[limpet chicken]

I had a pretty good idea, that will definately be practical.

Take the tazer, it has one shot effectively, and the personal ones often have a point blank range (excluding backpack based water tazers and plasma tazers)

I think I am going to build myself a tazer whip for self defence and such.
Something along the design of a reasonably short bullwhip, with metal, or better yet, carbon fiber, strands to conduct the electricity running along the length of the whip, perhaps a sharpened metal barb on the tip, sort of like a stingray spine, or a chunk of barbed wire etc.

Have a transformer and replaceable PP3 type battery in the handle, and you have yourself a pretty vicious shock-whip, I imagine any mugger confronting someone with a weapon like that is going to squeel like a b$*%( and run away pretty quickly

I think it might be a good idea actually, instead of having one barb, have four or more strips of carbon fiber running down the whip length, connected to an equal number of sharp, but short metal barbs, so as to enable production of a "demonstration" crackling arc, to provide for a feature to just scare the potential assailant away, the actual sight and sound of a high voltage arc snaking all over the whip would look pretty damn fearsome I think

[Corvettaholic]

Oh I like this one! What about having your standard issue bullwhip, and sewing in a relatively thick, yet very flexible, uninsulated wire? Weld/Solder on small 2mm barbs all along the whole thing. In the handle have your battery and a highvoltage transformer (flyback comes to mind), and when power is on all those little barbs might act as spark gaps? What if you didn't have a wire as a "backbone" and instead just had a crapload of little iron barbs all sewn in the leather, but something like a 1mm apart? There would be a spark gap between each one, however tiny, but there would be a LOT of sparks. Make it look like snaking lightning. How much energy is lost creating a spark across a gap anyway? What is a pp3 type battery anyhow?

Oh, just thought of something. Forgot one of the fundamentals of electricity, you need a COMPLETE CIRCUIT! So if you only have one spark gap trail (or wire) coming out of the battery, then you won't have a complete circuit until you smack someone with it. So lets say you have your thousands of barbs (and therefore spark gap trail) on the bottom "edge" of the whip, then you could loop a return wire at the opposite end of the whip. Keep the return wire heavily insulated so you don't get a short. When the whip hits something, it should still zap them, right? Wonder what would happen if you decided to whip appliances with this thing!

[limpet chicken]

I like the idea of using multiple spark gaps.
Why not use carbon fiber, with barbs attatched to it? I think it might have less of a tendency to overheat.

As for the barbs themselves, I think, something like those of a fishhook might be good or perhaps, sections of razor blade, tiny metal shards all along the whip length, they would do some quite brutal damage in and of themselves, as soon as I can find a bullwhip for sale somewere, which shouldn't be too hard, I will start work on making the razor-edged people-shocking version

[Corvettaholic]

Well as opposed to shelling out cash for a bullwhip, for experiments sake get an old blanket and tear it into strips. Or old clothes, socks, whatever. Twist them into one big long strand and you have something to experiment with!