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george's patton once said wars may be fought with weapons but they are won by men that may
have been a quote about the honor skill and metal of soldiers but it can also apply to the use of
these impractical weapons which seem more likely to help you lose a fight than to win one
number 10. davy crockett portable nuke it's hard to imagine there's anything you could do
to a nuclear weapon to make it more dangerous than it already is but there was some effort put into
making them more portable which in turn made them frighteningly impractical to use the davy crockett
portable nuclear device was about the smallest warhead that could be produced while still being
able to actually create a fission reaction the tiny warhead looked like a watermelon with some
fins on the side of it and it was incapable of being fired from traditional artillery like
mortars or other such devices instead it had to be fired from some kind of recoilless gun that meant
a team of three soldiers had to be deployed to use it on the battlefield and with a range of under
three miles they were terribly close to wherever the warhead was going to detonate the risk of
exposing yourself to radiation was of course extremely high luckily soldiers never had to
endure the risk of exposure to radiation because after the davy crockett was test-fired in nevada
it was determined to be so terribly inaccurate that there was no practical way that it could be
used in battle number 9. urumi if you've ever seen the indian weapon known as a narumi then
it's definitely worth your while to take a look at it the basic concept is pretty simple it's
like a whip only instead of a long strap of leather you're wielding a flexible piece of
very sharp metal and just like a whip if you're not skilled in using it it has the likelihood to
snap back and cause serious damage to the person wielding it rather than whatever's being targeted
a combination of whip and sword symbol versions just feature one single flexible four or five
foot length of metal held by a handle that has a knuckle guard and a thumb guard the metal is
sharp enough to cut flesh more complicated versions exist with much longer blades and
multiple blades attached word is that there was even one kind that had 32 different blades these
additional blades made wielding it that much more dangerous number 8. flamethrowers no one really
needs to be told what a flamethrower is these days they've appeared in enough different kinds
of media by now that you've no doubt seen them and have a basic understanding of how they work
a tank fuel is trapped to the back of a soldier who then has some kind of spraying device hooked
up to it that will pump out the fuel and ignite it creating a constant stream of terrifying hellfire
as effective as a flamethrower is not just as a weapon but a method of scaring the daylights
out of your enemies it's also a horrible danger to person wielding it to start with the moment a
soldier sets foot on the battlefield and lights up a flamethrower they are literally pointing a light
at themselves that any enemy can see and target aside from making yourself vulnerable to enemy
fire the fuel tank itself was just as vulnerable and it could easily be hit by an errant bullet and
explode it's been said that the average lifespan of a flamethrower operator on the battlefield
was about five minutes this was due in part to the obvious target they made of themselves and
the fact that a flamethrower fuel tank would be completely drained in mere seconds leaving
the flamethrower operator mostly defenseless 7. duck's foot pistol a dark's foot pistol
was what was known as a volley weapon when in use you'd be able to fire more than one shot and
potentially take out several targets at the same time if you don't think about it at all and you
don't look at the picture of it it sounds really good however the design was remarkably impractical
and unless you managed to get four people to stand in front of you at exactly the same spot where the
barrels were pointed it was essentially useless as a weapon that's not to say there would be no such
cases where such a weapon would be impractical if you were somehow alone against a rush of enemies
coming at you from the same direction you could possibly kill four of them if they were grouped
together it's just that what are the odds ever going to be that that happens and you have one of
these guns handy never mind how you might holster the damn thing 6. double barrel cannon even though
modern firearms have come a long way the double barrel shotgun is still regarded as a powerful
and serious weapon if you want a character to look badass in a movie give him a double
barrel shotgun and there was probably some of the same thinking behind the development of the
double barrel cannon back in the day if a normal cannon is fearsome then surely a double barrel
cannon would have been awe-inspiring on paper the idea of a double-barrel cannon sounds promising
the reality was not quite the same however the initial test proved disastrous because the plan
was to fire two cannonballs that were attached to a chain creating a destructive scythe-like device
that would spin and cut through everything in its path unfortunately if both cannonballs don't fire
at exactly the same moment what you end up doing is destroying the cannon and anyone around it
word is there is one test fire of such a cannon during the civil war the chained balls tore up an
acre of cornfields before the chain broke with one of the cannonballs flying off into a field
and killing a cow realizing the cannon was going to be too hard to control it was never used again
you can still see it today at the athens-clarke county city hall in georgia now we'll get back to
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right now let's get back to today's video number five schwerer gustav there's no denying that the
shfera gustav was a massive weapon in an effort to invade france adolf hitler was looking for a way
to penetrate the fortifications of the maginot line the solution that they came up with was a
railway-mounted cannon the likes of which no one had ever seen before the gun was 12 meters high
47 meters long and weighed 1 350 tons it could fire 10 ton shells from a barrel that was 30
meters in length they called it the great gustav as potentially devastating as the gustav was it
became utterly impractical to make frequent use of it aside from the fact that it was so big it
was easy to spot from the sky which made it a target it was also too heavy to travel on normal
railway tracks the germans had to build reinforced tracks ahead of it whenever they wanted it to go
somewhere which would have been impractical during normal times let alone during wartime in order to
prepare the cannon for firing several hours worth of calibration was needed for each shot that meant
they could only shoot a maximum of 14 rounds per day it also took four days to fully assemble
the cannon once it was in place 4. sticky bombs during the second world war nearly a quarter of a
million sticky bombs came into service for british forces the bomb was essentially a container full
of nitroglycerin held inside an extremely sticky bird-lime solution in a glass bottle while they
were never officially okayed for military use obviously they saw a lot of action on the field
the initial plan was to throw them at a distance so the glass would break and the bomb would
adhere to a target but well that proved to be very inaccurate a simpler and more efficient method was
to walk up to your target and smash the sticky bomb on the side of it there was enough explosive
to actually get through the armor of some smaller tanks the big problem with the sticky bomb was the
fact that it was so sticky it had been noted that during training more than one soldier got a sticky
bomb stuck to themselves and had a seriously hard time getting it off while holding onto the handle
to ensure that it didn't blow them up there's at least one story of a soldier who got it stuck to
his pants and was only rescued by a fellow soldier pulled the man's pants off bomb and all number
three apache revolver history is rife with what can best be described as novelty guns like the
duck's foot pistol that we saw earlier but perhaps the most impractical of all the weapons of this
sort was the apache revolver clearly meant to be three weapons in one with a knife blade a gun and
a pair of brass knuckles it was arguably useless when used as either of these items let alone
trying to use all three together there was no trigger guard for the revolver which meant
that the risk of firing it randomly was always present the blade was attached very loosely and
ran the risk of breaking off and for whatever reason the brass knuckle portion of the handle
was designed so small that only someone with extremely small hands could even hope to get their
fingers through the holes the gun had no sight and essentially no barrel either it would have been
effective a very close range and that's about it because of the lack of trigger guard you would
have to store it unloaded for safety reasons and loading it meant removing the entire cylinder so
really this was a truly ineffective weapon if you needed to use it at a pinch or at a distance or at
all 2. novgorod scottish shipbuilder john elder thought that you could make a ship wider in the
beam with a shallower draft so that it could carry bigger guns while not requiring a lot more power
to make it move the imperial russian navy really liked this idea and the result was a creation of
a warship that was a nearly perfect circle the idea was that the circular design would offer
the greatest displacement of water and the least amount of armor because of the short
hull you could have giant guns on the deck and with so little side exposed you wouldn't need
to worry about heavy armaments as a bonus if a shell hit the side because it was a circle odds
are it would deflect off anyway and with no keel it could patrol extremely shallow waters when the
ship was finally built with a diameter of 100 feet no one foresaw the major problem that was going to
hold it back because it was a circle the steering was almost non-existent if you wanted to turn the
ship around it took about 45 minutes to do so and that was on calm seas in a storm or in a combat
situation the ship would have been utterly useless also because of the hull it had an incredible
amount of drag so the end result was a ship that was incredibly slow and very hard to steer 1. blue
peacock mine it's hard to overstate how silly the blue peacock mine was in order to appreciate what
a bizarre idea this weapon was you have to know that involved the use of live chickens to keep it
warm the way a blue peacock mine was supposed to work was that a 10 kiloton nuclear device was to
be buried on the north german plane there they would stay hidden underground until the soviet
army invaded the mines would be detonated either by tripwa or after an eight-day timer expired the
point was to destroy all the military facilities in the area and prevent the soviets from occupying
the space because of both the destruction and the nuclear contamination because of the part of
the world this was in there was a fear that the cold temperatures the mines would be subjected
to could be a hazard buried underground the electronics could potentially get too cold to
function properly so the method of preventing this was to have live chickens included inside the mine
they'd have a supply of food and water enough to keep them alive for about a week and their body
heat would be able to keep the mind working when this information was first declassified people
have assumed it was an april fool's joke since it was on april the 1 2004. however it was no joke
the chicken mine was an all too real idea so i really hope you liked that video if you did please
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you