10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

7. Schwerer Gustav (Germany, World War II)

The illegitimate child of overcompensation and poor strategy.

I'm going to come out and say it now: whoever designed this thing must have had an incredibly tiny penis because it is so impractically large that overcompensation is the only realistic reason for its creation. That old adage that bigger isn't always better was promptly ignored by this cannon's poorly endowed designer since Schwerer Gustav's (German for "Heavy Gustav") immense size (1,350 tonnes) and it being transported in pieces meant that it took a crew of 250 men fifty-four hours to assemble it at each location and a further 2,500 men to dig the embankments and lay the tracks for it. As well as that, it could only be fired about fourteen times a day, took between half an hour and forty-five minutes to reload, and its 16,000lb armour piercing shells weren't exactly accurate. On the bright side, it had a maximum range of 47,000 metres which is excellent but it was on tracks and therefore could barely move. Not to mention that with every single shot it fired, it recoiled back two miles along the tracks. The only way you can make an inaccurate cannon worse is if it can only move in a fixed direction to fixed distance, and if its largest movement is two miles in the wrong direction.