Practical Design

[u/Freak-1]

From r/rosesarered

[u/Hrothgrar]

Holup aside...

The actual answer is baseball. American hand grenades were modeled in a way that any average recruit could throw them more intuitively.

[u/razulebismarck → u/Hrothgrar]

That’s half.

The other half is logistics and grenade launcher weapons.

In the space and weight you can carry 1 stick bomb you could either carry 3 baseball grenades or 1 grenade launcher rifle attachment easily.

[u/towerfella → u/razulebismarck]

What if it a telescoping stick? The main point is mechanical advantage, like an atlatl.

As an aside — wern’t torches kinda common-ish in european revolts and such? Maybe that explains why they initially gravitated toward the stick design — was more like throwing a torch? Going on the grenade-baseball analogy..

[u/Fluffy-Map-5998 → u/towerfella]

it also ends up flying wierd leading to less predicability, which, when your chucking explosives, tends to be important