Top 10 Weapon Amazing Cases.

A good weapon should be dangerous to the enemy while perfectly safe to the person wielding it. But there have been plenty of weapons with designs so flawed or execution so poor that they actually achieved the reverse. Some of them were good ideas that were too far ahead of the curve, others were merely terrible engineering failures. And some border on sheer stupidity.


10. The Nambu Type 94 Handgun

Imperial Japan had some amazing weapons, ranging from the rugged Arisaka rifle to the nimble A6M2 Zero fighter aircraft. This was not one of them. In fact, the Nambu Type 94 is a serious contender for the title of worst service handgun ever.

9.  T-64 TANK 

 For decades, NATO commanders lived in fear of a flood of Warsaw Pact tank and mechanized infantry divisions breaking through Germany’s Fulda Gap. The spearhead of the offensive would be the T-64, a main battle tank that was certainly formidable on paper. A small target at just 2.17 meters (7 ft) tall, the T-64 was relatively light (allowing it to traverse muddy fields or flimsy bridges with ease), composite-armored, and armed with a smoothbore 125mm gun that could fire guided missiles. It also had the advantage of an autoloader that reduced the required crew to three (as in the famous Soviet Armored Guards hymn, “Tri Tankista“). For decades, NATO commanders lived in fear of a flood of Warsaw Pact tank and mechanized infantry divisions breaking through Germany’s Fulda Gap. The spearhead of the offensive would be the T-64, a main battle tank that was certainly formidable on paper. A small target at just 2.17 meters (7 ft) tall, the T-64 was relatively light (allowing it to traverse muddy fields or flimsy bridges with ease), composite-armored, and armed with a smoothbore 125mm gun that could fire guided missiles. It also had the advantage of an autoloader that reduced the required crew to three (as in the famous Soviet Armored Guards hymn, “Tri Tankista“). 

  

8.  The Century Series Fighters 

Photo credit: USAF

In the 1950s and ’60s, the US Tactical Air Command focused on developing fast planes with a high rate of climb to serve as interceptors or high-speed fighter-bombers—with maneuverability as a very secondary concern. It was decided that the new planes could be armed with air-to-air missiles, some of them nuclear-tipped, rather than traditional guns. The result was the Century Series: the F-100 Super Sabre, the F-101 Voodoo, the F-102 Delta Dagger, the F-104 Starfighter (pictured above), the F-105 Thunderchief, and the F-106 Delta Dart (which was developed from the F-102)


7.  Mark-14 Torpedo

 

Photo credit: US Navy

Not that the Navy is immune to bad weapons design. At the beginning of World War II, many navies had problems with their torpedo systems (only the Japanese had a really outstanding design, the Long Lance) but the Americans took the prize for messing up. In 1942 alone, Navy submarines fired more than 1,400 torpedoes to sink a paltry 109 Japanese ships, totaling under 42,000 tons.


6.  Glisenti M1910 Handgun

 


Italy has a reputation for crafting quality handguns, with variants of the Beretta 92 currently the standard sidearm for a number of NATO militaries (including the US M9). But there’s always an exception that proves the rule, and the Glisenti M1910 has to be a serious rival for the Nambu 94’s title of worst service handgun ever.


5.  Breda M1930 Machine Gun

 
The end of the Glisenti wasn’t the end of the Italian tendency to make elegant but flimsy items with low durability. The Breda M1930 lacked the simple primary extraction design of many other machine guns, so an internal oiler had to be installed in the feeding mechanism to ensure spent cartridges would actually be ejected. This did succeed in getting the cartridges out, but the oil tended to form a disgusting gunk in even slightly dusty environments. Such gunk would clog the mechanism of all but the most hardy of firearms, and the expensively precision-machined Breda was certainly not one of those. Armed with the M1930, Italy’s campaigns in Ethiopia and the deserts of North Africa had predictable results. No mass-produced design has used oiled cartridges since.


4.  Heinkel He -177 Greif

Photo credit: ibiblio.org

This one should have been named the “Grief.” In Nazi Germany, technical prowess and common sense were often overruled by the childish whims of the top brass, and the He-177 was one of the foremost examples. The idea was good: a bomber with the range and payload of the Allied Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, but able to fly faster and higher.



3.  LAGG-1 n LAGG-3 Fighters

Photo credit: taringa.net

The Nazis were not unique in producing terrible aircraft thanks to political meddling. Their deadly foe, the Soviet Union, arguably outdid them with the LaGG-1 and LaGG-3. Named after the initials of designers Semyon Lavochkin, Vladimir Gorbunov, and Mikhail Gudkov, the LaGG was built around a polished and very flammable wooden fuselage. Soviet pilots quickly began to joke that the name actually meant “Lakirovannii Garantirovannii Grob” or “Varnished Guaranteed Coffin.”



2.  The V-2 Rocket

 
The V-2 was the first ballistic missile in the world, an amazing engineering feat for 1944. Designed and built by Nazi Germany under the direction of Wernher von Braun (later to become a key figure in NASA) it was a single-stage missile with a range of 320 kilometers (200mi) propelled by a mixture of ethanol and oxygen. Originally named the Aggregat-4, it was renamed by Nazi propagandists as Vergeltungswaffe-2, or Second Vengeance Weapon, the V-1 being the infamous “doodlebug” flying bomb.


1.  SA-80 Rifle

 

When it comes to apparently brilliant ideas that don’t work well in real life, we couldn’t forget the British. The SA-80 is their current standard rifle, officially designated L-85, and although it has evolved to be effective in combat, it didn’t start well. Fully introduced in 1987, the SA-80 boasts a “bull-pup” configuration, which means that the receiver and magazine assembly are behind the trigger and handle, allowing a shorter overall length with the same weight and barrel size. The British originally explored the idea with the EM-2 rifle in the 1950s, but these prototypes were ultimately discarded in favor of the much less radical, but awesomely reliable FN FAL.