10 Insane Plans You Won't Believe The Military Tried
5. A Lightning Canon Commissioned By The Pentagon
Nikola Tesla is a cult figure for many reasons. There's the underdog thing, with the inventor of alternating current and scores of pieces of technology that we still use today being mostly ripped off and buried by Thomas Edison and his cronies. There's also the fact that before he died, he was working on a death ray. Like super villians have.
It took years before anybody picked up where Tesla's work left off, and as per the US military's recent history there was a complete lack of self-awareness when it came to the comic book villainous undertones. In 2009 DARPA, a research wing of the Pentagon you'll known from Metal Gear Solid, revealed early plans to make a lightning canon. This is the same R&D department which had worked on shoulder-mounted nuke launchers in the fifties. They're almost certainly run by 10-year-olds, or possibly Action Man.
The lightning canons were supposed to zap enemy weapons and vehicles with enough voltage to disable them, but they couldn't get it to fire further than fifteen metres.