The world's spookiest weapons

Posted May 15th 2008 7:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: news

As purveyors of a fine hacks, we often get pitched on what are generally considered very bad ideas. Luckily, most of these ideas die on the drawing board due to a lack of time and energy or maybe having a shred of moral accountability. There's nothing that government funding can't fix though. Popular Science has put together a gallery of The World's Spookiest Weapons. It's a who's who of real and speculative engineering that could lead to our eventual destruction. Opening with the atomic bomb, it moves quickly into more bizarre territory, everything from heat rays, to rail guns, to gassing people with elephant tranquilizers. Our personal favorite is The Rods from God. Imagine getting smote by a precisely targeted metal power pole dropped from space that has accelerated to 36,000 feet per second thanks solely to gravity. What a wondrous world we live in.

[via Acidus]

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. c..r..eepy..

Posted at 9:33PM on May 15th 2008 by wisefire

2. Interesting article, although I think it's highly speculative and written with a flare for the dramatic. All in all there wasn't anything I haven't already heard of.

Posted at 10:23PM on May 15th 2008 by Johnny B. Goode

3. Got a build log or instuctable for any of these?

Posted at 10:40PM on May 15th 2008 by pmac

4. The "Rods from God" was a project called Project Thor.
It's detailed quite thoroughly in an essay published in the first "There Will Be War" anthology, Jerry Pournelle, ed, published in the 80's.

Posted at 12:05AM on May 16th 2008 by Mark

5. IMHO stuff like mustard gas, zyklon B, Sarin and the likes of such are far more spooky than metal crap falling from the sky...

Posted at 7:20AM on May 16th 2008 by LoopyMind

6. Agreed. With a Kinetic Kill Device it's over before you know what hit you. Chem/bio weapons... shudder ... too much suffering.

Posted at 8:26AM on May 16th 2008 by BenH(Not that one)

7. I remember reading about most of these 15 years ago in a second hand bookstore!

Posted at 11:16AM on May 16th 2008 by Meto

8. Re 2: Stuff in Popular Mechanics and other magazines of its ilk is always speculative and dramatic. It's the genre. Check out the Modern Mechanix blog some time if you want to see what those magazines were predicting decades ago:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/

Posted at 12:34PM on May 16th 2008 by Orv

9. Of course, due to conservation of energy, you need at least the same amount of energy to put these guys in orbit. So if you can launch these things, might as well use the energy directly as bombs. Or not. Bombs are bad.

Posted at 7:02AM on May 18th 2008 by tanvach

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.