10 Most Inventive Weapons Used By Historical Societies

1. Hwacha Loosing an arrow from a bow is great, so loosing two arrows from a bow must be twice as good. That's reasonable logic. Unfortunately science gets involved and the fact of the matter is firing two arrows at once halves the power. Fortunately in 1409 the Koreans of the Joseon Dynasty came up with a way to fire two hundred arrows. That is, they came up with a way of doing it that didn't just require two-hundred archers. Hwacha just means fire cart, it was an assembly that a few soldiers could set up and load with two-hundred singijeon. There were three types of singijeon, the smallest of which were the ones usually fired by a hwacha and essentially just an arrow. Except for a pouch at the bottom full of black powder. What this amounted two was a relatively compact weapon, operated by a handful of soldiers that would launch up to two hundred rocket propelled arrows in a volley. The range wasn't great but it apparently could reach one hundred metres and had enough power to punch through the armour at the time. As mentioned previously it takes some serious stones to charge a gun with a dozen barrels but personally I find the prospect of running towards something that could feasibly shotgun blast me right in the chops with two hundred rocket propelled arrows all the more troubling. It could be worse though, if this weapon were Chinese then they would all be coated in poison. The two larger variants of singijeon also had explosive warheads and some hwacha could fire up to a hundred of the medium sized, exploding singijeon. So even if you reduce the amount of arrows actually being fired at you, you get an extra dose of psychological laxative due to the fact that the swarm of projectiles racing towards you are going to greet you with a hail of sulphurous explosions. That concludes the ten weapons I consider some of the most creative and inventive in history. There are dozens more that easily deserve a mention, especially since for the most part I deliberately avoided weapons from more recent history and tried to feature some that seem out of place in the time they existed. I've also tried to stay within my area of expertise but there are dozens more weapons I have never heard of and almost certainly going to be some errors on the ones I have mentioned, so feel free to bring up what I got wrong in the comments and let me know what your favourite weapons are.