Free Republic

Pyongyang says it has developed miniaturized nuclear BBs making it possible to fit them into standard BB and Air-soft projectors. The report comes just days after North Korea claimed a joint venture with Lucas Films to build a golf-ball-sized Death Star. “It has been a long time since we began miniaturizing and diversifying our means of nuclear strike,”North Korea’s National Autocratic Defense Commission said in a statement, as cited by the official Korean Nuclear Agency (KNA). "We have also reached the stage where the highest accuracy rate is guaranteed not only for short- and medium-range BBs such as 10 yards...

Three explosions rocked a black powder gun factory in northern New Hampshire Friday afternoon, officials say. It was immediately unclear whether anyone was injured in the fire and explosion at the MDM Muzzleloader plant in Colebrook, N.H., about 150 miles north of Manchester. Mishel Fenn, who works at an inn nearby, told the Associated Press her building shook in the initial blast and that black smoke continued to spew from the building.

John Hunter wants to shoot stuff into space with a 3,600-foot gun. And he’s dead serious—he’s done the math. Making deliveries to an orbital outpost on a rocket costs $5,000 per pound, but using a space gun would cost just $250 per pound. Building colossal guns has been Hunter’s pet project since 1992, when, while a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he first fired a 425-foot gun he built to test-launch hypersonic engines. Its methane-driven piston compressed hydrogen gas, which then expanded up the barrel to shoot a projectile. Mechanical firing can fail, however, so when Hunter’s company,...

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday. The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems, said Bruce Good, a spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line. The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard. The subsidiary of Carnival Corp. was investigating whether the weapon was successful in...