Projectile-to-Peer (P2P) Intercubicle Messaging

Remember those wind-up balsa airplanes you flew as a kid? Wind about a hundred turns of the propeller onto the nearly-impossible-to-replace-when-it-breaks rubber band, chuck it into the air, and watch it soar majestically onto the roof of your house?

Snickering as your dad almost falls off the ladder rescuing it?

That's torsion energy at work, kids, and it's woefully under-appreciated as an energy storage medium

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Ballistae work on the same principle. Picture a big- ass crossbow with twisted skeins of cord providing tension to the movable arms that connect to the bowstring. Despite - or perhaps because of - the simplicity of concept, this is a massively powerful mechanism. Full-scale ballistae (say, 12 feet high) once chucked regulation-sized javelins about 300 feet with enough wellie to impale two (purportedly armored) men. Call it a Greco-Roman cruise missile: the most formidable weapon of its time. Unlike gravity-powered early weaponry (which lose power exponentially as size decreases), the mechanism retains substantial guts and balls when scaled down.

Caution: torsion springs like we're making here store a lot more energy than you might think, so property damage and/or personal injury are distinct possibilities for the unwary.

You've been warned. And quite probably encouraged.

Bueno!

Let's flash forward in time about 1900 years, and consider Rocket Mail - delivering mail via rocket or missile. From early 1930s Germany to the present day, sporadic attempts have been made by various postal services worldwide to harness the motive power of missiles to deliver the mail,using everything from gunpowder-fueled fireworks (IndianAirmail Society, 1934) to submarine-launched refitted guided missiles (USPS, via USS Barbero, 1959) to piloted reusable craft (an XCOR Long-EZ piloted by "things that fly" legend Dick Rutan, 2005). On paper, it's a brilliant concept: the next logical advancement from Airmail.

Sadly, for some unknown reason, it still hasn't caught on, although full props go to the persistent few who Know A Good Idea When They See One© and fight the good fight to bring this innovation to market. We're gonna join this particular fight, though on a somewhat more modest scale. I've built a lot of desktop ballistae, with aesthetics ranging from a traditional and brutishly utilitarian model commissioned by a local motorcycle enthusiast to a black walnut Art Deco number inspired by Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. It's a flexible form factor.

...A flexible form factor that can easily be modified to fire 'Spinnin' Metal Tubes o' Death'™.  Buy the damned book and learn how.