Tankball: Armoured paintball battles

My first paintball battle taught me an important lesson: Women are dangerous. I don't mean in the usual psychological sense, I mean in the "lurk around quietly with a sniper rifle and calmly massacre the enemy" kind of way. I dread to see what would happen in a "friendly" guys vs. girls mechanized battle.

Southfields farm, near Husbands Bosworth in Leicestershire has a long history of paintball competitions. Farm owner Stuart Garner recently decided to up the ante with the purchase of five FV432 Armoured Personnel Carriers -- conveniently outfitted with gun turrets and custom-made 40mm ping pong firing paintball cannons. Armourgeddon has well and truly arrived:

"Their chosen ammunition, fired by compressed air, would be paint-filled ping-pong balls.

The first attempt blasted a ball into orbit. [Cannon inventor Jez Smith] lost sight of it after a mile-and-a-half when it passed the church spire. It also sent a small potato through the sound barrier. Over time, he calmed it to a legal and relatively modest 200mph. Jez then designed a 40mm, 8ft steel barrel to slot into the turret and the company now has five. 'Obviously, these aren't proper guns with rifled barrels or they'd be illegal,' says Stuart, 38. 'But a ping-pong ball full of liquid doing 300ft per second is lethal. That's why we operate with sealed hatches."

The cost for a couple of hours of heart-pounding tank warfare is anything but lethal: a 2 hour tank battle costs a reasonable £55 per person, as does a 45 minute driving lesson.

Armourgeddon: Military vehicle driving and tank battles
Weapons of mass decoration [Daily Mail, via Gizmodo]