How could pears be used as ammunition?

Question

In a dramedy science-fantasy children's (for 8 to 15 years old) videogame I want to create, Salade de Fruits (which naturally means Fruit Salad) (my first language is French), there is a villainous antagonist who has a gun charged with pears. The technological level is a modern cannon, as a potato cannon but with pears.

Why would he have that? Because in my world, there is a protocol that makes standard projectiles illegal. Why would they be illegal? That is because normal bullets are too polluting.

So, how could pears be used as ammunition? Should European pears (Pyrus communis) or Asian pears (Pyrus pyrifolia) be preferred?

Answer 1

Frozen Pears.

I remember an anecdote of engineers testing the durability of a bullet train against birds. They used a chicken in the tests and the train did fine. The French on the other hand should have been told beforehand that the chicken needed to be unfrozen... I don't remember where I heard this, but the story holds true even for pears.

Your pear cannon would need the ammunition to be kept in a freezer overnight to be effective. Otherwise the fruits splat like fruits typically do. A frozen pear on the other hand hits HARD. Littéralement se prendre une poire!

The concept is fun. Keep up the good work!

Answer 2

Less Lethal Pears:

Shorter ranges and lower speeds can be achieved with the kind of pressure-based weapons you are suggesting.

• Riot pears: pears, even ones coming apart, can be fired at your onerous rioting civilians, and in the same way. under-ripe pears will be firm and sting, ripe pears soft and messy, creating difficulty for opponents moving (and can be counted against rioter's food rations-after all, you issued them food). Rotting dried out pears sprayed with nasty molds before drying can sicken opponents, disabling them without TECHNICALLY using biological weaponry. Or those same rotten pears can reek and be a substitute for chemical irritants. Dried, re-molded pear can be sharp like shrapnel without leaving a lot of evidence (since it will rapidly soften once moist).

And all of this can be labeled "response in kind" because rioters throw fruit at the riot police,

Answer 3

Frame challenge: Do you need an explanation?

When fruits are consistently the only objects being weaponized in your fictional universe, and the overall tone of the work is wacky enough that the audience knows that it is not to be taken too seriously, then they are going to suspend their disbelieve and just accept that this is how your world works.

You can easily make up a flimsy concept like "fruit power" which is inherit in all fruits and makes them powerful weapons. Other weapons like firearms or bladed weapons lack "fruit power", making them inherently inferior to fruit-based weaponry and thus an illogical choice of weapon in your world. What is that "fruit power"? Where does it come from? Nobody knows and nobody cares. It's inherent in your world, and that's all that matters.

The "everything needs a scientifically valid explanation" mindset is a common trap new worldbuilders fall into. As long as a world is internally consistent, it doesn't matter that the scenario would not make much sense in our world. The urge to come up with a plausible explanation for everything that's special about your world can be distracting and limiting.

This is even more true in the context of video games, where players will gladly accept the most unrealistic properties of the world as long as they are reflected in the games mechanics.

Should European pears (Pyrus communis) or Asian pears (Pyrus pyrifolia) be preferred?

In the context of a video game, I would prefer European pears for a simple UI reason: Asian pears are too easy to mistake for apples. Making objects distinct by color alone is dangerous due to color blindness. So when it is important for the player to tell apples and pears apart, then you should give them different shapes.

Answer 4

Clearly your evil villain needs to use Atago pears which are the heaviest. The current Guinness world record for a pear is a 2.9 Kg (over 6 lbs) Atago grown in Japan. For extra destructive power perhaps an unripe Atago might be best because I assume it would be harder. A pear Gatling gun firing a continuous stream of 2.9 Kg pears would be a formidable weapon.

Answer 5

Pears on their own can be pretty hard depending on the variety. They would make great munition.

Projectiles do not need to be hard to be able to do damage, even just water can do loads of damage if there is enough force behind it. And with a potato cannon you will have plenty of force!

Another fruit that comes to mind is the Pomgranate, it can be used as a fragmentation grenade, or as shotgun munition.

If you want to get a feeling for how much damage a fruit projectile can do, you should watch this video where someone fails to launch a watermelon with a catapult and gets the thing in their own face..

Answer 6

The Bradford Pear and the Callery Pear have small hard fruit that is almost woody. A tree with larger fruit could be used for ammunition very easily. Munitions that used to spread ball bearings could easily be repurposed to spread these. The tree is also starting to become classified as an invasive species in a number of US states.