Kazimir

I am making a giant manual water pump with 4" PCV. I need a giant plunger head to fit inside, a lot like a homemade nerf gun. The problem is i can't think of anything to make the plunger head out of because of the size. Can throw some ideas at me? Thanks in advance. . .

What sort of building skills do you have? That'll dictate, in large part, what sort of construction you'll be able to go with.

My first instinct, that said, is to suggest that you use a block of wood, cut round with a hole saw in a drill press. Depending upon how well you want it to seal, you could then gasket that with an O-ring of appropriate size or with a circular section of stryofoam, or even several dozen rubberbands.

Edited to fix a spelling error.

For the record, I love Allelectronics.com . They work just like Mcmaster does for the most part, in that they buy up stocks from a ton of different companies. For the most part though, allelec only deals in overstocks, so their stuff is realllly cheap. And really random. Very reliable too, and shipping quotes before you buy standard. Yum.

They're great for motors and solenoids, but not so much for batteries or IC's.

For many years now they've maintained a pretty big store of surplus windshield-wiper motors, and those things are great.

Although I don't do any LARP games, I have found from experience that often less rules make things better.
That is not always the case, but less rules seems to be the best way to go in this instance. The current rules divised look much more simple than LARP rules in the posted link. The less you have to stop and calculate the better. Things should flow much more smoothly with less calculation and more action.

nTeraction/Accelerant is a broad ruleset, but pretty lightweight. the calls are short, simple, and concise. There's no real calculation that you have to do except counting. "How many hits have I taken?" is the only question you need to answer, really, and that's just counting. hit location doesn't matter.

As it happens, I can think of some relevant LARPs whose rulesets you ought to familiarize yourself with.

The first is The Isles, which is an nTeraction/Accelerant LARP, founded by Ford Ivey back about four or five years ago. NERF weaponry features heavily in an effort to rep flintlock-style firearms. The current rules are at http://www.kzinhome.net/isles/

There's also EndGame, with which I am less familiar, which is sort of an alien/zombie holocaust LARP, so again, lots of NERF.

There's also The Osiris Sanction, which is more of an ARG (when it actually runs, which it hasn't in a couple of years) but uses AirSoft for the "Virtual" segments.

the LARPers might even be talked into granting arms of that class an exemption from their 10 second rule.

The rate of fire imposed by the rules is for game balance, more than anything. There's an extensive in-game production system and damage system (if you're interested, the base rules are the Accelerant system) and firearms are one of the things that can dole out the most damage with a single hit (and of course, out of range of some monster's polearm.)

In order to make that more balanced and fair, firearms are expensive to produce and take a good ten seconds to 'reload', wherein one is supposed to pretend (or actually) reload.

Contrast this with a "bow" where the rate of fire is as fast as you can chuck little beanbags, but you can't push as much damage through it (not even by half, really).