Swords? How droll. Guns? Completely unfashionable. Aren’t there any weird weapons out there to satisfy our thirst for novelty? You know what we’re talking about: the kind of completely bizarre contraption that’s as much a danger to the wielder as to the enemy. Fortunately, there are actually quite a few of those in both fiction and real life!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren!
Bunny: And I’m just so tired of this sword. I’m tired of this gun. They’re so basic and chunky. I want something unique. I want something that makes you scratch your head and ask who designed it, and I think the best way to do that is to stick two other weapons together. So I’ll go first. I’m going to have a gun, but it shoots nunchucks, and when the nunchucks are shot, they unfold into scissors.
Oren: That’s pretty scary. I’ll admit I would not want someone shooting that at me.
Bunny: What about you Oren? What weapons are you gonna jam together?
Oren: Okay, so obviously it’s gonna have to be a whip and a shield. ‘Cause we’ve already seen whip swords, right? For some reason, only sexy characters use whip swords. So I tried to think of what the opposite of that was. So a whip shield is like the least sexy weapon you could possibly use.
Bunny: Captain America and Catwoman.
Chris: Okay. I think I want a gun that when you pull the trigger, it actually dissolves into a bunch of nanites that fly over to the person you pointed the trigger at, which really begs the question of why you did the whole trigger thing and just attacks them.
Oren: Also, you better hope you don’t need your gun while the nanites are over there.
Bunny: Usually you confuse them. It’s psychological. They thought they were gonna be shot with a gun, but they were shot with nanites.
Chris: I mean, it might be cool if you had like a big gun that got smaller every time you shot it, as some of its nanites flew, and then those nanites would return and recombine with the gun.
Oren: That was the idea of the guns in Mass Effect. Not quite, but the idea of Mass Effect was that there wasn’t any ammo because the guns fired by shaving off little bits of metal from basically a bar of metal inside the gun and then accelerating them up super high. And so the idea was that in theory you could run out of material, but it would take so long that there was no reason to track bullets. So instead, it tracked how much heat your gun generated, which was a cool mechanic, but it turned out to be too hard to balance. And so in the second one, they invented heat clips, which are basically bullets. It’s just very funny to be Shepard and wake up in Mass Effect 2 after you’ve nearly died and had your near death experience and everything… and it’s like, “Hey, Shepard, while you were asleep, we invented bullets!”
Bunny: It’s the future, in which they have bullets! I think I didn’t get far enough in that game to encounter that particular lore, but what I do remember is that you can turn your gun into healing goo. Which is not a feature of most guns.
Oren: Oh, yeah, obviously, just shoot people with healing bullets. There’s some weird lore in Mass Effect if you read the in-game text, if you’re a nerd.
Bunny: Unfortunately, I’m just a nerd and not a very good gamer, so I could not get to the actual nerd stuff.
Chris: One weapon that I was surprised was not introduced earlier is the transporter gun in Star Trek because transporters are literally death-clone machines. So I’m surprised that nobody weaponized them earlier.
Oren: So there are a couple of different ways you can weaponize a transporter. Every time Star Trek does this, it raises the question of why they don’t do it all the time. But some writer is just really eager and they always are like, yeah, I’ll be clever by weaponizing the transporter.
Chris: We always knew the transporter was very dangerous. We actually need to forget that because characters use it all the time, and each time we’re cringing.
Bunny: Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about it.
Oren: No, you chaotic drama llamas, don’t do that. It’s hurting the entire setting when you do that!
Bunny: Don’t people always get stuck in the transporter too?
Oren: Yeah. The transporter can be used to cause and solve most problems, but this particular one was from the DS9 episode where it transports the bullet into the room and shoots you with it so that you can shoot through walls and stuff.
Bunny: Wow. That is OP.
Oren: Which is, yeah, it’s pretty OP and the answer to why they don’t use it all the time was some handwavium. It was like, it didn’t turn out to be viable… but it looks pretty viable to me in this episode!
Chris: It just really does ask the question, why doesn’t the gun instead just transport someone into nothing?
Oren: There’s transporting a bomb over, there’s just transporting away pieces of the target.
Chris: Oh, yeah. They also thought in the movie, thought they were so clever. Oh look, we transport a bomb!
Bunny: That’s the first thing it would’ve been used for.
Chris: The first thing. It would’ve been used for.
Oren: Some of the shows have done that too, and it’s annoying then too. Like guys, come on. We have to pretend we can’t do this, or the show doesn’t work.
Chris: Just like all the episodes where it’s like, okay, how about we solve this deadly disease by just running a person through the transporter and modifying them during transport? No, we need to pretend we can’t do that or else no medical drama works.
Oren: My favorite weird historical weapons are the ones that you hear about and they sound like a terrible idea, and then you see how they were used and it turns out that they were exactly as terrible as they sounded.
Bunny: “Why would someone do that? It must have a point.” Oh, oh child. Nope.
Oren: My favorite, my absolute favorite is the spar torpedo. ‘Cause back in the day, torpedo actually was just a synonym for what we would now call mines, just a floating explosive that a ship would run into. Nowadays they’re self-propelled weapons. But that wasn’t the terminology way back in the day. When they were making the first – or actually the second, the first one was during the Revolutionary War, but that’s a different story – the second combat submarine known to exist during the Civil War, and they were thinking of how to arm it. They thought, okay, what if we put a torpedo on the end of a long stick?
Bunny: I see where this is going…
Oren: And then we pedaled up to the other ship, ’cause this was a pedal driven submarine, and hit the other ship with our torpedo on the end of a stick and blow ’em up.
Bunny: Gotta be a pretty long stick.
Oren: Yeah. And so you can see the immediate problem with this is that this requires you to be very close to the ship when your torpedo goes off. For a long time, we didn’t know what happened to that submarine, the CSS Hunley, because it never returned from its mission when it was able to sink a single Union ship. But we eventually found it and did a bunch of studies, and right now the main theory of why it sank was that everyone on board was killed instantly by the torpedo explosion.
Bunny: Wow. Who would’ve thunk, you know?
Chris: But did they test the radius of the torpedo explosion?
Oren: They absolutely did not.
Bunny: This was before math, Chris.
Chris: Before math!
Oren: You have to understand how cursed this submarine was, okay? This submarine literally killed two entire crews in training.
Bunny: Oh God.
Oren: It got to the point where the Confederate naval personnel would not go inside it because it was a death trap, and so they had to get Army people to take it out on its mission. This is the most cursed ship you have ever heard of. It’s very grim, but I also love it.
Bunny: Save the submarines for a different war, guys.
Oren: Yeah, they’re not ready yet.
Bunny: They’re not quite there. Speaking of ships, when I was doing research for this episode, I learned of the claw of Archimedes.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: Which is just a very funny title, and it’s basically, I guess like a grappling hook that grabs an enemy ship, lifts it up, and then either drops it, turns it, or chucks it, and it sinks the ship. It’s just a big hand that grabs ships and sinks them.
Oren: Yeah. It doesn’t really work though ’cause the game is rigged so that the claw can’t actually grab onto the ship for long enough to get it over to the prize. So you have to put in more coins.
Bunny: A claw. A claw! You know, I have gotten a plushie with a claw of Archimedes.
Oren: What? No, you, that’s impossible!
Bunny: I know. I did it once!
Oren: Some kind of chosen one.
Bunny: I got a branded bee.
Oren: Mm. Very nice. So it should be noted that the claw of Archimedes is probably made up, but Archimedes is a real person – or was a real person, he’s probably not still alive – but a lot of the things he’s credited with inventing probably never happened. Like the claw of Archimedes, that’s probably fake. There’s that idea that he had the soldiers shine light from their shields and burn other ships as they were coming in. That probably didn’t happen, but it’s a neat idea. In a fantasy setting, you could probably make it work.
Bunny: Is that the same thing or a different thing than Greek fire?
Oren: Greek fire? Okay. All right. All right. Hang on. I gotta talk about Greek fire.
Bunny: Go off, Oren.
Oren: Okay, so first of all, it should be called Roman fire because it was invented in the Byzantine AKA Eastern Roman Empire. Mm-Hmm. Take that, historians destroyed by facts and logic! So Greek fire is just a general catch-all term we have for a kind of incendiary liquid that was used by the Eastern Romans from around, I think the nine hundreds, probably a little earlier than that. And they used it to protect Constantinople from various invading fleets. And it should be noted that they were not the only ones to have incendiary fluids. Incendiary fluids have been used for basically forever in warfare, but Greek fire, at least from the history records that we have, seems to have been more effective than whatever anyone else was using at the time. But it gets confusing because the term Greek fire got so popular that people would start using it for any kind of incendiary liquid. Often it’s hard to tell if this thing that they’re talking about is the same as the really famous Greek fire. But Greek fire basically made the Byzantine navy unbeatable for a certain stretch of time because there was just, there’s no answer to it. If you don’t have a gunpowder weapon and your enemy ship has a flamethrower… sorry, that’s over.
Chris: This is maybe an odd question, but were the flames from Greek fire a normal color?
Oren: Last time I checked, there’s different reports on that.
Chris: Oh, really?
Bunny: Interesting.
Oren: Yeah. ‘Cause we don’t really know exactly what it was made of. There are different ideas, but like the actual formulas for what the Byzantines were using were so tightly guarded that we don’t have them anymore. And that may have actually been why the Byzantine stopped using it after a while because it’s such a small circle that eventually they lost it.
Bunny: Well, that’s embarrassing.
Oren: There are illustrations that show them as orange and red flames, but I believe there are accounts that describe them in different colors, so it’s likely that they may have had different colors because who knows what was in there.
Chris: I think in Game of Thrones there’s what’s clearly Greek fire-
Oren: Yeah, alchemist fire.
Chris: -clearly inspired by Greek fire, that’s green flames or something like that.
Oren: As far as I know, there isn’t a lot of evidence that Greek fire burned green. I think that’s a George R. R. Martin invention, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
Chris: I mean, it’s certainly a cool image. Works great on film. One of my favorites when it comes to weird weapons is the point of view gun-
Oren: Yeah, that one’s great.
Chris: -that’s added to the Hitchhiker movie. It’s not from the book. They added it during the app adaptation, but it’s cool, so, when you shoot somebody, they understand your point of view on the situation.
Bunny: Okay, that’s great.
Chris: So it helps you win the argument. The description of it is weirdly gender essentialist though, because the movie explains its history by like a coalition of angry housewives that wanted their husbands to understand them and that it supposedly doesn’t have much effect on women because their empathy is high already.
Bunny: What?
Chris: It’s like, okay, we don’t, that’s weird. We don’t need to go there.
Oren: Look. I will accept that a group of housewives had to create this weapon because patriarchal standards make it so that men are not supposed to understand each other. But don’t tell me that one gender is inherently more empathetic. Come on guys, we can do better.
Bunny: And does that imply that women always empathize with the other side of an argument? Because that is emphatically not the case. I’ve had enough arguments with friends in philosophy class to know that.
Chris: But I like that because there is still almost something weapon-ish about it, in that if you’re having an argument, you could use it as part of your argument, but it’s also just entirely peaceful.
Bunny: But it is a gun!
Oren: I also really like historical weapons that sound like they should be superweapon game changers. And it turned out they weren’t. And so then you get a lot of people being like, why didn’t they use this thing more? And then that leads to weird conspiracy theories, which are very fun. I mean, fun to learn about. One of my favorites is the air rifle, which is an invention from around the late 17 to early 1800s, which was literally a gun that was fired using compressed air instead of gunpowder. And it had a really high rate of fire ’cause you didn’t have to do the whole ramming a ball down the barrel thing and it could fire in the rain more easily. It didn’t produce any smoke, so it seems like a wonder weapon. Why isn’t everyone using these? And so you get these weird conspiracy theories about how Napoleon hated them and would kill anyone who was using one, and none of that’s true. The reason is that they were really expensive and hard to make and had a tendency to catastrophically fail when you were using them. So that’s why. But they’re just a very fun weapon to imagine.
Bunny: “Eight Weird Weapons – Napoleon Hates Number Four!” One weird one that I learned about was apparently still in use – by, of course, the police, of all things – is the man catcher, or rather the person catcher, it will catch you either way. And it was used for pulling people off of horses. It’s basically those sticks with a little grabby thing on the end that you use to pick up trash. It’s basically that, but human sized.
Chris: What?
Bunny: And then it has spikes all over it.
Chris: Oh!
Bunny: Yeah. So you grab someone off their horse and they’re presumably wearing armor, so the spikes don’t kill them, but it could kill them and the police use it. They don’t have the spikes currently. But very funnily, in my opinion, people in India were using this to capture fugitives during covid so that they could social distance while they were arresting people.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.
Chris: But it’s for grabbing people off their horses.
Bunny: Yeah, but it can be just used for grabbing people too. It’s like a big trash picker upper, but for people.
Chris: Woof. That’s very strange.
Oren: I feel like that’s gonna become an overpowered weapon in the Avatar setting, because in Avatar, any weapon that is at least theoretically non-lethal is super good because they can’t kill or cut anyone, hence the prevalence of bolas in Avatar. Everyone loves bolas.
Chris: Right? So many bolas. So Hawkeye has an arrow that shoots bolas. I don’t know how that works, but apparently he has one.
Oren: My favorite thing about his bola arrow is that he also has at least one arrow that just like traps you in foam, which is obviously a more effective way to-
Chris: I like the big purple foam arrow. That’s cool.
Bunny: That sounds goofy.
Oren: I can only imagine that the purple foam arrow is more expensive. So he is like, “I’m on a budget, man. I retired from the Avengers. Tony Stark’s not paying for all my arrows anymore.”
Chris: So your bola arrow is like the poor man’s big purple foam arrow.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. Some video games make you track ammo, so you have to keep your very best ammo for the boss. And for the minions, it’s like, all right, I guess I’ll use bola arrows for these guys.
Bunny: Oh, what he should be doing is using heat clip arrows.
Chris: They even in the show, this one was kind of a joke, but he apparently has a USB arrow.
Bunny: Look, when your computer is on the other side of the room…
Oren: The problem with the USB arrow is that it wouldn’t work because to plug in a USB, you have to try to plug it in once, not work, take it out, turn it over. It still doesn’t work. You take it out and you turn it over a third time and now it works.
Chris: Maybe the arrow does that. You don’t know.
Oren: I’ve seen it. It doesn’t do that!
Chris: Maybe you just shoot three arrows, so you shoot one one way and then the other way, and then back the first way.
Bunny: You gotta rotate them.
Oren: It always goes in perfectly the first time, and my suspension of disbelief is ruined!
Bunny: That’s the most unrealistic thing in that show.
Oren: I do find it funny on Star Trek when they’re trying to come up with a unique weapon for aliens because there’s only so many ways you can put variety on like a point and shoot laser weapon, at least with the budget Star Trek is usually working with, so you’ve got like the Ferengi laser whips, which is just… sure, what if you had a phaser, but you also had to make this really awkward arm swing motion to use it? How do you aim that?
Bunny: There is that- we referenced the urumi, which is the whip-sword-whip. You can stick a bunch of these into a hilt and swing around and whip people with it. I guess it’s sort of like that.
Oren: The phase whip is supposed to be a ranged weapon.
Bunny: Oh.
Oren: It’s a whip, but when you crack the whip, it shoots a bolt of energy.
Bunny: What?
Chris: Why would you do that? A gun is so much easier!
Oren: Because the Ferengi, back in early TNG when we thought the Ferengi were gonna be the big bads of Star Trek-
Chris: Oh, isn’t it that first weird one where they’re super goofy and they’re introduced?
Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The laser whip stuck around for a few episodes after that, but then they retired them and just decided that Ferengi used phasers like everyone else, but they had a different shape of phaser.
Chris: That honestly reminds me, because it seems like it would be dangerous to the Ferengi, of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber handguards. The things on the sword that stick out on either side, they’re to protect your hands. Okay? They’re not to kill your opponent with, so making them a burning laser is not a good idea.
Bunny: Just get a little stabby stabby when you get really close to your opponent and you can’t impale them on the big one. You gotta like, stabby stabby on the side.
Chris: You’re just more likely to burn yourself with that at that point.
Oren: Man, okay. So there are like pages and pages of discourse on this because if you look closely at Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, you can see that the energy bits don’t come directly out of the handle. There are sections of just metal, and then the energy comes out of those. So at least in theory, if he slides his hand too far forward, he’s not just gonna burn it up on lightsaber stuff. But then this raises the question of what happens if someone else slides their lightsaber down the sword, which is the whole point of a handguard. Aren’t they just gonna cut through those little emitters? Which then led to the fan theory, I think propounded by Stephen Colbert, that those are not emitters, that those are actually just conduits and the lightsaber bits are coming off of the main one. It is so confusing.
Bunny: What? They wanted it to look cool.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, clearly they’re designed to look like handguards. That’s clearly what they’re inspired by. So regardless of the technical design, if you look closely, that’s what they’re supposed to be reminiscent of.
Bunny: Yeah. But what if he swung them around and it made a crack and then he shoots you?
Oren: Lightsabers are just a weapon that if you think about them for five seconds, you realize just how incredibly silly they are and how nothing about them makes any sense. So I just generally advise against making me think about the mechanics of lightsabers because like for example, I don’t want lightsaber fights where what people do is when they go to clash swords, one of them just turns off their lightsaber for a second and then turns it back on and kills you. That’s boring. I don’t want that kind of fight. A martial artist on YouTube pointed out that if lightsabers actually weighed nothing, the way you would use them is by kind of waving them around like a flashlight, and that also looks very silly. I don’t want that. So we just have to assume that lightsabers have weight somehow. Things like that.
Bunny: Like how far can you extend the blade?
Oren: Yeah. There are some of the books where the guy’s like, I have a nine foot lightsaber blade. Okay. At this point, why are you not just using a gun?
Bunny: I have a lightsaber where if you point it at someone and turn it on and off very quickly a beam shoots out and impales them.
Chris: Speaking of “why not gun,” I think we should talk about Omega’s laser bow on Bad Batch.
Oren: Oh my gosh.
Chris: Okay, so for anyone who’s not seen Bad Batch, Bad Batch is about a bunch of clones in the Star Wars universe who end up defecting when the Republic turns into the Empire and leaving, and the clones start getting replaced with other recruits. So it’s a bunch of burly guys, and then they have a little girl with them. Her name is Omega, and so she needs to learn to fight. But instead of giving her a blaster, they give her this laser bow and it’s big and bulky and apparently takes strength to pull back, ’cause you know, bows, a conventional longbow, or even a shortbow takes a lot of strength to pull back. And we even establish that she’s having trouble with the amount of strength that it takes to pull this bow back, and that’s affecting her aim. But then instead of being like, okay, Omega, you need to go weightlift until you can have enough strength for this bow, they just have her keep shooting at a target. It’s like, clearly strength training is what she needs. But anyway, it’s big, it’s bulky and all it does is shoot the same kind of blaster fire that just a normal gun would shoot, that you wouldn’t need strength for.
Oren: And it doesn’t have a stun setting. It’s just an objectively worse weapon and she’s the worst person on the crew to have it.
Bunny: Oh, it is massive!
Oren: Yeah. It’s such a weird choice for her and every time she’s in a face-off with someone and she has pulled the string back, the laser string, and is holding it on someone and they’re holding a weapon on her, I just think of how hard it is to hold a bow string like that.
Chris: That takes a lot of strength. You can’t just-
Oren: I just keep expecting her to lose her grip on it after a while. ‘Cause even a trained archer can only hold that for a short amount of time. Yeah, that bow is so silly.
Chris: I understand the impulse to want to give her a signature weapon. It’s also like… pink.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which opens questions about like, I mean, pink is fine, but did you give the girl a pink bow because she’s a girl?
Oren: Yeah. It becomes noticeable in that context. I noticed none of the burly guys have pink laser weapons.
Bunny: One has to wonder, we can only guess.
Oren: I also feel bad for sci-fi TV show prop designers who are trying to make alien melee weapons.
Chris: Oh, like the bat’leth?
Oren: Yeah, the bat’leth is the main example.
Chris: I mean, it looks cool with all its curvy blades, but yeah, probably wouldn’t actually make any sense to wield a bat’leth.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a very awkward weapon to try to use. It’s a big two-handed weapon with no reach and its swing is very awkward. And the way that you swing it, you’re trying to hit people with the spikes on the end, but the spikes are always at an angle to whoever you’re swinging it at. So you’re never getting full power from it. It’s just the weirdest weapon. But there are only so many ways to design a practical melee weapon, okay? And we’ve explored most of them as humans.
Chris: Okay, so, pointy object that is designed to hurt another person. There’s only so many optimal designs. It’s not that complicated. It’s actually very simple. You try to get creative, you’re just making it suboptimal.
Oren: Or at least the ways it is complicated are very hard to read on screen. You can look at two swords that to most people would look almost identical, but to a trained swordsmith, there’s a lot of differences.
Chris: Sure. Absolutely. But to a viewer, so, trying to make it seem cool to somebody who doesn’t know anything about weapons…
Bunny: And then there’s apparently, I was remembering there’s that episode of, I think we see these in the original series, but I could be wrong about that. Where Spock gets really horny.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: And has to go back and then he and Kirk fight each other with these big pizza spoon looking things.
Chris: What?
Oren: Those are spears that have a big half moon blade on them.
Bunny: Lirpas?
Oren: Yeah. Those are pretty silly looking. I’m trying to remember if that’s based on a real weapon or not.
Bunny: If it is, I’m lost. I could not tell you.
Oren: Because I mean, there are some odd looking weapons historically speaking, especially because sometimes it’s not clear if a weapon was ever really used or if it was ceremonial. There are a lot of swords that are in museums and stuff that look too big for a person to have ever used, and the two explanations for them are that they were either ceremonial, or that there are secretly giants that the Jews are hiding from us. So I’ll leave it to you, which one of those you think is correct. Speaking of Star Trek, I unironically love Kirk’s bamboo canon in the Gorn fight. I don’t care if it works or not. There’s internet discourse about whether or not you could actually make that work. And I’m on the record as “I do not give a crap.”
Chris: I’m not familiar with this cannon. Tell me about the cannon.
Oren: So this is the first Gorn episode and the Gorn are rude guys and an alien beams Kirk and a Gorn down to fight. ’cause why not? The Gorn is much bigger and physically more powerful than Kirk. And so Kirk figures out that he has all the things he needs to make gunpowder, and he uses a reinforced bamboo tube as the barrel, and then he uses diamonds as the ammunition.
Bunny: Uhh…
Oren: And he builds this thing and he uses it and he shoots the Gorn and then doesn’t kill the Gorn, therefore showing that we have evolved as a species, and it’s great. I love that part. Fantastic episode. Except for the part where we just let the Gorn get away with murdering a bunch of people for no reason.
Bunny: Well, I’ll keep that survival tip in my back pocket in case I ever have bamboo, diamonds and gunpowder.
Oren: Mythbusters did an episode where they tried to recreate it and they couldn’t get it to work. I think their conclusion was that the bamboo is just not strong enough and that it would explode.
Bunny: Fancy that.
Oren: But there are competing claims. There are other people online who claim to have made something similar. So I think it is conceivably possible. As an engineering obstacle, it might be too much for Kirk to realistically overcome, but wooden cannons are not unheard of in history. They have happened. They’re just- obviously metal is better. I have never tried it. I just know that there’s discourse about whether or not this would actually work.
Bunny: So, I know we’re running out of time here, but I wanna mention one more, and I’m curious if either of you have heard of it. I think it’s the Panjandrum.
Chris: A drum.
Bunny: So it’s basically a steel drum full of explosives – This was in World War II – put between two big wheels, giant wagon wheels that were propelled by rockets. Rockets around the rim of these wheels.
Oren: Yeah, why not? It seems like a fun day at the beach.
Bunny: Yeah. And then you light the rockets and set the thing going and it just rolls through whatever barrier you put in front of it. For some reason it was never used, which is sad.
Oren: There are a lot of very odd weapons that you can find in World War I and II.
Chris: So it was supposed to basically carry explosives into something.
Bunny: Yeah. The ultimate goal is to bust down big defenses like concrete walls and fortresses, and it could get up to 60 miles per hour with these rockets on it.
Chris: So if you have a flat, no man’s land, whatever, that you don’t want a person to go on. You set this thing rolling into the wall with a bunch of explosives. And the idea is that it hits the wall and then explodes.
Bunny: Yeah. And like crashes through it. And it’s to get a tank sized hole in it, so then you can get your tank through it. And the best way to do that is a rolling ball of explosive death.
Oren: Well, maybe not the best way.
Bunny: [laughing] No. Shut up Oren!
Oren: As it turns out…
Bunny: Shush!
Oren: Alright. With that we will, I think, call this weird episode to a close.
Bunny: Closing it with a bang.
Oren: Ah!
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons who help make sure we can afford to research all of these bizarre weapons, which, you know, is a very important process. I think you’ll all agree. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Finally, there’s Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.