7 Ridiculously Over-The-Top Modifications to Deadly Weapons
If we know our audience, most of you are armed right now.
And at some point you'll be sitting in your armory, drunk off your ass, sorting through your various weapons of death and thinking, "You know, I should really combine some of these to make one super weapon."
Well, you're not the only one. That's how we wound up with...
The Chainsaw Bayonet
Starts With:
The AR-15, an assault rifle which apparently just isn't good enough on its own.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Attaching a fucking chainsaw to the barrel. In theory, this provides the AR-15 with a viable melee option in the event that every round in the magazine has missed its intended target. Cracked feels at that point, the chainsaw might as well be an enchurrito.
"This is a very good idea!"
To try to prove us wrong, the creator has posted his weapon on YouTube:
Yeah, it should be noted that while the chainsaw bayonet seems to be ideal for dispatching a band of marauding pumpkins, it would probably not fare as well against enemies that can move and/or shoot back.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
Gears of War nerds trying to carve FENIX into the side of their mom's hatchback after pulling an all-nighter drinking Mountain Dew game-fuel out of their collectible Halo 3 Slurpee cups.
The Wasp Knife Air-Shooting Knife
Starts With:
A nice, sharp diving knife, designed for hate-killing the living shit out of octopi, sharks, other divers, Snorks and Ursula the Sea Witch.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Adding a gas canister in the handle to inject a basketball-sized wad of freezing cold gas out of the blade, and directly into the object of your stabbing aggression. It's labor-saving technology!
The knife's official website cites many practical applications for the gas-inflation technology, such as floating carcasses to the surface to avoid attracting more predators and punishing disobedient children in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Also, if you hate watermelons, you can stab AND blow it up. Finally.
What the website doesn't explain is why anyone would shell out $400 for what amounts to a pointy can of Dust-Off, unless the army finally read all those letters we sent them and are preparing to fight the greatest threat our nation has yet faced: terrorist sharks.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
James Bond. In Live and Let Die, Bond dispatched Kananga with a shark-gun pellet to the face, inflating him like a balloon until he exploded. We imagine MI6 buys this Wasp Knife shit by the gross.
The TAC-15 Machine Gun/Crossbow
Starts With:
The crossbow, favored weapon of Wookiees and Renaissance Faire nerds everywhere.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Not being a standalone crossbow. The TAC-15 is designed as an "upper" attachment for the AR-15, a space generally reserved for the portion of the gun that fires bullets.
It appears that the AR-15 is kind of the gun-dweeb's version of Linux: All kinds of modifications can be made to it, but most of them make about as much sense as tying your dick to a roller skate. The AR-15 also happens to be a semi-automatic rifle, which, by the way, is what we invented specifically so we wouldn't have to use crossbows any more.
It's like this, but for weapons.
The website for the TAC-15 offers no logical reason to put the crossbow on top of an assault rifle body, and the best we can come up with is if you also strap a laser or railgun underneath it you'll be set to do battle wherever your time machine lands you.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
NRA members who also enjoy RenFair.
Note that if cheating at Civil War reenactments is your thing, please see the combination AR-15/black powder musket.
The AA-12 Fully Automatic Shotgun
Starts With:
The ever-reliable shotgun.
Become Ridiculous By:
Making that shotgun fully automatic and adding fucking grenades.
Yes, the AA-12 is fully automatic, capable of firing 300 rounds per minute, and yes, those rounds can be super-sized to grenades. Military Police Systems, who owns the patent on the AA-12--hereafter known as "GigaShotgun"--has been trying to sell the weapon to various militaries for 18 years without much success, presumably due to the divisive nature of their slogan "You can never have too much shotgun."
Apparently even the most militant dictator realizes that should the need to buckshot five people a second arise, an emergency escape submarine would probably be a better investment.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
Currently there is but one user of the AA-12: the HAMMER Remotely-Operated Weapons System, which is a completely autonomous robot designed to be attached to either unmanned ground or aerial vehicles. In other words, it gets driven around by other robots. This puts us roughly one coffee-spilling intern away from the wrath of an unstoppable death machine.
Sleep tight.
Knife Guns
Starts With:
The knife, the sharp object designed for stabbing people when they piss you off.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Adding firearms, and in one memorable case, brass knuckles.
Ever since guns were invented, manufacturers have been swirling firearms and knives together like peanut butter and chocolate into ridiculous, half-baked morsels of wretched stupidity. One example is the G.R.A.D. RS1 Knife, which packs five .22 caliber rounds into the handle and apparently is so incredibly unsafe/illegal it doesn't even have an official site, only a collection of YouTube videos:
Predating this masterwork is the Elgin Cutlass Pistol, a flintlock/bowie knife hybrid evidently designed for Final Fantasy characters to use on the Oregon Trail.
In 1837, the U.S. Navy outfitted Charles Wilkes, commander of the United States Exploring Expedition in the South Pacific, with 150 Elgin Cutlass Pistols for use on the voyage. This was possibly due to an intense dislike for Charles Wilkes.
Finally we have this gem, designed by an unknown gunsmith in the 19th century--presumably after losing a substantial wager.
Yes, it's the knife/gun/brass knuckles combo. If someone managed to actually kill another human being with this Seussian marvel, a new word would have to be invented to describe the cause of death (we suggest "fistablasting"). Why the inventor thought brass knuckles would succeed after the abject failure of both gun and blade has been lost to the mists of history, and to a more significant degree the mists of alcoholism and shame.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
Video game characters. Yeah, when we mocked the gross impracticality of the Final Fantasy Gunsword in a previous article, we had no idea people ever actually owned the things.
Bomb-Covered Bombs a.k.a. Reactive Material
Starts With:
Your standard bomb. You know, that really explosive thing you drop on people when they piss you off.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Turning what holds the bomb into a bomb.
The U.S. military is always figuring out ways to kill people more efficiently, and the very blandly named "Reactive Material" is one of their latest ideas. It also happens to redefine the dick move.
Reactive materials work by sticking a nasty explosive compound, such as powdered aluminum, into a coating with something really good at keeping it from blowing the hell up, such as Teflon.
The resulting mixture is inert, which means you can pretty much abuse the stuff with a jackhammer and not run the risk of vaporization. The fun doesn't start until the bomb is actually dropped.
The explosion of the bomb triggers the powdered aluminum mixture, which is stuck to the bomb's external casing. So whereas before a target surviving the initial blast would simply be torn apart by huge chunks of jagged metal, thanks to RM those jagged chunks of metal are now on fire and occasionally exploding. This provides the tactical advantage of making the enemy more dead.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
The M-388 "Davy Crockett" Nuclear Bazooka
Starts With:
The weapon that practically defines overkill: the bazooka.
Becomes Ridiculous By:
Sticking a nuclear warhead on it.
The Davy Crockett already seems like the most counter-intuitive weapon ever invented--a short-range, radioactive bomb for soldiers to use on the ground amounts to little more than a "self destruct" button--but it gets a lot more stupid with the details.
Designed during the Cold War as a defense against Soviet ground expansion in Europe, the weapon had absolutely zero accuracy. Its three-man firing team would just kind of point it towards the nearest battalion of Commies and pull the trigger, hopefully not while downwind. The M-388 only had an effective firing range of about two and a half miles, and laid a cloud of lethal radiation for a quarter-mile around its blast radius.
So, odds were pretty good the three-man firing crew wouldn't get to use their bayonets made out of uranium.
Really Will Only Be Used By:
Duke Nukem. Or, possibly the Brotherhood of Steel.
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For more weapons that will make you shit your pants (some literally), check out 6 "Non-Lethal" Weapons That'll Make You Wish You Were Dead.
And visit Cracked.com's Top Picks because we actually have an TAC-15 equipped with a railgun, and we know how to use it.
