Posted on 01/29/2020 5:42:16 AM PST by w1n1
There are a lot of ways to win a battle at different levels, but the most effective methods involve some kind of surprise and deception. Sneak attacks go back as far as war itself, and since then man has always come up with a lot of weapons designed to deliver damage without getting caught.
This list are some of the coolest, scariest, and most notorious sneak attack weapons in history, focusing on attack weapons not traps or ambush tactics. This list of stealth weapons is meant to take out a single target in silence or wipe out whole contents in a global doomsday scenario.
U-480 Submarine
At first glance, this German U-Boat looks like any other, which in a way already immediately classifies it as an epic sneak attack weapon. But U-480 was a stealth weapon among stealth weapons, being the first submarine in history ever to use a sound-absorbing, rubberized anechoic coating that made it almost invisible to sonar. Submarines still use this anechoic coating, and even 80 years later its exact composition remains classified information.
Poison Gun Umbrella
Among followers of shadow wars and spy games, this KGB killing tool has reached almost mythical proportions. Using compressed air to fire a tiny pellet of ricin toxin into its victim, the umbrella gun silently stung like a bee made of doom. Its most notable victim was Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov, though likely nobody short of Vladimir Putin truly knows the umbrella guns final body count.
V-2 Missile
The grandfather of all ballistic missiles and space rockets, the German V-2 engineered by Wernher von Braun terrorized Londoners throughout the second half of WWII. Generally, the first warning youd get of an incoming V-2 was when it blew up next to you.
Lipstick Gun
Standard equipment for Natasha Romanovs handbag, the KGB called this single-shot, 4.55-millimeter weapon The Kiss of Death. Yes, it really was carried by female Soviet spies on missions of seduction and assassination, but the lipstick guns full service record is still buried somewhere under the Kremlin.
Das U-Boat
While another, very singular U-Boat makes this list on the basis of its revolutionary stealth technology, U-Boats in general were regarded at the time as one of the most dastardly sneak attack weapons ever devised. When Hitlers wolf packs first began roaming the Atlantic, there was a strong movement in the naval community to make summary execution of all submariner spies part of the Geneva convention. Loathed, detested, and feared, U-Boat crews were considered among the most dishonorable of killers by Allied powers. At least, until the Allies got subs of their own, and universally did a 180 on the "honor" of these underwater assassins. Read the rest of sneaky weapons in history.
Not to go all conspiracy theory, but . . . coronavirus.
Crossbow. Knives.
Electrons are “up”cycled now.
“...the baddest mother of them all: the legendary M82A1 Barrett .50 cal...fires the...BMG round...introduced in 1921 as a scaled-up version of the .30-06 hunting round... airplanes. The BMG went on to widespread use on fighter planes...a bolt-action rifle like this, its capable of punching big holes in engine blocks from more than a mile away. The longest known confirmed hit was taken in 1967 by a Marine sniper in Vietnam, and he still holds the record at 6,558 feet...doesnt so much kill as vaporize....” [from original article]
The authors got most details on the 50 cal wrong.
30-06 was introduced in 1906 by the military and only later gained popularity among civilian users.
It was developed for use against armored ground vehicles, not against aircraft. Its use in the anti-aircraft role and as aircraft armament came later. Even at the outset of WW2, it was recognized that aircraft guns firing inert (nonexploding) projectiles were becoming marginal.
The Barrett M82 (DoD nomenclature M107) is not a bolt action, it’s a recoil-operated semi-auto.
All long-range hits from the Vietnam period have been bettered by later snipers.
The 50 cal round is not the final word in long-range sniping. More modern rounds such as 408 Chey-Tac have greater effective range.
50 cal bullets damage targets by transferring energy. Vaporizing doesn’t happen.
The “Q-ships” pioneered by Britain in WWI (and used in both wars) was smart; they armed merchant ships with concealed weapons and when the German sub surfaced to sink it they’d blast it - once the sub couldn’t dive due to holes, it was outgunned by the weapons of the Q ship.
A lot of people think torpedoes were the primary weapon of the U-boats, but the deck gun was the intended main weapon for sinking cargo ships (much more economical - they could carry far more shells than torpedoes).
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