10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

5. The Tsar Tank (Russian Empire, World War I)

"We need a practical design that will strike fear into hearts of our enemies.""How about a massive tricycle?""Excellent. Build it!"

Even the good World War I tanks weren't exactly marvels of engineering (their tendency to occasionally explode kind of held them back in that respect) but the Russian Tsar Tank is on a whole other level of bad design. The Tsar Tank was designed by Nikolai Lebedenko, Nikolai Zhukovsky, Boris Stechkin, and Alexander Mikulin in 1914 and work continued on it until 1915 when a series of disastrous tests in front of the Russian High Commission finally brought everyone to the conclusion that it wasn't viable for use in the field thanks to it being underpowered and vulnerable to artillery fire. Not to mention that you could probably stop it in its tracks by wedging a branch in the spokes of each wheel. You might be wondering how the last of these tests ended. It got stuck in a muddy patch. The engineering problem was that, because of weight miscalculations, the tank's back wheel (which had a diameter of five feet) kept getting stuck on soft ground and a lot of the time the front wheels (which had a diameter of 27 feet) weren't strong enough to pull it out. And no matter how many guns you put on something, they won't be any help if it can't move. The prototype was left abandoned where it was stuck for eight years until it was scrapped. This thing was so badly designed that there were eight years where somebody could have stolen it (and the Russian government would have probably been grateful) and it was left undisturbed.