Abnormal Ammo

"All you really need to know is that there is a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I wish I could make something like that up. It shoots shurikens and lightning!"

—Ben "Yahtzee" Crosshaw on Painkiller, Zero Punctuation

We've seen plenty of guns in all kinds of media, so what's one way to make a gun different? Remove the bullets, lasers, and rockets, and replace with something... that isn't a bullet or laser or rocket. Or just make the bullet do something other than just rendering the target dead. Perhaps there's some really strange Applied Phlebotinum about, but we all know someone's trying to take Refuge in Audacity or trying to invoke the Rule of Cool. All bets are off if a catapult comes into play.

Oh, and don't ask how they fit a kitten in a handgun. Just don't.

Compare Trick Arrow, Impossibly Cool Weapon, Improbable Weapon User. Not to be confused with Depleted Phlebotinum Shells. If the ammo really stings, see Bee-Bee Gun. If the ammo breaks up into smaller ammo, that's Recursive Ammo. If it's foodstuffs that's being shot, then it's Edible Ammunition.

Related tropes include Bone Projectile and Natural Weapons. For team-mates literally throwing other team-mates (or unusual objects), see Fastball Special.

Examples of Abnormal Ammo include:

Anime and Manga

  • Final Fantasy Unlimited character Kaze is a summoner, who uses a device called a Magun and a magical substance called Soil which is effectively the life energy of people who have died to summon monsters. His gun essentially fires summons.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima has Magitek bullets able to alter space-time at the point of impact. They were used to send people three hours into the future, but it's implied they can also displace the target to a nearby location. Negi used magic blast guns and strip laser beams.
  • X-Laws in Shaman King have guns that fire regular bullets that are used as mediums to summon their angel spirits. Humongous Mecha ghost angels, no less.
  • Outlaw Star had 'Caster Shells' -- magic in a bullet. Special mention goes to Number 4 shells, which fire miniature black holes. Their effect on Gene's unfortunate enemies produces some of the more frightening scenes of the series. What they do to Gene when firing them isn't exactly pretty either.
  • In The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, Haruhi subconsciously modified model guns into firing pressurized water balls with unimaginably explosive firepower. Dual squirt guns turned dual mini water-grenade launchers/pistols.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure--
    • Mista has six little creatures for his Stand. He uses ordinary bullets, but the six creatures (named "1", "2", "3", "5", "6" and "7") can fly and deviate the trajectories of bullets (with kicks), making it possible to Mista to hit targets beyond a corner, to say one. At least one time some of them ride a bullet to reach the target faster, although they never strike him on their own.
    • Part 4 has Yoshikage Kira combining the power of his Killer Queen stand and Stray Cat's to create invisible shots of air that explode.
  • Teana from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S has Cross Mirage, a pair of handguns that shoot magic. From the same franchise, there are Cartridges, which are condensed magic in what looks like a firearm shell, but these are not actually shot, just exploded to supercharge a Device.
  • The Sonic Driver (Sonic Power Cannon in the dub) in Sonic X that fires the title character as its ammo counts here.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:
    • An assassin used a unique weapon against her wealthy target: a shotgun, built into her forearm, that fired rolls of coins.
    • In the episode "Testation", a rampant Spider Tank—which had dodged or neutralized everything else thrown at it—gets stopped by a gun that fires canisters of some kind of quick-hardening glue. Gumming up the tank's legs being the only means of stopping it, short of using weaponry too powerful for use in an urban area.
  • In Fist of the North Star, there is a technique in the Nanto martial arts that involves launching the practitioner out of a cannon while they hold a sword.
  • One chimera ant in Hunter X Hunter used an airsoft sniper rifle to fire huge fleas (which somehow survived the brutal impact) to make the victims bleed to death due to their bites preventing coagulation.
  • Macross 7's Nekki Basara pilots a robot that shoots speaker pods (Thoughtfully loaded with glue so the target won't be killed by cockpit depressurization) and sings to his aggressors, hoping to make them give up fighting. He also keeps in reserve a scaled up cannon larger than his own machine for use on battleships.
  • One Piece:
    • Mr. 5 loads his revolver with his BREATH. However, his devil fruit power let him make any part of his body explode, breath included. How he was able to tell where his breath bullet was after fired, we'll never know.
    • Usopp uses pachinko balls for his slingshot Kabuto and whatever he could get his hands on prior to that (Rotten eggs, Tabasco balls, small rocks...). After the Time Skip, he uses Pop Greens, insta-growing plant seeds.
  • In Zoids: Chaotic Century's Finale, The Hero and his Humongous Mecha are fired out of a cannon of a truly massive Humongous Mecha at the Big Bad and his Humongous Mecha, giving a literal meaning to the term "Live Ammunition".
  • Kai in Blood Plus has a gun that fires delayed exploding bullets, with the last bullet of each magazine triggering the others to explode simultaneously. This is used to overcome the Chiropterans' substantial Healing Factor.
  • Soul Eater has Death the Kid and his twin guns, the Thompson Sisters, who can fire condensed bursts of Kid's own soul at enemies.
  • Reborn:
    • Reborn is an adorable baby mafioso who has a gun that, if shot in the head by it, you die. And then come back to life, in your underwear, for five minutes, with the ability to complete your life's ambition. If you complete said ambition, you get to continue living. If not, you perish. Again.
    • Xanxus and Gokudera also have guns that fire Dying Will Flames (although Gokudera's is more of an Arm Cannon). Xanxus uses his own Flames of Wrath as ammo, while Gokudera loads his gun with dynamite.
  • Mic Sounders the 13th can fire a GaoFighGar with Goldion Hammer. BEST. AMMO. EVER.
  • Letter Bee has Letter Bees (postmen with special training to fight enormous monsters) tote around a special kind of gun that shoots a fragment of their 'Heart', something equivalent to their life force in this series. They're important because Letter Bees drag letters around a dark, miserable world where 70% of the land is crawling with giant almost-invincible monsters in order to do their jobs...
  • Yu Yu Hakusho:
    • The main character Yusuke Urameshi and his Rei/Spirit Gun.
    • The character Sniper has the ability to imbed his spirit energy into any object and fire it with the velocity of a bullet, generally making said objects much stronger in the process. Ammunition used includes: pencil erasers, dice, marbles, blades of grass, rocks, an absurd amount of knives, and A GODDAMN TRUCK. Abnormal Ammo, indeed. However, when he's done screwing around he just opts for a gun.
  • In Hellsing
    • Alucard's first gun fires 13mm explosive steel/silver alloy rounds (the silver is also melted from a cross from a cathedral), Victoria's Harkonnen fires 30mm armor-piercing depleted uranium/silver alloy or incendiary shells, and the Jackal fires explosive shells encased in Macedonian silver with mercury tips.

Alucard: It's perfection, Walter.

    • In the last episode of the anime he manages to pull off firing actual melted silver from a cross with his half wrecked gun. He manages it because he is Alucard.
  • Tsurara Shirayuki from Rosario Plus Vampire uses ice bullets to snipe people. They melt, leaving no evidence.
  • Canti's gun in FLCL uses... Naota himself as ammo, albeit rolled into a flying, glowing red ball.
  • Et Cetera is about a girl with a gun that shoots the essence of the animals in the Chinese Zodiac. The gun is powered by rubbing the barrel against any item that is made from the animal represented in the zodiac—including a bikini made from Tiger skin.
  • In Digimon, the Garbagemon wield bazookas that fire faeces at their targets.
  • Abnormal Ammo is pure Rule of Cool in Bleach during Ishida's fight with Cirucci Sanderwicci in Hueco Mundo: he finishes it by firing an arrow made of a chainsaw lightsaber.
    • Coyote Starrk's guns fire ceros.
    • Riruka's gun fires miniaturized objects that enlarge in midair.
  • Perhaps as compensation for only ever being issued six bullets, Daisuke in Heat Guy J is usually provided with one devastatingly explosive "Red Cap" round.
  • During the "Tower of Hell" chapter of Eyeshield 21, Hiruma uses bullets that are actually pellets full of desiccant powder, designed to make the ice being carried by the candidates for a spot on the Devil Bats melt faster.


Comic Books

  • Deadpool has an inflatable sheep gun. The gun fires inflatable sheep. This being Deadpool, it could be an inflatable gun that fires normal sheep.
    • --->Deadpool: C'mon guys? don't you remember that totally sweet Rabid Hamster Shotgun I once had? Or what about that gun made of solid gold? It shot freaking diamonds!
  • The Punisher comic had a gun that shot swords.
  • The Joker has a "BANG!" Flag Gun, for all your Double Subversion needs. Pull the trigger once, it sends out a "BANG!" flag. Pull it again, and it fires the flag (which has a pointed tip) into the victim. He once pulled out a gun that had a "CLICK!" flag in it, so that he could declare, "Damn! Misfire!"
  • In Judge Dredd, the Judges' standard Lawgiver sidearm has several types of unusual ammunition in addition to standard ammunition which can be easily switched as needed. These types include ricochet, heatseeking, incendiary, armour piercing and high explosive. All of the above are usable in the FPS video game too.
    • Memorably parodied in a Dredd story set in Ireland, where terrorists use "spud guns" which lethally fire potatoes in various forms - mash, chips, etc - culminating in the memorable line, "Spud guns to roasties!"
  • In Marvel Comics' Earth X, Tony Stark's Humongous Mecha Iron Factory fires Iron Man suits from its guns.
  • The minor DCU Batman villain the Condiment King uses guns that shoot, well, condiments like ketchup and mustard. Pretty silly, until he uses hot sauce based guns and spice powder to blind people and burn their throats.
  • The Fantastic Four B-List villain Paste Pot Pete had a gun that shot quick-setting glue. Which would have been cooler if he didn't need to carry around a bucket in the other hand filled with his ammo. His attempt to change his name to the Trapster after designing a self-contained glue gun has been undermined by people who won't let him live down his earlier lameness.
  • A later issue of 52 has Will Magnus using bullets that are miniaturized versions of his Metal Men.
  • Gold Digger had Brianna Diggers experiment with "Peebo bullets" based on her robot pets in one issue. They were supposed to seek out and hit bad guys on their own, thereby making them perfectly safe for bystanders; unfortunately their limited AI gave them a rather broad view of what actually constituted a 'bad guy' and hilarity predictably ensued.
  • One of the stormtroopers in Twisted Toyfare Theatre once built a gun that shoots lightsabers. It ended up destroying a planet.
    • Dr. Doom built a Spice Cannon that uses Baby Spice as ammo.
  • In the accompanying material of Watchmen, there's an excerpt from Tales of the Black Freighter in which the pirate crew uses half-rotted human heads as ammunition for their cannons.
  • Spy Boy's gun, the Magnum Opus, fires a variety of these.


Fan Works


Film

  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Eddie Valiant's toon gun just fires bullets. They are semi-intelligent cartoon bullets that can talk, chase down criminals, and apparently return to their case independently. One even carries a large tomahawk. Unfortunately, almost all of them (save the one with the tomahawk) were too stupid to figure out which way the bad buy went. In the english version, known simply as "Dum-Dums". In the Italian dub, they are called "mezze cartucce", an Italian phrase used to say "idiots", but with the literal meaning of "half cartridges".
  • The Matrix Revolutions features a giant, full auto, deconstructor robot gun.
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    • The evil French fling several things at the English knights. Including a cow and the large wooden rabbit the English constructed in an attempt to "Trojan horse" their way inside.
  • In Hot Shots part deux
    • Topper runs out of arrows after missing about 15 times due to his oblivious target just happening to bend over, take a side-step, etc, at exactly the right time. So Topper fires a chicken at him instead.
    • The same movie also features a gun that bops someone on the head with a hammer from close range, and another that springs out a punching fist.
  • One of the weapons featured in the Mind Screw movie eXistenZ is a bone gun that fires human teeth—using chunks of jawbone as cartridges.
  • In the kid's gangster movie Bugsy Malone, all the gangs were developing machine guns that threw cream pies.
  • The battle between the "Black Pearl" and the "Interceptor" in Pirates of the Caribbean occurred after a chase in which the crew of the Interceptor, desperate for more speed, threw almost everything they had overboard ... including most of the cannon shot. They were reduced to loading up, in the words of Will Turner, "anything! Everything! Anything we have left!", including cutlery, into the cannons as makeshift ammunition. This is Truth in Television, to a degree. Scrap metal and chains were often used as anti-personnel cannon loads, and indeed, had they not been fighting undead pirates it might have worked. Using an undead monkey as ammo carries slightly less verisimilitude.
  • The Incredibles: Syndrome's lair on Nomanisan Island utilizes sentry guns that fire sticky inflating balloon rounds to nonlethally stop any erstwhile superheroic intruders. According to some of the commentaries, that was the only kind of weapon they could think of that would conceivably stop Mr. Incredible without killing him and/or destroying the base (it may have also been lightly based on real weapon concepts currently in development).
  • In G.I. Joe: Retaliation - its trailer, no less - we are treated to a motorcycle that is made of ROCKETS. Which are immediately fired into a building after said bike is ramped into the air and its rider leaps to safety.
  • XXX gives Vin Diesel a modified revolver that shoots interchangeable rounds, ranging from knockout capsules complete with fake blood to some kind of surveillance bug. This actually backfires on him late in the film; because he's got the gun loaded with non-standard rounds, he ends up pointlessly firing a radio transmitter bullet when he's trying to retaliate against the mooks armed with good old-fashioned machine guns. He then switches to an explosive bullet for a better distraction.
  • In Young Guns II Billy The Kid kills a sheriff with a shotgun filled with eighteen dimes (nine in each barrel) used as slugs. "Best dollar-eighty I ever spent!"
    • This particular event is inspired by something the real Billy the Kid did once when cornered without normal ammo.
  • Similarly to the above, in The Crow Eric Draven blows up Gideon's pawnshop by spilling gasoline all through it and firing a blast from a shotgun he'd stuffed with dozens of pawned/stolen rings (although it did have a normal charge in it as well).
  • District 9. THE GODDAMNED PIG CANNON. According to the director, there actually are random pig carcasses lying around South African slums, so the Powered Armor using one as ammo for its gravity gun isn't so weird. Actually... it is pretty weird, but Rule of Cool applies.
  • In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Budd proactively cancels The Bride's attack on him by knocking her on her back with a blast of rock salt to the chest from a double-barreled shotgun. This is a real-world option for less-lethal fire, but mostly at close range.
  • Despicable Me.
    • Piranha gun
    • Squid Gun, which works as a Grappling Hook Pistol
    • Fart Gun, although that one was by mistake since he really wanted a dart gun.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Alice kills zombies with a shotgun that fires quarters.
  • In The Return of the King, in the battle for Minas Tirith the trebuchets in Minas Tirith hurl broken-off chunks of the city's buildings, a metre or more across, at the attacking Orcs.
  • Blade explored this in all 3 installments of the franchise. "Daylight flare" bullets that expose vampires to a momentary deadly flash are especially prominent.
  • Somehow even vampires and werewolves can fight with guns in Underworld - as the vampires use silver bullets (later filled with liquid silver nitrate due to the werewolves pulling them out too quickly), while the werewolves load their guns with bullets that contain an irradiated fluid—irradiated with ultraviolet light.
  • The Smurfs make use of golf balls, bowling balls, needle-laden fruit, and lipstick when forced to fight Gargamel near the end of The Smurfs.


Literature

  • In the Thackery T. Lambshead The Cabinet of Curiosities anthology, the Bear Gun is mentioned at the very end. It shoots bears. Read that again. Tiny bears are used as the ammunition, which expand at some point after leaving the barrel.
  • In Logan's Run, the Sandman cops carry The Gun, which is a 6-shot revolver where each round is different. Among its payloads are a regular bullet, an expanding net, and a heat-seeking bullet. Oddly enough, they don't seem to carry backup rounds...
  • The Prince Roger series has "bead rifles", which use mass driver technology to propel glass beads at hypersonic speeds. The energy release at impact is very destructive. Glass beads are cheap, easy to make, extremely hard, and tend to shatter on impact so you don't need to worry about over-penetration. A mass driver will presumably let you fire them without breaking. Even more exotic is tightly coiled net made of monomolecular filaments that expand upon firing. They make mincemeat out of unarmored targets.
  • In China Mieville'sUn Lun Dun, Deeba aquires the UnGun, which fires larger amounts of whatever you put in it. It, among other things, fires hair and ants. This is WAY more badass than it sounds and then it fires nothing...uh, well, more like "unfires," acting like a vacuum to suck up the Smog.
  • China Mieville's Bas-Lag Cycle also has a race of cactus-people (known as the cactacae). While they can be punctured by bullets, crossbow bolts, arrows and the like, their complete lack of internal organs makes such weapons next-to-useless. They're also enormous, extremely strong, and covered with spines, which makes close-range weapons like blades or clubs viable, but an extremely risky and inadvisable option for most people. A sort of crossbow called a rivebow was invented to get around this problem. It fires huge whirling chakris that can sever the heads and limbs of humans and cactacae alike, but the rivebow itself is so heavy and unwieldy that usually only other cactacae carry them.
  • The evil Delta Force soldiers of Dan Brown's Deception Point carry guns that can make ammo from nearly anything you jam in the barrel, from ice to sand.
  • The Martians in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles use a gun that shoots live bees, the idea being that the moral responsibility for the actual killing is laid on the head of the living projectile, and the gun-wielder's role is mitigated to that of an accomplice. Proves every bit as effective as earthly firearms. Bizarrely enough, this is a subtrope in its own right.
  • Jack Vance's The Demon Princes series puts in the hands of its protagonist a device that fires "slivers of explosive glass" and either another device or the same device with different loadings/settings, which discharges very fine needles that cause intense and prolonged itching.
  • Soledad in Those Who Walk In Darkness goes so far as to design her own ammo for fighting Mutants, with an average of one Achilles' Heel exploited per ammo type. A few of the many examples include phosphorus bullets to fight pyrokinetics, bullets coated with contact poison for foes that are Nigh Invulnerable, homing bullets for use against enemies with Super Speed, and exploding bullets for virtually anything.
  • In the Discworld books, Detritus the Troll uses a converted siege crossbow loaded with a bundle of regular crossbow bolts. The firing speed is high enough that the ammo generally shatters and then bursts into flame (or vice-versa) ending up in a supersonic flaming ball of wooden shards, which is why it's called 'the Piecemaker'.
  • John Dickson Carr's novel The Plague Court Murders involved a murder where the victim was shot by a bullet carved from rock salt that dissolved in his body, leaving no trace.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, the forces of Mordor used catapults to launch the severed heads of their defeated enemies over the walls of Minas Tirith, mostly for Squick effect (see Real Life below).
  • In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, agents of ARM generally use guns that shoot crystallized doses of fast acting sedative. How or why this is better than tranquilizer dart guns is unknown. Probably it's better because the ammo is smaller and lighter. A dart gun has to shoot not only the tranquilizer, but also the syringe that delivers it; a "mercy pistol" only has to shoot the tranquilizer itself.
  • At least one Poul Anderson short story involved tranquilizer darts that, if they hit a wall or armor instead of flesh, would break open—and then the drug inside would instantly volatize into tranquilizer gas.
  • In Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File, the Count made a point of congratulating Holmes for thinking to use wooden bullets. This one is a fairly common strain of Abnormal Ammo. It's the secret weapon used to tip the balance of power between warring vampire factions in the film Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat, while the CIB in the excellent TV series Ultraviolet use a high-tech, hardened-carbon variant.
  • In Iain Banks's Against a Dark Background there's the Lazy Gun, which never destroys its target the same way twice, and seems to have a warped sense of humor.
  • In Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo equips his underwater hunting parties with air-rifles that fire electrically-charged glass bullets.
  • In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, every ranged Yuuzhan Vong weapon fits this description, from the living ship that fired miniature black-holes to the sword/spear/staff/whip/snake that spat venom.
  • The J. T. Edson short story Some Knowledge of the Knife was a murder mystery in which the assassination weapon was an oddly-balanced knife fired from a large-bore "wall gun".
  • In James Kennedy's "The Order of Oddfish" the Appology Gun shoots... well, appologies. However, they can range from extremely sincere to lethally sarcastic.
  • In Krabat, golden bullets are the only ones that can kill magic users. At one point, a golden button is used as a bullet.
  • In Sharpe's Revenge, our hero is severely outnumbered (as usual) but does have a chest of gold coins, which he fires at the approaching enemy. This is not to kill them, but to get them scattering to pick the coins up so he can escape.
  • In R. Austin Freeman's story "The Aluminium Dagger", the specially-made titular weapon was shot out of a Chassepot rifle to create one of the most far-fetched locked-room murder mysteries yet.
  • In the Dark Future setting, explosive rounds are remarkably widespread in everything from pistols up. GenTech manufacture a special version of napalm that genetically bonds to skin on contact and continues to burn underwater and inside of people. They also make smart bullets, referred to in-universe as 'smugslugs,' that can track human heartbeats.


Live-Action TV

  • Spudgun in Bottom was named for his ability to fire potatoes out of a certain part of his anatomy.

Richie: Why do they call you Spudgun?
Spudgun: Give me a potato and I'll show you why.
Eddie: No-no, you don't want to see that Rich!
Richie: And why do they call you Hedgehog?
Dave Hedgehog: Give me a hedgehog and I'll show you why!

  • The wormhole weapons in Farscape can shoot a) black holes that grow geometrically or b) wormholes that can then shoot chunks of plasma-hot star at a target. If you include the Peacekeeper Wars TV movie, you get to see both occur in the course of the series. While it isn't immediately obvious, what the wormhole weapon did was connect two points in space - a sun and an enemy ship. That's where the plasma came from and that's why it's so cumbersome to use.
  • * Parodied in X-Play in which auxiliary character "Johnny Extreme" proposes a video game idea that involves Rocket Launchers that shoot chainsaws that explode.
  • The MythBusters:
    • They have made air cannons that have shot the following: conventional cannonballs, baseballs, chickens (frozen and thawed), straws and twigs, piano wire, Kevlar-wrapped steak, a net, styrofoam cups full of liquid, and a whole host of other strange items. There was also the section of sewer-type pipe they modified to shoot Buster, their much-abused crash test dummy, with a blast of high explosives. Then there was the attempt to fire ice, gelatin, and meat out of rifles, but these were mostly non-lethal. Lastly, they also modified a rifle to fire a penny—this time, it was potentially lethal.
    • Also, inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean example, they loaded up a whole variety of odd ammo into a US Civil War era cannon to test their effectiveness. Examples included bottles of rum, wooden legs, silverware, steak knives, nails, lengths of chain, and cheese, with varying levels of effectiveness.
    • The cigarette butts shoved into the barrel of a shotgun, which proved to be potentially lethal at close range. (unsmoked cigarettes were less useful, and almost resulted in a false Busted) and those were supermarket cigarettes. Since the myth in question involved a couple of hillbillies, they probably smoked roll-your-owns so no light weight filter thus more mass thus more impact force thus... you get the point.
    • Or the Korean Hwacha. A salvo of arrows. Arrows propelled 500 yards by gunpowder. That then exploded when they land.
    • Or the bowling ball fired from a modified gas cylinder, using match heads as propellant.
    • Soda. It started with styro cup with ice, cup with soda, soda and ice, slushy, and culminated w/Jamie's shoulder-mounted pop-gun.
    • Not strictly ammo, but in a late 2009 episode, they built a cannon out of duct tape. That fired a five-pound iron ball several hundred feet. They've also built and tested both a wood cannon and a leather cannon.
    • Finally, they created a hook cannon for a Batmobile high-speed turn myth.
  • The Royal Canadian Air Farce segment "Chicken Cannon: Target of the Week". Originally a dig at pitiful mid-nineties Canadian military budgets, the cannon was used to fire upon pictures of whomever the show's writers thought were deserving of a little public humiliation. The traditional projectile of a rubber chicken was often supplemented with "custom" ammo suited to the situation at hand (e.g., sawdust for someone involved in the softwood lumber dispute, or Eggos for a politician who was perceived to waffle. And sometimes Jell-O for the hell of it—or, more accurately, because there's always room for Jell-O.)
  • On Supernatural, the Winchester brothers used shotguns loaded with rock salt for ghost-dispersal.
  • Doctor Who. Shotguns loaded with rock-salt are used in "Image of the Fendahl.
    • This happens to be Truth in Television, rock-salt is sometimes loaded into shotguns to cause pain but little damage.
  • Get Smart. A KAOS assassin posing as a vampire used a gun that fires twin ice bullets, leaving the distinctive Vampire Bites Suck mark, but no evidence of any weapon.
  • The final episode of JAKQ Dengekitai featured the heroes launching a rat out of a cannon. More appropriately, it was a missile that turned into a rat in midair.
  • The A-Team once built a couple of cannons that shot cabbages at the bad guys. Yes, cabbages.
  • While pursuing a bad guy in Bones, Brennan and Booth were stunned by the bomb the perp dropped. You know how bombs sometimes have nails and such attached to them to increase damage? This one had human teeth.
  • Top Gear once used a gun that fired cars. The kind you drive. In the episdoe, they fired a selection of old cars into a quarry. At a colossal dartboard. Richard Hammond won. By crushing a caravan with a flying Volvo.
  • An episode of CSI had a killer make a bullet out of frozen ground beef.
  • Wooden bullets appear in True Blood. Jason uses one to dispatch Stalker with a Crush Franklin.
  • A Show Within a Show Expy of CSI in Monk has it to where the "killer" used a bullet of his own frozen blood.


Newspaper Comics

  • In one Far Side strip, a burglar is confronted by a man with a gun that shoots Doberman Pinschers. Called, appropriately enough, the Dobie-O-Matic (the gun, not the ammo).


Tabletop Games

  • BattleTech has the Needle pistol, which uses solid blocks of plastic as ammo. It rips off bits of plastic and fires them as a horrifically effective anti-personal bullet. There's Inferno missiles which are essentially napalm rockets, and artillery that shoots radar jammers.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has nothing but abnormal ammo:
    • Guns that fire shells which explode after they're imbedded into a target? Standard issue for the Space Marines.
      • Specialists, such as Sternguard Veterans, carry into battle special issue ammunition for their Bolters: hellfire bolts carrying mutagenic acid (it's used against rapidly regenerating creatures such as Tyranids), Vengeance Rounds using "unstable flux core technology" (as far as anyone can tell, plasma containment) to take out power armor users, and everything in between.
    • Guns that fire molecular-edged shuriken? Standard issue for the Eldar. Additionally, guns which fire nets made of Razor Floss.
    • Guns that send you straight to Hell
    • Biological guns which use muscle impulses to fire killer beetles, killer maggots, acid crystals, floating spores or exploding tumours.
    • Tiny goblins fired into you through Hell.
    • Guns that fire screaming wires that make anyone they hit explode.
    • Guns that fire the captured souls of tortured psychics.
    • Guns that fire the tortured souls of sentient plastic.
    • The guns that strip off your armour, flesh and organs layer by layer.
    • Plague Marines have the shrunken heads of the victims of Papa Nurgle's Plague as a type of grenade. We assume it's the nausea effect that makes them so effective.
    • One weapon from the Soul Drinkers books was a daemon bound into a gun that fired its own daemonic spawn at enemies.
    • The Angry Marines fan fiction chapter gives us the following: Door Knob bombs, a Baneblade pistol (a pistol that fires the rounds of Baneblade super tanks), the heavily modified Predator Angrinator which fires Angry Marines, and the Land Raider launcher, a spaceship weapon which fires Land Raiders filled with Angry Marines at other spaceships.
  • Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay goes on a non-stop rampage with this. Most of those things also can be had in "Blessed" version.
    • Low-caliber firearms: aside of the familiar "man-stopper" (armour-piercing), "expander" (hollow-point), dumdum, tracer and incendiary, there are hyper-density penetrators (AP, but from an exotic material), void rounds (to fire in vacuum without problems), Purity rounds (illegally produced EMP), amputators (explosive) - also for shotgun, bleeder rounds (poisoned with anticoagulant), acid shells - also for shotgun and autocannon, organgrinder (extra-messy unwinding bullets) - also for bolter, envenomed, fyceline-tipped (homemade explosive bullets), scrambler rounds - also for bolter,
    • Shotguns: on top of the usual shot and slugs, there have Inferno (incendiary) - also for bolter, Ignitius Shell (flamethrower, see Dragonbreath in Real Life section), Executioner shell (very expensive and restricted seeking slug), snare shells (shoots a blob of webber fluid), adapted bolter rounds (obvious, but illegal), mono-edged flechette shells and the same in toxic variant, gas round (anything that can be had as a gas grenade put in a smaller ampoule), stun (see shotgun tazer in Real Life section), Space Marine shotguns also have breaching (explosive shot) and shredder (the same, but slightly nastier) rounds. Heretics also get Glittershells (sorcerous hallucinogenic), Scatterscream (extra-concussive explosive slugs) and Scourge (slugs that are better against armor, but not quite as damaging to unarmored targets as the common variety).
    • Bolters: Inferno, Tempest Bolt (with minor EMP effect), Blazer Shell (flamethrower), Psybolt (not quite as cool as for specialized weapon, but idea is the same), Kraken (armour-piercing), Hellfire (see above), Dragonfire (incendiary explosive), Vengeance (may harm the user, like most of Imperial plasma weapons), Metal Storm rounds (frag), Stalker rounds (quiet ones, work better with silenced boltgun), Implosion Shells (gravitic warhead), witch bolts (messes up psychic targets, but not sanctified). Chaos guys also have Tzeentchian Inferno bolts (sorcerous explosive/incendiary that ignores armor on living targets - probably meaning that it burns the soul) and Bloodrot (explosive caustic/toxic warheads, for heavy bolters only)
    • Flamers: Nephium-laced fuel (even more napalm-like), poisoned fuel (produces toxic smoke), psyflame (sanctified and more effective against psychic/sorcerous targets).
    • Crossbow: stake-bolt (sanctified crossbow bolt that messes up psychic targets), explosive, thermal (tipped with a small melta-charge), shard (frangible), incendiary, Purity (EMP), silver stakes (sanctified and more damaging for psykers and daemons), concussion (unreasonably strong explosive) and shock.
    • Special weapons: Psycannon is a boltgun, but shells are also supercharged from the psychic strength of the user. Less exotic weapons shoot things like injector dart, modified signal flare (explosive/incendiary), adamantine fractal-edged dart, "Sting-Blunt" bullets (shock bullets, miniaturized for pistols), Techxorcism ammunition (for specialized EMP weapons). Naval pistols and SMG have as standard ammunition frag rounds (soft bullets that are messier against unarmored target, but don't pierce much, thus unlikely to create trouble if they miss the enemy and fly into something like a plasma conduit). Airtorch canisters for melta weapons (gives shotgun-wide beam, but halves range and prone to overheating). Plasma weapons have microburst flasks (doesn't overheat, but doesn't fire in maximal power mode, and has slightly increases range) and "purified plasma" flasks (only hereteks have those). Needler shoots rocket spikes laced with poison and propelled by being vaporized with laser, but also has "micro-blast needles" that explode on hit instead. Webbers spray sticky, rapidly semi-solidifying fluid, but also have razorweb ammo. Aliens have less of the weird optional ammunition (but more weird primary ammunition), though Kroot rifle (which is "pulse" weapon) has sniper rounds (high-powered and accurate but single-shot only).
    • Exitus rifle for Vindicare assassins have its own variant ammunition - Hellfire, Shield-Breaker (uh, breaks through protective fields), Turbo-Penetrator (AP on steroids).
      • Then Only War introduced Longshot sniper rifle - baby Exitus for ratlings, with choice of penetrator, explosive, flash and toxin slugs.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle:
    • The Doom Diver, a giant slingshot that launches Goblins, the halfling soup pot launcher and the Screaming Skull Catapult. Also the Hellcannon, which loads living beings as the ammunition, then fires their souls.
    • At least one army featured in White Dwarf a few years back had a stone thrower rebuilt as a Squig Thrower. (A squig-firing cannon would later appear in the Storm of Chaos event thanks to a vocal fansite). Never let it be said that Orcs let the manifest insanity of an idea stop them from trying it anyway.
    • Ogres don't tend to have a lot of anything (at least, not identical) This includes bullets and cannonballs. So they just make due with anything on hand; a few spoons, a fork or two, a rock, and that gnoblar on your shoulder.
    • The spin-off game Blood Bowl has Throw Team Mate which allows larger players to throw small ones in place of the ball.
  • Magic: The Gathering is loaded (no pun—okay, okay, pun intended) with cards that shoot or throw odd things. (Most of these cards are at least partly red, the color of chaos, bloodlust, randomness, and some kinds of madness.) Aside from the Hornet Cannon, there are:
  • Dungeons & Dragons: lots and lots of enchanted ammunition, from "hits harder and affects non-corporeals" to "instant death if saving throw is failed".
    • Probably any magic-rich setting has its share, but Netheril, being a Magitek sub-setting, featured the netherpelter (a telekinetic gun) with imprisoning, expansive (as in pebble to boulder), decay inducing, fireball, water jet lashing, and whirlwind (for grounding fliers) pellets as "standard" ammo, though it propelled mundane darts and pellets just as well.
    • Spelljammer setting has "mageshot" (old good enchanted ammunition, now in siege engine sizes) including seekers, rounds that make metal ships loudly ring (incapacitating the crew), cloud the target in a dust cloud, etc. Of non-magical sort, there are jugs with aggressive oozes and weird gnomish weapons up to electrified bolas. Also, there's accelerator -- magical breachloading cannon which sucks anything placed in the ammo cup and hurls it with enough exit speed to damage ships' hulls. Grabbing the cup in such a way that some fingers happen to be inside is not recommended. Any and all living "ammo" dies in process—even amorphous fungal mold or slime. Its way of power supply sucks, however.
    • Perhaps the most disturbing ammunition in DND: arrows with screaming heads on them that distract spellcasters.
    • Healing Arrows: These arrows are meant to be fired at your own side in combat, allowing them to keep fighting. They usually heal more than they do in damage. (They double as Depleted Phlebotinum Shells against the undead, thanks to Revive Kills Zombie.)
  • In a flavor-text encounter from a Ravenloft supplement, an ally of the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins scores a glancing shot on an unidentified monster with an arrow tipped with multiple needles, each of a different substance. After the skirmish, the twins re-claim the arrow and check which needle is bloodied, thus learning the creature's specific weakness.
  • In Exalted, Sidereal Exalted have a charm that lets them fire anything smaller than their arm as an arrow, including shouts - the latter is used as an odd communication technique. They also have a charm that transforms arrows into various things such as wheat, life-force, glass, and boulders.
    • In the right combo, said charm could allow a Sidereal to fire a barrage of flaming squirrels, or something else even more ludicrous. The game rewards this.
    • Then you're got the shoulder-mounted cannon that fires giant pearls covered in magical napalm.
      • There's a weapon which fires solid gold bullets, and propels them towards their targets using the power of the tiny, tiny shrines inside the barrel.
  • Human Occupied Landfill had a flaming gerbil cannon.
  • For both GURPS and Rifts, There are special rules for making items that use exotic ammo. There's a joke saying a baby wearing a lobster costume in a bucket could be a PC, a weapon, or ammo. Turns out, it's not a joke.
  • Changeling: The Dreaming encourages this kind of creativity when coming up with dream weapons. Still, it is pretty common to simply find a steam powered cannon firing burning coals from its own firebox.
  • Scion has Knacks that let you pick up far more than you should, as well as Knacks that give you immense throwing ability. With Epic Strength 10, Strength 5, and the right knacks, you can throw anything in the world. The game notes that at a certain point (say, throwing the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan), damage becomes narrative rather than dice-based.
  • In the Starship Troopers RPG, there are several weapons that do this, including grenades that can be filled with chemical agents and missile launchers that shoot rockets that unleash walls of fire.

Video Games

  • Metro 2033. The game has "Metro" ammo (recycled ammo, weak), and "Military" ammo (brand new rounds). Metro rounds are cheaper and abundant, but less powerful. Military ammo is stronger but also used as currency, so when you load military rounds into your AK, you're effectively shooting money. More straight examples are the Volt Driver, which fires ball-bearings using magnetic rails, and the Hellsing, which uses manually-compressed air to shoot metal arrows.
  • Armed and Dangerous revels in this trope - aside from conventional bullets and explosives your arsenal also includes:
    • The Land Shark Gun fires a baby shark into the ground which homes in on the nearest enemy before bursting out fully-grown and devouring them whole.
    • The Knockout Bomb a wearable boxing glove that flings enemies towards you, allowing you to deliver a Megaton Punch.
    • The Topsy Turvy Bomb is a device that flips the entire world upside down and back again, with predictable results.
    • The Black Hole In A Box.
  • There is a bonus weapon in Crimsonland called Splitter Gun. It shots a single bullet that, upon hit, splits into two bullets that spread squarely. The splitting can repeat unlimitedly until all the bullets miss. Bonus points to abnormality for the chance that subsidiary bullets will hit you. Impractical, in fact, but awesome. More "conventional" examples are Rocket minigun and Gauss shotgun.
    • Though it's not a weapon per se, but through an inventive capitalization on in-game mechanics you can form a reload-powered multi-lateral plasma gun. First, there is an otherwise poor Sonic gun. Frankly, it qualifies for Abnormal Ammo itself (it shoots sound waves), but right now we're more interested in its near-instant reloading. Then, there is a perk called "Angry reloader" that makes you shoot small plasma balls in four directions every time you reload. You combine both, hold the reload button and voil?four endless orthogonal bursts of plasma. Once again, not especially effective, but cool.
  • In Evil Dead Regeneration, Ash has the ability to turn into "Deadite Ash". In this form his "boomstick" fires energy bolts. He also constructs a harpoon gun that can attach to his right arm in place of the classic chainsaw, and what can only be described as a rocket launcher shotgun.
  • Seen in every Final Fantasy game featuring modern technology.
    • Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy Tactics have guns that fire spells. FFVII has the Hand Wave of it being a Mako Gun, and VI had them exclusively as part of a magitech mecha.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics had the Blaze Gun, which fired ice spells rather than fire, and the Glacier Gun, which fired fire spells rather than ice. Maybe they are named for the things they destroy.
    • There is also the Blast Gun, which shoots lightning spells.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance similarly has magic handguns, including the Peacemaker, a revolver that fires charm shots.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has cannons, used by two classes. The Flintlock class mostly uses it to shoot his allies to create various effects such as regen or mana restoration. The Cannoneer is more offensive, but can also shoot allies with Potion Shells and Ether Shells.
    • Final Fantasy VIII also featured Abnormal Ammo in the form of Irvine's Shot Limit. You had your regular ammunition, along with Shotgun or Fast Ammo, but then there's Flame Ammo, AP Ammo, Dark Ammo, and Pulse Ammo. Rinoa uses a crossbow that shoots chakrams. But the real insanity is her Limit Break, in which she stuffs her dog onto the crossbow and shoots it at the enemy. The dog explodes, then runs back to his mistress.
    • The Gun-Mages in Final Fantasy X-2 are blue mages that use guns to shoot abilities learned from enemies. Shots vary from generic-fireballs to "1000 Needles" to pillars of holy energy. They can even shoot bullets that heal their whole party (White Wind).
    • Final Fantasy XII features various bullets and arrows that somehow carry with them elemental damage, and several carry status effects as well. They're also completely infinite, unless you sell them, then they're Gone Forever.
  • One of the best (if not the best) ranged weapons in Lands Of Lore The Throne Of Chaos is the Crossbow "Valkyrie", which shoots fireballs.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos has the shark gun. And the Baseball sniper rifle, exploding bouncing football grenade launcher, Party Cracker shotgun, soap bubble flamethrower, and the homing dragon railgun.
  • Worms has sheep and homing pigeons being fired from bazookas, the Priceless Ming Vase, the Banana Bomb, the Holy Hand Grenade, and the Old Lady (among the most powerful non-super weapons in the game) as well as the Super Sheep, which is a flying sheep (with a red cape!) which you guide into its target. The super weapons include the "Concrete Donkey", the Super Banana Bomb, and the Flaming Sheep Strike. Let's just put it this way: The more unlikely the weapon, the more powerful it's probably going to be.
  • Worms Forts: Under Siege has, among other things, a minigun that fires hamsters, a trebuchet that launches a moose and a mortar that fires a bishop.
  • Donkey Kong 64's coconut gun, it fires in spurts! (If he shoots ya, it's gonna hurt!) Also, Diddy uses popguns that fires peanuts, Tiny has a crossbow that launches barbed feathers, Lanky spits grapes out of a blowpipe, and Chunky has a gun that fires pineapples. Funky shoots K. Rool with a rocket propelled boot, and Krusha gets in on the act with a gun that fires exploding oranges.
  • The Medic's Syringe Gun from Team Fortress 2 The alternate Blutsauger shoots syringes that restore the medics health when they hit an enemy.
    • Jarate (one of the Sniper's weapons) is a thrown jar that splashes on impact.
    • There's also Mad Milk, a bottle of milk you can throw at the enemy that saps their health upon subsequent hits with your other weapons.
    • Some servers also allow custom particle effects, so you can have your guns shoot whatever you can find a skin for.
  • The Earthworm Jim games have a bubble gun as a Joke Weapon, but a far less harmless weapon is the homing missile, which launches tiny rocket-propelled houses.
  • Mega Man, amongst all the abilities he's gained, has scissors, snakes, flowers, and bees amongst the weirder ones.
  • BioShock has several:
    • The Chemical Thrower, a gun that fires liquid nitrogen and electric gel, along with the standard napalm. The liquid nitrogen is used to freeze things without destroying them; this is useful for hacking turrets, since they can't shoot at you while you try to hack them. The electric gel turns the Chemical Thrower into a lightning gun, which is perfect for taking down Big Daddies.
    • The Insect Swarm plasmid, which lets you fire bees from your hand.
    • The shotgun, which in the beginning is just a normal pump-action, can be loaded with electric or explosive rounds.
    • The crossbow can fire "trap bolts" that deploy an electrified trip-wire trap.
  • Half-Life also has a "bee launcher".
    • Half-Life 2 has the gravity gun, which picks up and launches anything and everything that isn't nailed to the ground, so it can be called an everything launcher. Once it gets supercharged, it can pick up plenty of things which are nailed to the ground, walls, and balls of energy from anti-gravity energy columns. Even enemies become ammunition when the gravity gun is supercharged. And that's saying nothing about the sawblades, explosive barrels, cars...
    • The Half-Life 2 version of the crossbow appears to shoot glowing-hot pieces of rebar.
    • The Pulse Rifle's secondary fire launches balls of dark energy that cause targets hit to float upward and disappear into the aether. Same effect from the Combine Hunter's exploding flechettes in Episode Two.
  • Based on Garry's original description of the request forum on the Facepunch Studios forums, somebody made a scripted weapon for Garry's Mod of an AK-47 that shoots rainbow colored babies that can swarm any target and you can eat for 10 health. Yes.
    • In response, someone else made a version that can also shoot sawblades, and another someone else went the extra mile with a baby SWEP that shoots AK-47's. Yes indeed.
    • There's tons of these for Garry's Mod, when you come to think of it - the in-game toybox includes a "Scavenger Cannon" that can suck up 20 props at once and launch them in any order the player wants similar to Fallout 3's Rock-It Launcher.
  • Borderlands has relatively tame guns that simply shoot giant globs of acid; as Marcus puts it in a sales pitch, "Is shooting bullets just not cool enough for you? Then get a Maliwan [brand weapon] and light some people on fire!" Then there's the "Carnage" line of shotguns, whose weapon text proclaims, "Holy crap! It shoots rockets!" Again, this is a shotgun.
    • There's also the Eridian Cannon and Mega Cannon which shoots a slow moving ball of energy, the Eridian Flare gun which shoots fire and the Eridian Glob Gun which shoots acid. The projectiles of the Maliwan Rhino bursts after it has travelled a certain distance.
  • Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil has a weapon like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. The main difference is that the Grabber in Doom can only hold objects in its field for a couple of seconds before being released.
  • A cheat code in Shadow Warrior transforms the shots from your missile launcher into bunnies. Killer Rabbit indeed.
  • One of the hidden weapons that could be earned in the Arcade First-Person Shooter War Final Assault was a barrel that fired a monkey with a bomb strapped to its back.
  • South Park for Nintendo 64 has...yellow snowballs. The most powerful weapon is a cow launcher. There are grenades that look like Terence and Philip dolls; they fart to explode. The game's equivalent to a sniper rifle is a chicken that shoots eggs. You even aim it through a little notch in its tail feathers!
  • Warcraft III has the Undead Meat Wagon, a catapult that launches corpses. Notice that this is not as far-fetched as it seems; there are real instances of armies stuffing their catapults with corpses, as you can see in the appropriate section below. The Night Elf Glaive Thrower from the same game is a siege weapon that throws blades so sharp at such high speed they can cut down trees.
  • In the Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft, one of the goblin quests in the Twilight Highlands requires you to shoot an antiaircraft gun that's been loaded with anything the goblins could find lying around—old shoes, inflatable pool ponies, you name it. As with all pieces of goblin technology, this improvised ammo still manages to explode on contact with its target.
    • The Wrath Of The Lich King expansion brought out the Isle Of Conquest PvP battleground which had (among many fun vehicles) Glaive Throwers (which fired big spinniny things of doom) and quite small, unassuming catapults...that fired THEIR OWN DRIVER (as a way to get troops inside the enemy fortress before breaking the gates).
    • Another Cataclysm quest involves attacking an enemy-held war zeppelin. By being shot out of a cannon at it! When asked why, if he has a cannon, he doesn't just shoot cannonballs at them, the quest giver replies, "No way! They'll see that coming..."
    • There's also the Chuckshot gun attachment, which sometimes shoots a random critter at your target, in homage to Flintlocke's Guide To Azeroth.
  • As noted in the Zero Punctuation review of the game, Painkiller has the Electrodriver, which does indeed fire shurikens and lightning. There's also the stakegun ("penis extension gun", in Yahtzee's parlance), which shoots "sharpened telephone poles".
    • The fanmade sequel Overdose includes a number of these, to its detriment. Some examples include a crossbow that shoots skulls, a shotgun that shoots (fragments of) skulls, and a knife that shoots more SKULLS.
  • Cave Story has the bubble gun (surprisingly powerful), and a throwing knife whose fully-leveled form launches a knife-wielding ghost (very powerful!). There's also the highest-level form of the Nemesis gun, which actually gets weaker as you level it up; it shoots rubber ducks.
    • One of the bosses, Monster X, shoots fish at you. Or rather, homing missiles shaped like fish (complete with eyes).
  • In Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, the main character has a crossbow that shoots a variety of wildlife, including: enemy-taunting chipmunks, giant armored pillbugs, exploding bats, and little bitey alien things perhaps best described as rabid carnivorous tribbles.
  • Crusader gains a couple of Abnormal Ammo guns in its second installment. The crystallizer shoots a weird cartridge that inhibits its targets' molecules; since motion is heat, the shot is described as being comparable to "several minutes' exposure to absolute zero". The result is a statue in an agonized pose, which you can then shatter. The liquidizer shoots a classified catalytic compound which breaks down molecular bonds, reducing the target to a puddle of its base elements. There's a neat, brownish, human-shaped cloud when it hits a target, and then all that's left behind is a splotch of green goo.
  • Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel has a water gun. You think it's a joke weapon, until you come across jars of acid.
    • Fallout 3 adds a gun that shoots railway spikes, and a gun that can shoot any trash the player can find. You haven't lived until you kill a Super Mutant by launching a teddy bear at them and blowing every limb off their body.
    • Fallout 2 has the Solar Schorcher, a solar-powered gun. You can only reload it outdoors.
    • Fallout: New Vegas has the trusty 12 Gauge shotgun, which can be loaded with coin shot (a shotgun shell loaded not with lead, but with legion denari.)
  • God of War has the Minotaur Boss, a heavily armored behemoth that you have to stun before resorting to twisted means to execute it: You run back to a platform and fire a flaming log/stake at it, cracking the armor and eventually nailing it to the door it emerged from.
    • It also has the Atlas Statue. In order to get to an objective, you have to risk life and limb plowing through Undead Mooks and platforming to wind up the statue, which then throws the Earth it bears down the hallway and through the wall that impede your progress.
  • The Unreal Tournament series has mostly-conventional Standard FPS Guns, the impact hammer aside, but one of the more interesting ones is the GES Biorifle, a goo gun which you can either slime someone with or lay down explosive poisonous traps with.
    • The goo gun doesn't appear in Unreal II the Awakening, which instead has something much weirder: a gun that shoots spiders. Primary fire covers a target in spiders, which doesn't kill them very quickly but does make them run around screaming "Aaaaaaagh get them off meeeeeeee!" For this reason it may well be the second-most fun weapon in the game. Secondary fire shoots a glob of biomass that turns into a big spider when you hit it with the primary fire; the spider then follows you and attacks your enemies. Then there's the BFG that shoots miniature black holes.
    • The entire Unreal series is very friendly to weird weaponry, thanks to the way the engine works. Open up the editor, find a projectile-launching weapon, substitute the class name of the bullet with that of most other entities in the game world, and... voila, a Stinger that fires rockets, or ASMD blast-balls, or grenades. Or rabbits.
  • One weapon in the "Contrabobo" stage of Abobos Big Adventure is a gun that shoots Lemmings. Not real lemmings, by the way: the green-haired, bipedal critters from the eponymous game: if they hit an enemy, they bounce off and walk around for a while before exploding.
  • Star Wars: Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight used a similar idea: The alternate fire on the rocket launcher made the spider-shaped rockets grab onto objects and wait for a few seconds before going off. Instead of just blowing up the enemy, you got to see them run around with an exploding spider-bomb on them. So, so much more fun.
  • A wild magic surge in Baldur's Gate II could result in a cow dropping on the target. Also in the game was Jan Jansen's Flasher Master Bruiser Mates, used (naturally) with Jan Jansen's impeccably stylish Flasher Master Bruiser crossbow. They were stun bombs, but they looked like skulls.
  • Planescape: Torment features a high-level spell called Mechanus cannon. It's a pretty generic cannon... fired from a different plane of existence, through a portal, opened five feet from your enemy's head.
    • It also features a few strange projectiles for Nodrom - Rule of Three bolts with spring-loaded pyramidal heads, Bolts of Wincing which look like bladed U's (the name comes from what observers do when the bolts go in...or are pulled out), and bolts with sponge-heads (the sponges are full of acid).
  • Tyrian had several "hidden" ships you could play through a "super arcade mode" by using a cheat code. The Ninja Stealth ship had several ninja-themed weapons, including poison bombs (against other ships?), "starburst" (a near-useless weapon that threw starshaped chunks of hot metal out sideways from your ship), and shuriken, which when fully-upgraded resulted in a massive forward field of shuriken shot from the front of your ship. Taking the cake, though, had to be the Foodship Nine Supercarrot, which used entirely food-related weapons, from a banana gun that threw out a tree's worth of explosive bananas per second, a secondary banana bomb launcher, a hotdog-with-optional-mustard-spread, an orange...thingy...that created a whirling circle of oranges.
  • Although it wasn't seen, in Apollo Justice, Trucy mentions that one of her tricks involves firing a gun that shoots Bullets. Turns out "Bullets" is the name of a cat.
  • One of the bonus guns obtained in Shadow the Hedgehog is the Omochao gun, which, just like you would think, fires the Omochao from Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
  • Wizardry 8 features the gadgeteer class. This class comes with a unique rifle, whose choice of potential ammo expands as you level up. It starts able to only fire rocks and pellets, later gaining the ability to shoot daggers, arrows, axes, swords, lightsabers, grenade-like potions...
  • RuneScape has a number of these, many of which use living creatures in some way or another. It's a good thing there's no PETA in RuneScape...
    • The Fixed Device shoots dyed toads.
    • Salamanders use up tar mixed with various herbs as the ammo for them to shoot flames out. Yes, you hold the salamanders in your hands.
    • Crystal Bows "use" no ammo. They weaken as you use them because you're essentially firing little bits of the bow itself at things.
    • Chinchompas are small, highly explosive animals. You throw them at people. They may not be shot out of anything, but they are fun to watch.
  • Indiana Jones and The Infernal Machine: When a cheat code is entered, your bazooka fires flying rubber chickens... They also play tropical music as they pass by you.
  • Scorched Earth features a type of shell that explodes in a 100–300 feet sphere (well, circle, it's a 2D game) of dirt. Apparently dirt is very compressible. It also features three different families of dirt-destroying weapons.
  • As an Easter Egg gag weapon, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a Solar Gun from another Hideo Kojima game. It shoots Sunlight!
    • The Tanegashima, which looks like your ordinary, everyday musket. Until you shoot it and a tornado comes out.
    • Also the grenades and tranquilizer rounds that make people get emotional.
  • Mass Effect makes use of a variety of upgradable ammunition types, including incendiary, radioactive, cryo, proton, explosive, hammerhead, armor-piercing, anti-personnel, snowblind, sledgehammer...
    • Mass Effect 2 trims away some of these, but adds Jack's loyalty power: biotic ammo. Mini gravity wells.
    • Some of the heavy weapon options are pretty weird too: at the time of writing, options include a gun which shoots giant blobs of freezing liquid, an electrolaser (shoots lightning), and a mini black hole cannon.
    • Mass Effect 3 continues the trend. We knew about two weapons that made use of this trope before the game was even released. We can now add a krogan shotgun that shoots spikes designed to make enemies bleed out and a geth sniper rifle that fires ferrofluid.
  • Starsiege: Tribes features the Spinfusor, which shoots exploding frisbees of death. Functionally, it's a dumbfire Rocket Launcher on the Standard List Of FPS Guns, but its distinctive design is iconic of the series.
  • Drawn to Life has a gun that shoots snowballs for the first world. For the second world, it's tinkered with so that it shoots exploding acorns.
    • In the third world, it shoots starfish.
    • In the second game, you can make the ammo WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE.
  • Many of the games in World of Mana series had a system of cannons, located all around the world, that fired main characters very, very high in order to transport them elsewhere. Needless to say, there wasn't any fall damage, so it was way superior to walking through half the world to player's next destination.
  • System Shock 2 had the 'Exotic' weapons class, which reloaded with annelids - AKA worms. The Viral Proliferator shot clouds of flying, stinging worms, whilst the Annelid Launcher shot a homing rocket. Made of worms.
  • Ratchet and Clank: Amongst the weapons included in the game we have guns that will turn any enemy into various farmyard animals, a land shark gun, a gun that fires heat-seeking servings of vindaloo curry, a mine that spits out bees, and the suck cannon, a weapon which sucks up your enemies and fires them as ammo. There is also a gun that shoots black holes, and grenades that turn into little robots that themselves have guns. Finally, we have the gun that fires tornadoes, complete with lightning storms, wrist weapons that launched sentient and powerful blobs of slime, and capping it all off with a bomb that makes any enemy - from wandering creatures to NPC's to bosses - start dancing to disco music, each one having a distinct dance.
  • Half-Life spinoff Gunman Chronicles has a gun that shoots a variable amount of acid, basic and neutral liquid in form of globs. The amount of the three liquids is user-selectable, resulting in different effects and different ammo consumption. The bad thing is that such a user interface is obviously very fiddly, so players tend to set the gun to its most destructive setting (full acid, full base, half neutral) and leave it at that; the good thing is that, in contrast to other such weird guns (such as, say, the aforementioned biorifle from Unreal) smart players actually use the chemical gun.
    • The mod Rocket Crowbar changed the shotgun to fire screaming scientists who flew towards the target and exploded on contact.
  • In Super Mario RPG for the SNES, Bowser's Hurly Gloves weapon, described as "A classic Mario-toss attack," is just that: Bowser tossing Mario comedically at enemies. When Mario is unable to be thrown (due to death, absence from the battlefield, or the mushroom and scarecrow status ailments, etc.), the Mario doll first seen in Gaz's house is thrown (for the same amount of damage).
  • Super Mario Brothers has been doing this for a very long time with the Bullet Bill as well as the Bo-bombs.
  • In Redneck Rampage you find dynamite, a generic tossed explosive. Later, you upgrade it to a rocket launcher by finding a crossbow. Then you find a chicken... strap the chicken to an arrow, jam dynamite up the egg-hole, and now you have a chicken-guided missile launcher complete with 'b-gawk!' sound effects and drifting feathers. Also, while not exactly abnormal ammo, you kill a big alien and take its gun... which is cyber-grafted to its arm. You fire it by yanking on dangling tendons.
  • In Bungie's Oni, some of the more advanced weapons included a sniper railgun that fired slugs of frozen mercury, and an energy weapon that fired a grenade, which released a Life Energy absorbing psychic entity, that would move from target to target until it was done feeding, including attacking the player if it was fired carelessly. Each of those took the same generic ammo clips as the other projectile and energy weapons.
  • Rise of Legends has a number of these, especially from the Steampunk "Vinci" factions. Standouts are the Doge Cannon and Doomcannon, both of which can fire a poison gas, shrapnel, or explosive shell; or the ability of certain heroes to fire flare rockets that turn into so-called "Holdout Towers".
  • In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, GDI Grenadiers throw bouncing explosive frisbees instead of normal grenades. Tiberium Wars gives them more oval-shaped grenades which can lock onto and guide themselves to far-away targets, particularly ones holed up in abandoned buildings - one Grenadier getting close enough is all you need to clear the entire building and place your own soldiers in it.
  • Red Alert 3, among the rest of its weird and wild arsenal, has the Soviet APC that can only deploy the soldiers within it by launching them out of a cannon on its back. Much fun can be derived from bombarding the enemy with bears. Armoured War Bears.
  • Shin Megami Tensei used to feature special ammo for your guns that could put your enemies to sleep, poison them or charm them.
  • Xenogears: Citan built the Buntline, a Gear that can transform into a giant gun. Its ammo? Its own cockpit, pilot and all.
  • One of the attacks one can learn for Bazookas in Makai Kingdom involves stuffing your opponent down the barrel and firing them out.
  • Toejam and Earl has you using tomatoes as your primary attack. The first sequel has bottles. No, they don't break on enemies and hurt them; they open and suck enemies in, rather like the ghost trap in Ghostbusters.
  • Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project has an unlockable lightning gun that kills every regular enemy in One-Hit Kill and never runs out of ammo.
  • In Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, the mechas can shoot anything from missiles, to swords, to holy water, to statues, and NPCs and enemies. In fact, any item you collect in the game can be used as ammo.
  • Battlefield 2142 has a gun that shoots C4.
  • One of the first moves learned in Banjo-Kazooie is how to launch blue eggs out of Kazooie's mouth.
    • There's Mr Patch from the sequel, whose main attack is to spit exploding beach balls at you.
    • Kazooie's egg-shooting ability is taken to a ridiculous extreme in the sequel, in which, in addition to the standard blue eggs, you get fire, grenade, ice, and "clockwork kazooie" eggs. The same game's multiplayer mode adds proximity eggs, which latch onto walls and explode whenever someone gets close enough.
  • The Turok series has the bore-gun which fires nanobots of some type which slice apart the enemy into bite-sized chunks.
  • Portal has a gun that fires interlinked portals. Firing directly at a turret won't even nudge it, but there are numerous ways to use the portals around the turrets to disable them.
    • Speaking of the turrets, they don't shoot ordinary bullets. They shoot the entire bullet (that's 65% more bullet!).
  • Hellgate:London has guns that shoot bees, exploding lightning balls, and horrible clouds of green plague gas.
  • The Gun Del Sol from Boktai shoots solar energy in some solid form - there's bullets, grenades, and seeker missiles, but the Dragoon is a solar-powered flamethrower! Yes, a Solar Gun that kills enemies with sunfire.
  • Pocket Tanks, ScorchedEarth clone, is an extreme example of this trope. Tanks there can shoot: *deep breath* ...dirt, pop corn, rubber, bees, roman candles, sawblades...FLEAS!...star dust, water, tornadoes, coal, fireflies, glue, chalks and so on.
  • Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords has the Gobshooter enemy - a catapult that uses goblins as ammo (Destroying a random gem on the board for 20x effect). The funny thing is that the Hurl Goblin attack is learnable!
  • Zombies Ate My Neighbors. You start with a squirt gun full of holy water that can kill zombies. You also can attack with: tomatoes, popsicles, silverware, dishware, six packs of soda (That explode like grenades), footballs, fire extinguishers, weed trimmers and an alien ray gun that fires bubbles. The only "normal" weapon you obtain is the bazooka.
  • Anarchy Online starts you off with a weapon with infinite ammo. This is handwaved as being a gun which fires tiny nanotech-created replicas of itself.
  • The SMG in Deus Ex: Invisible War has an alt-fire which launches flash grenades. By contrast, the Widowmaker SMG (every weapon has a special variant) has an alt-fire which launches spiderbots. Spiderbots are far from deadly, until your enemy is surrounded by twenty or so.
  • This trope features very heavily in the ending of Sakura Taisen 3.
  • Revolution X, the Spiritual Sequel to Midway Games' Terminator 2 - The Arcade Game, had the player armed with a machine gun...as well as a launcher that fired exploding CD's. As a powerup, the player could also upgrade to Laserdiscs!
  • The Angelic Rifle in Baroque shoots tiny winged babies that are living, sentient incarnations of pain.
  • In Okami, you can shoot your NPCman-turned-wolf companion Oki in the battle against the twin clockwork owls.
  • Metal Slug:
    • While the first game had normal weapons for the most part (Rocket Lawnchairs notwithstanding) from 2 onwards things got weird.
    • The Drop Shot, which fires a bouncing explosive blob,
    • Iron Lizard, an exploding robotic car (or bomb-on-legs in Fat mode),
    • Super Grenade, which is a rocket propelled grenade,8
    • Thunder Gun, Emperor Palpatine-style insta-kill arc lighning,
    • The helper character gets pretty standard weaponry (Hyaktaro's Ryu rip-off notwithstanding), except for the unused Glen Achilles, who apparently fires spinning, exploding Heavy Machine Guns.
  • The Metroid series has the following: a gun that shoots superheated magma grenades (Magmaul), supercooled plasma (Judicator), killer neutrinos (Shock Coil), miniature nuclear weapons (Battlehammer), holy planet energy (Light beam) and a miniature star (Sunburst), anti-energy (Dark beam) and a portal to hell (Darkburst), matter-antimatter (Annihilator beam) and the sound barrier (Sonic Boom), sentient goo in energy form (any phazon weapon) and the Stacked beam, which contains the plasma, ice, and wave beams at the same time in a six foot wall.
    • And if we count glitches, there's also the Murder Beam, which is best described as a wall of solid PAIN AND SUFFERING.
  • Can be modded into Dwarf Fortress quite easily, since the game can support up to three different types of arrow, crossbow bolt and (presumably) blowdart each. Anything can be thrown in adventure mode. One rather famous story is how a player decapitated what is essentially a living statue of liberty with a rabbit.
  • In Champions of Norrath, one boss you fight can shoot souls from his bow like arrows.
  • Bile Demons and Giants in Dungeon Keeper 2 have a special ability called Dwarf Chucking.
  • The Cyclops in Heroes of Might and Magic V will throw goblins at the enemy army if it can grab them.
    • On the subject of Might and Magic, Might and Magic VI has a unique weapon, Artemis, which is a longbow that shoots lightning bolts. It also has the "of Carnage" enchantment, which only applies to bows, and makes them shoot arrows that explode.
    • Also, Liches from the Heroes of Might and Magic games throw clouds. Of death.
      • And Magogs from Heroes of Might and Magic III throw fireballs.
  • In Vangers there is a basic machinegun that makes ammo out of dirt and water. Also a gun that shoots money.
  • Prey's alien world is chock full of annoying crab-like three-legged things. They don't really do anything other than walk around. You can load them up into a pneumatic launcher and shoot them at enemies, because apparently, they have an explosive self-destruct.
    • The acid gun, a shotgun that sprays acid instead of pellets, and launches an acid-filled tube with the secondary fire.
  • In No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, Million Gunman has a gun that shoots tightly packed wads of cash.

Fuck you, I shoot money!

    • In the original No More Heroes, Bad Girl hits her ammo at you with her baseball bat. Her ammo? Gimps. Yes, GIMPS.
  • The Osamodas from Dofus and Wakfu can fire raven-rounds.
  • Resonance of Fate features Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Poison bullets and grenades. We're not touching the grenade called "Dog Droppings" with a ten foot pole.
  • The Wallace and Gromit's Close Shave porridge gun returned as a hand held Gatling gun along with the telescopic banana gun and a turnip bazooka in Wallace and Grommet Project Zoo.
  • In Red Alert 3 Paradox, the Mediterranean Syndicate's standard weapons fire Gyrojets, little finless rockets that accelerate as they fly, doing more damage the farther away they hit. They're based on an actual weapon described below, and the numerous flaws listed are the reason why they never made it to mass production in Real Life.
  • The PlayStation game Terracon features the "Genergy Gun". In combat it's a fairly ordinary energy weapon. The gimmick is that the game also features coloured wireframe "meshes", which turn into solid objects and functional devices when shot with enough Genergy.
  • Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare introduces the Blunderbuss, which Nigel West Dickens gives to you stating that you could stuff it with anything to kill zombies with as it has been the choice weapon of zombie hunters for many years. John stuffs it with zombie parts (as in, fingers and ribs and such) as projectiles. It makes zombies blow up REAL good.
  • The Blood series has the Life Leech, a staff with a one-eyed skull that launches magic fire at enemies, sucking the life out of them and healing the player. In the first game, its intended ammunition was trapped souls.
  • In the second Paper Mario game, Magnus von Grapple 2.0 has an attack that sucks up the audience and then fires them like a machine gun. To make matters worse, this is one of the strongest attacks in the game if you don't guard correctly.
  • In Scribblenauts and Super Scribblenauts there's a gun that fires exploding barrels.
  • In the first and fourth installments of the Quake franchise, one of the more common weapons the player must master is a nail gun.
  • In Touhou, practically anything that moves is deadly: magic bullets, knives, stars, paper charms, Yin-Yang orbs, rocks, roses, hearts, anchors, coins, and laser beams (linear and twirly).
  • In the original The Legend of Zelda, Link uses Rupees as arrows.
  • X Com Interceptor features mostly normal weapons: you start with lasers and missiles, upgrade to more powerful lasers and missiles, eventually get plasma weapons, and then develop the psi-beam, which is a laser that shoots mind-control beams.
  • The LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean game has a scene where the Spanish fire a pig from a cannon to destroy the Fountain of Youth. Since this is a LEGO game and everything is smashable, this is more successful than the film example of firing a monkey.
  • In Jabless Adventure, your only weapon is the Hurricane Pistol, which fires a concentrated air blast.
  • Rock Man 4 Minus Infinity has the Spark. Manbow. Normally, it is just Mega Man creating a lightbulb with his to shock his foes at point-blank range. Release the fire button and it becomes a projectile.
  • Terraria brings the Sandgun. It does exactly what you expect it to do, it shoots sand blocks. It can be used as a direct fire weapon, or block off an area from a distance.
  • The Angry Birds use themselves as ammo against the pigs. They even come in different varieties, including an exploding bird.
  • Bulletstorm has a gun that shoots explosive bolas (the Flailgun) , and another that shoots rocket-propelled drillbits (the Penetrator). The sniper rifle fires tiny guided missiles.
  • League of Legends has the usual ricochet bullets, homing bullets, bola nets and giant knives. Urgot's Butcher skin shoots homing chainsaws.
  • In Iji it is possible, through the use of prolonged self-abuse, to find a Banana Gun. And it's the only human-made weapon in the whole game.
  • In Hyper Princess Pitch, bricks are your basic ammunition. Your other weapons are a rainbow blaster and an ice ray.
  • The Point Singularity Projector in the X-Universe games fires what are essentially naked singularities at enemy ships. The Fragmentation Bomb Launcher shoots a ball full of fletchettes, which explode in proximity to other ships. The Cluster Flak Artillery Array shoots a flak shell which bursts, spewing out more flak in all directions. In a player-only example, you can build stations INSIDE enemy ships, instantly destroying them.
  • In Kid Icarus: Uprising, some of Pit's odder weapons can fire things like bouncing pawprints, jumbled chunks of skyscraper, or crescent moons
  • Dragon Age II's Mark of the Assassin DLC has a villain named Duke Prosper as its Big Bad. He is also the final boss fight; he uses an automatic crossbow that can shoot either arrows or a strange green goo. The strange green goo does no damage by itself...but as the cutscene just before the boss fights demonstrates on the poor, unfortunate Salit, Prosper also has a pet wyvern named Leopold that has been trained to relentlessly chase and attack-to-kill anyone Propser has first shot with this green goo. When he uses it in battle, he will either shoot one of Hawke's companions with it, so Leopold will chase that companion leaving itself open to an attack from Hawke, or more frequently Prosper will shoot Hawke with the goo, making it necessary for Hawke to spend his/her time running from Leopold until the goo wears off.


Web Animation


Web Comics

It could've been Rob and Elliot, or one of the Digital Pimp comics, in which there was a gun that was outdone by the author's previous fantasy of a gun that shoots fancy leather furniture.

Commander: Space Commies are th' biggest threat t' red-blooded American freedom we got in the' future. So the armed forces decided they'd jazz up high ranking officers enough t'push action figures.
Jared: Does it come with accessories?
Commander: Jus' this gun. I guess it shoots little guns.
Jared: I LOVE CAPITALISM!
Commander: I think th' little guns shoot deep-fried beer cans or somethin'.
Jared: Where are they coming from?

Jeff: This is it... The 3219 armor-piercing, drill-tipped, rocket-propelled, nuclear-powered, high velocity bullet with pneumatic shaft explosion dampener, buzzing flagellatory membrane, and a miniature camera so you can see the look on his face before you go through it.

Web Original

  • Global Guardians PBEM Universe:
    • Trident uses a wrist-mounted gun that fires little miniature tridents.
    • Chuckles the Clown uses a "pie-shot"—a slingshot that fires bannana cream pies and has a pistol that fires ping-pong balls. The pies deliver a knock-out drug and the ping-pong balls explode.
  • Cute little Generator in the Whateley Universe has a linear accelerator gun which fires Tasers, explosives, and sticky nets of webbing. But her bracers are even better. While they appear to fire different kinds of missiles, what they really fire are psychokinetic copies of Generator herself, which then hold and direct the missiles.
  • Guns in Chaos Fighters-Route of Sea can fire swords, lances and feathers.
  • For your viewing pleasure, the RPC M1B Rocket Propelled Chainsaw Good Launcher.


Western Animation

  • The title heroes of The Mighty Ducks fire weapons loaded with exploding... pucks.
  • Hoss Delgado in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy can turn his bionic hand into a crossbow that shoots chainsaws.
  • The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack features a villain with a mechanical whale submarine, whose cannon fires juvenile delinquents.
    • Somewhat akin to the three rarest varieties of Castor Shell in Outlaw Star, because the juvenile delinquents also served as its power source (well, they shovelled the coal, anyway).
  • In Family Guy, Mayor Adam West has a cat launcher.
  • A superheroine in The Tick (animation) had a rocket launcher that fired groups of poodles. Another episode featured George Washington Carver constructing a canon that shot out streams of Peanut Butter.

The Human Bullet: "Fire me, Boy!"

  • The pie-zooka from Gargoyles. Vinnie called it Mr. Kotter.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants
    • A What If episode in which Plankton and Mr. Krabs trade places has SpongeBob shooting a clothes cannon at a naked Krabs.
    • Another episode has Spongebob behind the controls of a dishwasher turret, one so powerful that Spongebob resorts to crossing the streams in order to clean a stubborn stain from a plate, and ends up destroying the Krusty Krab in the process. If you're wondering how beams of soap, water, and steel wool can cause any sort of explosion, don't.
    • Spongebob himself ingests cleaners/soap bubbles and chews up bars of soap for use in battle. He's also an efficient snowball cannon.
  • Swat Kats has drill missiles. And claw missiles. And burning missiles. And net missiles. And chainsaw missiles and oilslick missiles and Tesla coil missiles and motorcycle missiles and jetski missiles and, very occasionally, actual blow-you-up-on-impact missiles. All contained in the body of a single jet fighter. And don't even get us started on the Gatling gun that fires balls of cement.
    • In one episode, a cauldron of boiling soup is attached to the Turbokat.
      • "Bride of the Pastmaster", when they're stuck in the Dark Ages, they rig a giant mace as ammunition.
    • In "Chaos in Crystal", they also hooked up the rebuilt mining device to the Turbokat's arsenal, to use it to fix Rex Shard.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door features weapons that shoot anything from melted cheese to live hamsters. Well, anything except actual bullets. It is a kids show, after all.
  • The CG short film A Gentlemans Duel features, as the last-resort weapon deployed by the French and English steam-powered boxing giant robots, a howitzer that fires an angry French poodle named Fifi.
  • One G.I. Joe episode had the Joe team convert their vehicle and personal weapons to fire apples, using the vitamins in them to fight a giant germ.
  • Invader Zim, a gigantic, one-shot muffin cannon.
    • A devastating sandwich shot from GIR's head.
    • Dib's elaborate water balloon launcher, which is outdone by Zim's satellite water balloon launcher, which fires Earth's supply of water into Dib's enormous head.
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man has been featuring progressively more bizarre ammo.
    • Tombstone's minions use full-auto machine guns that fire metal slugs which sprout tiny spikes all over in mid-air.
    • Silver Sable fires giant staples out of a never-named staple gun
    • [[spoiler:Spidey gets to fight a massive battle across NYC's rooftops against {{the Green Goblin and his Hyperspace Arsenal,}} some pumpkin-bomb-launchers camouflaged as watertowers, and hordes of pumpkin-masked Mooks wielding bazookas that fire large metal slugs sprouting tiny spikes all over in mid-air.
  • The Simpsons had an accidental version of this when Homer joins the Navy Reserve. Through his general incompetence Homer ends up firing their captain out of a torpedo tube, which then hits another sub. The men on the other sub remark that "they've fired an officer at us." When ordered to return fire, the men are about to grab their officer who stops his men and says "Not me, a torpedo!"
    • Another instance is when Homer signs up for the Army. He is assigned to be the leader of the enemy in war games. While the Army uses live ammo, Homer's army has bubbles for ammo.
    • The make-up gun Homer invented. "Homer, you've got it set on 'whore!'"
    • As Joan of Arc, Lisa suggested the French army use bigger soldiers in their catapults, or better yet, rocks. The soldier who was about to be fired doesn't know how to feel.
  • Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa had guns that fired tiny sheriff badges, cactus spines, vegetables, spider webs, chunks of dirt, and everything else except actual bullets.
  • The Black Raven from Wakfu fires eggs that hatch into mini ravens.
  • In Wallace and Gromit, A Close Shave, Gromit's plane has a spherical gun that shoots porridge.
  • In the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Ricochet Rabbit, the title character had an arsenal of trick bullets, each one unique.
  • An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had a gun that shot some small, unknown creatures.
  • Futurama's "Godfellas" has Leela accidentally using Bender as a torpedo.
  • In the Camp Lazlo episode "Mascot Madness", Edward's mascot the Duke of Lice has a lice cannon that shoots... Well, you figure it out.
  • In The Problem Solverz episode "Fauxboro", Alfe and Roba construct a Gatling gun that fires root beer.
  • On The Ren and Stimpy Show Stimpy is reading the story of "Robin Hoek." He can't remember what Robin fired in the air with his bow but thinks it was a melon. He then believes it was a chicken, which Ren is prepared for as he is wearing a helmet this time. At the last moment, Stimpy surmises it was a moose.
  • In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Sailing the Seven ZZZ's" Mr. Bighead thinks he is a pirate while Sleepwalking. He uses his laundry machine as a cannon and fires several items including a TV set, a toaster, and a blender.
  • Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has a Party Cannon according to the episode "Sweet and Elite". As the name suggests, it's a cannon that shoots party supplies, which explains how she's able to set up parties so quickly. It was later weaponized in "A Canterlot Wedding: part 2".
  • Generator Rex: Rex's Slam Cannon build grabs rubble and shoots that. In one episode, a fight in a bowling alley featured him treating the Pack to a brief bombardment of bowling balls.
    • He also used it to shoot Ben in their crossover.
  • In the ThunderCats (2011), episode "Berbils" mercenary slaver the Conquedor wields a BFG that fires giant, brightly-colored globs of adhesive goo to stop attacks, while his Cute Machines victims the Ro-Bear Berbils later retaliate by building a green slime dispensing turret gun in defense of their village.


Other

  • Bionicle has several examples, but one of the first and best is probably the Kanoka, which are essentially superpowered frisbee disks.
    • There was also an arc that took place underwater; some of the good guys used air bubbles as ammo (toxic to waterbreathers) while the bad guys shot vampiric squids.
    • Near the end, the ammo of choice was Thornax, a kind of fruit. Hey, don't laugh; would you like to get hit with a coconut at high speed? A spiky, potentially explosive coconut?
  • An editor's error in a Polish video game magazine Top Secret resulted in a description of a "grenade-launcher launcher". Nifty.
  • With Second Life having tons of user created stuff, there are certainly guns out there that shoot weird stuff. There's a gun that shoots more than 15 Red Shells that seek out other avatars nearby and makes a big firework-like explosion upon impact. Then there's another gun that shoots Stars by the truckload and all of them have the starman theme playing at the same time, which sounds freaky when the sound gets distorted due to how fast they fly when shot out.
    • Also Watermelon Rifles, Cat Cannons, Heart Crossbows, and a dildo gun.
  • Uncyclopedia's list of weapons that shoot other weapons that don't exist, but should.
  • Years ago, one of the Star Wars fan boards out there on the internet had developed a cannon that shot Ewoks. Sadly the schematics or specs or backstory are no longer available, but they were even developing different types of ammo for said cannon.
  • There was a discussion on GameFAQs once regarding the usefulness of detonating FTL cores of ships in the Halo universe. Cortana was a fan of it because of the massive explosions.

Unknown poster: What we need is a ship that shoots ships at them.

  • Invoked in Mass Effect 3; after a Thresher Maw takes down a Reaper destroyer, Joker suggests they just build a gun that shoots Thresher Maws. This is a Thresher Maw. Mass Effect 2 had a black-hole gun and a lightning gun. Every conventional firearm in the series, rather than shooting bullets, shoots grain-of-sand-sized pieces of metal shaved off from a larger block, accelerated to high speeds by mass-effect physics.


Real Life

  • A shoulder fired recoilless RIFLE with a nuclear warhead. Known as the M28 or M29 Davy Crockett Weapon System, it fired the M388 Cartridge which contained a W54 warhead with a 10-20 ton variable yield.
  • During the nuclear test sequence Upshot-Knothole in 1953, test Grable fired an 11-inch nuclear warhead from a specially constructed artillery piece known as 'Atomic Annie.' This is fairly unconventional in itself, but more so if it's noted that the W9 warhead used was of similar construction to the 'Little Boy' bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This therefore marks perhaps the only time in history that a gun has been fired out of a gun. The design of 'Little Boy' featured a core of barely sub-critical reaction mass, with an additional radioactive slug stored separately with a gunpowder charge. At a certain altitude the gunpowder would be detonated, propelling the slug into the main core, causing it to reach critical mass and explode. Thus, the Grable test featured a bomb, set off by a gun, fired from another gun.
  • Aside from the rather specialised Atomic Annie piece (and its lesser-known Soviet counterpart), if one were to look-up a list of American, Soviet/Russian, NATO, and probably even Chinese artillery pieces post-1965 and pick any tube (as in a gun or howitzer, not rocket) piece of 150mm or more on that list, there is a 99% chance that artillery piece had tactical nuclear artillery shells designed for it. Even the US's Iowa-Class Battleships main 16-inch guns received nuclear artillery shells.
  • Corpses have often been used as catapult ammo. In fact, the Black Plague is thought to have originated in 1346, when the Mongols launched bubonic plague-infected corpses over the walls of Crimean city of Kaffa (now Feodosia) that was besieged. Six years earlier at Thun l'Eveque, decomposing animals were used as ammo. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (these days called Tallinn).
  • In 204 B.C, Hannibal of Carthage had clay pots filled with venomous snakes and instructed his soldiers to throw the pots onto the decks of Pergamene ships.
  • Some of the older types of cannonballs include grapeshot, exploding cannonballs, and chainshot, which was two cannonballs chained together, usually used to destroy sailing masts or sails themselves. Or just fire a big wad of chain out of a cannon. It will tear a man to pieces.
  • The word "shrapnel" comes from the British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel, who invented a cannon ball that would explode in mid-air unleashing a rain of musket buckshot.
  • In The American Civil War, when ships still used wooden hulls but steam power became common, gunners sometimes heated their cannonballs red hot using the engine furnace before firing at the enemy. Using "hot shot," as it was called, could easily set the target on fire. Captains used this sparingly, since mishandling the red hot cannonballs could easily burn down their own ship
  • An old American favorite in the early nineteenth century was "Buck-and-ball" which was one musket ball and three buckshot. It continued in favor through the American Civil War when advances in rifle technology made it obsolete.
  • "Hot Shot" is a couple hundred years older than that, it just was only used by fortresses—most of which would have a ready furnace, and no hull or sails to worry about. Steam just made it ship-deployable.
  • An early hobby for many tinkerers is designing such weapons. Probably the most common one is the potato gun. Followed by the marshmallow gun, a more contemporary example.
  • And then there are the famous demonstrations/competitions of the physics of catapults and trebuchets, where people use them to fling watermelons, pianos, cars, and sometimes people.
  • slings and slingshots. Seeds, pebbles, coins, ball bearings, screw nuts, bone pieces - anything that can fit on the pouch goes.
  • Also not meant to be lethal - a Japanese company sells air guns that shoot teddy bears with parachutes. For weddings, apparently.
  • The flamethrower, a gun that shoots burning liquid! On fire!
  • The incredibly awesome Dragon's Breath shotgun round fires a gout of flame about 20 feet long for about 3–5 seconds from a manually operated shotgun. The Dragon's Breath shotgun round does a lot of damage to the barrel of the shotgun, making it Awesome but Impractical for most situations.
  • For one particularly crazy example, the Taser XREP, which is miniaturized taser fitted within 12 gauge shell for long distance wireless delivery of electric shocks.
  • Large-bore shotguns are sometimes loaded with rolls of coins. Makes a big, big hole at close range. Supposedly, during Stepan Razin's rebellion one of their supply squads reported about being caught by tzar's troops and having to "buy off". And clarified that they quickly ran out of bullets, but still had lots of coins... and powder.
  • Uruguay gained its independence from the Spanish by, in one battle, firing rock-hard balls of Edam cheese out of its cannons at enemy ships after its ships had ran out of normal ammo.
  • Used at many a sporting event: the infamous T-shirt cannon.
  • The SPP-1 pistol and the APS underwater assault smoothbore are specially designed underwater weapons with their own underwater ammunition—long and slim bullets. Yeah, it's a real nailgun. Modern ADS uses both standard issue ammo for AK-74 (in the air) and new underwater cartridge that looks like the same 5.45x39—but its bullet continues all the way to the bottom.
  • The steam catapults (and now also EMALS) on aircraft carriers can be considered big, spinal-mounted guns that fire airplanes which have their own guns!
    • Before WWII, the US fielded battleships fitted with special canons to launch seaplanes as spotter aircraft. (The aircraft rode a sort of sled puched by the explosive charge, so it isn't quite as cool as it might have sounded there.)
  • The M712 Copperhead, which is sort of like an artillery shell - except it's really a laser guided killer robot!
  • Not a weapon, but one of the ways they test jet engines, windows, and various other parts of the plane for durability against bird airstrike hazards is to use a specially designed cannon that fires whole chickens. It's important to remember to defrost them first, though.
  • The Gyrojet line of weapons must be mentioned here. Designed and built in the 1960s they fired gyroscopically-stabilized 13mm rockets looking much like normal cartridges. Gyrojets were supposed to be very accurate near-recoilless near-silent armor piercing weapons able to even work underwater like a 13mm torpedo. The system didn't see widespread use due to reliability problems (the rockets' pinhole-sized jet nozzles were small enough to easily get plugged up and not strong enough to clean themselves) and consequences of the low muzzle speed—that is, less accuracy than expected and being weaker than some slingshots at point blank range (you could allegedly prevent a round from exiting the barrel just by placing your hand over the end). Although the rockets had very low exit velocity, because they continued to accelerate they could achieve supersonic speeds - but only after 20 meters or so of acceleration. Once Phlebotinum Du Jour, they are considered collectors' items today and can cost as much as $1,000 per round to shoot because of the rarity of the remaining ammo.
  • Brunswick RAW (Rifleman's Assault Weapon) -- an underbarrel grenade launcher about halfway between Gyrojet and Soviet rocket-propelled grenades. Its projectile (several variants including 'flying Claymore' and HESH) is a 140mm sphere with a little tail... yes, it's a rocket clyster.
  • For more incredibly weird weapons, see this list from Cracked.
  • Similar to the Mythbusters example above, several Aeronautics and engineering companies use air cannons that fire chickens and other organic debris at a high velocity to test the resilience of various Aircraft skins against, well, organic material (Birds) hitting at a high velocity. And not just skins, either. They gotta (as in: Federally mandated) test their engines for 'em, too.
  • During the siege of Pelusium in 525 BC, the Persian general Cambyses was known for hurling live cats over the walls of the Egyptian fort to demoralize the defenders (to whom the cats were sacred). He also instructed his men to drive cats before the army, and tie cats to their shields to further deter the egyptians. He was not a nice person.
  • Not sure if this counts, but an early ancestor of the machine gun called a Puckle Gun (named for its inventor) fired both round ammo and special square bullets for use against non-Christians.
  • The U.S. Air Force once tried to make a "Gay Bomb". The idea was to load it full of sex pheromones and neutralise enemy forces by making them make love, not war.
  • Double A batteries make for a very dangerous projectile.
  • At a high school, a physics class once used leftover fetal pigs as ammo for their potato cannons. Another physics class shot squash, tennis balls, hard boiled eggs, and someone's backpack across the school playing field. The cleanup wasn't fun though...
  • Somewhere in the UK there is a man with a carrot cannon. He takes it to schools.
  • To test windows and wall material against hurricanes and tornados throwing stuff around, there is a gun which shoots lumber at them.
  • HESH rounds, they're essentially a slow moving round containing a plastic explosive which flattens itself against the target before exploding due to an embedded fuse, creating a shock wave that, owing to its large surface area and direct contact with the target, is conducted very effectively (and if said target is an armoured vehicle which lacks spaced armour or spall liners, it results in heavy spalling on the inside of said vehicle, cutting up the poor guys inside it) not very useful against modern tanks but is still very popular for use against bunkers and demolition work.
  • For an example that overlaps with Bling Bling Bang, bullets made out of white gold and tipped with diamonds. See for yourself. Unfortunately, these can not actually be fired.
  • The US Navy's Mk 182 Kinetic Energy-Electronically Timed round for the Mk 45 5" gun is essentially a five inch wide shotgun shell. It carries (sometimes more than) 9,000 tungsten pellets which are released when the round is detonated, putting lots of small holes in the target(s). It's meant for use against small, lightly armored boats.
  • And, there is always the bomb that drops more bombs, also known as a cluster bomb. There is also a cluster bomb that drops land mines, another that releases more cluster bombs, and a version that drops heat-seeking anti-tank smart bombs.
    • The last is the CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW). During development, it was nicknamed "The weapon of 13 consecutive miracles." It has only been used once in combat, and essentially destroyed an Iraqi armored battalion in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
  • Area denial munitions. Artillery fired shells that can deploy minefields.
  • While less unusual than most of what's listed here, there's now High Explosive Incendiary Armor Piercing Ammunition. Meant for .50 cal barrels, you get everything in one practical package!
  • There are toy guns that are tiny hand-held catapults that fling little plastic figurines, like monkeys, rubber chickens, and pirates.
  • During the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001, British special forces who stormed the cave complex used special frangible bullets that rather than being made out of conventional metal, were made from brittle ceramic. The idea of this was that when a stray bullet hit a cave wall it would disintegrate, rather than ricochet dangerously. It also had the added benefit of instantly fragmenting upon entering a target causing massive injury, yet still being (kind of) legal under the Hague Convention.
  • Beehive rounds used to be popular for tanks that expected they would have to deal with footsoldiers. It worked like a shotgun except that it used thin rods rather than balls. Because they were moving so fast the rods flexed in the air which caused them to slash targets like thousands of tiny knives.
  • Then, there's this. It's an anti-tank rocket that uses White Phosphorus instead of explosives to get the job done. It appears to rely on infiltrating through whatever chinks there are in the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical protection and causing "sympathetic detonation" of ammo.
  • Musketoons and blunderbusses, the flintlock predecessor of shotguns, have been known to fire anything one can shove down their large barrel.
  • Technically rail guns and gauss guns can shoot anything that is metallic (or ferromagnetic in the case of the gauss gun) and can be fed in the barrel. Did you run out of ammo? put in some nails, or coins, or your ex's keys, or used bullets.
  • Firearms were so named because they used to shoot fire. And pebbles.
  • The Chinese were fairly creative with their cannons. In addition to cannonballs and mortars, they also liked to shoot pots filled with excrement. They were called shit bombs.
  • Modern law-enforcement agencies use lots of different non-lethal rounds, such as rubber bullets for crowd control. SWAT teams in particular have specialized shotgun shells, such as bean bag rounds to stun without killing, and breaching rounds that will destroy a lock without sending hot lead into the room beyond.
  • 40mm Grenade Launchers—like the M79, M203 and Mikhor MGL—can be loaded with a number of specialized ammunition. Tear-gas, buckshot, white phosphorus flare and smoke rounds are just some of the rounds available. There is even a 40mm canister shot developed for the MGL that fires a small camera with a parachute linked to a wireless device.
  • 40mm "Hornets Nest" shell. It's an aluminium cylinder with 10 rifled barrels that fire .22 Long Rifle rounds.
  • During WW 2, a number of strange bombs, rockets and munitions were designed for a variety of reasons with a varying degree of effectiveness. A ball-shaped bomb was developed by the British to bust dams by skipping along the water. The Americans tested bombs that delivered bats equipped with timed napalm charges. The Japanese used human-piloted rockets and torpedoes and the Germans developed cannons designed to "fire" gusts of wind to knock down bombers (Only the dam busting bomb was put into service and worked as planned). And those are the ones that got off the drawing board.
  • Explosive ammo used in World War II which will leave a fist size hole in your chest or make Your Head Asplode. The biography Sniper on the Eastern Front describes their use
"As the Russian lunged with a final deadly thrust, his face passed momentarily into my crosshairs and I fired. The Germany infantryman stared, almost incomprehensibly, at the burst head of the Russian destroyed by the explosive round. Bone fragments and strips of cerebellum had sprayed the German's face and uniform. The combination of fear and relief as his unexpected salvation seized the man"
—Sniper on the Eastern Front
(...) threw our respective optics the NCO and I saw the white fur cap swell like a baloon and burst like an overripe watermelon.
—Sniper on the Eastern Front
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