Fictional Weapons

The Chakram has featured in a Discovery program on weapons already, Weaponmasters, with Mick Loades , and is part of the cultural identity of people of the Hindu and Sikh religions.

I feel it's a little insulting to call it a fictional weapon, may be not well known but not in the same category as a Chainsword or Batarang.

How about making Black Widow's (from The Avengers) gauntlets that fire knock out darts & other such items from them?

Captain America's shield, or rather using a shield as a throwing weapon, might have potential. This was asked once or twice on Discovery.

Like the idea of wrist mounted dart throwers, and the glove mounted 'stun gun' variant used in the Avengers films. The wrist mounted dart throwers were also in James Bond and Star Wars.

We should probably try and restrict ideas to weapons that seem practical, or at least possible to actually make. (Not that rockets attached to wrist bands don't fall into this group).

The wrist-mounted dart gun, or for that matter wrist mounted guns, make fairly frequent appearances in comics. As well as Marvels Black Widow, there was/is also a character known as the Prowler. Plus DC's Deadshot, who I think used wrist mounted guns on the TV series Arrow, and at least one Marvel character a few years back had wrist mounted guns.

Wolverines claws might be another type of weapon that could be looked at. Sure, they can't make them from Adamtium let alone implant claws in someone's forearms. But they could test to see if you could really parry a sword with weapons like that.

This is the original 1983 figure for the Destro character.

If you go down to to the "images" section and pull up the shot of his right side, you can clearly see the rockets on his right wrist band.

The 2007 version of the figure has him as wearing proper metal gauntlets, and so the team could test the rockets with both regular material and with metal gauntlets for protection.

The comic books also depicted him using the rockets while in his 1988 "ceremonial" outfit, which appears to be leather. So that's three materials that could be tested.

The rockets themselves, meanwhile, were shown to be quite devastating at times. One issue (I'm trying to remember which one) shows him firing a rocket point-blank into a red-garbed ninja sent to kill him; not only is the ninja killed outright, it's implied that a good chunk of the body is gone.

Can I enter the myths around just how much weaponised you can get with Shields?...

Myths around at this time include the central boss being a spike...
Some say to deflect sword strikes,
Some say to be sharpened to a pint as a thrusting weapon.

Some myths concern pointed shield edges being sharpened.

BTW, Most people I know in historical research would say you would never EVER throw a shield.....

Those were shields used by King Henry VIII's body guard. These shield-pistols were heavy and since you couldn't look down the barrel effectively impossible to aim. Of course like shields with a sharpened central spike the intention was probably to only use the 'weapon' part of the shield if you were blocking in such a way that your opponent was at very close range, if not practically pressed against the shield. So they would have been more of an emergency weapon to even the odds in a tough fight, or at least cause enough of a distraction to allow you to disengage or create an opening so you could finish an opponent off with something more effective.

This was the transitional period between the medieval knight and the black powder era. And you see a fair number of pistol/musket hybrids with more traditional melee weapons. These ranged from sword-pistols to musket-warhammers, none of which really proved to be all that effective either as ranged weapons or melee ones. Off the top of my head the only design that stuck around for any length of time was the sword-pistol, which was certainly still around circa 1700.

Given the unreliable nature of early blackpowder weapons, their very low rate of fire and inaccuracy it is hardly surprising that people would try to mix firearms with more proven and reliable weapons. This would occur with the invention of the bayonet, which turns a rifle into a spear. The spear is probably the most successful weapon design in history, since humans have been using them since the dawn of our existence and still do.

A common mistake when discussing weapons is in failing to understand or consider exactly what role they were intended for and how they were used.

In the case of sword-pistols and similar designs we tend to assume they were intended for ranged fire, since that is what we use modern firearms for - and what muskets were used for.

That they may have been intended to be used as a boost in close quarters combat is overlooked.

Well, TV shows pistols as the primary weapons in most situations rather than a backup weapon as they were intended. Even police really use pistols as a secondary weapon, since they tend to do their best to avoid having to draw a weapon in the first place.

Pistols were always intended to be short ranged, secondary weapons for military personal who had nothing better to fall back on, or in the case of officers and some personal (say tank crews or air crews) not really meant to get involved in combat first hand. The other use is for self-defence in civilian life - which is to say at close range against someone who is unlikely to have a 'better' weapon.

Even when swords were common the pistol was very much a secondary weapon.

As I said, discussions as to the capabilities and effectiveness of weapons really needs to be considered in the context of what the weapon was intended for. A sub-machine gun is not a weapon you'd want to be using in a long-ranged fire-fight. But it is effective for close quarters fighting, or as a weapon that can be carried easily in a confined space - such as a tank or aircraft. In the latter case a sub-machine gun is (arguably) a 'better' weapon than, say, an M16.