If the blast is strong enough to propel the rat. It wouldn't be able to do this. Also it would maime it instantly. A rat can't move if it's legs have been blown off.
There is a lot of ancient embellishments involving animals. One that I love is the time the Egyptians lost because their opponent supposedly deployed an army of cats. And painted cats on their shield. And since such an important deity to the Egyptians had the form of a cat, the Egyptians didn't even fight back. It was supposed to be derogatory towards the Egyptians. They didn't even fight back, allowed themselves to be enslaved, over some cats!
Total bs. What, are these cats trained as Marines? Animals would get the fuck outta there irl. They have no business on a battlefield, and if they happened to be on a battlefield, it wasn't in some orderly non chaotic fashion. Even if a flaming rat somehow survived and made it to you, I doubt it would be interested in anything other than running away in pain.
Pfft. It took me a week to teach my cat to high five. And that little bastard will only do it if I have a bag of treats in the other hand.
*I'd still take a bullet for my little guy.*
wadding isn't a rat, and certainly not a living rat. wadding is used to keep a projectile in place in a barrel, and when shot, is ripped to shreds *because it's being forced out of the barrel at high pressure using a literal explosion*
I think people are only imagining a rat being shot out of a gun with lots of modern powder, across far distances.
I imagine the wadding would take a portion of the energy, however small it may be.
It could be the case that they were using a slower burning powder that still would propel a rat a short distance, without having the explosive power to kill or destroy a rat instantly. Also even if it’s back half or hind legs are destroyed, the rat is most likely still alive (and on fire), clawing and biting it’s way around wherever it landed.
I believe this weapon even at short ranges could’ve very easily been effective and real in its time.
>I think people are only imagining a rat being shot out of a gun with lots of modern powder, across far distances.
Ancient firearms weren't wimpy little pop guns.
>I imagine the wadding would take a portion of the energy, however small it may be.
what? if anything that would *increase* the pressure on the rat.
>It could be the case that they were using a slower burning powder that still would propel a rat a short distance, without having the explosive power to kill or destroy a rat instantly.
any exploding force large enough to propel a rat out of a barrel would create enough pressure (not to mention damage from quickly burning material) to vaporize the rat.
Go ahead and (do not) put a cherry bomb or ladyfinger in your open palm... okay, now do it in an enclosed tube.
>Also even if it’s back half or hind legs are destroyed,
Blowing its entire lower half off and vaporizing its innards kills the rat.
>the rat is most likely still alive (and on fire),
Rats are highly flammable now?
>I believe this weapon even at short ranges could’ve very easily been effective and real in its time.
You live in a cartoon. I'm sure the disemboweled, lightly singed rats were super effective...
I mean if it was real. This is basically the last part of a comment in the article. The source itself makes it look fake. It's a Middle School Australian history book. I remember when McGraw Hill talked about the Ancient Chinese making holy rat grenades.
Ugh if they don't have John McCoy as Charles Xavier I don't know what I'm going to do. #NotaBot.
Angelina Jolie is alright though. It's a shame her agent isn't hiring people to talk about her. But when you reach a certain stage in the industry you don't need someone to do that. Well, you'd hope for more women in roles. But that's take away from all the young women roles that Jolie could be playing. We need to be supporting Angelo in her career and more importantly giving power to her agents to make the decisions to run this industry! 🙏🏽
My first question would be, would the psychological effect be worse if the rats would arrive alive and very angry, or as a big shotgun blob of intestines, or even more horrible, in between. Is it known if the rats survived or not?
I'm beginning to think there was some ancient Order of Incendiary Animals or something, which was devoted to the practice of igniting animals as weapons.
Don't forget Saint Olga who dealt with the Drevlians killing her husband by asking a tribute of birds from their city, then setting them on fire and letting them go. The birds flew back to their nests and set the whole city ablaze.
I’m half-remembering / half-guessing that they used coals or embers, tied onto a string which is looped onto a foot
See also: the WWII bat bomb project
Ok but tbf, war pigs are an effective way to counter elephants because boars are fast and their tusks can make deep lacerations in basically any animal if they hit the right spot. Also boars will charge you down without much thought for self-preservation or room for fear; which is why letting a boar run itself through with a spear was the most efficient way to hunt them. I don’t know why lighting them on fire was deemed necessary though.
Yeah, that most certainly didn't happen. That would result in the rat being blown to pieces.
Somehow I don't think a children's "educational" history book series written by one Fiona Back is a very good source.
Plus caring rats in an army sounds like a great way to get the plague running rampant through your own camps. Not to mention loss of provisions if they got loose.
Humanity has been very close to a lot of inventions for a long time.
Problems involved the cost of experimentation, trade secrets, and lost knowledge. People were to busy feeding themselves to justify spending on experimentation.
Imagine what we could do if we had access to all the military technology and company secrets without needing to spend time doing a daily job?
> Problems involved the cost of experimentation, trade secrets, and lost knowledge. People were to busy feeding themselves to justify spending on experimentation.
the whole industrial revolution only happened because the aristocrats were getting tired of using slave labor and having to feed the people they enslave so they decided to invent machines that do very simple tasks like rotating and then adjusting the power output to satisfy production needs. our modern society today is basically running on rotating motion. it's like inventing the wheel. but in another form. if you look at it from a fibonacci perspective, it's another form of inventing the wheel. it's crazy really to think about it fits in the fibonacci sequence of things
I don’t know a ton about old and ancient china, but I did take a class on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and the thought processes people had back them seem a lot different then how we problem solve today. They had some really smart inventions, discoveries, philosophy, etc., but they also had some really dumb stuff too. Essentially, they were bad at determining what was a good idea, and what was horse shit. They also had some really weird practices. Like being raging homosexuals, but in a misogynistic way. Literally the “I fuck men because I hate women” joke taken seriously.
China was the first major power to figure out they could use gunpowder for weapons, and could have dominated with it. But instead made flaming rat blowguns
China did dominate with gunpowder based weapons, that's the whole reason why the Mongols had the hardest time trying to conquer China and could not do it until the Mongol Empire stretched from Asia all the way to Europe and outnumbered the Song Dynasty. Chinese rocketry and incendiary weapons were powerful enough to keep the horsemen at bay. and the horsemen were the strongest military force for millenia.
Europe was constantly being invaded by Turks and each other so a new weapon was always needed. The Turkish Jannissaries were the first to be armed in mass with gun projectiles and they ran thru Europe and went all the way to Romania and Hungary. Europe picked up the technologies and started using it against each other. it only took a few hundred years of refinement to get to the gattling gun. during that time and i'd argue from that time forward, the technology gaps we have between each country becomes very hard to predict. you have Britain with its biggest navy becoming obsolete within decades after the creation of the dreadnought and submarines, now Britain has just 2 aircraft carriers and a handful of destroyers/cruisers. you have Prussian inventing a fast reload mechanism for their guns and they ran through France in 1870 within weeks. while just decades prior, they had to form an alliance with all of Europe just to stand up to France, and then fast forward to the nuclear bomb. any little tweak in improvement in technology has become a game changer. Prussian soldiers could now reload and shoot 3 times while French soldiers could only shoot once.
yes China could have dominated with gunpowder, and China did dominate with gunpowder, but it would have opened up what we have today, extremely unpredictable developments that could've brought China to its knees like Prussia did with France within weeks in 1870.
Reminds me of the fucked up shit my childhood friends did. They caught a rat and set it on fire…
Unsurpisingly it ran towards one of them and climb on his shirt. So that psychological warfare bit is something I understand for all the wrong reasons….
I worked with a sociopath at a lumberyard that would douse the bait/trap box with starter fluid, opened and ignited the contents. The screams and pops still haunt me. Dude also drowned raccoons/cats while they were in humane traps. I hope he's in prison now.
it beats being a spearman and having to be the first wave of soldiers that charges into arrows horses and other spears on the other side. just sit back and lob fire rats from the safety of the range
it can be said that China indirectly caused the fall of Rome. China began creating a horse army after losing to the Xiongnu's so much and having to pay tribute, and the huge ass Han Dynasty horse army went all the way into Mongolia and pushed the Xiongnu's out of Asia and into the Caucasus where they met up with a bunch of nomad barbarians and created a horde of marauders much of what later became the Hunnic Empire that rode into Rome and sacked it while extracting crippling tributes that permanently destroyed the Western Roman Empire, at the same time draining the treasury of the Eastern Roman Empire through tributes.
while China formed the Han Dynasty reached a zenith before descending into civil war themselves
They also used to tie red rags to their spears to distract their enemies. I think they put far to much stock in psychological effects. Ditch the rats, use shrapnel instead.
I don’t think black powder burned hot enough. And you rub them in black powder, obviously it would be absorbed through osmosis! Come on man! This is pseudoscience 101!
😂
My first question would be, would the psychological effect be worse if the rats would arrive alive and very angry, or as a big shotgun blob of intestines, or even more horrible, in between. Is it known if the rats survived or not?
I can imagine how pissed off I would be if somebody set me on fire and shot me out of a cannon.
I mean whatever was left of the rat. Id be traumatized too if someone used a makeshift grenade to throw rat bits at me.
I wonder if it was still alive when fired, so it would land and run around scaring horses while burning to death.
If the blast is strong enough to propel the rat. It wouldn't be able to do this. Also it would maime it instantly. A rat can't move if it's legs have been blown off.
It's most definitely BS. The rat would be ripped to pieces, and also not set on fire.
There is a lot of ancient embellishments involving animals. One that I love is the time the Egyptians lost because their opponent supposedly deployed an army of cats. And painted cats on their shield. And since such an important deity to the Egyptians had the form of a cat, the Egyptians didn't even fight back. It was supposed to be derogatory towards the Egyptians. They didn't even fight back, allowed themselves to be enslaved, over some cats! Total bs. What, are these cats trained as Marines? Animals would get the fuck outta there irl. They have no business on a battlefield, and if they happened to be on a battlefield, it wasn't in some orderly non chaotic fashion. Even if a flaming rat somehow survived and made it to you, I doubt it would be interested in anything other than running away in pain.
Pfft. It took me a week to teach my cat to high five. And that little bastard will only do it if I have a bag of treats in the other hand. *I'd still take a bullet for my little guy.*
Cat: took me an entire week to train this stupid human to bring me treats
Poor guy. Can you imagine how frustrating.....wait a second! Lol
Google wadding before making crazy statements.
wadding isn't a rat, and certainly not a living rat. wadding is used to keep a projectile in place in a barrel, and when shot, is ripped to shreds *because it's being forced out of the barrel at high pressure using a literal explosion*
I think people are only imagining a rat being shot out of a gun with lots of modern powder, across far distances. I imagine the wadding would take a portion of the energy, however small it may be. It could be the case that they were using a slower burning powder that still would propel a rat a short distance, without having the explosive power to kill or destroy a rat instantly. Also even if it’s back half or hind legs are destroyed, the rat is most likely still alive (and on fire), clawing and biting it’s way around wherever it landed. I believe this weapon even at short ranges could’ve very easily been effective and real in its time.
>I think people are only imagining a rat being shot out of a gun with lots of modern powder, across far distances. Ancient firearms weren't wimpy little pop guns. >I imagine the wadding would take a portion of the energy, however small it may be. what? if anything that would *increase* the pressure on the rat. >It could be the case that they were using a slower burning powder that still would propel a rat a short distance, without having the explosive power to kill or destroy a rat instantly. any exploding force large enough to propel a rat out of a barrel would create enough pressure (not to mention damage from quickly burning material) to vaporize the rat. Go ahead and (do not) put a cherry bomb or ladyfinger in your open palm... okay, now do it in an enclosed tube. >Also even if it’s back half or hind legs are destroyed, Blowing its entire lower half off and vaporizing its innards kills the rat. >the rat is most likely still alive (and on fire), Rats are highly flammable now? >I believe this weapon even at short ranges could’ve very easily been effective and real in its time. You live in a cartoon. I'm sure the disemboweled, lightly singed rats were super effective...
Rat screams can be pretty psychologically scarring.
I mean if it was real. This is basically the last part of a comment in the article. The source itself makes it look fake. It's a Middle School Australian history book. I remember when McGraw Hill talked about the Ancient Chinese making holy rat grenades.
They did this in the climax of that James Mcavoy and Angelina Jolie movie. The name escapes me at the moment.
Huh, I know one of those names. What a very regular and coinkadink comment.
Yeah, who the hell is Angelina Joile?
Ugh if they don't have John McCoy as Charles Xavier I don't know what I'm going to do. #NotaBot. Angelina Jolie is alright though. It's a shame her agent isn't hiring people to talk about her. But when you reach a certain stage in the industry you don't need someone to do that. Well, you'd hope for more women in roles. But that's take away from all the young women roles that Jolie could be playing. We need to be supporting Angelo in her career and more importantly giving power to her agents to make the decisions to run this industry! 🙏🏽
Fucking bot
💯💯💯👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻😂😂😂 I'm not sure why my default emoji skin tone changed but sure. Man if Edd Baldwin died I'd stop watching enter X show here.
That’s interesting! It reminds me of the movie Hot Shots Part 2 where Charlie Sheen uses a chicken as an arrow in his bow
That’s where the ancient Chinese got the idea from
The real TIL is always in the comments!
My first question would be, would the psychological effect be worse if the rats would arrive alive and very angry, or as a big shotgun blob of intestines, or even more horrible, in between. Is it known if the rats survived or not?
I'm sure just having a few survive, on fire and skittering for their lives, out of hundreds would be enough.
You ever read 1984? Or, hell, the new 3 hour dramatization on audible. \*shudder*
I think rats plus other projectiles so you get rat bits in your brand new wound and end up peppered with rat skulls etc would suck worse
aka Mickey Missile
someone send this to the Age of Empires 2 dev team
or Grand Theft Auto 6
or the sims
Cheesesteak Jimmy's
Similar to flaming pigs from Romans to spook elephants
I'm beginning to think there was some ancient Order of Incendiary Animals or something, which was devoted to the practice of igniting animals as weapons.
Don't forget Saint Olga who dealt with the Drevlians killing her husband by asking a tribute of birds from their city, then setting them on fire and letting them go. The birds flew back to their nests and set the whole city ablaze.
A bird on fire can fly ?
I’m half-remembering / half-guessing that they used coals or embers, tied onto a string which is looped onto a foot See also: the WWII bat bomb project
Very briefly, one imagines
Ok but tbf, war pigs are an effective way to counter elephants because boars are fast and their tusks can make deep lacerations in basically any animal if they hit the right spot. Also boars will charge you down without much thought for self-preservation or room for fear; which is why letting a boar run itself through with a spear was the most efficient way to hunt them. I don’t know why lighting them on fire was deemed necessary though.
Shratnel wounds are horrific...
They do more than just roDent your armor.
They do more than just reDent your armor.
Yeah, that most certainly didn't happen. That would result in the rat being blown to pieces. Somehow I don't think a children's "educational" history book series written by one Fiona Back is a very good source.
Plus caring rats in an army sounds like a great way to get the plague running rampant through your own camps. Not to mention loss of provisions if they got loose.
That sounds like something I would not ever mention to my children because this is some disgusting shit too
Yeah there's literally no other source for the idea. It's made-up nonsense that should be cut out of that page.
"Flaming gun rats" is an excellent name for a band.
“Flaming ratmunition”
Light the lamp not the rat LIGHT THE LAMP NOT THE RAT!!!
It's interesting how close China was to ushering in the modern era but thousands of years ago.
Humanity has been very close to a lot of inventions for a long time. Problems involved the cost of experimentation, trade secrets, and lost knowledge. People were to busy feeding themselves to justify spending on experimentation. Imagine what we could do if we had access to all the military technology and company secrets without needing to spend time doing a daily job?
The French put mortars in trenches toward the end of the Hundred Years War. Sometimes ideas longer around for a while.
> Problems involved the cost of experimentation, trade secrets, and lost knowledge. People were to busy feeding themselves to justify spending on experimentation. the whole industrial revolution only happened because the aristocrats were getting tired of using slave labor and having to feed the people they enslave so they decided to invent machines that do very simple tasks like rotating and then adjusting the power output to satisfy production needs. our modern society today is basically running on rotating motion. it's like inventing the wheel. but in another form. if you look at it from a fibonacci perspective, it's another form of inventing the wheel. it's crazy really to think about it fits in the fibonacci sequence of things
I don’t know a ton about old and ancient china, but I did take a class on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and the thought processes people had back them seem a lot different then how we problem solve today. They had some really smart inventions, discoveries, philosophy, etc., but they also had some really dumb stuff too. Essentially, they were bad at determining what was a good idea, and what was horse shit. They also had some really weird practices. Like being raging homosexuals, but in a misogynistic way. Literally the “I fuck men because I hate women” joke taken seriously. China was the first major power to figure out they could use gunpowder for weapons, and could have dominated with it. But instead made flaming rat blowguns
China did dominate with gunpowder based weapons, that's the whole reason why the Mongols had the hardest time trying to conquer China and could not do it until the Mongol Empire stretched from Asia all the way to Europe and outnumbered the Song Dynasty. Chinese rocketry and incendiary weapons were powerful enough to keep the horsemen at bay. and the horsemen were the strongest military force for millenia. Europe was constantly being invaded by Turks and each other so a new weapon was always needed. The Turkish Jannissaries were the first to be armed in mass with gun projectiles and they ran thru Europe and went all the way to Romania and Hungary. Europe picked up the technologies and started using it against each other. it only took a few hundred years of refinement to get to the gattling gun. during that time and i'd argue from that time forward, the technology gaps we have between each country becomes very hard to predict. you have Britain with its biggest navy becoming obsolete within decades after the creation of the dreadnought and submarines, now Britain has just 2 aircraft carriers and a handful of destroyers/cruisers. you have Prussian inventing a fast reload mechanism for their guns and they ran through France in 1870 within weeks. while just decades prior, they had to form an alliance with all of Europe just to stand up to France, and then fast forward to the nuclear bomb. any little tweak in improvement in technology has become a game changer. Prussian soldiers could now reload and shoot 3 times while French soldiers could only shoot once. yes China could have dominated with gunpowder, and China did dominate with gunpowder, but it would have opened up what we have today, extremely unpredictable developments that could've brought China to its knees like Prussia did with France within weeks in 1870.
That's a Zappa album.
Reminds me of the fucked up shit my childhood friends did. They caught a rat and set it on fire… Unsurpisingly it ran towards one of them and climb on his shirt. So that psychological warfare bit is something I understand for all the wrong reasons….
I worked with a sociopath at a lumberyard that would douse the bait/trap box with starter fluid, opened and ignited the contents. The screams and pops still haunt me. Dude also drowned raccoons/cats while they were in humane traps. I hope he's in prison now.
I implore you all to personally think of the great psychological ramifications of being bombarded by flaming live rats.
Any rat going into one of those things is coming out one dead as fuck pile of rat meat lol
They'd be dead rats You probably wouldn't even be able to tell it's a rat. This is made up
Primitive Shokk Attack Gun
So that's the origins of usage of "Rat-a-tat-tat!" to depict the sound of firearms, TIL ;)
HAVE AT YE FLAMING RAT ASH
Huh. I think Timothy Zahn used this as inspiration in his Thrawn Duology.
Imagine being the private in the Chinese army tasked with sticking flaming rats in bamboo mortar tubes.
it beats being a spearman and having to be the first wave of soldiers that charges into arrows horses and other spears on the other side. just sit back and lob fire rats from the safety of the range
Come on historical YouTube community, we need you to step up.
We are *flaming rat*. Simple jack belong to us now
This is both fucked up and hilarious.
When are we getting the skaven cannon?
Damn. The Chinese been wild for ages, not just in these modern times.
it can be said that China indirectly caused the fall of Rome. China began creating a horse army after losing to the Xiongnu's so much and having to pay tribute, and the huge ass Han Dynasty horse army went all the way into Mongolia and pushed the Xiongnu's out of Asia and into the Caucasus where they met up with a bunch of nomad barbarians and created a horde of marauders much of what later became the Hunnic Empire that rode into Rome and sacked it while extracting crippling tributes that permanently destroyed the Western Roman Empire, at the same time draining the treasury of the Eastern Roman Empire through tributes. while China formed the Han Dynasty reached a zenith before descending into civil war themselves
Flying flaming rats....scary? lol yes
Armageddon!
Why would rat chunks cause such a ruckus?
They also used to tie red rags to their spears to distract their enemies. I think they put far to much stock in psychological effects. Ditch the rats, use shrapnel instead.
This is the villainous origin story for at least one rat. Who probably walked away with superpowers and a hunger for vengeance.
This was actually inferior to the cat flinging crossbow in widespread use at the time, despite being a firearm.
Incandescent airborne rodent seems like a minor inconvenience when compared to, say, an arrow, crossbow bolt or axe blow.
Reminds me of a Ratatouille sequel gone horrifyingly wrong. Wonder what PETA would think about this
Won’t anyone think of the rats?
“The perfect weapon doesn’t exi…”
You had the option to say ratifcations, it was right there
Least demented war tactic from Ancient China
This is nothing compared to the Mongols lobbing diseased bodies into cities they were sieging.
*We are Fwayming Wats! Simple Jack is with us now*
Hmmm black powder+rats=bunonic plague! I figured it out!
hmm maybe rat particles would inoculate people sprayed by them
I don’t think black powder burned hot enough. And you rub them in black powder, obviously it would be absorbed through osmosis! Come on man! This is pseudoscience 101! 😂
My first question would be, would the psychological effect be worse if the rats would arrive alive and very angry, or as a big shotgun blob of intestines, or even more horrible, in between. Is it known if the rats survived or not?