Obscure Military Weapons

[TorontoReign]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedgley_OSS_.38

This glove looks like it is telling us to go fuck ourselves.

The Sedgley OSS is a single shot, break action, smoothbore .38 Special pistol which was designed by Stanley M. Haight for the Naval Intelligence Office. It was meant as a covert operations and assassination weapon in the Pacific Theater. It was mounted on the back of a cowhide glove; the gun would be usually worn along with a long-sleeved coat to hide the weapon until it was used. Due to its appearance, it was commonly nicknamed "Glove Pistol" or "Glove Gun".

The trigger is a bar parallel to and extending past the barrel. After being loaded and cocked, the weapon is fired by the shooter making a fist and pressing the trigger against the target's body. Between 52 and 200 are believed to have been manufactured. Each Sedgley was issued only as one glove and not as a pair.

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I consider myself relatively well informed on military weapons and events, but this one has gone unnoticed until now, sparking the fire that created this thread. Post your favorite obscure military weapons and get a free no-prize courtesy of Bethesda.

It doesn't matter the era so all of you ancient history buffs can play ball.

 

[Hassknecht]

That's really cool.
I really like the Koborov Device 3b and the TKB-408, two very (retro)futuristic soviet assault rifle prototypes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TKB-059
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TKB-408
The Device 3b/TKB-059 has three barrels, which makes it 300% awesome.

Triple-barrelled soviet bullpup assault rifle. Just epic.
The TKB-408 is more conservative, looking more like a really cool bullpup-version of an AK47.

I can imagine that the magazine would interfere a bit with the pistol grip when reloading, but still, it looks fantastic.
The most brilliant thing the russians ever built was this laser pistol, though:

It's a laser pistol for cosmonauts, to be used to disable satellite sensors and cameras.
Obviously, laser weapons are useless even to this day, but the design is quite interesting. It's flash lamp pumped, and it uses a pyrotechnical flash bulb that is disposed after each shot. That handily gets around the problem of having to supply a ton of electrical power to the device and apparently gives enough power to take out cameras. I guess the laser is either a Nd:YAG laser or a Ruby laser, since these were the most common types of lasers at the time and they can be flash-pumped. And the NIR wavelength of the Nd:YAG would be enough to kill cameras.
Oh yeah, they made a revolver version, too.

Actually, a Stanford professor built a little Ruby laser pistol back in the 60s out of a toy gun as a demonstrator.

 

[Crni Vuk]

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

Really hard to top the Davy Crockett for something that would feel right at home in Fallout. (Someone, somewhere thought a nuclear mortar was a good idea and that will baffle me forever and ever)

 

[Crni Vuk]

Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s.


The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear mines in Germany, to be placed on the North German Plain and, in the event of Soviet invasion from the east, detonated by wire or an eight-day timer[1] to:


... not only destroy facilities and installations over a large area, but ... deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination ... (...)

Really hard to top the Davy Crockett for something that would feel right at home in Fallout. (Someone, somewhere thought a nuclear mortar was a good idea and that will baffle me forever and ever)

Chicken power
One technical problem was that during winter buried objects can get very cold, and it was possible the mine's electronics would get too cold to work after some days underground. Various methods to get around this were studied, such as wrapping the bombs in insulating blankets. One particularly remarkable proposal suggested that live chickens be included in the mechanism. The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so. Their body heat would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature. This proposal was sufficiently outlandish that it was taken as an April Fool's Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on 1 April 2004. Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, "It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes."[4]

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

Oh, England. You so silly.

 

[Hassknecht]

If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.
Speaking of stupid and british, here's the Panjandrum:

Rocket-propelled rolling mine, because why the fuck not.

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.
Speaking of stupid and british, here's the Panjandrum:

Rocket-propelled rolling mine, because why the fuck not.

Gotta admit, seeing that thing barreling at you would probably induce soiled undergarments.

 

[Hassknecht]

Gotta admit, seeing that thing barreling at you would probably induce soiled undergarments.

Absolutely.
The Germans had something similar in the form of the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel, which was a planned combination of plane, rocket-powered helicopter, and pure terror.

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

SPINNING THINGS ARE TERRIFYING
MORE SPIN = MORE TERROR

Wonder how the Germans planned to LAND that thing

 

[Hassknecht]

I guess like it started, on the tail.

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

Backing up a car is hard enough for some people. Backing up a jet-powered planecopter from hell would have been an interesting experiment.

Wonder why the designers didn't go for 4 main airfoils.