep people from picking on me, I decided to create the world’s largest functional NERF gun,” Rober says in his YouTube video.
He contacted two “fellow engineering nerds” from YouTube channel Eclectical Engineering to help develop his contraption. The result is absolutely awesome.
READ MORE: Explore Mars in this 360° view from Curiosity rover
How does the gun work? A 3,000-psi air tank pushes air into a chamber that is then regulated to only 80 psi. One tank provides about 20 shots. And the enormous darts are made out of pool noodles with toilet plungers on the end.
When the team used a 3-D printed, more aerodynamic projectile, it travelled about 125 metres across a football field.
What’s the take-away lesson here? Don’t mess with engineers.