TLDR: there was an "experiment" that involved using a screwdriver to hold the top half of the cover to get the core as close to critical as possible. One time the screwdriver slipped and the top fell releasing a huge amount of radiation in a very short amount of time.
My guess is that they can kind of steer it by driving only the right or left side wheels. It's diesel electric so they could individually control each wheel motor.
Scorpion rocket launcher. (This one is legitimately neat. YES, the designers know what backblast is, and the design redirects it to the side and away from the shooter. NO, the launcher is not permanently attached to the M16, it fixes using the bayonet lug and goes on and off just as quickly.)
Huh, yeah that's actually a neat design. The fact that the back blast now goes in two directions must make that fun ("fun") to use; at least with a regular shoulder-launched recoilless anything, you only need to make sure there's nothing or nobody behind you that you don't mind turning into dogfood and regrets
It was developed as one of many proposed weapons to fill the U.S. Army's desire for a squad level weapon that could be fired from inside a building, and packed more anti-armor punch than a 40mm.
Think about the time period and planners thinking about how to stop hypothetical hoards of BMPs rolling through West Germany.
This, along with other weapons, weren't adopted because the Army pivoted doctrine away from focusing on new squad level weapons that could damage IFVs, to larger weapons like the TOW that could take out MBTs. The change in thinking traded lightweight and abundance organically to infantry on the move, for better performance per system.
I was gonna point out that printed guns usually use proper metal barrels, but no, that fuckin thing sitting in the ejection port looks like a printed barrel. What the hell.
Documentation is pretty spotty. The publicly available stuff tends to be corporate marketing material which is written by people who might not fully understand the technical aspects and/or are fudging or intentionally simplifying.
The overview is that it's a rifle launched multi-mode munition for the M16.
I saw one on display in the late 90's, they were a special batch ordered by the Royal Guard of the Arab Emirates or Quatar, if memory serves correctly. The image does not give away how mindblowingly cool it was in real world.
EDIT:
I was mistaken. It is not RK-95 but some other AK variant, as OP clearly points out in the comments.
Drip (or "pop off") rifles were self-firing rifles used at Gallipoli to deceive the Turks during the evacuation of December 1915.
Fire was maintained from the trenches after the withdrawal of the last men, by rifles arranged to fire automatically. This was done by a weight being released which pulled the trigger. Two kerosene tins were placed one above the other, the top one full of water and the bottom one with the trigger string attached to it, empty. At the last minute, small holes would be punched in the upper tin; water would trickle into the lower one, and the rifle would fire as soon as the lower tin had become sufficiently heavy.
Another device ran a string, holding back the trigger, through a candle, which slowly burnt down, severed the string, and released the trigger.
Iirc, they were left behind when troops moved out. The drip doohickey would make it fire after a while, giving the enemy the impression the trenches were still manned.
I have touched the pins on the original flash capacitor when it was half discharged, and I was scared it restarted my heart (it didn't).
With this one I'm even more terrified as it has about 4 times the capacity and voltage, so it would be an even more effective defibrillator.
Also the noise it makes is scary too. It takes a solid minute to charge, and as it does that you can hear a high pitched noise getting higher pitched as the voltage increases. When you finally discharge it, it sounds like a quiet gun shot with echo and everything.
The significant plumes of smoke generated when the weapon was fired indicate that it does not make use of commercial small arms ammunition propellant (‘smokeless powder’), and may instead use blackpowder or an alternative propellant. This makes the use of ‘separate-loading’ ammunition (i.e., propellant and projectile loaded separately into the weapon) more likely, as well as increasing the likelihood that the weapon was a muzzle-loading design—that is, loaded from the bore (‘front’ of the barrel), rather than the breech (‘rear’ of the barrel) of the firearm.
the weapon appears to use an electric firing mechanism. Images of the firearm show that an electrical wire passes through each endcap. ...This high voltage creates a hot plasma arc between two conductive contacts that can be used to ignite flammable materials
Probably the most prominent electric firing mechanism for 3D-printed firearms has been developed by the user ‘@SuckBoyTony1’. This mechanism uses an 80 kV High Voltage Pulse Generator that converts 6–12 V (the electric potential typically provided by battery packs such as that seen with the assailant’s weapon) into 80 kV. This high voltage creates a hot plasma arc between two conductive contacts that can be used to ignite flammable materials
What's with this level of overengineering? Just get the Piezo from a lighter and maybe that igniter powder from fireworks and good.
Firearms don't have to be needlessly complicated, zeroed in. Ammo, propellant, firing cap/something to ignite propellant, metal tubes to direct the subsequent blast & ammo.
The guy basically rigged up a rudimentary cyberpunk blunderbuss.
M113 (Gavin) fitted with M5 Modular Crowd Control Munitions (MCCM). The MCCMs intentionally use the same bodies as Claymore mines for an intimidation factor. The MCCM works similarly to a Claymore, except with a much lower powered charge and rubber balls instead of metal.
The vehicle was meant for military prison control. If a prison riot was getting out of hand, the vehicle could roll up and let off a broadside.
I made in my teens a gun from Lego Technic that shot a lady cracker with another lady cracker. It got about 20 m before the cracker exploded after 0.5 seconds.
Sadly no foto, and it got unusable after about 20 shots.