Well, boys and girls, could this be it? An actual, working gas powered airsoft grenade? Carlton from Airsoft Innovations presents Tornado airsoft hand grenade, which sounds like excellent concept:
Hello Airsoft News!
We're nearly ready to release our Tornado airsoft hand grenade. It's very combat effective spewing 180x 6mm pellets in a 3 dimensional scatter.
The Tornado uses a novel method for storing and propelling, and scattering pellets at high velocity. Twin spiral passages wrap around a machined aluminum valve body. Individually they store about 90 pellets. If they were unwrapped and straightened, each passage would measure close to 50cm. This method of storage is compact and provides a long passage to efficiently accelerate the pellet charge. You also only have to load two passages with pellets so loading is reasonably fast. Each passage opens on tangent to the valve body so when the pellets get blasted out, the reaction force causes the grenade to counter rotate in recoil. This spinning effect is augmented by two ramp features at the exit of each passage so they don\'t end up scattering pellets in a flat disc. One passage traces a 45 degree cone upwards while the other traces a 35 degree cone downwards. Random bouncing against the ground when the grenade spins helps randomize the scatter even more so the distribution is quite spherical.
Check out our product page:
http://airsoft-innovations.com/Grenade.html
We've posted a promo video which features high speed videography taken with a very special camera. The high footage was taken at 3000 frames/sec so it can really capture the way the grenade scatters it's pellet charge in a room. We had to use a spindle mount to stop the grenade from running out of frame, but you can imagine it\d do if it was sitting on the floor when it went off.
--Carlton Chong
Airsoft Innovations Inc.