ever heard about the machine gun mounted on a scooter or the guided
missile piloted by kamikaze pigeons join us today as we peer anxiously
through the fog of war and unveil the craziest military machines ever made
zuba meaning bison in russian the largest military hovercraft in the world has been scaring the
bejesus out of coastal communities since the early 90s able to ferry three fully laden tanks
10 armored personnel carriers or 140 paratroopers it has a crew of 33 and comes equipped with five
gas turbine engines each generating 12 100 shaft horsepower it zooms along at a lively 55 knots 63
miles per hour thanks to these gargantuan 5.5 meter propellers when it gets in a scrap zuba
can deploy twin faster 4m surface-to-air missile launchers and two ak-630m gatling
guns each rocking six pokey 30 millimeter barrels zuba's capabilities also include dropping c mines
not to mention two ogon 22 round 140 millimeter rocket launchers for vaporizing beach defenses
it's also quite happy charging around on land maybe give it a wide berth the rye boulder quinn
what's cooler than a gun 12 guns the frankly preposterous ribolderquin aka organ gun was a
medieval war machine first deployed by edward iii of england during the hundred years war 12 small
caliber iron barrels are arranged in a row the idea being that even if one barrel misses one of
the others will probably find the mark no doubt effective as a deterrent terrifying armor-clad
french knights on their ponzi white horses the ribalda quinn nonetheless had a major drawback
you could only fire it once after that some paul sap would have to painstakingly muzzle load all
dozen barrels by which time your sneering foe will have either retreated or brutally murdered you or
possibly both the vespa 150 tab a bazooka mounted on a scooter what could go wrong the vespa tap was
a short-lived wheeze dreamt up by the french army in the 1950s essentially a regular civilian vesper
with an 82-inch gun sticking out the front they were designed to be sneakily parachuted in behind
enemy line the plan was to drop the vespers in pairs one would have the giant gun and another
some additional ammo and a machine gun tripod the nippy pair could scoot to an advantageous position
assemble their kit anti-tank gun and raise merry hell the bazooka was able to vent propellant
gasses out the back so there was little in the way of recoil so at a pinch it could even be
fired with the scooter in motion sounds mad but 600 were built by a company called the ateliers
de construction the motorcycle automobiles between 1956 and 1959. london class ekranoplan in an ideal
world we'd all be a lot more familiar with the ekranoplans these so-called ground effect vehicles
are basically planes designed to zoom along at ultra low altitudes around 20 meters it's
a lot more efficient than high altitude flight and faster than ground level transport and capable of
carrying massive loads across oceans but they're also dangerously prone to colliding with things
not least unexpected waves anyway in the 1980s the soviet union built the lond class military akrama
plan the largest and most ambitious ekranoplan ever under the exciting code name project 903
it could carry 100 tonnes roughly the same mass elon musk is trying to yield into orbit aboard
starship the plan was for it to blow up warships perfect for the job as it was fast and capable of
flying under enemy radar the ekranoplans had six missile launchers ranged along the back of the
fuselage each capable of launching a p270 mosquito guided missile just one of which could sink an
aircraft carrier by the way the ekranoplan's eight jet engines could carry it a thousand
miles on a single tank of fuel but its 242 feet length and 144 feet wingspan was too ungainly
plus the inherent danger of flying at low altitude meant this idea never quite got off the ground the
molodyns missile train as the cold war wore on the soviet union was confronted with a problem the us
knew exactly where its nuclear icbm silos were and was contemplating a pre-emptive strike where could
the soviets hide their precious missiles on a train of course with ninety-nine thousand miles of
railway lines across the land for shunting around these so-called molodets a creepy fully launched
capable nuclear battle station the idea was the pentagon could never disarm the ussr and that was
a vital edge lots of clever engineering went into multijets the soviets at the time preferred liquid
fuel propulsion for their rockets but that was no good as it was dangerously volatile if the train
journey happened to be bumpy and bear in mind this 23.3 meter long molodes missile packed the
equivalent force of 900 hiroshima bombs fitting that in a train car required some innovative
workarounds like this space-saving inflatable nose cone fortunately it's the only part that ever blew
up the pigeon guided missile way before all that in 1943 the us had an entirely different problem
to overcome how to accurately guide missiles inside hostile nazi territory step forward the
unflappable bf skinner a renowned psychologist and inventor he'd noticed while pottering in
his garden that pigeon seemed pretty good at navigating so he proposed recruiting three pigeons
who'd be trained to recognize military targets from the air and peck furiously at a target cables
attached to the plucky bird's heads would steer the missile and hey presto victory except for
the pigeons who would die in a coup for skinner the national research defense committee awarded
him 25 000 to prototype his invention which apparently had some limited success in trials alas
no such missile was ever deployed in the field big dog you'll have seen those lovable boston dynamics
robots grinding and backflipping to upbeat chart hits well imagine if the army had one
except they did big dog was intended as a 21st century successor to your classic wartime pack [
__ ] carting heavy supplies and ammo across tricky terrain in support of human soldiers somehow they
were deemed too noisy for combat and cancelled by top brass fear not another us firm called ghost
robotics has only gone and put a great big gun on the back of its robot dog the spur or special
purpose unmanned rifle blocks an effective range of 1 200 meters 30 times optical zoom
on the site and thermal camera for targeting in the dark think that's scary just imagine what the
chinese are probably working on in secret what do you think know any other mental military machines
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