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Usually video game themed weapons look like shiny plastic, perfect for cosplay but not likely to put fear in the hearts of all who oppose you. But these arm blades, inspired by the video game Bloodrayne, look like they can do some serious damage.
From their stainless steel construction, to the rubber pistol grip handle that ensures you don’t lose your grip when the red stuff starts flowing by the gallon, this is the perfect backup weapon when you’re surrounded by Nazi zombies and need to make a big hole real fast.
(note: you should read the hilarious review left for this item on Amazon, which has been included in the Super Punch article)
Link –via Super Punch
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"Guns
don't kill people, bullets do" or so the saying goes, but 59-year-old
Verlin Q. Alsept was a bit unclear of the concept that you still need
that gun:
Rather the fellow who entered a Family Dollar Store in Dayton on Tuesday threatened the cashier with a bullet — a single .38 caliber round he pulled from his pocket.
The 59-year-old man asked the cashier for all the money in the cash register. Unfazed by the threatening bullet, she declined, and he left the store empty-handed. A nearby private security guard at the Westown Shopping Center — alerted by the cashier — quickly ran the man to ground as bystanders called police.
Link - via News of the Weird
Krystopher Sapp takes antique gun parts and reassembles them into fanciful sculptures. This is “The Privateer,” and it looks the part. It’s made from the remains of a Savage, a M1 Garand, an ’03 Springfield, an AR-16 and a M-16. His exhibit, “When a Good Man Goes to War,” is on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles until January 29.
Link -via My Modern Met
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For a year and a half, the 401st Air Expeditionary Group of the United States Army Air Force wreaked havoc on Nazi Germany. You may know that these brave men often decorated the noses of their bombers with cartoonish or saucy images. But they also personalized their jackets with similar works of art, often marking down individual bombing runs. You can find a gallery of pictures of these jackets at the link. Content warning: some NSFW images.
Link -via American Digest
There’s a good reason why this Spitfire is painted pink. It helped its pilot hide in the clouds. Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how:
To make sure they were rarely seen from above, these planes were painted to fly just under cloud cover. Although the planes were ideally meant to fly at sunset and sunrise, when the clouds took on a pinkish hue and made the plane completely invisible against them, they were also useful during the day. Clouds are pinker than we give them credit for. We perceive them as white against the sky because the particles in the sky scatter blue light, sending some of it down towards us and letting us see the sky as blue. Clouds scatter every kind of light, and against the intense blue sky look whitish gray. But their color depends on what kind of light gets to them, and what they are floating next to.
Although we see the sky as a radiant blue, the particles are actually filtering out a lot of the blue light that gets down to the earth’s surface. When the blue light is scattered, a good deal of it goes right back up into space, which is why the atmosphere of earth glows blue in some pictures. This filters out a good deal of the blue that gets to the clouds. The clouds scatter what they have, which is a spectrum of light with at least some of the blue filtered out, shifting the overall light ever so slightly towards red. Add to that the fact that the water droplets in clouds can diffract light at different angles, and the clouds are often rife with pastel shades of pink, orange, and green. They look white compared to a glowing blue sky, and a quick glance leaves people with the impression that they are white, but a long look should reveal this shifting, if minor, shades. A light pink plane is safer against them than anyone would expect.
There’s a video at the link that demonstrates the effectiveness of this camouflage scheme.
It is not unknown in the annals of history for warring powers to continue to trade with each other, on a limited basis, during active hostilities. But journalist Adam Hochschild found a remarkable episode of it during World War I and wrote about it in his new book To End All Wars. Tyler Cowen, an economist, summarizes:
My favorite section details how the British responded when it turned out they had a drastic shortage of binoculars, which at that time were very important for fighting the war. They turned to the world’s leading manufacturer of “precision optics,” namely Germany. The German War Office immediately supplied 8,000 to 10,000 binoculars to Britain, directly intended and designed for military use. Further orders consisted of many thousands more and the Germans told the British to examine the equipment they had been capturing, to figure out which orders they wished to place.
The Germans in turn demanded rubber from the British, which was needed for their war effort. It was delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.
Cowen offers a few possible explanations for this transaction at the link.
Link | Amazon Link | Photo: Imperial War Museum
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more drones! Thankfully, the US Navy has developed the Cicada Mark III disposable drone. Technicians have equipped the Tempest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with two of them. They’re about a foot long, but can fly up to eleven miles and land within fifteen feet of their targets.
Link -via Geekosystem | Photos: US Navy
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You can buy a pen like this, but the more ambitious tinkerers among you may try to make their own. Instructables user Mrballeng shows you how to make a reliable click ballpoint pen with two .30-06 cases. Find photos, written instructions and a lengthy video at the link.
Link -via Make | Maker’s Website
Comments Off The greatest problem with using a puncture-based weapon against zombies is that it may become lodged in the skull of your undead foe. That’s a problem that Jörge Sprave, maker of the sawblade-firing slingshot, the pump-action slingshot, and the Gatling-gun slingshot has now solved. His weapon includes a standard slingshot on one end, and a mace on the other that’s paired with a heavy spike. If your spike gets stuck in a skull, pull the lever to push it out.
-via Make
What is this odd helmet-like object? It’s an armored car built by Venezuela. Machinists at Puerto Cabello Naval Arsenal constructed the Tortuga (turtle) over a Ford 6×4 commercial truck chassis and usually armed it with a Vickers 7mm machine gun. They built only twelve because the Tortuga was hard to steer, poorly ventilated, and offered limited visibility to crewmen. This is one of twelve weird tanks and armored vehicles highlighted at Oobject. Check out the rest at the link.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo: William A. Kirk
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Batman would have been proud. In 1942, California’s state defense force experimented with bat-like wingsuits for soldiers. The ultimate goal, as explained by the magazine Mechanix Illustrated, was to create an airborne unit that could be deployed with them.
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Launched in 1972, the Kiev was once the pride of the Soviet Navy. But in need of cash, Russia and Ukraine sold it and another carrier called the Varyag to China. Although the Varyag is at sea, China has converted the Kiev into a luxury hotel:
This is the Kiev, currently anchored in the Chinese port of Tianjin. Once she was the flagship of the mighty Soviet navy’s Pacific fleet. Now she’s available for business retreats, intimate getaways or simple relaxation.
That’s because the Chinese have bought the aircraft carrier and transformed her into a floating luxury hotel.
The Kiev will stay permanently docked. Much as a Soviet-era sailor might resent the indignity, Kiev won’t go back out to sea. She’ll entertain guests and clients at anchor, a bizarre museum to a different country’s naval power.
View a slideshow of the hotel’s fancy interiors at the link.
Slideshow and News Story -via DVICE | Photo: Xinhua
Comments Off Built in the 1950s, this bunker in Wiltshire could house and feed 4,000 people for three months. The United Kingdom designed it to house the government if the worst happened during the Cold War. Watch this video tour of its facilities and make an offer. It’s up for sale.
Link -via Boing Boing
In the 1970s, during the heights of the Cold War, more than 1,000 engineers
worked on a project
so secret that they couldn’t tell their wives and children decades
after it was over.
In September 2011, the project – a series of spy satellites so advanced
that it could see objects about 2 feet wide from space (mind you, this
was in the 1970s before the ubiquity of computers so the satellites were
built with slide rules), was declassified and with it, the stories of
the men who kept their secret for 45 years:
"Ah, Hexagon," Ed Newton says, gleefully exhaling the
word that stills feels almost treasonous to utter in public.It was dubbed "Big Bird" and it was considered the most
successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971
to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles
of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast,
panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential
foes. The film was shot back through the earth’s atmosphere in buckets
that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes
snagged them with grappling hooks.The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking.
The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission
blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took
to their graves.
Helen O’Neill of the AP has the fascinating story: Link – via Boing Boing | More at SPACE.com
What happens when a top-secret government project is canceled? The details are not quite clear, but it’s hard to keep a secret when prototype parts are sold for scrap and end up on eBay.
Anyone interested in top secret aircraft will know of the A-12 Avenger II, which was cancelled in 1991 and remains at the centre of ongoing litigation to this day. The stealth attack aircraft, developed by General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, was terminated before the first airframe had been assembled. But the latest twist in this still-shadowy tale comes in the form of an A-12 canopy appearing on eBay – and it looks like the real thing.
See more pictures at Urban Ghosts Media. Link
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Man, Christmas seems to come and go faster each year! These ads harken back to a simpler time, a time when cowboys were all the rage, and gun ads were allowed to appeal to kids during the holidays.
It’s a nice bit of nostalgia, and a few of the pics in this gallery are definitely chuckle worthy. Just don’t shoot your eye out!
Link –via BoingBoing
Well, of course. Did you think that he was going to use an alphorn? Those things take up too much room in a sleigh.
The tune becomes more recognizable about halfway through the video.
-via View from North Central Idaho
A lot of wars get left out of our history books because they left no changes in maps or the balance of power. However, some of these lesser-known wars lasted for hundred of years! There are also declared wars in which no one was killed, and, in the case of the Paraguayan War, hundreds of thousands killed for no apparent reason.
The President of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, was a huge admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. He fancied himself a skilled tactician and excellent commander, but lacked one thing, a war. So to solve this problem, in 1864 he declared war on Paraguay’s three surrounding neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The outcome of the war? Paraguay was very nearly annihilated. It is estimated that 90% of its male population died during the war of disease, starvation, and battles with enemy armies. This was perhaps one of the most needless wars in history since Lopez had almost no reason to declare war on his more powerful neighbors.
Read about ten of these obscure and bizarre conflicts ay Listverse. Link -via The Daily What
Comments Off YouTube user Hickok45, who we’ve seen previously seen carving a jack-o’-lantern with a Glock, knows how to use tools in unorthodox ways. He starts out trying to chop down a small Christmas tree with a heavy knife but then adds a unique “attachment” that gets the job done.
There are thousands of tiny soldiers locked in eternal combat in Valencia, Spain, housed in the Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo (museum of the little lead soldiers).
What started as a small collection belonging to Museum Director Alejandro Noguera’s father has become a collection of over one million, with 85,000 on display in diorama scenes straight out of history. You can see more of Derek Workman’s beautiful photos of the historical tableaus at the link below.
Link –via BoingBoing –image credit:Derek Workman for Smithsonian Magazine
Image: Sir
EDW/Flickr
Protecting Santa is a tough job, so Santa's Defense Forces need heavy-duty weapons like this candy cane small arm that is standard issue on the North Pole:
The core of the system is the Candy Cane Carbine (C3), a modular candy cane small arm that can be tailored to a variety of applications. For more serious threats to Santa, especially those hardened against small arms fire, there is the weapon of last resort, the Mark 12 Tenenbaum Launcher.
Link - via Laughing Squid
This amazing custom rifle, more of a hand cannon really, fires modified .50 caliber rounds and looks badass punching giant holes in targets. Here’s how this rifle puts the WTF in firearms:
The cartridge, named the .700 WTF (“What The F…”) and is made by fire forming a .50 BMG brass case, trimming it to 3″ in length and then sizing it. The round is loaded with a 1132 grain paper patched .700 lead cast bullet.
The rifle, with just a 16.25″ barrel, can push the 1132 grain of lead up to 2300 fps. Thats 13,000 ft/lbs of energy, right up there with the .50 BMG and far exceeding the .700 Nitro Express. The cast lead bullet has enough energy to pass clean through a 1/4″ steel plate.
It’s a must-have when you come face-to-face with an angry dinosaur, or Godzilla on the rampage. Hit the link to check out a video of this bad boy in action.
Link –via Geekologie
The Comp Bullet is a intriguing invention by an Italian firm of the same name. The bullet feature vents that, the company claims, increase velocity and reduce noise. Steve at The Firearms Blog writes:
According to the company, these vents reduce friction by allowing gas to lubricate the bullet as it passes through the barrel and then act as a muzzle brake as the bullet exits the barrel. They apparently also reduce smoke, increase velocity (a rocket effect as they leave the barrel) and reduce muzzle flash. In other words, they are miracle bullets. [...]
As for the muzzle brake and “rocket” effect claim, the physics is beyond me. I cannot work out how gas venting out of the bullet for a brief moment in time would have any effect on recoil. Surely because the bullet is not fixed to the gun any muzzle brake effect would slow down the bullet not the recoil of the gun?
Do you think they would work?
The Scottsdale (Arizona) Gun Club invites you to have your picture taken with Santa Claus ..and his machine guns. Other firearms are available for your photo shoot, and you can even try out the machine guns! Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath
This guy is known for making some serious head choppers. Artisans like Korehira Watanabe are fading into history, as their creations are no longer in demand and the inherent secrecy of their craft makes passing on the legacy virtually impossible. Watch this master in action and see the skills that may someday be lost to antiquity.
–via BuzzFeed
Everyone joined in the war effort during World War II, helping out however possible stateside. Disney artists decided to join the cause by creating various forms of propaganda, like this surreal animated short, meant to show how food will help the Allies win the war. Using morbidly obese Americans to “black out all of Berlin” never seemed like a valid wartime strategy until this short came out!
Want to take your pillow fights to the next level? These pillow weapons were designed with you in mind! Guaranteed to cause less bodily harm than a real scimitar, or lightsaber for that matter, they will make you fee like you’re armed with a real weapon when the pillows start flying. Now go forth and plush the heck out of each other!
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The US Army wants a means of determining if mysterious objects may be improvised bombs. Specifically, they want to be able to fire a chemical pellet at an object and tell from the color of the splatter if the object is an explosive:
The system would work by loading up projectiles with materials that advertise the presence of explosives — sort of like a litmus test for bombs — and firing them at the suspected bombs. Picture paintballing, but with a target that might really kill you. [...]
The paintball idea is comparatively low-tech. The Army notes that the technology to detect explosives with paints and powders is already a commercial reality. They point to Raptor Detection Technology’s SAFE-T Spray, which turns orange on contact with certain explosives, as an example.
Link -via GearFuse | Photo: Flickr user VisitLakeland
Mental_floss is marking 11/11/11 by posting lists of 11 things all day long! It’s also Veterans Day, so what better time to learn about some heroes that you might not otherwise know, like eleven women of various nations who served in World War II. One was Nancy Wake, a New Zealand native who was living in France when Germany invaded.
Wake immediately went to work for the French resistance, hiding and smuggling men out of France and ferrying contraband supplies and falsified documents. She was once captured and interrogated for days, but gave no secrets away. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, Wake managed to escape to Britain in 1943, and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence agency. After training with weapons and parachutes, she was airdropped back into France -as an official spy and warrior. Wake had no trouble shooting Nazis or blowing up buildings with the French guerrilla fighters known as maquis in the service of the resistance. She once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.
Read what happened to Wake and ten others in this list of eleven at mental_floss. Link
Colonel Doolittle (second from left) and his flight crew.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.
After Japanese air power struck a stunning tactical blow to the U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, a retaliatory strike against the Japanese was a priority for president Frankin D. Roosevelt, who challenged his general staff to devise a way to attack the heart of Japan.
PAYBACK PLANS
By mid-January 1942, a carrier-based air strike against Japan was accepted as the most plausible solution to FDR’s request. When Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of Naval Operations, was asked to evaluate the possibilities, he passed the idea to General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, who then asked Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle to work out the details with the Navy. In the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, service rivalries took a back seat to striking a blow against the enemy.
B-25s specially modified for this mission are ready to go.
After preliminary test flights, the North American B-25 Mitchell bomber was selected for the mission. Eighteen B-25s flew from their Oregon home base to Indiana for modifications. The range of the unmodified Mitchell was only 1,300 miles on a favorable day, so additional internal tanks were added to allow for more fuel. At the last second, 10 five-gallon cans of gas were stowed in the radio operator’s seat. The heavy guns were removed, along with the highly secret Norden bombsight, whose classified technology couldn’t fall into Japanese hands. In the planned scenario, the Norden bombsight wouldn’t have been very accurate at the low altitude that would be flown anyway, so it was replaced with a simple metal aiming sight. Aircraft radios were also removed, since the mission would be executed under strict radio silence. These changes allowed each aircraft to carry just over 1,100 gallons of usable fuel, which under typical flight conditions would allow for a range of 2,400 miles. After all of these radical modifications, four 500-pound bombs barely fit into the bomb bay.
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