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Sunday 28 July 2013

TOP 10 HORRIFYINGLY DANGEROUS WEAPONS


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Top 10 Horrifyingly Dangerous Weapons
By Karl Smallwood,
Toptenz, 27 July 2013.

Humanity has spent almost its entire run as a species trying to figure out the optimal way to murder each other. Ever since the first guy sharpened a stick and pointed it threateningly at another guy’s groin, someone has thought, “what if I put some buffalo poop on the end of that stick?”

Nowadays, we rarely need buffalo poop to get our point across, as we have weaponry that can literally turn a person into a pink stain. Here’s our list of the ten most terrifying weapons man has at his disposal.

10. Hollow Point Rounds

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Hollow point rounds are basically bullets with a hollow point instead of a lead one, in case you were wondering. Though taking something out of the bullets seems like an odd way to make them more dangerous, this small change turns them into something so dangerous, they’re banned in actual warfare. This is because, unlike rounds which are designed to leave clean trails through a human torso, hollow point rounds refuse to wipe their feet, drink all your booze, and don’t flush your toilet the second they’re invited into your body.

The bullets, rather than quietly lodge themselves somewhere and wait to be removed, explode and fragment, leaving an exit wound that look like Bruce Lee’s ghost that tried to uppercut your ribs apart. That is, if they ever leave your body at all. Since all of the bullet’s energy goes into exploding within your ribcage, they rarely leave a human body. Which actually makes them an ideal choice for law enforcement, since they have less risk of hitting another person through over-penetration. So yeah, don’t mess with cops. They have bullets so dangerous and painful the army isn’t allowed to use them. [Video]

9. AC 130 Spectre

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The AC-130 Spectre (that big-ass plane from the Call of Duty games) probably isn’t going to be a new piece of technology to most of the people reading this, due to its aforementioned inclusion in a popular video game series. However, it’s the sheer amount of fire-power this thing possesses, combined with how little any given person can do about it, that we think will be surprising to people.

If you’ve played the games, you no doubt know that the AC-130 gunship is able to rain down death from a mile in the sky, literally hitting enemies through windows, and even when they’re within spitting distance of a friendly combatant. Along with this frankly insane amount of firepower it has at its disposal, the AC-130 also packs something colloquially known as “Angel Flares,” a combination of chaff and flares which make the AC-130 all but invincible to all known lock-on technology.

But here’s the worst part: they’re known as angel flares because, as you can see, they form the image of a huge fiery angel when they’re released. Which means that, at one point in time, it’s entirely likely a guy once looked up, saw the image of an angel in the sky, and was hit in the face with a cannon a second later. So yeah, unless your day is bad, you now know that there’s someone out there who has definitely had a worse day than you. [More] [Video]

8. Dragon’s Breath Rounds

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With a names like “dragon’s breath,” this already sounds like something you’d rather not be on the wrong end of but, as with all weapons, it’s way more dangerous than it sounds. Dragons Breath rounds are shotgun shells that, rather than being filled with buckshot, are filled with magnesium shards which, upon hitting air, immediately set on fire. This means that someone out there looked at a shotgun, a device capable of turning your face into raw meat, and decided that it needed the ability to shoot fire.

Dragon’s breath rounds are understandably illegal as hell, and have seen virtually no use in combat. As such, we’ve no idea what they’d actually do to the human body, though this YouTube video gives us a pretty good idea:


Then again, we can’t imagine being hit with fiery shards of white hot metal is good for the complexion, so we’re going to assume that these things are fairly dangerous.

7. Metal Storm

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Metal Storm, along with being a badass band name, is the name given to perhaps one of the most terrifying weapons systems ever developed. Why? Well, Metal Storm is capable of firing a million rounds per minute. That’s 16,000 rounds, per second!


If that in itself isn’t scary enough, the Metal Storm system fires so many bullets in such a brief amount of time, into the exact same location, that it’s likened to firing a javelin. A javelin made of bullets. This gives the system superior armour-piercing potential, since if one bullet isn’t enough to break through, the other 16,000 probably will. Because sometimes, you just need to make sure something is dead.

6. Depleted Uranium Rounds

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Depleted uranium rounds sound exactly like the kind of thing you’d want to stay right the hell away form. Even with the “depleted” bit thrown in there, these things still sound worse than wasps made of anthrax.

In a nutshell, depleted uranium rounds are exactly what you’d expect: rounds with a small amount of uranium crammed in them, because the pointy metal thing that flew at you at 400 MPH wasn’t dangerous enough. It’s not what these rounds do to the human body that makes them terrifying though; it’s what they do to armour. When depleted uranium rounds are in the hands of your enemy, the last place you’d want to be is inside of a tank. This is because it’s “self-sharpening,” which means when the round hits a hard target, it immediately hardens and burns through anything stupid enough to get in the way; the second it hits air, the round instantly catches fire and then explodes.

When such a round hits a tank or APC, the vehicle’s fuel, and even its ammo, all catch fire and explode too, usually killing the crew at the same time. Because apparently, the world needed a bullet capable of exploding other bullets. [Videos]

5. AA-12

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The AA-12 is a shotgun, but not just any shotgun: it’s a fully-automatic shotgun. As in, it fires shotgun rounds at a rate of 300 per minute. If being hit by a shotgun isn’t a scary enough thought as is, imagine being hit by six shotguns, all within the space of a second. That’s essentially what an AA-12 is.


But here’s where things get silly as, with all shotguns, the AA-12 is able to accept multiple ammo types, ranging from buckshot all the way up to high-explosive grenades. In case your eyes glossed over to avoid the insanity of that last sentence, the AA-12 is a shotgun, that can fire grenades. 300 of them, in a minute. We don’t think we need to describe what such a weapon is capable of doing to the human body, since we’re pretty sure everyone reading this has already seen a puddle.

4. Barret M-82

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The Barret M-82 anti-material rifle, AKA the Barret 50 Cal, is a sniper rifle that fires bullets bigger than a standard battery faster than the speed of sound, because someone out there needed to show the Duracell Bunny how things are really done. Now, sniper rifles aren’t anything new, but it’s the sheer range of the Barret that earns it a place on this list, since the weapon is easily capable of taking your head clean off from a mile away, through a solid concrete wall.

Neither of those two things is in anyway hyperbole; for one, the Barret has an effective range of 1800 meters. And two, the sheer size and speed of the projectile gives it enough kinetic energy to literally rip apart a human being. For a second, imagine talking to your friend, only to see his head literally explode. Then a few seconds later, you hear a gunshot. Imagine the fear you’d feel knowing that you were fighting an enemy who possessed the ability to make people’s heads explode from a mile away, through walls. We’re pretty sure there’s not even a member of the X-Men who can do that. So yeah, step it up, comic books. [Video]

3. WP Grenades

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WP grenades, also known as white phosphorus grenades, are grenades that, funnily enough, throw out a cloud of white phosphorus, which is really, really bad, in case you weren’t sure. How bad? Well a single fleck of burning phosphorus is easily able to burn not only through a person’s skin, but it’ll continue burning until it reaches the bone itself where - you guessed it - that sucker will keep burning until you crap out your own spine to end the pain. No wonder this stuff is banned; anything that metal should be limited to Iron Maiden album covers and Bloodstock only.

The worst part? The grenade has an effective range of 35 meters. The average human can throw a grenade 30 meters, meaning this grenade, by design, could melt the bones of the person throwing it. [Video]

2. Kinetic Bombardment

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Kinetic bombardment is what you get when you ask scientists to create a device capable of making Mother Earth miss a period. The appropriately named “Rods from God” are envisioned as several foot-long tungsten rods that could, theoretically, be dropped anywhere on Earth by an orbiting satellite.

Now we’re gonna drop some science. Kinetic bombardment, as the name suggests, uses no explosives. It uses only the kinetic energy achieved by the rods falling to Earth. Despite this, the weapons theoretically could have a payload equal to that of a nuclear bomb, without any of the nasty nuclear fallout, since they’d be able to reach speeds upwards of Mach 10.

Though this device is largely theoretical, don’t you feel safer knowing that somewhere out there, a scientist on the taxpayer’s dime worked out an equation about what would happen if he dropped a telephone pole-sized rod of metal from space onto someone’s melon? Presumably, he fist-pumped the air when he realized how radical the results would be.

1. Thermobaric Weapons

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Right off the bat, thermobaric weapons are probably one of the most powerful things we humans have at our command. A single bomb has the capability to vaporize an entire city block, but it’s what happens to the people outside of that range that makes this weapon really scary.

To the unlucky people who are near a thermobaric weapon when it goes off, but not close enough to be immediately incinerated, they’re destined for one of the most painful deaths imaginable. You see, along with producing an insane amount of heat, thermobaric weapons also produce a massive shockwave that, upon hitting a human being, can cause their lungs to explode! We’re just going to quote this part because:
What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue…it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.
We’re pretty sure if they called these weapons “lung exploders,” we’d end war overnight, out of pure fear. [Videos]

Top image: AC 130 Spectre (source)

[Source: Toptenz. Edited. Top image and some links added.]


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