Hitting a baseball far. Like really far (Patreon)

My quest to hit a baseball really far is now underway. I've been fascinated with ramset powder actuated nailers which use blank 0.22" or 0.27" rifle cartridges to drive nails into concrete. I've been thinking about what other awesome things you can do with them. It turns out I'm not the first person to have this thought - you can actually buy a golf club that uses them to hit balls with no swing. That's cool but in my opinion it would be way cooler if you actually swung the club and it gave you a huge boost on top of your swing. This got me thinking about baseball and how you probably could put some kind of device in a bat which would give the ball some extra kick. 

This has been in my mental back-burner but the pieces are coming together. I have several candidates for viable designs and I also just acquired the perfect tool for making a complex wooden bat:

This design is challenging for a few key reasons:

The contact time between a baseball and a bat is ~700 microseconds. 

A single ramset cartridge doesn't have enough energy to fulfill my goal of world record distance

It needs be safe with no failure modes that cause the bat to explode or the ball to go at me

I want it to be quiet enough that I don't attract unwanted attention (i.e. silenced)

I need to run more detailed calculations though but my back of the envelope calculations suggests that I need to fire 3-4 cartridges simultaneously. I think it is going to be hard to truly fire multiple cartridges simultaneously. For one if one cartridge detonates slightly before the others and things begin moving it can easily lead to the other cartridges remaining un-detonated. Alternatively even if they all fire but there is timing mismatch the ball may be already gone by the time they all fire and I get weak energy transfer.

The short contact time is also hard because I need any mechanism which fires the cartridges, the burn of the cartridges, and the mechanism that transfers the energy of the reaction to the ball to all take place in approximately this time. I can probably increase the time window by making the mechanism complaint (spread out the impulse) but that just makes things more complicated. 

Two other very important questions are:

 What happens if the system detonates with no baseball to absorb the energy. This needs to be handled gracefully without the system tearing itself apart

What happens if the mechanism jams but still detonates. This also needs to be handled without the system tearing itself apart.

I really like this problem because at first glance it seems straightforward but when you dig into it there are some tricky design problems that have to be done just right for it to work and be safe. I'll definitely be doing all initial testing this one from behind a shield before I dare try to use it for real. 

I'm posting a lot of mini updates and thoughts in discord if you want to follow along or have ideas to share. There's already been some good discussion with folks on there and I appreciate all the input and ideas!