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Ever wish you could be a real assassin like Altaïr or Ezio? Then try your hand at making this handy assassin blade, but just don’t lose your hand in the process.

Via The Daily What

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We’ve featured slingshots by German CEO Jorg Sprave before, but this amazing pump-action slingshot was just too awesome to ignore. True, it might not fire machetes, circular blades or any of the other horrendously deadly ammo he has used in other machines, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be hit by one of these shots.

Via Geekosystem

It’s easy to look at this picture and wonder, “why is this umbrella so special that it is locked in a glass case?” But that’s before you learn it was a brilliant Soviet spy weapon:

So it was that one day, while Markov was walking to his car in London, he felt a sharp bite on his thigh. When he turned around he saw nothing, only a man who fumbled briefly with an umbrella before running off. The next day he became deathly ill, and died, as one is wont to do when becoming deathly ill. To this day no one has ever been tried for the murder.

It’s one thing to be a hero who kills hundreds of enemy soldiers in battle, but to become a hero without even using a weapon -now that’s impressive. Cracked has a great list of heroes who fought the good fight without ever handling a gun. Take, for example, Bill Millin who played bagpipes at the battle of Normandy.

So, he ordered his piper, Bill Millin, to go ashore on one of the main landing points for the invasion of Normandy and wail on a set of bagpipes. Once on the beach, Millin calmly walked up and down at the water’s edge, playing while carnage exploded and people died all around him….Millin later talked to some of the Germans who had been captured to ask why they never shot him, and discovered it was because they thought he had gone mad.

The other four fighters are just as impressive.

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The Empire’s answer to Ash Carter should have seen it coming. It’s embarrassing enough that the galaxy’s supposedly most fearsome weapon was felled by crappy duct work.

But it was entirely predictable. A project so big and complex, Ward writes, will invariably stretch the oversight capabilities of acquisition staff. In this case, it led to manufacturing delays and prevented the Empire from realizing that one of its thermal-exhaust ports was a de facto self-destruct button.

Moreover, for all the expense poured into it – $15.6 septillion and 94 cents, to be precise — the Death Star is destroyed twice, and in its two iterations only ever manages to get off a few shots.

Ward says that droids are a much better bargain for any military budget. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, but can be related to some actual military spending projects. Read more about it at Wired’s Danger Room blog. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

Previously/Related: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction

Humans might be one of the only animals to use tools as weapons, but Crack has a great list of animals born with weapons built right into their bodies -like the Giant Amazonian Centipede’s ninja skills, which allow him to catch and eat whole bats. Read about the rest at the link.

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Swords are some of the most interesting and continually chivalrous weapons ever made. That’s why even today in movies the bad guy will often wield a sword rather than a gun to make the action that more intimate and “sexy.” But how were ancient swords originally created?  

The sword is the perennial symbol of empires, knighthood, chivalry and fantasy. But it’s also one of the world’s most ancient technologies, connected with breakthroughs in metallurgy that would change the world. There are even some types of ancient swords so strong that modern science still can’t determine how they were made.

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Over on Mental Floss, Miss C has a great round up of tiny artworks by extremely talented artists. My personal favorite is the tiny working gun seen here, created by Michel Lefaivre. I can’t help but wonder how much damage this little thing could actually do.

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If you are going to build a “good” weapon you need to make sure that it effectively does what you want it to do; a gun that hits the enemy and a tank that protects your troops (also while hitting the enemy). However it seems through history there have been some pretty ill-conceived weapons. This includes something called the Bob Semple Tank which was built by looking at a picture of a tank.

Besides having the least-threatening name ever bestowed upon a tank, the Bob Semple barely qualified as one. It was little more than a farm tractor — and due to several design flaws, it was about as useful as one in a war zone. The designers based it on an American tractor tank, but the problem was that they had no blueprints, no building materials outside those found in a farm and no idea what the hell they were doing. They literally designed the Bob Semple by looking at a postcard of the original tank. By that logic, half of us should be able to reconstruct the Eiffel Tower.

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From the folks at Vice Magazine comes this mini documentary on the Pakistani Homemade Machine gun market. It gives an in depth look (with photos and video) of how arms are created, bought and sold in that part of the world.

The bulk of Pakistan’s homemade automatic weapons and explosive devices are forged, built and sold at Darra Adamkhel, a village located near Peshawar where main street is an open-air arms market.

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The US military is making ever more use of unmanned fighters and intelligence
gathering aircraft. The great thing about this type of aircraft is that they can loiter over some far away battlefield for a long time, and if they are shot down, no lives are at risk. The Being Phantom Ray Stealth UAV made its first flight this week and is on its way to becoming the first stealth UAV in the arsenal. The Phantom Ray is the size of a fighter aircraft, and its maiden voyage took it to 7,500 feet and a speed of 178 knots.

“The first flight moves us farther into the next phase of unmanned aircraft,” said Craig Brown, Phantom Ray program manager for Boeing. “Autonomous, fighter-sized unmanned aircraft are real, and the UAS bar has been raised. Now I’m eager to see how high that bar will go.”

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Neatoramanaut Senor Mysterioso (featured previously) did something neat that you would never have thought of in a million years. He crocheted an entire gun store! The pistols in the display case, the ammo boxes, the weapons hanging on the walls -all made of yarn! This was his Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis project. See details in his Flickr set for the installation. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user SenorMysterioso)

In the beginning, the German U-boats were hardly a threat to the world’s largest naval powers. Even after the U-l’s dreadful collision during its first test during a training exercise, the German engineers stayed hopeful. Germany now had a powerful weapon.

The Lusitania, carrying war supplies for the war effort, had already been warned prior to its maiden voyage. In fact, the German embassy posted a full page advertisement in the New York Times, warning Americans that German U-boats would be in the water and may attack due to the wartime cargo aboard the ship. Against warnings, the Lusitania sailed. On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat, killing close to 1200 people, 124 of which were Americans. Rumors serviced that blamed German U-boats for the second explosion, after the Lusitania was already sinking. Further investigations, however, proved that the explosion was due to the ammunition aboard Lusitania.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The bats eventually had a successful test, although the bats themselves wouldn’t consider it so. Link -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Furryscaly)

(Image by ngbiblog)

Recycling is a potent concept. Many regard it as simply the repurposing of objects in order to prevent waste, but in the right hands, it can be a process that charts all sorts of powerful aesthetic and cultural shifts. The “Throne of Weapons” and “Tree of Life” are two pieces of “recycling” that do just this. Made from decommissioned AK47s and other instruments of death from the Mozambique civil war, they take the physical remains of war and transform them into the collective hopes of a nation traumatized by violence and cruelty.

(Image via wikimedia, by drow male)

Both objects are the product of the imaginatively entitled “Transforming Arms into Tools” project. But despite its rather functional name, the scheme, set up in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique, is consistently creating some of the most the most poignant “recycled” art in recent memory. These guns began life in the poisonous smelting factories of Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea or Portugal, before being put to bloody use in the dense jungles of Mozambique’s coastal lowlands. Now, under the initiative of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, they are crafted into icons that carry a nation’s hopes for peace.

(Image by hjallig)

Under the guidance of the Christian Council, teams from the project (known as Transformação de Armas em Enxadas, or TAE) cut up the guns and re-mould them into sculptures: an elaborate, if disturbing chair, and a tree dedicated to ‘life’. The chair alone is composed of guns that originated in seven different countries, pointing up the resolutely unresolved issue of international arms trade. The resulting artworks are not only hauntingly beautiful for the casual observer, but also draw together many intersecting currents for the people of Mozambique.

(Image by James M Thorne)

In one sense, we might think of them as cathartic: they perform a cleansing or purging movement, ridding us of painful emotional excess, not unlike the original intentions of Greek Tragedy. They give outer form to Mozambique’ s collective surplus of sorrow, left to stew long after the firing stopped, a form of relief that prevents such pain from eating its people up, or worse still, erupting into further violence. Conversely, they also enable us as viewers to experience their pain in a controlled form, fostering a sense of profound empathy for the victims of such a tragic conflict, perhaps an implicit form of advice that we should never let this happen again.

(Image by hdptcar)

At another level, they are also signs of peace that point the way to happier times. Just as these sculptures recycle guns that brought misery into art that brings pleasure, so they recycle the memories of those who perished, into a new feeling of humanity, brotherhood and charity. They serve as reminders of what came to pass, and of why we should strive to avoid human conflict in the future. In this sense they embody a change, and one for the good, that we hope is sweeping through the villages of Mozambique and other war-torn countries the world over.

(Image by rvacpinta)

The pieces were acquired by the British Museum in 2005 and spent the next few years touring the major cities of Britain, garnering huge applause. Now on display in the museum, they are definitely worth a trip to London we think; these moving sculptures may be recycled monuments to death, but crucially, also to life and a peaceful future.

Thanks to author Chris Ingham Brooke of Environmental Graffiti.

If you’ve ever watched a movie and wondered what kind of gun that is, or if you have argued with a friend about movie weapons, here’s the perfect resource. The Internet Movie Firearms Database (imfdb) has the answers! You can look up movies by title, actors, television shows, the weapons themselves, and even video games. Pictured is Johnny Depp with a M1911A1 in the 2001 film Blow. Link -via Transbuddha

Recent advances in both laser and fibre optic technology now make it possible to detect tiny particles of different substances. The EPSRC-funded project team is developing sensors which incorporate these technologies and that are small enough to be carried on the 30cm-long robot, in order to detect the specific ‘fingerprint’ of illegal substances at much lower concentrations than is now possible.

When placed inside a steel freight container, the ferret will attach itself magnetically to the top, then automatically move around and seek out contraband, sending a steady stream of information back to its controller.

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You can get a better look of the cases by visiting the artist’s website. The site’s in French, so if you speak the language you’re in luck. But if you’re like me and speak only two languages – English and bad English – there are plenty of pretty-shiny designs and pictures to look at.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Just because they wear colorful, puffy pants, it didn’t mean that these medieval martial artists weren’t deadly. Paul Hector Mair documented the various gruesome weapons used by fighters during medieval times in his manuscript De Arte Athletica.

You can browse the entire manuscript online (it’s 600 pages long), but if you’re short on time, BibilOdyssey has some choice illustrations: Link

This very interesting 14 minute video demonstrates the functionality as well as the effectiveness of Germany’s infantry weapons during WWII. Listed is a description of the Karabiner 98K, MP40 Machine Pistole, the famous Luger, the Stielhandgranate or better known as the Potato masher both MG34 and MG42 machine guns and more.

The video appears to be a vintage color film that was probably used for training purposes between 1939-1945 (unconfirmed)

Link: YouTube

Here is a huge list of some of the world’s largest and strangest tanks ever built. You’ll need to scroll down a bit to see them all.

Link: Ramugita (deleted – shame on this blog for copying)

Original Links: Part 1 and Part 2 at Dark Roasted Blend