Sticky Bomb

He's in a sticky situation.

"You take a standard G.I. sock, cram it with as much Comp B as it can hold, rig up a simple fuse, then coat the whole thing with axle grease. Now when you throw it, it should stick. It's a bomb that sticks, a 'sticky bomb'."

— Capt. Miller, Saving Private Ryan

If there's a live bomb thrown nearby you, you have a chance to grab it and throw it away. However, if a sticky one is involved, you better run away really fast. And if it's stuck on you...

Usually adhesive is involved in making the bomb sticky, though things like nails and magnets can be used too. Expect there to be problems when someone tries to throw such a bomb but gets it stuck on his/her person.

Truth in Television, as during WWII, the British army developed a sticky bomb that could be used if Nazi Germany did a land invasion. As one can imagine, the combination of "really sticky container" and "bomb" was as unsafe to the user as the enemy. There was also a naval mine that used powerful magnets rather than glue.

A Sub-Trope of Trick Bomb. Compare with Insert Grenade Here. See also Sticky Situation. Frequently used in a game of Grenade Tag. Some variations of Satchel Charge may be considered this.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dead Leaves has sticky bombs in the form of lipstick. Pandy gets a whole bandolier of them.
• Oyecomova from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run has the power to create grenade pins with clock heads attached to any surface (And we mean any surface). If these pins lose contact with the surface they were created on — which they will, if there's nothing applying pressure to them — then they explode.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00: When not in his Humongous Mecha, Setsuna F. Seiei frequently uses plastic bombs against nonhuman targets.
• Naruto: All Deidara's explosives are clay and thus inherently sticky, but the insectile ones will also chase and cling to their target.

Comic Books

• Atomic Robo: The namesake fighters of "Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the Pacific", who have jetpacks, sometimes put sticky bombs with timers on enemy planes while they're in the air.

Films — Live-Action

• The warehouse fight scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Batman throws (seemingly magnetic) small explosives that stick to the automatic weapons of Lex Luthor's mooks and triggers them, which gets him rid of said weapons and causes confusion, allowing him to go mano-a-mano with the mooks.
• Battle of the Bulge (1965): Infantrymen slap plastic explosive sticky bombs onto attacking German tanks.
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Nick Fury has successfully escaped a large scale ambush when the Winter Soldier makes his introduction, casually striding into the middle of the road and firing a grenade that slides along the road under Nick's SUV, magnetically clamps onto the undercarriage, and explodes.
• Captain America: Civil War: Crossbones hurls a bomb that attaches to Captain America's shield, forcing him to hurl his shield into the air before the explosion could harm anybody.
• A Colt is My Passport: Kamimura defeats the bad guys by diving into the foxhole he dug ahead of time and throwing a magnetic bomb up and into the underside of their car as they zoom over him.
• In Cloud Atlas, Hae-Joo uses sticky bombs to dispose of some Corporacy aircraft.
• In The Dark Knight, Batman uses a sticky-bomb launcher to blast his way into Lau's Hong Kong office, and later to stop the Gotham City SWAT team from killing the Joker's hostages. Notably, in this case the adhesive and the explosive appear to be the same thing, a ball of sticky goo with an electronic timer embedded in the material.
• In The Fifth Element, Dallas uses a sticky grenade on the cruise ship. A little different than most, as it uses large spikes to impale in things, versus magnets or adhesive material.
• For Your Eyes Only: As they're about to leave the wreck of the St. Georges with the ATAC system, Bond and Melina are attacked by one of Kristatos's goon who's wearing a diving suit with claw hooks. Bond uses the self-destruct explosive that was intended for the ATAC and attaches it to the goon's suit, who can only hear it ticking down till it detonates.
• Hudson Hawk: A short-range launcher shoots rockets with time-delay fuses that stick to their targets.
• Max Manus. Max Manus and his fellow Norwegian commandos rehearse for a raid by attaching magnetic limpet mines to the side of a British ship, but the mine won't stick to the hull. They joke that it will work fine on the night, which fortunately turns out to be true.
• Once a Thief: In the vault shootout, Joe flings an adhesive explosive device at a mook. Said mook retaliates by headbutting the explosive away, only to have it stuck on his forehead. Boom.
• Saving Private Ryan has improvised sticky bombs made of plastic explosive stuffed into socks and covered in axle grease used against German tanks. As Captain Miller notes, it is in fact in the GI handbook for World War 2 soldiers. The results are... mixed.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): At one point, Robotnik sends an armed robotic vehicle after Sonic and Tom, which spawns a new, smaller vehicle when it's demolished, which spawns another, etc. The final form is a small, sticky bomb, which gets stuck to Sonic's hand. When he finally manages to dislodge it, the explosion knocks him unconscious.
• In Stalingrad (1993), German infantry in foxholes have to wait for tanks to drive over them so they can stick magnetic bombs on their undersides. Some of the soldiers come to sticky ends.
• In the climax of Superhero Movie, Hourglass throws one of his bombs at Dragonfly, who immediately catches it and throws it back, or more accurately, gets it stuck to his hand (and eventually his crotch while trying to get it off his hand).

Literature

• In The Dreamside Road, Orson uses magnetic variants of this trope to destroy a Liberty Corps drop ship, during the Curb-Stomp Battle he delivers in the derelict graveyard.
• In "Justice by Fire", Able Team sets up an ambush for a Salvadorean death squad. One of them sees he's triggered a grenade Booby Trap and runs for his life, not realising the grenade is bouncing after him because it's hooked on his clothing via a monofilament line and a fish hook.
• In the Babylon 5 book Legions of Fire, Vir of all people pats a villain on the head. The villain finds something stuck there just before Vir triggers the remote.

Live-Action TV

• Blake's 7
  • In "Warlord", Servalan sticks a magnetized bomb to the airlock as she leaves Warlord Zukan's spaceship. Later Zukan's mook spots the bomb and is ordered to remove it. The moment the mook detaches the bomb from the wall, Zukan blows him out the airlock. Unfortunately the bomb explodes at that moment, inflicting fatal damage on the spaceship.
  • In "Headhunter", Dayna attaches bombs to a bridge and the head of a killer android to make sure it won't come to life again. As the blooper reel shows however, the actress had trouble getting the sticky bombs to stick!
• In the season 1 finale of Burn Notice, Michael and Fiona build one by plastering tile adhesive over a mop wrapped around a C4-containing piece of Tupperware.
• An episode of Dad's Army has the Home Guard training with sticky grenades. Hilarity Ensues.
• Doctor Who: In one of his more coldblooded actions, the Fourth Doctor sticks a magnetic grenade to the Graff's back and lets him get blown up in "The Ribos Operation".
• In the first episode of Power Rangers RPM, Dillon fashions a makeshift sticky bomb by sticking a grenade to a wet lollipop. Unrealistic? Yeah. Awesome? Hell Yeah!
• Star Trek: Enterprise: in the finale for Season 3, the Enterprise away team has magnetic bombs to help destroy the Xindi superweapon. A Xindi reptillian gets a nasty surprise when Archer attaches a bomb to the back of his armor.
• The villains in the Wonder Woman episode "The Deadly Dolphin" plan to use a trained dolphin to attach a magnetic bomb to an oil tanker to drive up prices.

Music

• In the video for Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock", The Neidermeyer teacher tries to throw a grenade at the rock band, but instead ends up throwing the pin and winds up with the grenade stuck to his hand. He dives into the high school's swimming pool to try defusing it, but it explodes and Neidermeyer bangs his head against the diving board.

Tabletop Games

• Limpet Mines from GURPS Ultra-Tech work this way. The supplement even came up with good reasons to stick them to yourself.
• Warhammer 40,000 has Krak Grenades, Meltabombs, EMP Grenades, and various similar weapons to give ordinary infantry a chance against tanks. Not to be confused with ork stikkbombs, bombs-on-a-stick they use as grenades.

Video Games

• The Batman: Arkham Series has an odd version with its Explosive Gel, in which case the "sticky" is the bomb. Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate has a device which is functionally identical to The Dark Knight's Sticky Bomb launcher.
• Batman: Vengeance has "Electric Charges," remote-controlled bombs that can be fired from the Bat-Launcher and which stick to any surface. Detonating them unleashes a blast of electricity.
• Proximity mines/grenades in BioShock are secondary ammunition type for the grenade launcher and stick to objects and surfaces and detonate when enemies are nearby. Although the mines don't stick to enemies themselves, the objects they stick to can be picked up with Telekinesis and thrown at them.
• Blood II: The Chosen has Bombs in place of the prequel's TNT bundles. Whether it has a remote, timed, or proximity-based activation, they're all sticky and will attach to walls, floor, and ceiling alike.
• In Blue Print from Bally/Midway, you can accidentally pick up bombs while scouring the houses in the village for parts to your machine. Once you pick up a bomb, it sticks to you and must get it to the pit to get rid of it or else it will explode.
• Borderlands has various sticky bomb mods that can be attached to your Protean Grenades, with the expected result. They can be tricky to use, however, since they stick to anything, even the ground. Due to the enemy AI in the game, anyone who sees the grenade will then run away from it, making the grenade pretty much harmless. However, if you get close enough to stick a grenade onto somebody, they will very entertainingly flail around randomly screaming something to the effect of "AAAAAH GET IT OFF ME" before exploding.
  • In Borderlands 3, all Torgue guns can fire shots that stick to enemies and explode upon reloading, with the damage stacking the more shots you land on a single target.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty 2 has the same improvised sticky bombs as Saving Private Ryan above in the Russian campaign for anti-tank work.
  • Finest Hour, 3, and World at War have the British No. 74 sticky bomb. It has a smaller blast radius than regular grenades, but it sticks to whatever it hits, be it a wall or another player, and can't be thrown back.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops have Semtex grenades, which loudly beep for about two seconds before detonating on whatever - or whoever - they first impacted with and stuck to. However, by charging the enemy in your last few seconds of life, you can often take the guy who threw the bomb with you, or at least ensure said guy doesn't get more than one kill. It should be noted that Semtex in real life is more akin to C4 rather than being scrunched into a ball, having some electronics wired onto them and forcibly called "grenades"; in fact, one level of Black Ops actually does have it be used in the same manner as C4, using a retextured version of the C4 model and being detonated remotely rather than via a timer.
  • All of the post-WWII-set games also have blocks of C4, which are thrown at shorter distances and can't stick to enemies but can still be stuck on walls, ceilings and detonated at will to ambush enemies. In Call of Duty 4 and the first Black Ops they're treated as separate pieces of equipment (allowing you to carry two of each, but having a slower time to equip the detonator before you can toss them), but in every game afterwards, they act as an actual substitute for lethal grenades.
• Company of Heroes lets you buy an upgrade for Riflemen that allows them to throw sticky bombs. They are only to be used against vehicles, though.
• Contagion has the IED, a block of C4 attached to an old Nokia phone. It has a bigger blast radius than the hand grenade and can wipe out dozens of zombies, but can't be thrown — instead, you attach it by contact to whatever surface you want, retreat, and call the phone to detonate the C4.
• Deep Rock Galactic: The Gunner can have a set of Sticky Grenades in his arsenal, which is useful when his usual enemies are swarms of bugs that crawl on cavern walls and the ceiling.
• Dishonored: the grenade can be upgraded with spikes to stick onto things.
• In Dissidia Final Fantasy, Laguna Loire has this as one of his attacks. It can stick to terrain or enemies and will explode a few seconds after contact.
• Earth Defense Force 2025: The Air Raider's signature weapon is a gun that fires limpet projectiles that attach to enemies and other surfaces before being set off.
• IEDs in Far Cry 2 and both C4 and mines in Far Cry 3 can be stuck onto walls or vehicles by standing right up next to them before placing them, though the game never explicitly tells you this. In Far Cry 4 you can also purchase an upgrade to let mines and C4 automatically stick to whatever you toss them at.
• The Machinist class in Final Fantasy XIV has the Wildfire skill, which has the Machinist toss a sticky bomb on the target and blows up a few seconds later. While the bomb is active, dealing damage to the enemy will have the bomb also do more damage when it goes off. The player can also choose to detonate the bomb manually before the timer expires, which is helpful if you know the target is close to death or is about to go off screen.
• First Encounter Assault Recon, in the spirit of GoldenEye (1997) and Red Faction, has the M77 remote bomb that can be stuck to surfaces and enemies alike; unexploded ones can be picked back up. In the sequel, proximity mines also stick to walls.
• Fortnite has the Clinger, a plunger-bomb that can one-shot anyone with no shields. And if you get hit with two...
• Foxhole has sticky bombs that can be placed on walls, vehicles, and buildings, but they can't be thrown from range.
• Gears of War features four kinds of grenades that can be attached to walls with a melee attack to act as proximity mines, or can be attached to enemies to invoke this trope.
• In Ghost 1.0, the Grenade secondary weapon fires bouncing grenades that stick to the first enemy they touch.
• GoldenEye (1997) and Spiritual Successor Perfect Dark: all mines (timed, remote and proximity) can stick to walls. Perfect Dark added the ability to stick them on Shield-less people too. Having one on you makes a Dead Man Walking because there is no way to survive the explosion.
• Goldeneye Rogue Agent has the "Detonator," which works a bit like Batman's goo-gun in The Dark Knight. Since the game takes place in the somewhat-fantastical James Bond world, the explosion sends your foes flying but leaves them otherwise intact—no missing legs or anything.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there are remote-detonated satchel charges that when thrown stick to any wall, vehicle, mission objective or innocent bystander. They can't be thrown nearly as far as grenades and molotovs, to compensate.
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, Luis Lopez can use sticky bombs to kill foes and set surprise traps.
  • Reintroduced in Grand Theft Auto V, with the ability to be either thrown or placed on a vehicle or surface, then detonated remotely. They also have the special property of blowing open armored car doors when placed directly on them, allowing you to steal the contents. Sticky bombs can be tossed both on foot and when riding a vehicle.
• The Magnusson Device in Half-Life 2: Episode Two, which is sent to you by mini-teleporters, and you have to launch it at Striders and quickly shoot the bombs with any of your weapons while making sure nothing nearby can destroy those bombs first. Needless to say, it's introduced in one of the hardest combat sequences of the series. You're going to need these bombs, because they're a One-Hit Kill on striders.
• Halo: Plasma grenades and Spike grenades, the former thanks to a coating of searing hot plasma, the latter thanks to... well, the spikes. There's also the Sticky Detonator gun in Halo 4, which fires a more conventional version of this. Another Day At The Beach, a short film that came with the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack depicts an ODST trooper getting a plasma grenade stuck to his helmet. He quickly yanks the helmet off and flings it away before it explodes.
  • The two types of grenades actually work differently in how they bounce, too. Plasma grenades stick only to living things and vehicles; they'll bounce right off walls and floors. Spike grenades stick to anything they touch.
• Henry Stickmin Series: In "Stealing the Diamond" during a police chase, Henry can try to use a sticky grenade against the helicopter chasing him. However, it gets stuck to his hand and explodes, killing him. The fail screen wonders how such a grenade would even work.
• The Glyph of the Ancients in Hexen II works like this for two characters:
  • When the Assassin deploys a Glyph, it flies straight until deployed, then when it hits a surface it attaches and deploys a tripwire in the opposite direction. Anything that touches the chain triggers the explosive.
  • The Paladin simply lobs the Glyph like a grenade. It attaches to whatever it hits, including enemies, and detonates with a growing shockwave a fraction of a second later. Until he gets the Axe, these are his only ranged attack that doesn't rely on the Tome of Power.
• inFAMOUS: Cole has the ability to throw balls of lightning that can stick and explode like Halo's Plasma Grenades. There's even a trophy for sticking enough grenades to Mooks, called "Oh, I See You've Done This Before".
• One of weapons in Jak X: Combat Racing. Collecting Red Eco power up may give you Magnetic Mines, which releases three spiky mines that attach to the next car that drives nearby. It is possible to get rid of them before they blow up by jumping. With Dark Eco meter fully charged though, they become a standard mine that oneshots anyone driving on top of it.
• C4 charges in Killing Floor 2 stick to any surface or enemy you toss them at. There's no explanation for it here, but you don't really need one when a single one can tear apart a Fleshpound, and three or four can take out half the Patriarch's health.
• Lost Planet 2 has the Disc Grenade and the aptly named Gum Grenade.
• Mass Effect 3 features the Scorpion heavy pistol which launches sticky-bomb grenades. Garrus is jealous ("How do I not have one of those?"). Regular ol' stickies can also be thrown by the Infiltrator class.
• MechWarrior: Living Legends had all three types of Battlearmor grenades being capable of sticking to any object. C8 explosives worked like regular grenades and dealt huge amounts of damage to Battlemechs after a relatively long fuse, Inferno grenades burst into a massive fireball after only a second to kill enemy battlearmor (and Aerospace fighters), and NARC grenades stuck to enemies and cause friendly missiles to home in on the NARC. All grenades were removed in 0.9 and replaced with a powerful short-range high explosive missile launcher due to unsolvable bugginess in the underlying grenade code.
• Mega Man:
  • The Crash Bomb from Mega Man 2 clings to walls and explodes after about two seconds, and is required to defeat at least one boss in Dr. Wily's castle.
  • The Remote Mine from Mega Man & Bass acts like this, along with Player-Guided Missile. When fired, the player can hold up/down to control its vertical movement, and when it touches an enemy it sticks to them. Pressing the fire button again causes the mine to blow up in a highly damaging explosion.
  • The Magnet Mine from Mega Man X2 works similarly to the Crash Bomb from 2, except X can fire more than one Magnet Mine at a time.
  • The Chain Blast from Mega Man 11 only sticks to enemies and hovers around them upon contact, but detonating them creates a larger explosion depending on the number of bombs used.
• Metro 2033 has pipe bombs covered in nails as its version of this trope. The nails will stick to surfaces (even concrete) or enemies, and are powerful enough to one-shot a Demon if you nail the toss.
• Mighty No. 9 has the Remote Cannon, Battalion's ReXelection for Beck that allows him to shoot powerful explosives that can latch onto enemies and surfaces which can be detonated manually by pressing the Attack button.
• Throughout the Monster Hunter series, Hunters can load Crag Shots (renamed Sticky Ammo starting in Monster Hunter: World) into their Bowguns. When fired at a monster, the ammo will stick on it for several seconds before detonating. Slicing Ammo works similarly, but releases a flurry of blades upon detonating rather than a fiery explosion.
• MouseHunt (2008): One of the various mice types in the Iceberg area is the Stickybomber mouse, who uses these as weaponry. If the player manages to catch them with the Remote Detonator Base, it will cause their bomb to explode prematurely and advance the player further into the iceberg.
• Mines in Mr. Shifty don't stick when you walk over them, but will if you pick one up and throw it.
• In Nefarious, some of Crow's grenades stick to enemies and can be detonated remotely.
• The modern Ninja Gaiden series has Incendiary Shurikens, the signature ranged weapon of the Black Spider Ninjas.
• Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm: Tracer's Pulse Bomb is effectively a grenade that sticks to whatever surface it touches, including enemy players, and Tracer's own Teleport Spam capabilities allow her to easily get up close to an unfortunate enemy and play Grenade Tag with them. Getting stuck with a Pulse Bomb is helpfully indicated by "STUCK" appearing on the victim's screen in big, bold letters before they explode about two seconds later.
• In PlanetSide 2, the Engineer class can equip sticky grenades that will stick onto players and vehicles. Courtesy of their long fuse and small size, they are very good at killing entire groups of enemies when an enemy player runs back to his buddies without realizing there's a grenade stuck to his chest. The Advanced Specialization Program allows the stealth-suit Infiltrator class to unlock sticky grenades for even more evil shenanigans.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has the Stickybomb Rice. She lobs wads of explosive sticky rice that not only stick to zombies, but will also stick their feet to the ground and prevent them from moving until the rice explodes in a 3x3 area. The sticky bombs can stack thrice for increasing damage, and cause an explosion chain reaction with other sticky rice bombs.
• The Zombie Scientist in Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is equipped with Sticky Explody Balls that stick to enemies, allies and surfaces alike. This allows the Scientist to stick them onto allies going into enemy territory, turning them into his action bombs, which fortunately won't harm them.
• The Time Bomb Mod in Ratchet: Deadlocked does this to all explosive weapons.
• Red Faction: for massive schadenfreude, toss a slap-charge onto an enemy's back and watch him run around screaming until you set it off. Their panic is the same as when they're torched.
• Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil 4 have the mine thrower, which shoots exploding darts that stick to the target before detonating.
• Saints Row 2 features demolition charges that can be stuck to whatever you toss them at. Owing to the developers being behind the aforementioned Red Faction, people react with the same sort of screaming terror if you stick one to them.
• C4 acts this way in Serious Sam 3: BFE, sticking to both surfaces as well as enemies. It's handwaved by the presence of small metallic hooks on one end of the block. Bigger enemies even have red glowing indicators on them for where you should aim for; with a properly-placed block you can actually kill some of the largest enemies like Scrapjacks with a single charge. Their main risk is that Sam's throwing range is shorter than the blast radius, and this being Serious Sam, most enemies are faster than you unless you sprint.
• The original Shadow Warrior has these as a weapon, supposedly the first use of a sticky bomb in an FPS game. They look like small, metallic spheres with spikes. Can be stuck to the walls or to enemies, and explode if someone is in the vicinity for a while.
  "Look, you have a new friend!" (after sticking a bomb to someone)
  "Oh ho ho, Sticky Bomb likes you!"
• Spec Ops: The Line features sticky grenades that look like a more modern British sticky bomb, down to the breakaway shell. They work particularly well against the 33rd's Heavy Troopers. Attaching it to a regular human nets you an achievement.
• Spelunky: As an upgrade gained from a shop or by killing a Giant Spider. They will stick to anything except the Spelunker's hands.
• Splatoon has the Suction Bomb, an oddly shaped ink bomb with a suction cup under it. These bombs can stick to any surface and explode in a burst of ink after a few seconds, making them ideal to, say, place in the corner to surprise that player following you around. A few weapon sets in Splatoon 2 grant a super weapon that allows the player to Grenade Spam these for a limited time. Needless to say, players on the receiving end, stay away. The Octo Expansion adds an even more powerful variant but those need to be manually detonated by shooting them.
• Star Wars: Battlefront:
  • Not explained very well, but thermal detonators, in contrast to the rather un-sticky one shown in Episode 6, can stick to enemy soldiers if thrown properly.
  • Battlefront also has concussion grenades that are meant for taking on vehicles: they deal less damage to infantry than thermal detonators but stick to vehicles. Battlefront II removed them entirely and just made thermal detonators stick to vehicles.
  • Time bombs, detpacks, and landmines will also stick to walls and vehicles. For extra fun, the former two can also be attached to enemy infantry.
• The Trooper from Star Wars: The Old Republic has them as a special ability. When they attach onto random Mooks, the mooks become disoriented, allowing for the trooper's heavier abilities to be used directly after that.
• Super Smash Bros.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
    • The game adds Gooey Bombs to the item repertoire. These clingy suckers stick to either the terrain or a player after being thrown, exploding on their own after a few seconds. This bomb can be passed to someone else, including the one that launched it by running into them before it explodes, making for a silly-looking game of Grenade Tag.
    • Snake's down special, C4, can stick to opponents if timed just right. These are hard to see and remote activated, meaning unsuspecting opponents may find themselves suddenly flying in the air after Snake triggers it. Like Gooey Bombs, these can be passed between players; giving the C4 back to Snake and watching him blow himself up can be surprisingly cathartic.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U: Mega Man's side special, Crash Bomb, works almost exactly like the Gooey Bomb item, except that it's fired in a straight line rather than thrown. Like the other sticky bombs, these can turn on Mega Man if the player's not careful.
• Team Fortress 2: The Demoman has a Stickybomb Launcher. The sticky bombs it launches are remotely detonated with Secondary Fire as opposed to the regular Grenade Launcher's time fuse grenades, so they can be used to lay traps. These stickies only attach to static objects, not to enemies, probably to avoid griefing. Something to note is that stickybombs don't need to attach themselves on surfaces to detonate, they just need a certain time after being fired, and this means the Stickybomb Launcher can also be used for direct or indirect fire at mid-range because of the large splash radius and mag size⁺due to the much faster charge time, the Quickiebomb Launcher is adept at doing this at especially long ranges, while the tactic is utterly inviable with the Scottish Resistance since the bombs take around two seconds to arm. The game's achievements list calls these "air burst sticky bombs".
• Bombs, dynamite sticks and grenades in Terraria can be combined with slime gel to make sticky versions, which stop as soon as they hit a block. Tossing may be difficult^note not really, the throwing arc is the same. Bomb Fish obtained by fishing are also sticky.
• TimeSplitters has also had plasma grenades as an underslung launcher on the plasma rifle in TimeSplitters 2 and as a separate weapon in TimeSplitters Future Perfect. All three games have also had an array of "mines" with various trigger mechanisms (timed mines, remote mines, proximity mines) which can be thrown onto enemies.
• Watch_Dogs features 2 separate variants of IED that stick to surfaces they are thrown at, one that had a digital trigger that Aiden can detonate remotely, while the other employs a proximity trigger. The mission the technically introduces them specifically refers to them as sticky bombs.
  • Watch_Dogs 2 sees a different variant introduced, one functioning similar to the IED with a programmable trigger so that Marcus can either remotely detonate or activate a proximity trigger. The game also features an electroshock variant.
• Worms 3D had a 'sticky bomb' - a Cartoon Bomb coated with little suction cups all over. Worked similar to a grenade, minus the bouncing.
  • A possible setting made the ground of the map sticky, making all kind of thrown weapons not roll away unlike usual. That didn't make then stick to worms, though, while the actual sticky bomb could do so.

Web Animation

• In Red vs. Blue, Donut gets one of Halo's Plasma Grenades stuck onto his head. However, as a member of the local Red Shirt Army, his teammates don't do anything but stand there trying to figure out what it is until it explodes. After that, it becomes his rarely-occurring weapon.
• In volume 7 of RWBY, the protagonists all get weapon upgrades upon arriving in the Kingdom of Atlas. Yang, the brawler of the group with shotgun equipped gauntlets, gets a new ammo type that lets her punch small explosive darts onto her enemies. After a series of punches to load up explosives, Yang then remotely detonates them for the finisher.

Webcomics

• In the Awkward Zombie comic Tag, the Smash Bros kids play tag with what turns out to be gooey bombs.
• The subject of a Brawl in the Family story arc, where King Dedede and Meta-Knight both get stuck to the same bomb. Its timer apparently malfunctions, and it takes Meta-Knight stabbing it (because the alternative was losing his mask) to set it off.
• In Flaky Pastry, the goblins have a sport called Cavernball, where the teams have to score with the eponymous Cavernball, a ball-shaped device that can produce various effects when different buttons on it are pressed. Such effects include igniting or letting the person carrying the ball jump two meters up off the cuff. One of these functions is making the ball sticky... and whenever somebody holds on to the ball for more than 30 seconds, it explodes violently and quite often fatally. The goblin vizier Reptilis uses his knowledge of Cavernball to dispose of political rivals in "friendly sport matches" and tries the same with the main trio, who turn the "sticky-bomb-trick" against him.
• Ash makes a pile of these in Latchkey Kingdom to kill the Titan. They're just sticks of dynamite with some glue on the end.
  Ash: Make sure you space them out, I don't want a half-dead monster.

Western Animation

• In the Five-Episode Pilot of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Snake-Eyes brings magnet grenades to use against COBRA's robots.
• Kim Possible had the nano-tick bomb. It eventually gets stuck on Kim, with classmates mistaking it for a zit.
• Looney Tunes: On more than one occasion, Wile E. Coyote has had to deal with a lit stick of dynamite accidentally glued to his hand.
• Transformers: Prime: one of Dreadwing's usual tactics is sticking bombs on his enemies.
• In ThunderCats (2011), the Lizard army had magnetic bombs that stuck to walls and blew them up.

Real Life

• During World War II, the British developed an anti-tank grenade that was little more than a bottle of nitroglycerine coated with glue. The user was expected to run up to an enemy tank, smack the grenade onto the armour, and hope to make it to a safe distance before it went off. Although the whole idea was clearly insane, the "sticky bomb" was nevertheless cheap and quick to manufacture - important advantages, given that the British were expecting an imminent Nazi invasion and had been forced to abandon most of their anti-tank guns during the Dunkirk evacuation. The main drawback was that it was terrifyingly easy for the user to get an armed grenade stuck to themselves. In the words of one Home Guard volunteer:
  "It was while practicing that a [Home Guard] bomber got his stick bomb stuck to his trouser leg and couldn’t shift it. A quick-thinking mate whipped the trousers off and got rid of them and the bomb. After the following explosion the trousers were in a bit of a mess though I think they were a bit of a mess prior to the explosion."
  • Ironically, despite the Sticky Bomb being too sticky with its user and getting caught on their clothes or equipment, it was not sticky enough when it was actually used on the enemy. The explosive had trouble sticking to enemy tanks or vehicles whenever they were dirty - which was pretty much was the universal case in battlefield conditions. It wasn't uncommon for sticky bombs to only stick on a vehicle for a second or two before falling right off; this wouldn't be much of a problem if the enemy was stationary and the bomb could still damage the tracks, but when moving they literally drive away from the explosion.
  • Not surprisingly, the Sticky Bombs were quickly replaced with more reliable Anti-Tank weapons, like the Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank (PIAT) Spigot Mortar. And given the major shortcomings of the PIAT (cocking the weapon required considerable strength, especially if done while prone to avoid detection; the projectile would fall out of the tube if it was aimed downwards, and if improperly braced when fired the recoil could potentially dislocate the soldier's shoulder!), that should tell you how bad the sticky bomb was.
• Nearly everyone prior to WW2 had some kind of magnetic bomb or mine designed to be thrown a short distance onto a tank. As they were uniformly bad at sticking and required getting within a few feet of an active tank, most nations quickly phased them out a few days after they first tried to actually use them in combat. On the other hand, magnetic mines for naval use are more effective (these however don't stick to a ship — they're just exploded by its magnetic field).
  • There is a type of naval mine called a limpet mine that sticks to the bottom of the hull. It is either attached by a diver (the more common variant) or waits on the bottom until a ship passes over then floats up and hopefully adheres to the hull. Both variants are done to allow the mine to explode far away from where it was attached so that the enemy doesn't know where the security weakness is.
    • The Philadelphia Experiment is a Conspiracy Theory positing that the US managed to take a destroyer and make it travel through time/space/become invisible, believed to originate from the practice of degaussing to make the ship "invisible" to such mines.
  • Zimmerit was a paste applied to WWII German vehicles to prevent the magnetic variant from sticking to the vehicle.
• The origin of the nailed bomb version would probably be the petard, a siege weapon consisting of a large explosive nailed to a castle door. William Shakespeare references just how easy it was to blow yourself up with it, hence naming the trope.
• The very controversial "Operation Tailwind" story that got a bunch of people fired from CNN in the 1990s claimed the existence of a type of anti-personnel mine called "Pot Pie" that was supposed to be deployed using a styrofoam cooler. When it warmed up, it was supposed to extend tendrils that would wrap around whatever was nearby and hold it in place until detonation. Whether this actually existed is unclear; after the producers were fired for alleged shoddy journalism, they sued CNN for millions and got fat settlements, while the executives who fired them were fired as well, leaving the veracity of the entire story more or less permanently unresolvable.^note Though the fact that a design of this vintage was not declassified by the Freedom of Information Act or has an alleged use since casts doubt on it. Thus are the perils of reporting on The Vietnam War.

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