Abnormal Ammo / Real Life

• The recoilless rifle with a nuclear warhead known as the M28 or M29 Davy Crockett Weapon System, it fired the M388 Cartridge which contained a W54 warhead with a 10-20 ton variable yield. While this seems like a cool-looking idea, the Davy Crockett had it's share of problems: poor accuracy from the smooth bore of the gun, limited range of 1.25 mi(2km) for the M28 and 2.5 mi(4 km) for the M29, and the fact that there was no safety on the warhead itself; when the bomb, code-named "Little Feller I/II", was launched it had to explode. The weapon was, in a sense, glorified artillery and never designed for direct combat, just to hold off the enemy forces until NATO forces could mobilize into the area.
• During the nuclear test sequence Upshot-Knothole in 1953, test Grable fired an 11-inch nuclear warhead from a specially constructed artillery piece known as "Atomic Annie." This is fairly unconventional in itself, but more so if it's noted that the W9 warhead used was of similar construction to the "gun-type" "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This therefore marks perhaps the only time in history that a gun has been fired out of a gun. The design of "Little Boy" featured a core of barely sub-critical reaction mass, with an additional radioactive slug stored separately with a gunpowder charge. At a certain altitude the gunpowder would be detonated, propelling the slug into the main core, causing it to reach critical mass and explode. Thus, the Grable test featured a bomb, set off by a gun, fired from another gun.
• Aside from the rather specialised Atomic Annie piece (and its lesser-known Soviet counterpart), if one were to look-up a list of American, Soviet/Russian, NATO, and probably even Chinese artillery pieces post-1965 and pick any tube (as in a gun or howitzer, not rocket) piece of 150mm or more on that list, there is a 99% chance that artillery piece had tactical nuclear artillery shells designed for it. Even the US's Iowa-Class Battleships main 16-inch guns received nuclear artillery shells.
• Langrage. It is basically charging a muzzle-loaded cannon with iron and steel junk, pieces of chain, pebbles and anything shootable and shooting it against a charging enemy. The range would be less than that of a regular cannonball, but it could make horrendous damage at close range. Usually langrage was the last measure against an oncoming enemy, and if it did fail to stop the enemy, the gunners would spike the cannons and flee.
  • Similar to Langrage but less improvised, you had Grapeshot and Canister. Grapeshot was a collection of relatively smaller shot bundled together, and Canister was a canister typically loaded with buckshot. Both are devastating when used at close range against softer targets (canister is still in use today with tanks and artillery)
• During The Vietnam War, the crew of the USS Midway (CVA-41) found a very creative way to dispose of a malfunctioning toilet◊.
• Corpses have often been used as catapult ammo. In fact, the Black Plague is thought to have originated in 1346, when the Mongols launched bubonic plague-infected corpses over the walls of Crimean city of Kaffa (now Feodosia) that was besieged. Six years earlier at Thun l'Eveque, decomposing animals were used as ammo. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (these days called Tallinn).
• In 204 B.C, Hannibal of Carthage had clay pots filled with venomous snakes and instructed his soldiers to throw the pots onto the decks of Pergamene ships. This was used as a Horrible Histories segment. Specifically, Snakes on a Ship, complete with the line "I want these Carthaginian snakes off this Carthaginian ship!"
• Some of the older types of cannonballs include grapeshot, exploding cannonballs, and chainshot, which was two cannonballs chained together, usually used to destroy sailing masts or sails themselves. Or just fire a big wad of chain out of a cannon. It will tear a man to pieces.
• An early hobby for many tinkerers is designing such weapons. Probably the most common one is the potato gun. Followed by the marshmallow gun, a more contemporary example.
• And then there are the famous demonstrations/competitions of the physics of catapults and trebuchets, where people use them to fling watermelons, pianos, cars, and sometimes people.
• Slings and slingshots. Seeds, pebbles, coins, ball bearings, screw nuts, bone pieces — anything that can fit on the pouch goes.
• Also not meant to be lethal — a Japanese company sells air guns that shoot teddy bears with parachutes. For weddings, apparently.
• The famed Dragon's Breath shotgun round fires a gout of flame about 20 feet. It's "common knowledge" they damage your gun but this is actually a myth - they make it quite dirty, as can be expected from turning a regular gun into a quick flamethrower, but anything that could outright damage a gun's barrel wouldn't be safe to fire once, never mind repeatedly. They also don't have enough energy to cycle a gun thus require pump-action. Its a basically a small firework crammed inside a shotgun, but still not something you'd want to be on the receiving end of.
• For one particularly crazy example, the Taser XREP, aka the 'shotgun taser', which is a miniaturized taser fitted within a 12 gauge shell for long distance wireless delivery of electric shocks.
• Large-bore shotguns are sometimes loaded with rolls of coins. Makes a big, big hole at close range. Supposedly, during Stepan Razin's rebellion one of their supply squads reported about being caught by tzar's troops and having to "buy off". And clarified that they quickly ran out of bullets, but still had lots of coins... and powder.
• Uruguay gained its independence from the Spanish by, in one battle, firing rock-hard balls of Edam cheese out of its cannons at enemy ships after its ships had ran out of normal ammo.
• Used at many a sporting event: the infamous T-shirt cannon.
• The SPP-1 pistol and the APS underwater assault smoothbore are specially designed underwater weapons with their own underwater ammunition — long and slim bullets. Yeah, it's a real nailgun. The more modern ADS uses both standard issue ammo for the AK-74 (in the air) and a new underwater cartridge that looks like the same 5.45x39 — but its bullet continues all the way to the bottom of the casing.
• Before WWII, the US fielded battleships fitted with special cannons to launch seaplanes as spotter aircraft. (The aircraft rode a sort of sled pushed by the explosive charge, so it isn't quite as cool as it might have sounded there.)
• Not a weapon meant for people, but one of the ways they test jet engines, windows, and various other parts of the plane for durability against bird strike hazards is to use a specially designed cannon that fires whole chickens. It's important to remember to defrost them first, though.
  • After the Columbia space shuttle disaster, NASA used a similar device to shoot blocks of foam insulation at models of space shuttle wings. These tests confirmed that foam breaking from the upper part of the shuttle's main fuel tank could break the insulating tiles along the wing, which lead to the loss of Columbia during re-entry.
• The Gyrojet line of weapons. Designed and built in the 1960s, they fired gyroscopically-stabilized 13mm rockets looking much like normal cartridges. Gyrojets were supposed to be very accurate, near-recoilless, near-silent armor piercing weapons able to even work underwater like a 13mm torpedo. The system didn't see widespread use due to reliability problems (the rockets' pinhole-sized jet nozzles were small enough to easily get plugged up and not strong enough to clean themselves) and consequences of the low muzzle speed — that is, less accuracy than expected and being weaker than some slingshots at point blank range (you could allegedly prevent a round from exiting the barrel just by placing your hand over the muzzle). Although the rockets had very low exit velocity, because they continued to accelerate they could achieve supersonic speeds - but only after 20 meters or so of acceleration, by which point they were very unlikely to retain any sort of accuracy. They are considered collectors' items today and can cost as much as $1,000 per round to shoot because of the rarity of the remaining ammo.
• For more incredibly weird weapons, see this list from Cracked.
• During the siege of Pelusium in 525 BC, the Persian general Cambyses was known for hurling live cats over the walls of the Egyptian fort to demoralize the defenders (to whom the cats were sacred). He also instructed his men to drive cats before the army, and tie cats to their shields to further deter the Egyptians. He was not a nice person.
• An early ancestor of the machine gun called a Puckle Gun (named for its inventor) fired both round ammo and special square bullets for use against non-Christians—at this time, mainly Ottoman Turkish soldiers. The square bullets were supposedly more painful, intended to "convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilization" (according to the patent); the few Puckle Guns that were actually manufactured were most likely never fired in anger, so it's unknown what the Turks would have thought of it.
• The U.S. Air Force once tried to make a "Gay Bomb". The idea was to load it full of sex pheromones and neutralise enemy forces by making them make love, not war.
  • The same think-tank project also came up with a number of other odd bombs. They ranged from stink bombs designed to paralyze the enemy with the stink, to bombs loaded with pheromones to attract swarms of bees, the project suggesting hives being placed in the planned battle area beforehand.
• Double A batteries make for a very dangerous projectile.
• At a high school, a physics class once used leftover fetal pigs as ammo for their potato cannons. Another physics class shot squash, tennis balls, hard boiled eggs, and someone's backpack across the school playing field. The cleanup wasn't fun though...
• Somewhere in the UK there is a man with a carrot cannon. He takes it to schools.
• To test windows and wall material against hurricanes and tornados throwing stuff around, there is a gun which shoots lumber at them.
• For an example that overlaps with Bling-Bling-BANG!, bullets made out of white gold and tipped with diamonds. See for yourself. Unfortunately, these cannot actually be fired.
• There are toy guns that are tiny hand-held catapults that fling little plastic figurines, like monkeys, rubber chickens, and pirates.
  • But this is definitely the cutest version - a Teddy Bear Gun.
• Then, there's this. It's an anti-tank rocket that uses White Phosphorus instead of explosives to get the job done. It appears to rely on infiltrating through whatever chinks there are in the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical protection and causing "sympathetic detonation" of ammo.
• Musketoons and blunderbusses, the flintlock predecessor of shotguns, have been known to fire anything one can shove down their large barrel.
• A refinement to the use of chemical weapons during World War I involved putting the chemical agents into artillery shells to be fired at enemy lines, which had the advantage of being far less likely to blow into allied trenches though it can with the drawback most gases would require a lot of shells to be released in an area to be appreciably lethal (except Mustard gas, which turned out to be an excellent choice of agent to put in an artillery shell). These did not explode like regular high-explosive shells and probably claimed a number of wrongly-relieved lives that assumed these shells were dud rounds. The British and Germans both even developed dedicated (and cheap) tube projectors that would be prepared and placed en masse to fling chemical agent canisters into enemy trenches named the Livens projector and gaswurfminen respectively.
• Firearms were so named because they used to shoot fire. And pebbles.
  • Arrows made to be fired from guns were found in some archaeological sites dating from The Late Middle Ages. They had brass fletchings that wouldn't be burned off by the muzzle flame, and long "tails" designed to fit snugly into the barrel of the gun.
• The Chinese were fairly creative with their cannons. In addition to cannonballs and mortars, they also liked to shoot pots filled with excrement. They were called shit bombs.
• World War II:
  • A number of strange bombs, rockets and munitions were designed for a variety of reasons with a varying degree of effectiveness. A drum-shaped bomb was developed by the British to bust dams by skipping along the water. The Americans tested bombs that delivered bats equipped with timed napalm charges. The Japanese used human-piloted rockets and torpedoes and the Germans developed cannons designed to "fire" gusts of wind to knock down bombers (Only the dam busting bomb was put into service and worked as planned). And those are the ones that got off the drawing board.
  • Arguably the American "Tiny Tim" rocket: A 500lb semi-armor piercing naval shell with a rocket motor strapped to it.
  • In the early battles, the Germans devised a strange round for their standard anti-tank rifle (a rifle of sufficient calibre to fire a large projectile that would penetrate what in this period was very thin tank armour). Attached to the armour-piercing payload bullet was a small disc of solid material, which under the heat of being fired and the friction of passage through the air, would sublimate into a measured quantity of tear gas. This was intended to incapacitate the driver or crewman, should he not have been wounded by the AP round. The problem was that the round could only carry a small amount of teargas and, always assuming the gas had not been burnt off by the bullet's passage through the air, that carried by a single strike was so small as to go undetected. As this weapon was also thought to contravene Geneva Convention regulations on use of battlefield poison gas, it was very quickly withdrawn.
• The Imperial Japanese Navy, once they realized the danger posed to even the mightiest surface combatants by aircraft, developed their san-shiki round, also called the "beehive". Fired from a capital ship's main battery, the shells detonated at a pre-set altitude, releasing shrapnel and incendiary charges. The design was intended create a "cone of flame and shrapnel", but the shells were never all that reliable, firing them damaged the gun barrels, and the blast of firing the heavy guns sometimes injured the exposed crew members of anti-aircraft guns.
  • In general, shotguns are one of the most common medium for exotic ammo due to its large caliber.
• When Key West separated from the U.S. to form the Conch Republic, they attacked Coast Guard ships by throwing stale bread and conch fritters at them. This "battle" is reenacted each year.
• By having its warhead located outside the barrel, RPG-7 ammo can be customized to anything imaginable. Officially it comes in four flavors: HEAT^* High-Explosive Anti-Tank a.k.a shaped charge., tandem HEAT^* two-staged HEAT shells designed to defeat modern tanks, with a reputation of breaching even the armor of the Abrams & Challenger tanks, which is reputed to be nigh-invulnerable., thermobaric^* low-density explosive fuel which sucks up oxygen from the surrounding air, causing explosions more massive than conventional explosives weight-per-weight, particularly devastating in confined space like bunkers & caves., & fragmentation^* basically a giant frag grenade.. Let's not get started with a myriad of homemade rounds created elsewhere.
• Performance art group (for lack of a better term) Survival Research Laboratories' shows frequently involve guns that fire plate-glass, 2x4s, beer cans filled with plaster, or fluorescent light tubes. The guns are variously mounted on or fired at rickety robots, usually not the audience.
• YouTube channel Taofledermaus has a series of videos called "You make it, we shoot it", where they receive all sorts of bizarre shotgun slugs from viewers and attempt to shoot them. They've attempted some rather exotic rounds, like the taffy slugs, brass slugs made from doorknobs, "expanding" saboted slugs made from spring-loaded door hinges, pykrete slugs (pykrete being ice and wood fibres mixed into a durable composite), gallium slugs, jelly slugs made from reconstituted gummy bears, glass slugs, and a wax-and-sand 'quartz' slug. They have also experimented with using doll arms as slugs and LEGO minifigure heads as bullets. Their favorite form of abnormal ammo is the wax slug, which can be made at home by mixing melted wax with birdshot. The result is a slug that shatters when it hits a target while transferring all of the energy of a normal slug into the target, thus minimizing the amount of penetration and maximizing the stopping power, and is surprisingly accurate.
  • This last one is actually a commercial product, used by police and military forces to turn a shotgun into a quick way to punch through locked doors while decreasing the risk of shrapnel bouncing back at the shooter.
  • This video from the channel shows what happens when an Xbox 360's outer casing meets a hail of dimes shot from a shotgun.
• Another YouTube channel, Demolition Ranch, brings us shotguns loaded with drill bits. Given that the drill bits are too long to fit in the shells, each shell is loaded directly into the barrel (this requires removing the barrel to load the shell and reattaching it to the shotgun).
• The Nerf Nitro series. They fire foam cars. One of them is even full-auto, magazine fed.
• FPSRussia once did a test-firing of various homemade shotgun shells, including nails and an arrow.
• The U.S Military has developed a variant of the AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missile with the apparent designation of AGM-114RX9, known colloquially as the "Ninja Bomb" and the "flying Ginsu" due to its peculiar modification. In lieu of an explosive warhead, the RX9 instead deploys six pop-out blades akin to sword blades moments before impact, using speed of impact to cut soft targets to shreds. Although much of the weapon's design isn't widely known, it's theorized that the gruesome munition is used as a precision strike weapon to kill high-value targets whilst also minimizing collateral damage. So far, the weapon has been reportedly used to kill several high-ranking members of Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organizations in Syria and Libya, although the exact number of times this munition has been used have not been confirmed. It's suspected this is the munition that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri while he was on the balcony of his house; reportedly no one else in the abode was harmed.
• Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced has invented the mask launcher, a gun that shoots face masks onto people who refuse to wear them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

---