Is there consensus among those knowledge about weaponry of which man-portable weapon is most powerful? I’m excluding RPGs and the like, but anything that hurts people/breaks things with kinetic energy and can be carried by a person is fair game.
I’ll see your RPG and raise you a suitcase nuke.
Minus the large caliber portable things like suitcase nukes or cans of airborne virii, I’m going to have to go with the 81mm mortar. Good old hip pocket artillery.
I’ll see your explosive toys and raise you one aerosol can of anthrax spores (not smallpox – too vulnerable) and a backpack load of VX nerve agent.
``Hell hath no fury like a bacillus spored.’’
Just posted this in the trench war thread.
The MK19 Mod3 40mm Grenade Machine Gun was first developed by the Navy in the early 1960’s. The MK19 firing rate is over 350 grenades per minute and it is effective to ranges of over 2200 meters. The system was deployed in Southwest Asia during Operation Desert Storm and devastated enemy infantry.
Light infantry weapon.
Tris
Suitcase bombs and the Davy Crockett are nice but still too big to conceal, or use multiple times.
I’m voting for the Street Sweeper - it’s an machine-gun type shotgun that has been outlawed. Here’s a picture.
The trouble with all these high firepower man-portable machine guns is that one man can only carry so much ammo in his backpack. And these full auto weapons tear through pounds of ammunition in seconds. Once you run out of ammo your uberweapon is a poorly balanced club.
So I’ll nominate one of those 50 caliber sniper rifles that can take off somone’s head from a mile or two away.
Wait a minute. I just read the Davy Crocket link. Yep, a man portable nuclear recoilless rifle might do the trick. The site claims that the warhead was only 2-4 times as powerful as the Oklahoma City bomb…in other words, a nuke small enough to only take out a city block. Yikes.
I’d say a nuclear device. I don’t think a gun that fires nuclear warheads is small enough to be moved around by a single person. There is such a thing as a critical mass.
There’s always this thing, and it also comes in 9 barrel version like a conventional machine gun, a 4 barrel hand gun version.
used to detonate a nuclear weapon constructed in the actual target area.
You don’t need that, you just need a switch.
Here are a few more shotguns, automatic and not, for consideration.
Then again, flamethrowers probably deserve consideration, as well.
Then of course, you might go for the simple and classic.
Or the simple and REALLY classic.
Or, for something more exotic, 5 pounds of antimatter in your pocket will give you a 100 megaton explosion.
Or, for something more mundane. A 7mm Remington Magnum bullet (which has a very high muzzle velocity) has a kinetic energy of about 4 kilojoules. If you drop a 10 kilogram javelin from the top of the Empire State Building, it will hit the ground with about 10 times the kinetic energy of the bullet.
www.birdman.org has some interesting weapons.
Well, you have a choice:
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The bible
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The quoran
The most deadly weapons mankind has ever manufactured.
I assume the OP was asking for firearms, in which case the best bet would be the “anti-material” sniper rifles. The Soviet 14.5mm B-32 cartridge (listed here http://web4.integraonline.com/~bbroadside/General_Info.html) has a muzzle energy of 32 kJ. And the NTW-20 South African rifle uses a 20mm cannon shell as it’s cartridge! :eek:
In terms of size to damage ratio, a very harmful computer virus that can attack corporate institutions would have to be a contender. If it could seriously interfere with or destroy financial records, such a virus could wreck faith in electronic transactions and bring down entire economies, leading to widespread unemployment and poverty, leading to anarchy and revolt, leading to bloodshed.
Weight: nothing
Size: effectively nothing, a few bytes of digital poison
Range: global
That’s good enough for me.
I’m not sure if the “Dragon” portable missile is still used. But it was capable of taking out a main battle tank, and was light enough to carry.