Super Soaker Central

Okay, so I have a potential design for a water balloon sabot that could survive high accelerations. The picture details a sabot with a rubber cradle on the inside. When the acceleration occurs, the rubber of the cradle will stretch, instead of the balloon onto hard plastic. And when the acceleration stops, the balloon will continue forward out of the sabot. (Sorry about the attatched file, I couldn't get it to insert properly.)

Sounds like a potential improvement on this design. The tricky part is shaping the rubber to cradle the balloon as well as possible. The cradle should be shaped as similar as possible to a balloon at it's normal size.

This leads to another question. Which way is the best to orientate the balloon when loading it? It would seem that having the knot point either outside the barrel or inside would be best, but this position may be more prone to rupture. On the other hand, if the knot is facing the side, it won't launch very evenly and will most likely result in a bad trajectory.

Interesting, but it might be hard to make.

You could make it a bit smaller - just large enough to cradle the balloon, maybe a little deeper. When the balloon accelerates, it'll act like a liquid settling under extreme gravity, as its inertia will "pull" it towards the base of the sabot. The perfect shell would maintain the shape the of balloon and entirely prevent friction with the barrel, to reduce stress on the rubber.

In your design, which way would the cradle stretch? Is the mouth supposed to close up around the balloon?

Ideally, the cradle would stretch downward, (but paint is very limited in the shapes I can draw) and the inertia of the balloon would be contained until it finishes accelerating.

Edit: Yeah, sorry about the confusing drawing, but I wanted to use the cradle in an existing sabot made from a cup.