The World's Worst Weapons !

Kunal Biswas

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The World's Worst Weapons ! :becky::becky:


Not every weapon design can look forward to decades of service and popularity like the famous Ma Deuce, the AK, the MiG-21 or Mirage. There's always the ugly ducklings in every family of design.

45/5 mod. 35 light mortar (Italy)



The modello 35 was needlessly complicated, expensive to manufacture, and fired tiny shells with poor explosive effect. Obviously the Italians were looking for a high rate of fire, but it's hard to understand why they didn't focus on a simpler weapon.

Mistel (Germany)


A waste of fighters and bomber aircraft, vulnerable and apparently never managed to inflict any significant damage on Allied targets.

Aphrodite drones (USA)


War-weary B-17s packed with explosives and remote-controlled to hit German targets. All of the missions were dismal failures: the only one to hit its target failed to explode and the Germans got their hands on a nearly-intact B-17 with RC equipment.

Blackburn Roc (UK)


Even worse than the Defiant turret fighter, it was slow, vulnerable and useless as a fighter (at least the Defiant gave valiant service as a night fighter). Relegated to non-combat duties and ended up getting its only confirmed kill by shooting down a German bomber while parked on an airfield.

Breda Ba.88 (Italy)



Hated by the poor Regia pilots who had to fly it, the Ba.88 could hardly get off the ground with a full bomb load, was extremely overweight, slower than most biplane fighters, and very vulnerable. Most ended up as airfield decoys.

Chauchat machine gun (France)



Awkwardly designed, terribly built, unreliable and given to failure in combat. Considered the worst machine gun of WWI and a stark contrast to the excellent Hotchkiss series of weapons that served alongside it.

Of the top of my head I can recall a few other examples, like the Japanese WW2 service pistol which was a real pos, the XP-79 flying wing, etc. Any others out there that really stood out for their sheer level of fail?
 

Kunal Biswas

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the Northover Projector, emergency weapon built by the British after the disaster at Dunkirk. Fired glass bottles filled with phosphorous (!) that tended to break inside the barrel. Bright idea :roll:

 

Kunal Biswas

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The U.S. Mark 14 Torpedo was central to the torpedo scandal of the US Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Over the course of fully twenty months of war, torpedo after torpedo either missed, prematurely exploded, or struck targets (sometimes with an audible clang) and failed to explode.
 

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M114 APC. Meant to be a light air-dropped APC for reconnaissance and airborne units utilizing aluminum armor. However it was found in Vietnam that it easily got stuck in mud due to being underpowered, and an antitank mine would blow the thing in half. In Germany it got stuck in snowdrifts. Creighton Abrams ordered it removed from the US Army. Its only use was for civilian SWAT, where it didn't have to leave the pavement.
 

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Ross Rifle (Canada)
A straight pull action weapon that was over complicated and ****e to jamming and damage. A good sniper's rifle (it was retained for that purpose after its demise as an infantry weapon), but hopeless as a weapon for the basic infantryman. Luckless Canadian infantrymen started discarding the Ross as early as 1915 in favor or Lee Enfield rifles found on the battlefield




Nambu Type 94 pistol (Japan)
Possibly the worst military weapon ever issued. I's defined as a weapon that is so poorly designed, manufactured or maintained that it poses as much or more danger to its user, or innocent bystanders, than it does to the target. The design is so bad that it can be fired before the breech is even locked and an exposed sear bar can be released to fire the weapon.




M50 Reising (USA)
A complicated weapon whose action made no allowance for dirt or grit (things found in abundance down range), which caused it to jam. Worse, its very design seemed to attract fouling and/or dirt. Briefly used by USMC troops at Guadalcanal, it was soon discarded in favor of anything else they could find.


 

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M-28 Davy Crockett Nuclear recoiless rifle
as a political tool, borderline.

As a full blown weapon....stupid as your own troops would get irradiated due to the range
 

Armand2REP

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The Showshit's open magasine was like the dumbest firearm modification in history.
 

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XF-84H - What do you get when you stick a 5,800-shp turboprop engine on a lightweight Thunderstreak fighter-bomber? The world's loudest plane. It was a mess from the beginning: test pilots hated it, had severe stability problems due to massive engine torque, the shockwaves from the supersonic blade tips made men nauseous or physically knocked them down, and could be heard from something like 30 miles away.
 

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Possibly the ugliest airplane to ever take to the skies & a turd of a program: the Nimrod AEW. The British decided against buying the American E-3 to replace the obsolete early warning planes then in service, and instead ended up building this abortion of an AWACS. Massive cost overruns, delay after delay, and terrible technical problems which were never ironed out. The ironic part... the RAF ended up flying E-3s after all.
 

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Yak-38 'Forger'
The Soviet equivalent of the early Harriers, the Yak-38 was obsolete by the time it entered service. It relied on lift engines to give it VTOL capability, which became useless weight once in level flight. It could only carry a small amount of ordnance, if at all, depending on the weather conditions, had terrible range, no radar, and like most other early V/STOL aircraft, had a bad safety record.
 

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The Imbel MD-97 assault rifle, made a state-owned Brazilian weapon's manufacturer, pretty much plagued by the same issues that plagued the L85A1 and more.



Magazine fell off randomly cause the magazine retention mechanism was poorly designed, made of shoddy material; the section where the barrel was attached to the camber was frequently broken due to the fact that the barrel was made of weak metal, the slightest excessive torque could shatter it; the charging handle was awkwardly placed, wobbled too much during semi-auto/auto fire and it usually fell off for no reason at all, also it could break the shooter's finger if such was stupid enough to wrap his finger around the charging handle; the barrel's round-life also suffered from inconsistent quality due to the same reasons as the previous flaws; the rifle itself was frequently plagued by shooting incidents as failures to extract, failures to insert the round properly aligned with the barrel, many of those could be blamed on damaged magazines but such instances were way too frequent to do so.

Eventually, after thousands of units being purchased by several LEO agencies across the country, the army caught a hold of the failures, tested the rifles extensively in the Marambaia testing grounds and were, therefore, officially rejected.
 

Armand2REP

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The Showshit's open magasine was like the dumbest firearm modification in history..
 

Kunal Biswas

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The Matra R.530 - a huge export success, and an equally huge failure in combat. Matra sold thousands of them, since they were the only game in town outside of the American missiles, but they were truly atrocious missiles. Hit percentages against even non-maneuvering targets (like the bombers it was designed to shoot down) were abysmal, and just about everybody that used them (Israelis, Pakistanis, Argentineans, Spanish, etc) thought they were crap but were stuck with them. At least it led to the much improved Super 530 series.
 

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M47 Dragon

View attachment 161437


not a epic fail weapon but a weapon that was overall failing in everything it did

a overpriced ATGM that was very slow with a flight speed of 100m/s and had an short distance of engagement of 1000m so exposing the operator in that time to danger reducing so with that the effectivnes to a overall big low

the improvments off the ATGM could not make at the end the ATGM realy worthy at all even the "super-dragon" was still slow, and had only a engagment incresse of 500m
 

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