Former NASA engineer makes ‘world’s largest’ Nerf gun that shoots darts at 40 mph

How would you like a Nerf gun so large it makes children run away screaming?

That’s what former NASA engineer Mark Rober created and showed off in a YouTube video on Tuesday.

“People have these Nerf dart wars at work sometimes, and in an effort to keep people from picking on me, I decided to create the world’s largest, functional Nerf gun,” Rober says at the beginning of the video.

The gun appears to be around five-feet long and the “darts” are made of toilet plungers and pool noodles. Rober claims it is the world’s largest Nerf gun.

Rober said the gun shoots darts at about 40 mph, and he and two other engineers made a more aerodynamic projectile that the gun shot a distance of 130 yards — longer than a football field.

Rober explains that he made the gun using a 3,000 pounds per square inch paintball tank on the inside of the gun, and then another internal chamber fills up to 80 psi at a time. That chamber then releases when the trigger is pulled, allowing the user to shoot about 20 darts at a time without needing to refill the paintball tank.

The YouTube video has nearly 900,000 views. In it, the engineers use the gun to shatter a sheet of glass, knock a beer bottle off a fence, go skeet-shooting and scare Rober’s niece and nephews.

“I wanted to see if this thing actually worked in real life, and as usual my niece and nephews were picking on me,” Rober says. “So I challenged them to a Nerf dart war, only I may have neglected to tell them about my creation.”

The three children got one look at the gun and ran away screaming.

This story was originally published June 22, 2016 at 3:28 PM with the headline "Former NASA engineer makes ‘world’s largest’ Nerf gun that shoots darts at 40 mph."