I confess I thought piton guns were a reality at this point. It turns out they are still fictional.
You know the gimmick I mean: they're rather like a nail-gun used in home construction. At least, they should be.
In action lit, a hypothetical mountaineer presses a piton gun right up to a granite rock-face and fires a climbing piton directly into the rock.
Then, he loops his cord through the piton and it lets him advance up the cliff much faster than hammering in each piton by hand.
In thriller novels, there's a fabulous piton gun in Norman Hartley's "Viking Process". But that fabulous yarn is a dystopic.
In cinema, they are first seen --I believe --in Connery's, 'Diamonds are Forever' where Bond rappels his way into an impregnable hi-rise penthouse suite in Vegas.
Okay, so Bond films are full of hogwash as we all know --so when a piton gun re-emerges in the Brosnan 'Goldeneye' we should scoff with deep scorn at that point.
Curiously enough, Roger Moore does not use a piton gun in 'For Your Eyes Only' when his James Bond is in Italy scaling his way up a sheer cliff-face to a rock-bound monastery. Bravo to whoever wrote that script, for not cheating on existing technology.
But what is really strange is that apparently a piton gun was a key element in Sly Stallone's actioner, "Cliffhanger". Or, so I've read. If true, how can they possibly do such a thing? Shame on them.
Bond is outright fantasy, but if you're making an American action film which features a no-nonsense real-life American sport, how can you flout authenticity so flagrantly?
How can you infuse a muscular tale like that with a totally unrealistic fantasy weapon? Supposedly in that yarn, Stallone even uses his piton gun to slay an adversary.
Anyway, so all this incongruity in fiction makes me very surprised that piton guns are apparently, still not possible.
Is this actually the case? Even with all the new gear we have these days? Couldn't a cordless impact wrench be converted into a piton gun?
You know the gimmick I mean: they're rather like a nail-gun used in home construction. At least, they should be.
In action lit, a hypothetical mountaineer presses a piton gun right up to a granite rock-face and fires a climbing piton directly into the rock.
Then, he loops his cord through the piton and it lets him advance up the cliff much faster than hammering in each piton by hand.
In thriller novels, there's a fabulous piton gun in Norman Hartley's "Viking Process". But that fabulous yarn is a dystopic.
In cinema, they are first seen --I believe --in Connery's, 'Diamonds are Forever' where Bond rappels his way into an impregnable hi-rise penthouse suite in Vegas.
Okay, so Bond films are full of hogwash as we all know --so when a piton gun re-emerges in the Brosnan 'Goldeneye' we should scoff with deep scorn at that point.
Curiously enough, Roger Moore does not use a piton gun in 'For Your Eyes Only' when his James Bond is in Italy scaling his way up a sheer cliff-face to a rock-bound monastery. Bravo to whoever wrote that script, for not cheating on existing technology.
But what is really strange is that apparently a piton gun was a key element in Sly Stallone's actioner, "Cliffhanger". Or, so I've read. If true, how can they possibly do such a thing? Shame on them.
Bond is outright fantasy, but if you're making an American action film which features a no-nonsense real-life American sport, how can you flout authenticity so flagrantly?
How can you infuse a muscular tale like that with a totally unrealistic fantasy weapon? Supposedly in that yarn, Stallone even uses his piton gun to slay an adversary.
Anyway, so all this incongruity in fiction makes me very surprised that piton guns are apparently, still not possible.
Is this actually the case? Even with all the new gear we have these days? Couldn't a cordless impact wrench be converted into a piton gun?