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Abnormal Ammo
Gunsmith: "It's a gun, Frank. A gun that shoots swords."
— The Punisher

We've seen plenty of guns in all kinds of media, so what's one way to make a gun different? Remove the bullets, lasers, and rockets, and replace with something... that isn't a bullet or laser or rocket. Or just make the bullet do something other than just rendering the target dead. Perhaps there's some really strange Applied Phlebotinum about, but we all know someone's trying to take Refuge In Audacity or trying to invoke the Rule Of Cool. All bets are off if a catapult comes into play.

Oh, and don't ask how they fit a kitten in a handgun. Just don't.

Compare Trick Arrow, Impossibly Cool Weapon, Improbable Weapon User. Not to be confused with Depleted Phlebotinum Shells. If the ammo really stings, see Bee Bee Gun.

Examples

Anime
  • Final Fantasy Unlimited character Kaze is a summoner, who uses a device called a Magun and a magical substance called Soil which is effectively the life energy of people who have died to summon monsters. His gun essentially fires summons.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima has Magitek bullets able to alter space-time at the point of impact. They were used to send people three hours into the future, but it's implied they can also displace the target to a nearby location.
    • Don't forget Negi's magic blast guns or the strip laser beams.
  • X-Laws in Shaman King have guns that shoot angels. Humongous Mecha ghost angels, no less.
  • Outlaw Star had 'Caster Shells' — magic in a bullet.
    • Special mention goes to Number 4 shells, which fire miniature black holes. Their effect on Gene's unfortunate enemies produces some of the more frightening scenes of the series.
  • In The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, Haruhi subconsciously modified model guns into firing pressurized water balls with unimaginably explosive firepower. Dual squirt guns turned dual mini water-grenade launchers/pistols.
  • Mista in Jojos Bizarre Adventure has six little creatures for his Stand. He uses ordinary bullets, but the six creatures (named "1", "2", "3", "5", "6" and "7") can fly and deviate the trajectories of bullets (with kicks), making it possible to Mista to hit targets beyond a corner, to say one. At least one time some of them ride a bullet to reach the target faster, although they never strike him on their own.
    • Part 4 has Yoshikage Kira combining the power of his Killer Queen stand and Stray Cat's to create invisible shots of air that explode.
  • Like the Outlaw Star example, Teana from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS has Cross Mirage, a pair of handguns that shoot magic. From the same franchise, there are Cartridges, which are condensed magic in what looks like a firearm shell, but these are not actually shot, just exploded to supercharge a Device.
  • The Sonic Driver (Sonic Power Cannon in the dub) in Sonic X that fires the titular character as its ammo counts here.
  • An assassin in Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex used a unique weapon against her wealthy target: a shotgun, built into her forearm, that fired rolls of coins.
    • In the episode "Testation", a rampant Spider Tank—which had dodged or neutralized everything else thrown at it—gets stopped by a gun that fires cannisters of some kind of quick-hardening glue.
  • In Fist Of The North Star, there is a technique in the Nanto martial arts that involves launching the practitioner out of a cannon while they hold a sword.
  • One chimera ant in Hunter X Hunter used an airosoft sniper rifle to fire huge fleas (which somehow survived the brutal impact) to make the victims bleed to death due to their bites preventing coagulation.
  • Macross 7's Nekki Basara pilots a robot that shoots speaker pods (Thoughtfully loaded with glue so the target won't be killed by cockpit depressurisation) and sings to his aggressors, hoping to make them give up fighting. He also keeps in reserve a scaled up cannon larger than his own machine for use on battleships.
  • One Piece had Mr. 5 load his revolver with his BREATH. However, his devil fruit power let him make any part of his body explode, breath included. How he was able to tell where his breath bullet was after fired, we'll never know.
  • The very basis of The Catapult Turtle Flying Castle Gambit.
  • In Zoids: Chaotic Century's Finale, The Hero and his Humongous Mecha are fired out of a cannon of a truly massive Humongous Mecha at the Big Bad and his Humongous Mecha, giving a literal meaning to the term "Live Ammunition".
  • Kai in Blood Plus has a gun that fires delayed exploding bullets, with the last bullet of each magazine triggering the others to explode simultaneously. This is used to overcome the Chiropterans' substantial Healing Factor.
  • Soul Eater has Death the Kid and his twin guns, theThompson Sisters, who can fire condensed bursts of Kid's own soul at enemies.
  • Reborn has an adorable baby mafioso who has a gun that, if shot in the head by it, you die. And then come back to life, in your underwear, for five minutes, with the ability to complete your life's ambition. If you complete said ambition, you get to continue living. If not, you just...die. Again.
  • Mic Sounders the 13th can fire a GaoFighGar with Goldion Hammer. BEST. AMMO. EVER.
  • Tegami Bachi has Letter Bees (basically postmen with special training to fight enormous monsters) tote around a special kind of gun that shoots a fragment of their 'Heart', something equivalent to their life force in this series. They're important because Letter Bees drag letters around a dark, miserable world where %70 percent of land is crawling with giant almost-invincible monsters in order to do their jobs...
  • In Yu Yu Hakusho, the character Sniper has the ability to imbed his spirit energy into any object and fire it with the velocity of a bullet, generally making said objects much stronger in the process. Ammunition used includes: pencil erasers, dice, marbles, blades of grass, rocks, an absurd amount of knives, and even A GODDAMN TRUCK. Abnormal Ammo, indeed.
  • In Hellsing, Alucard's first gun fires 13mm explosive steel/silver alloy rounds (the silver is also melted from a cross from a cathedral), Victoria's Harkonnen fires 30mm armor-piercing depleted uranium/silver alloy or incendiary shells, and the Jackal fires explosive shells encased in Macedonian silver with mercury tips.
    Alucard: It's perfection, Walter.

Comic Books
  • Deadpool has an inflatable sheep gun. The gun fires inflatable sheep.
  • The Punisher comic had a gun that shot swords.
  • The Joker has a gun that shoots "bang" flags, for all your Double Subversion needs. For those who don't quite get it - you pull the trigger once, it sends out a "BANG!" flag. Pull it again, and it fires the flag (which has a pointed tip) into the victim. He once pulled out a gun that had a "CLICK!" flag in it, so that he could declare, "Damn! Misfire!"
  • In Judge Dredd, the Judges' standard Lawgiver sidearm has several types of unusual ammunition in addition to standard ammunition which can be easily switched as needed. These types include ricochet, heatseeking, incendiary, armour piercing and high explosive. All of the above are usable in the FPS video game too.
  • In Marvel Comics' Earth X, Tony Stark's Humongous Mecha Iron Factory fires Iron Man suits from its guns.
  • The minor DCU Batman villain the Condiment King uses guns that shoot, well, condiments like ketchup and mustard. Pretty silly, until he uses hot sauce based guns and spice powder to blind people and burn their throats.
  • The Fantastic Four B-List villain Paste Pot Pete had gun that shot quick-setting glue. Which would have been cooler if he didn't need to carry around a bucket in the other hand filled with his ammo. His attempt to change his name to the Trapster after designing a self-contained glue gun has been undermined by people who won't let him live down his earlier lameness.
  • A later issue of 52 has Will Magnus using bullets that are miniaturized versions of his Metal Men.
  • Gold Digger had Brianna Diggers experiment with "Peebo bullets" based on her robot pets in one issue. They were supposed to seek out and hit bad guys on their own, thereby making them perfectly safe for bystanders; unfortunately their limited AI gave them a rather broad view of what actually constituted a 'bad guy' and hilarity predictably ensued.

Film
  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie Valiant's toon gun just fires bullets. Of course, they are semi-intelligent cartoon bullets that can talk...
    • One also carries a large tomahawk. Others are too stupid to figure out which way the bad buy went, causing Eddie to call them "Dum-Dums".
  • The Matrix Revolutions features a giant, full auto, deconstructor robot gun. I'll bet you lots of writers want one.
  • Monty Python And The Holy Grail had the evil French fling several things at the English knights. Including a cow and the large wooden rabbit the English constructed in an attempt to "Trojan horse" their way inside (though throwing something that was once alive wasn't unknown while besieging a castle in the Middle Ages, as it was to attempt to promote disease; meaning, the French attack was an inversion of Truth In Television).
  • One of the weapons featured in the Mind Screw movie eXistenZ is a gun that fires human teeth.
  • In the kid's gangster movie Bugsy Malone, all the gangs were developing machine guns that threw cream pies.
  • The battle between the "Black Pearl" and the "Interceptor" in Pirates Of The Caribbean occurred after a chase in which the crew of the Interceptor, desperate for more speed, threw almost everything they had overboard ... including most of the cannon shot. They were reduced to loading up, in the words of William Turner, "anything! Everything! Anything we have left!", including cutlery, into the cannons as makeshift ammunition. This is Truth In Television, to a degree. Scrap metal, chains, nails, etc. were often used as anti-personnel cannon loads, and indeed, had they not been fighting undead pirates it might have worked. Using an undead monkey as ammo carries slightly less verisimilitude.
    • While scrap metal and chains might have been used, cutlery wouldn't have been in any shape to do considerable damage (as proven by the Myth Busters) or stick in wood like the comedy shot for that scene showed, and gets so spread out their energy is dissipated,. Nails and anything smaller or more fragile will just be vaporized.
  • Syndrome's lair on Nomanisan utilizes sentry guns that fire sticky inflating balloon rounds to nonlethally stop any erstwhile superheroic intruders. According to some of the commentaries, that was the only kind of weapon they could think of that would conceivably stop Mr. Incredible without killing him and/or destroying the base. (It may have also been lightly based on real weapon concepts currently in development.)
    • He also has a missile base that fires giant robots.
  • xXx (Triple X) gives Vin Diesel a modified revolver that shoots interchangeable rounds, ranging from knockout capsules complete with fake blood to some kind of surveillance bug. Unfortunately the film ignores the weapon most of the time.
  • In Young Guns II Billy The Kid kills a sheriff with a shotgun filled with eighteen dimes (nine in each barrel) used as slugs. "Best dollar-eighty I ever spent!"
  • Not sure if it falls under this, Trick Arrow, or another trope altogether, but Hot Shots: Part Deux sees Topper Harley, after running out of arrows for his bow without ever hitting his target, grab, load, and fire a chicken at the man. This finally works ;).

Literature
  • In Logans Run, the Sandman cops carry The Gun, which is a 6-shot revolver where each round is different. Among its payloads are a regular bullet, an expanding net, and a heat-seeking bullet. Oddly enough, they don't seem to carry backup rounds...
  • The March Upcountry series has "bead rifles", which use mass driver technology to propel glass beads at hypersonic speeds. The energy release at impact is very destructive. Glass beads are cheap, easy to make, extremely hard, and tend to shatter on impact so you don't need to worry about over-penetration. A mass driver will presumably let you fire them without breaking.
  • In China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, Deeba aquires the UnGun, which fires larger amounts of whatever you put in it. It, amoung other things, fires hair and ants. This is WAY more badass than it sounds.
    • And then it fires nothing...uh, well, more like "unfires," acting like a vacuum to suck up the Smog.
  • The evil Delta Force soldiers of Dan Brown's Deception Point carry guns that can make ammo from nearly anything you jam in the barrel, from ice to sand.
  • The Martians in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles use a gun that shoots live bees, the idea being that the moral responsibility for the actual killing is laid on the head of the living projectile, and the gun-wielder's role is mitigated to that of an accomplice. Proves every bit as effective as earthly firearms.
  • Jack Vance's Demon Princes series puts in the hands of its protagonist a device that fires "slivers of explosive glass" and either another device or the same device with different loadings/settings, which discharges very fine needles that cause intense and prolonged itching.
  • Somehow even vampires and werewolves can fight with guns in Underworld - as the vampires use silver bullets (later filled with liquid silver due to the werewolves pulling them out too quickly), while the werewolves load their guns with bullets that contain an irradiated fluid—irradiated with ultraviolet light.
  • Soledad in Those Who Walk In Darkness goes so far as to design her own ammo for fighting Mutants, with an average of one Achilles Heel exploited per ammo type. A few of the many examples include phosphorus bullets to fight pyrokinetics, bullets coated with contact poison for foes that are Nigh Invulnerable, homing bullets for use against enemies with Super Speed, and exploding bullets for virtually anything.
  • In the Discworld books, Detritus the Troll uses a converted siege crossbow loaded with a bundle of regular crossbow bolts. The firing speed is high enough that the ammo generally shatters and then bursts into flame (or vice-versa) ending up in a supersonic flaming ball of wooden shards.
    • Which is why it's called 'the Piecemaker'.
    • It has been said to be able to open both the front and back door of a house at the same time.
  • In The Lord Of The Rings, the forces of Mordor used catapults to launch the severed heads of their defeated enemies over the walls of Minas Tirith, mostly for Squick effect. (See Real Life below.)
  • Cute little Generator in the Whateley Universe has a linear accelerator gun which fires Tasers, explosives, and sticky nets of webbing. But her bracers are even better. While they appear to fire different kinds of missiles, what they really fire are psychokinetic copies of Generator herself, which then hold and direct the missiles.
  • In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, agents of ARM generally use guns that shoot crystalized doses of fast acting sedative. How or why this is better than tranquilizer dart guns is unknown.

Live Action TV
  • Spudgun in Bottom was named for his ability to fire potatoes out of a certain part of his anatomy.
    Richie: Why do they call you Spudgun?
    Spudgun: Give me a potato and I'll show you why.
    Eddie: No-no, you don't want to see that Rich!
    Richie: And why do they call you Hedgehog?
    Dave Hedgehog: Give me a hedgehog and I'll show you why!
  • The wormhole weapons in Far Scape can shoot a) black holes that grow geometrically or b) wormholes that can then shoot chunks of plasma-hot star at a target. If you include the Peacekeeper Wars TV movie, you get to see both occur in the course of the series.
  • X Play with "A rocket launcher that shoots chainsaws that explode."
  • The Mythbusters have made air cannons that have shot the following: conventional cannonballs, baseballs, chickens (frozen and thawed), straws and twigs, piano wire, Kevlar-wrapped steak, a net, and possibly other things this troper can't recall. There was also the section of sewer-type pipe they modified to shoot Buster, their much-abused crash test dummy, with a blast of high explosives. Then there was the attempt to fire ice, gelatin, and meat out of rifles, but these were mostly non-lethal. Lastly, they also modified a rifle to fire a penny—this time, it was potentially lethal.
    • Also, inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean example, they loaded up a whole variety of odd ammo into a US Civil War era cannon to test their effectiveness. Examples included bottles of rum, wooden legs, silverware, steak knives, nails and lengths of chain with varying levels of effectiveness.
      • The links of chain, in particular, were quite possibly more damaging than cannonballs; not only did they demolish the target, but they would also be more effective at piercing sails due to their bigger area (similar to grapeshot) while still being able to have the power to damage the hull and anybody unlucky enough to be hit. (This is a straight-up case of Truth In Television—see below.)
    • Let's not forget the cigarette butts shoved into the barrel of a shotgun, which proved to be potentially lethal at close range. (Unsmoked cigarettes were less useful, and almost resulted in a false Busted.)
      • And those were supermarket cigarettes. Since the myth in question was a couple of hillbillies, they probably smoked roll-your-owns so no light weight filter thus more mass thus more impact force thus... you get the point.
    • Or the Korean Hwacha. A salvo of arrows. Arrows propelled 500 yards by gunpowder. That then exploded when they land.
    • Or their various non-show builds, such as Leonardo.
    • Or the bowling ball fired from a modified gas cylinder, using match heads as propellant.
    • And then there's the myth of cheese being used as cannon ammo.
    • Not strictly ammo, but in a late 2009 episode, they built a cannon out of duct tape. That fired a five-pound iron ball several hundred feet.
  • The Royal Canadian Air Farce segment "Chicken Cannon: Target of the Week". Originally a dig at pitiful mid-nineties Canadian military budgets, the cannon was used to fire upon pictures of whomever the show's writers thought were deserving of a little public humiliation. The traditional projectile of a rubber chicken was often supplemented with "custom" ammo suited to the situation at hand (e.g., sawdust for someone involved in the softwood lumber dispute, or Eggos for a politician who was perceived to waffle. And sometimes Jell-O for the hell of it—or, more accurately, because there's always room for Jell-O.)
  • On Supernatural, the Winchester brothers have ghost poking guns that shoot rock-salt.
    • Doctor Who. Shotguns loaded with rock-salt are used in "Image of the Fendahl''.
  • Get Smart. A KAOS assassin posing as a vampire used a gun that fires twin ice bullets, leaving the distinctive Vampire Bites Suck mark, but no evidence of any weapon.

Newspaper Comics
  • In one Far Side strip, a burglar is confronted by a man with a gun that shoots Doberman Pinschers.
    • Called, appropriately enough, the Dobie-O-Matic. (The gun, not the ammo.)

Tabletop Games
  • Warhammer 40000: Guns that fire molecular-edged shuriken? Check. Guns which fire nets made of Razor Floss? Check. Flamethrowers that use holy napalm? Check. Guns that send you straight to Hell? Check. Biological guns which use muscle impulses to fire killer beetles, killer maggots, acid crystals, floating spores or exploding tumours? Check. Tiny goblins fired at you through Hell? Check. Guns that fire screaming wires that make anyone they hit explode? Check. Guns that fire the captured souls of tortured psychics? Check. Guns that fire the tortured souls of sentient plastic? Check.
    • I'm not familiar with all of those; the shuriken guns are either the Eldar shuriken weapons, or the Dark Eldar splinter weapons, which are typically the same thing, only poisoned; also, there's a specialist version of this, which fires shuriken poisoned so the victim explodes in a shower of blood. The razor floss would be the Shadow Weaver/Night Spinner, depending on how it's mounted. The gun which sends you to hell is the Eldar D-Cannon, which opens a portal to the warp; it doesn't send all of you, just part of you, to hell. The holy napalm is used anyplace regular napalm would be. The biological guns are, in various forms, used by the Tyranids. The goblins fired through hell is the ever-beloved Shokk Attack Gun, that most orky of weapons. The tortured souls of plastic would be Terrorfex grenades. The screaming wires and tortured souls of psychics I'm unfamiliar with, though the screaming wires sounds like Hellfire rounds used by Space Marines, who themselves have some interesting toys.
      • Screaming wires could be the Deathspinner or spinneret rifle?
  • Warhammer features the Doom Diver, a giant slingshot that launches Goblins, the halfling soup pot launcher and the Screaming Skull Catapult. Also the Hellcannon, which loads living beings as the ammunition, then fires their souls.
    • At least one army featured in White Dwarf a few years back had a stone thrower rebuilt as a Squig Thrower. (A squig-firing cannon would later appear in the Storm of Chaos event thanks to a vocal fansite). Never let it be said that Orcs let the manifest insanity of an idea stop them from trying it anyway.
  • Magic The Gathering is loaded (no pun—okay, okay, pun intended) with cards that shoot or throw odd things. (If you notice that most of these cards are at least partly red, the color of chaos, bloodlust, randomness, and even some kinds of madness...well, duh.) Aside from the Hornet Cannon, there are:
  • Dungeons And Dragons:
    • Most giants have an ability to throw boulders. There's even a prestige class called Hulking Hurler which allows such a character to do frankly ludicrous amounts of damage if built properly (how does a few million points of damage grab you?) Now, there is a feat called "Throw Anything", which is allows characters with it to throw weapons not normally meant for it—as long as they could wield the weapon in the first place. The Hulking Hurler has a class feature entitled, in response to this latter restriction, "Really Throw Anything".
    • The Races of Stone sourcebook adds two feats, "Fling Ally" and "Fling Enemy" respectively, allowing a larger than average character to either expedite the attack of a small character such as a dwarf or gnome, or throw enemies into walls and such. Unfortunately, they were included without quite enough playtesting, leading to questions as to, for instance whether a flung enemy would actually take falling damage, and if so, whether a flung ally would too.
    • A typo in the pre-press manuscript for AD&D's first edition DMG led to the creation of the joke item "Hammer, Dwarf Throwing." In essence, the hammer, when wielded by a dwarf, throws the dwarf at the opponent. The dwarf then flies back to the hammer. Note that this was long before "dwarf tossing" was invented, much less excoriated.
    • Probably any magic-rich setting has its share, but Netheril, being a Magitek sub-setting, featured the netherpelter (a telekinetic gun) with imprisoning, expansive (as in Enlarge), decay inducing, fireball, water jet lashing, and whirlwind (for grounding fliers) pellets as "standard" ammo, though it propelled mundane darts and pellets just as well.
    • Spelljammer setting has an accelerator, magical breachloading cannon which sucks anything placed in the ammo cup and hurls it with enough exit speed to damage ships' hulls. Grabbing the cup in such a way that some fingers happen to be inside is not recommended. It's specifically noted that any and all living "ammo" dies in process — even amorphous fungal mold or slime. Its way of power supply sucks, however.
    • Perhaps the most disturbing ammunition in DND: arrows with screaming heads on them that distract spellcasters. No, I'm not kidding.
  • In Exalted, Sidereal Exalted have a charm that lets them fire anything smaller than their arm as an arrow, including shouts - the latter is used as an odd communication technique. They also have a charm that transforms arrows into various things such as wheat, life-force, glass, and boulders.
    • In the right combo, said charm could allow a Sidereal to fire a barrage of flaming squirrels, or something else even more ludicrous. The game rewards this.
  • Human Occupied Landfill had a flaming gerbil cannon.
    • GURPS and Rifts. There are special rules (or lack there of) for making items that use exotic ammo. This troper saw a joke saying a baby wearing a lobster costume in a bucket could be a PC, a weapon, or ammo. Then saw a session where they were used in a special cannon.
  • Changeling The Dreaming encourages this kind of creativity when coming up with dream weapons. Still, it is pretty common to simply find a steam powered cannon firing burning coals from its own firebox.
  • Shadowrun features an adept power, Missile Mastery, which allows you to throw absolutely anything for damage. Playing cards, frozen shamrocks, pillows, if you can hold it you can throw it for Str/2 Moderate damage.
  • Scion has Knacks that let you pick up far more than you should, as well as Knacks that give you immense throwing ability. With Epic Strength 10, Strength 5, and the right knacks, you can throw literally anything in the world. The game notes that at a certain point (say, throwing the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan), damage becomes narrative rather than dice-based.

Video Games
  • In Evil Dead Regeneration, Ash has the ability to turn into "Deadite Ash." In this form his "boomstick" fires energy bolts. He also constructs a harpoon gun that can attach to his right arm in place of the classic chainsaw, and what can only be described as a rocket launcher shotgun.
  • Both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics have guns that fire spells. FFVII has the Hand Wave of it being a Mako Gun, but still.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics had the Blaze Gun, which fired ice spells rather than fire, and the Glacier Gun, which fired fire spells rather than ice. Maybe they are named for the things they destroy, like Mage Masher is good against Mages, Wyrmkiller beats dragons, etc.. The names were swapped in the game's Blind Idiot Translation, as the retranslation for the PSP version has it right.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance similarly has magic handguns, including the Peacemaker, a revolver that fires charm shots.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has cannons, used by two classes. The Flintlock class mostly uses it to shoot his allies to create various effects such as regen or mana restoration. The Cannoneer is more offensive, but can also shoot allies with Potion Shells and Ether Shells.
    • Final Fantasy VIII also featured Abnormal Ammo in the form of Irvine's Shot Limit. You had your regular ammunition, along with Shotgun or Fast Ammo, but then there's Flame Ammo, AP Ammo, Dark Ammo, and Pulse Ammo.
    • That's nothing, Rinoa uses a crossbow that shoots chakrams. But the real insanity is her Limit Break, in which she stuffs her dog onto the crossbow and shoots it at the enemy where it explodes. Seriously.
    • The Gun-Mages in Final Fantasy X-2 are blue mages that use guns to shoot abilities learned from enemies. Shots vary from generic-fireballs to "1000 Needles" to pillars of holy energy.
  • One of the best (if not the best) ranged weapons in Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is the Crossbow "Valkyrie", which shoots fireballs.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos has the shark gun.
  • Worms has sheep and homing pigeons being fired from bazookas, the Priceless Ming Vase, the Banana Bomb, the Holy Hand Grenade, and the Old Lady (among the most powerful non-super weapons in the game) as well as the Super Sheep, which is a flying sheep (with a red cape!) which you guide into its target. The super weapons include the "Concrete Donkey", the Super Banana Bomb, and the Flaming Sheep Strike. Let's just put it this way: The more unlikely the weapon, the more powerful it's probably going to be.
    • It could be argued that the entire purpose of the Worms franchise is this very trope.
  • Worms Forts: Under Siege has, among other things, a minigun that fires hamsters, a trebuchet that launches a moose and a mortar that fires a bishop.
    • Now be fair—the latter two are at least plausible.
  • Donkey Kong's coconut gun, it fires in spurts! Also, Diddy uses popguns that fires peanuts, Tiny has a crossbow that launches barbed feathers, Lanky spits grapes out of a blowpipe, and Chunky has a gun that fires pineapples. Funky shoots K. Rool with a rocket propelled boot, and Krusha gets in on the act with a gun that fires exploding oranges.
  • The Medic's Syringe Gun from Team Fortress 2 The alternate Blutsauger shoots syringes that restore the medics health when they hit an enemy.
  • The Earthworm Jim games have a bubble gun as a joke weapon, but a far less harmless weapon is the homing missile, which launches tiny rocket-propelled houses. (Home-ing Missile, get it?)
  • Mega Man, amongst all the abilities he's gained, has scissors and snakes amongst the weirder ones.
  • Bio Shock has a gun that fires liquid nitrogen and electric gel, along with the standard napalm. And then there's the Insect Swarm plasmid, which lets you fire bees from your hand. Also the shotgun, which in the beginning is just a normal pump-action, can be loaded with electric slugs, and the crossbow has electric darts (which, when they hit, themselves shoot another dart in the direction they came from, carrying an electric shocking wire).
  • Half Life also has a "bee launcher".
    • Half Life 2 has the gravity gun, which picks up and launches anything and everything that isn't nailed to the ground, so it can be called an everything launcher. Once it gets supercharged, it can pick up plenty of things which are nailed to the ground, walls, and balls of energy from anti-gravity energy columns. Even enemies become ammunition when the gravity gun is supercharged.
    • The Half Life 2 version of the crossbow appears to shoot glowing-hot pieces of rebar.
      • Which, to continue the theme, nails things to the walls...
    • The Pulse Rifle's secondary fire and the Combine Hunters in Half-Life 2: Episode Two fire explosive flechettes that cause targets to float upward and disappear into the aether.
  • Based on Garry's original description of the request forum on the Facepunch Studios forums, somebody made a scripted weapon for Garrys Mod of an AK 47 that shoots rainbow colored babies that can swarm any target and you can eat for 10 health. Yes.
    • To which another user responded by creating a SWEP (scripted weapon) of a baby that shoots AK-47s.
  • Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil shamelessly copied the gravity gun. The main difference is that, Doom being Doom, most players are unlikely to ever remember the "grabber"'s existence until the plot requires it, preferring instead to blast everything in sight using normal weapons.
    • It didn't copy it, the Grabber was added to demonstrate that far from being innovative, almost every game engine with a physics system had something similar to the HL 2 gravity gun knocked up by the devs for testing purposes to make it easier to test object interactions in-engine; the only thing new about the HL 2 gun was that Valve left it in the game. Of course the Fan Dumb missed the point entirely and thought it was a slavish copy of Valve's incredible innovation.
  • A cheat code in Shadow Warrior transforms the shots from your missile launcher into bunnies. Killer Rabbit indeed.
  • One of the hidden weapons that could be earned in the Arcade First Person Shooter War: Final Assault was a barrel that fired a monkey with a bomb strapped to it's back.
  • South Park for Nintendo 64 has...yellow snowballs. The most powerful weapon is a cow launcher. There are grenades that look like Terence and Philip dolls; they fart to explode. The game's equivalent to a sniper rifle is a chicken that shoots eggs. You even aim it through a little notch in its tail feathers! In the online-exclusive racing game, there's a powerup that lets you fling Kenny into the air.
  • Warcraft III has the Undead Meat Wagon, a catapult that launches corpses. Notice that this is not as far-fetched as it seems; there are real instances of armies stuffing their catapults with corpses, as you can see in the appropriate section below. The Night Elf Glaive Thrower from the same game is a siege weapon that throws blades so sharp at such high speed they can cut down trees.
    • Note, however, that in real-world history, firing corpses from catapults was primarily a scare tactic, albeit a highly effective one. (You'd be pretty freaked out too if a bunch of dead bodies fell out of the sky onto your front lawn.) It was also a primitive form of biological warfare, which Warcraft at least acknowledges to an extent with its own meat wagons. The meat wagons, however, are also very effective at destroying buildings.
  • The Mutalisks in Starcraft spit parasites that bounces towards nearby targets. The Hydralisks throw spikes from their backs. The Guardian aspect of the Mutalisk shoots powerful acid spores at ground and air, respectively. The Queens can shoot a parasite that burrows into an at-least-partially organic target, killing it and spawning two "broodlings". The Devourer (from Brood War) aspect of the Mutalisk shoot massive globs of acid. We can probably assume that any flying Zerg unit with a ranged attack in Star Craft II will continue the proud Zerg tradition of gooey projectiles.
  • As noted in the Zero Punctuation review of the game, Painkiller has the Electrodriver, which does indeed fire shurikens and lightning. There's also the stakegun ("penis extension gun", in Yahtzee's parlance), which shoots massive wooden stakes "sharpened telephone poles".
  • Cave Story has the bubble gun (surprisingly powerful), and a throwing knife whose fully-leveled form launches a knife-wielding ghost (very powerful!). There's also the highest-level form of the Nemesis gun, which actually gets weaker as you level it up; it shoots rubber ducks.
  • In Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, the main character has a crossbow that shoots a variety of wildlife, including: enemy-taunting chipmunks, giant armored pillbugs, exploding bats, and little bitey alien things perhaps best described as rabid carnivorous tribbles.
  • Crusader gains a couple of Abnormal Ammo guns in its second installment. The crystallizer shoots a weird cartridge that inhibits its targets' molecules; since motion is heat, the shot is described as being comparable to "several minutes' exposure to absolute zero". The result is a statue in an agonized pose, which you can then shatter. The liquidizer shoots a classified catalytic compound which breaks down molecular bonds, reducing the target to a puddle of its base elements. There's a neat, brownish, human-shaped cloud when it hits a target, and then all that's left behind is a splotch of green goo.
  • Fallout: Tactics has a water gun. You think it's a joke weapon, until you come across jars of acid.
    • Fallout 3 adds a gun that shoots railway spikes, and a gun that can shoot any trash the player can find. You haven't lived until you kill a Super Mutant by launching a teddy bear at them and blowing every limb off their body.
    • Fallout 2 has the Solar Schorcher, a solar-powered gun. You can only reload it outdoors.
  • God Of War has the Minotaur Boss, a heavily armored behemoth that you have to stun before resorting to twisted means to execute it: You run back to a platform and fire a flaming log/stake at it, cracking the armor and eventually nailing it to the door it emerged from.
  • Unreal Tournament has mostly-conventional weapons, the impact hammer aside, but one of the more interesting ones is a goo gun, which you can either slime someone with or lay down explosive poisonous traps with.
    • The goo gun doesn't appear in Unreal 2, which instead has something much weirder: a gun that shoots spiders. Primary fire covers a target in spiders, which doesn't kill them very quickly but does make them run around screaming "Aaaaaaagh get them off meeeeeeee!" For this reason it may well be the second-most fun weapon in the game. The most fun weapon being the BFG that shoots miniature black holes. Secondary fire shoots a glob of biomass that turns into a big spider when you hit it with the primary fire.
  • Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II used a similar idea: The alternate fire on the rocket launcher made the spider-shaped rockets grab onto objects and wait for a few seconds before going off. Instead of just blowing up the enemy, you got to see them run around with an exploding spider-bomb on them. So, so much more fun.
  • A wild magic surge in Baldurs Gate II could result in a cow dropping on the target. Also in the game was Jan Jansen's Flasher Master Bruiser Mates, used (naturally) with Jan Jansen's impeccably stylish Flasher Master Bruiser crossbow. They were stun bombs, but they looked like skulls.
  • Planescape Torment features a high-level spell called Mechanus cannon. It's a pretty generic cannon... fired from a different plane of existence, through a portal, opened five feet from your enemy's head.
    • It also features a few strange projectiles for Nodrom - Rule of Three bolts with spring-loaded pyramidal heads, Bolts of Wincing which look like bladed U's (The name comes from what observers do when the bolts go in...or are pulled out), and bolts with sponge-heads (note that the sponges are full of acid).
  • An old shooter in the style of Battle For Midway or Gradus called Tyrian had several "hidden" ships you could play through a "super arcade mode" by using a cheat code. The Ninja Stealth ship had several ninja-themed weapons, including poison bombs (against other ships?), "starburst" (a near-useless weapon that threw starshaped chunks of hot metal out sideways from your ship), and shuriken, which when fully-upgraded resulted in a massive forward field of shuriken shot from the front of your ship. Taking the cake, though, had to be the Foodship Nine Supercarrot, which used entirely food-related weapons, from a banana gun that threw out a tree's worth of explosive bananas per second, a secondary banana bomb launcher, a hotdog-with-optional-mustard-spread, an orange...thingy...that created a whirling circle of oranges.
  • Although it wasn't seen, in Apollo Justice, Trucy mentions that one of her tricks involves firing a gun that shoots Bullets. Turns out "Bullets" is the name of a cat.
  • One of the bonus guns obtained in Shadow the Hedgehog is the Omochao gun, which, just like you would think, fires the Omochao from Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
  • Wizardry 8 features the gadgeteer class. This class comes with a unique rifle, whose choice of potential ammo expands as you level up. It starts able to only fire rocks and pellets, later gaining the ability to shoot daggers, arrows, axes, swords, lightsabers, grenade-like potions...
  • Runescape has a number of these, many of which use living creatures in some way or another. It's a good thing there's no PETA in Runescape...
    • The Fixed Device shoots dyed toads.
    • Salamanders use up tar mixed with various herbs as the ammo for them to shoot flames out. Yes, you hold the salamanders in your hands.
    • Crystal Bows "use" no ammo. They weaken as you use them because you're essentially firing little bits of the bow itself at things.
    • Chinchompas are small, highly explosive animals. You throw them at people. They may not be shot out of anything, but they are fun to watch.
  • Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine: When a cheat code is entered, your bazooka fires flying rubber chickens... They also play tropical music as they pass by you.
  • Scorched Earth features a type of shell that explodes in a 100-300 feet sphere (well, circle, it's a 2D game) of dirt. Apparently dirt is very compressible. It also features three different families of dirt-destroying weapons, but sadly the "baby missile" is just a smaller version of the regular missile.
  • As an Easter Egg gag weapon, Metal Gear Solid 4 has a Solar Gun from another Hideo Kojima game. It shoots SUNLIGHT!
    • Not to mention the Tanegashima, which looks like your ordinary, every day musket. Until you shoot it and a tornado comes out.
    • And we also have the grenades and tranquilizer rounds that make people get emotional. Seriously.
  • Mass Effect makes use of a variety of upgradable ammunition types, including incendiary, radioactive, cryo, photon, explosive, hammerhead, armor-piercing, anti-personnel, snowblind, sledgehammer....
  • Starsiege: Tribes features the Spinfuzor, which shoots exploding frisbees of death.
  • Drawn To Life has a gun that shoots snowballs for the first world. For the second world, it's tinkered with so that it shoots exploding acorns.
    • In the third world, it shoots starfish.
  • Many of the games in Mana series had a system of cannons, located all around the world, that fired main characters very, very high in order to transport them elsewhere. Needless to say, there wasn't any fall damage, so it was way superior to walking through half the world to player's next destination.
  • System Shock 2 had the 'Exotic' weapons class, which reloaded with annelids - AKA worms. The Viral Proliferator shot clouds of flying, stinging worms, whilst the Annelid Launcher shot a homing rocket. Made of worms.
  • Ratchet And Clank: Amongst the weapons included in the game we have guns that will turn any enemy into various farmyard animals, a land shark gun, a gun that fires heat-seeking servings of vindaloo curry, a mine that spits out bees, and the suck cannon, a weapon which sucks up your enemies and fires them as ammo. There is also a gun that shoots black holes, and grenades that turn into little robots that themselves have guns. Finally, we have the gun that fires tornadoes, complete with lightning storms, a wrist weapons that launched sentient and powerful blobs of slime, and capping it all off with a bomb that makes any enemy - from wandering creatures to NPC's to bosses - start dancing to disco music, each one having a distinct dance.
  • Half Life spinoff Gunman Chronicles has a gun that shoots a variable amount of acid, basic and neutral liquid in form of globs. The amount of the three liquids is user-selectable, resulting in different effects and different ammo consumption. The bad thing is that such a user interface is obviously very fiddly, so players tend to set the gun to its most destructive setting (full acid, full base, half neutral) and leave it at that; the good thing is that, in contrast to other such weird guns (such as, say, the aforementioned biorifle from Unreal) smart players actually use the chemical gun.
    • Also, the mod Rocket Crowbar changed the shotgun to fire screaming scientists who flew towards the target and exploded on contact.
  • In Super Mario RPG for the SNES, Bowser's Hurly Gloves weapon, described as "A classic Mario-toss attack," is just that: Bowser tossing Mario comedically at enemies. When Mario is unable to be thrown (due to death, absence from the battlefield, or the mushroom and scarecrow status ailments, etc.), the Mario doll first seen in Gaz's house is thrown for a weaker effect.
  • In Redneck Rampage you find dynamite, a generic tossed explosive. Later, you upgrade it to a rocket launcher by finding a crossbow. Then you find a chicken... strap the chicken to an arrow, jam dynamite up the egg-hole, and now you have a chicken-guided missile launcher complete with 'b-gawk!' sound effects and drifting feathers. Also, while not exactly abnormal ammo, you kill a big alien and take its gun... which is cyber-grafted to its arm. You fire it by yanking on dangling tendons.
  • In Bungie's Oni, some of the more advanced weapons included a sniper railgun that fired slugs of frozen mercury, and an energy weapon that fired a grenade, which released a Life Energy absorbing psychic entity, that would move from target to target until it was done feeding, including attacking the player if it was fired carelessly. Each of those took the same generic ammo clips as the other projectile and energy weapons.
  • Rise of Legends has a number of these, especially from the Steam Punk "Vinci" factions. Standouts are the Doge Cannon and Doomcannon, both of which can fire a poison gas, shrapnel, or explosive shell; or the ability of certain heroes to fire flare rockets that turn into so-called "Holdout Towers".
  • Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun features GDI Disc throwers who fire bouncing explosive frisbees.
  • Persona 3 features Evokers (guns but not really) that fire psychological trauma. Takeda Yukari has trouble pulling the trigger in the opening anime, and Iori Junpei comments that it's a little weird. Everyone else seems to be just fine with the idea.
    • In the original Japanese version, they weren't guns that fired psychological trauma. They were real guns. This troper thinks making them shoot trauma is way cooler though.
      • I haven't heard or seen anything that would give the impression that this is the case. This is the same in both versions as far as I know.
  • Xenogears: Jessiah Lee Black built the Buntline, a Gear that can transform into a giant gun. Its ammo? Its own cockpit, pilot and all.
    • Citan built it. Jesiah made it better.
  • One of the attacks one can learn for Bazookas in Makai Kingdom involves stuffing your opponent down the barrel and firing them out.
  • ToeJam & Earl has you using tomatoes as your primary attack. The first sequel has bottles. No, they don't break on enemies and hurt them; they open and suck enemies in, rather like the ghost trap in Ghostbusters.
  • Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project has an unlockable lightning gun that kills every regular enemy in one hit and never runs out of ammo.
  • In Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, the mechas can shoot anything from missiles, to swords, to holy water, to statues, and even NPCs and enemies. In fact, any item you collect in the game can be used as ammo.
  • Battlefield 2142 has a gun that shoots C4.
  • One of the first moves learned in Banjo Kazooie is how to launch blue eggs out of Kazooie's mouth.
    • Also, there's Mr Patch from the sequel, whose main attack is to spit exploding beach balls at you.
  • The Turok series has the bore-gun which fires nanobots of some type which slice apart the enemy into bite-sized chunks.
  • Portal has a gun that fires interlinked portals. Firing directly at a turret won't even nudge it, but there are numerous ways to use the portals around the turrets to disable them.
  • Hellgate: London has (well, had) guns that shoot bees, exploding lightning balls, and horrible clouds of green plague gas.
  • Pokemon has the move Fling which let's a Pokemon throw anything from the fairly mundane berries up to iron balls (the only real use for that item, to be honest).
    • Actually, you can also use the move Trick to get your opponent to hold it, though there are much better items for the job and it's an entirely different trope.
  • The Gun Del Sol from Boktai shoots sunlight, for crying out loud!
  • Pocket Tanks, ScorchedEarth clone, is an extreme example of this trope. Tanks there can shoot: *deep breath*...dirt, pop corn, rubber, bees, roman candles, sawblades...FLEAS!...star dust, water, tornadoes, coal, fireflies, glue, chalks and so on.
  • Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords has the Gobshooter enemy - a catapult that uses goblins as ammo (Destroying a random gem on the board for 20x effect). The funny thing is that the Hurl Goblin attack is learnable!
  • Zombies Ate My Neighbors. You start with a squirt gun full of holy water that can kill zombies. You also can attack with: tomatoes, popsicles, silverware, dishware, six packs of soda (That explode like grenades), footballs, fire extinguishers, weed trimmers and an alien ray gun that fires bubbles. The only "normal" weapon you obtain is the bazooka.
  • Anarchy Online starts you off with a weapon with infinite ammo. This is handwaved as being a gun which fires tiny nanotech-created replicas of itself.
  • The SMG in Deus Ex: Invisible War has an alt-fire which launches flash grenades. By contrast, the Widowmaker SMG (every weapon has a special variant) has an alt-fire which launches spiderbots. Spiderbots are far from deadly, until your enemy is surrounded by twenty or so.
  • Duke Nukem Forever has a gun that shoots dogs.
  • This trope features very heavily into the ending of Sakura Taisen 3. To say any more would be a pretty big spoiler.
  • Revolution X, the Spiritual Sequel to Mid Way game Terminator2 - The Arcade Game, had the player armed with a machine gun...as well as a launcher that fired exploding CD's. As a powerup, the player could also upgrade to Laserdiscs!
  • The Angelic Rifle in Baroque shoots tiny winged babies that are living, sentient incarnations of pain.
  • In Okami, you can shoot your NPC man-turned-wolf companion Oki in the battle against the twin clockwork owls.
  • Metal Slug, anyone? While the first game had normal weapons for the most part, even the Flame Shot, from 2 onwards things got weird. There's the Drop Shot, which fires a bouncing explosive blob, Iron Lizard, an exploding robotic car (or bomb-on-legs in Fat mode), Super Grenade, which is basically a rocket propelled grenade, the Laser, Zentetsu Sword, a melee attack that sends out a WAVE OF ENEMY-KILLING ENERGY, Thunder Gun, Emporer Palpatine-style insta-kill arc lighning, and Stone for player weapons. All of which (except Stone and Zentetsu Sword) being represented by the EXACT SAME LITTLE RIFLE. The helper character get pretty standard weaponry (Hyaktaro's Ryu rip-off notwithstanding), except for the unused Glen Achilles, who apparently fires spinning, exploding Heavy Machine Guns.
  • The Metroid series has the following: a gun that shoots superheated magma grenades (Magmaul), supercooled plasma (Judicator), killer neutrinos (Shock Coil), miniature nuclear weapons (Battlehammer), holy planet energy (Light beam) and a miniature star (Sunburst), anti-energy (Dark beam) and a portal to hell (Darkburst), matter-antimatter (Annihilator beam) and the sound barrier (Sonic Boom), sentient goo in energy form (any phazon weapon) and the Stacked beam, which contains the plasma, ice, and wave beams at the same time in a six foot wall.

Web Animation

Webcomics
  • Its Walky has the monkey cannon from the Monkey Master.
  • Dreamleak features a quadruple pie thrower. Interestingly, it was not used as a weapon but as a clay pigeon launcher.
  • This from Sluggy Freelance shows an Inflatable Rabbit Decoy Inflatable Cannon. The repetition of the word "Inflatable" is not an error.
  • In the Guntron Alliance Force strip of Perry Bible Fellowship, we are presented with a Combining Mecha Gun that shoots the vehicle of the blue member of the group as a bullet. No wonder the green guy looks pissed as he takes his place in the gun chamber. They must go through many members that way...
  • Mac Hall implies there's two kinds of "Monkey Guns" — one that's just a run-of-the-mill gun used for shooting monkeys, and another that was a gun that shot monkeys ''out of it''. Ian is told that they didn't have either one on hand.
  • Girl Genius and the Hand-cranked spork runcible gun.
  • In Antihero For Hire the titular antihero's entire weapon is based around this. With special bullets that explode, do fire, and all sorts of things.
  • Nodwick has the "Henchapult".
  • Hellbent has the "Fetus Laucher 2007" aka FL2K7
  • Fighter talks about a weapon firing sword-beams. A constant stream of laser-powered swords. He really likes swords.
    • There is also the Giant Cannon. No, it's not just a really big cannon. Though I imagine it must be big to fire giants...
  • The World Of Warcraft parody strip Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth uses this as a running gag. To make matters worse, most of the ammo is alive at least until the time of firing. He killed someone in one hit using a supersonic woodchuck.
  • It's a crossbow, Virus. A crossbow that shoots beam swords...
  • From Narbonic: "He's shooting exploding flaming poison cannonballs!"
  • Magiversity has Wyndgarde Ironkeel who is a Gunmage, so basically she shoots magic.

Western Animation
  • Hoss Delgado in The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy can turn his bionic hand into a crossbow that shoots chainsaws.
  • The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack features a villain with a mechanical whale submarine, whose cannon fires juvenile delinquents.
    • Somewhat akin to the three rarest varieties of Castor Shell in Outlaw Star, because the juvenile delinquents also served as it's power source (well, they shovelled the coal, anyway).
  • In Family Guy, Mayor Adam West has a cat launcher.
  • A superheroine in The Tick had a rocket launcher that fired groups of poodles. An episode featured George Washington Carver constructing a canon that shot out streams of Peanut Butter.
    • You left out... the HUMAN BULLET!! Fire Me Boy!
  • Don't forget the pie-zooka from Gargoyles. Vinnie called it Mr. Kotter.
  • A What If episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants in which Plankton and Mr. Krabs trade places has SpongeBob shooting a clothes cannon at a naked Krabs.
  • In the Batman Cold Open of The Spectacular Spider Man episode Nature vs. Nuture, Tombstone's minions use guns that fire round metal slugs that sprout spikes mid-air. Because full-auto high-speed ball bearings tearing through flesh just isn't enough.
  • SWAT Kats has drill missiles. And claw missiles. And net missiles. And oilslick missiles and Tesla coil missiles and motorcycle missiles and jetski missiles and even, very occasionally, actual blow-you-up-on-impact missiles. All contained in the body of a single jet fighter. And don't even get us started on the Gatling gun that fires balls of cement.
    • In one episode, a cauldron of boiling soup is attached to the Turbokat.
    • In "Chaos in Crystal", they also hooked up the rebuilt mining device to the Turbokat's arsenal, to use it to fix Rex Shard.
  • Codename Kids Next Door features weapons that shoot anything from melted cheese to live hamsters.
    • Well, anything except actual bullets. It is a kids show, after all.
  • The CG short film A Gentleman's Duel features, as the last-resort weapon deployed by the French and English steam-powered boxing giant robots, a howitzer that fires an angry French poodle named Fifi.
  • One GI Joe episode had the Joe team convert their vehicle and personal weapons to fire apples, to take advantage of the tiny amount of organic poison in the seeds. They were fighting a blob monster.
  • Invader Zim featured a gigantic, one-shot muffin cannon, as well as a devastating sandwich shot from GIR's head.
    • Also Dib's elaborate water balloon launcher, which is outdone by Zim's satellite water balloon launcher, which literally fires Earth's entire supply of water into Dib's enormous head.
  • The Spectacular Spider Man has been featuring progressively more bizarre ammo. Tombstone's minions use full-auto machine guns that fire metal slugs which sprout tiny spikes all over in mid-air. Later, Silver Sable fires giant staples out of a, well, it's never called such but it's clearly a staple gun and Spidey gets to fight a massive battle across NYC's rooftops against the Green Goblin and his Hyperspace Arsenal, pumpkin-bomb-launchers camouflaged as watertowers, and hordes of pumpkin-masked Mooks wielding bazookas that fire larger metal slugs that sprout tiny spikes all over in mid-air.
  • The Simpsons had an accidental version of this when Homer joins the Navy Reserve (IIRC). Through his general incompetence Homer ends up firing their captain out of a torpedo tube, which then hits another sub. The men on the other sub remark that "they've fired an officer at us." When ordered to return fire, the men are about to grab their officer who stops his men and says "Not me, a torpedo!"
    • Another instance is when Homer signs up for the Army. He is assigned to be the leader of the enemy in war games. While the Army uses live ammo, Homer's army has bubbles for ammo.
  • The Cow Boys of Moo Mesa had guns that fired tiny sheriff badges, cactus spines, vegetables, spider webs, chunks of dirt, and pretty much everything else except actual bullets.

Other
  • Bionicle has several examples, but one of the first and best is probably the Kanoka, which are essentially superpowered frisbee disks. There was also an arc that took place underwater; some of the good guys used air bubbles as ammo (which is toxic to waterbreathers) while the bad guys shot vampiric squids.
    • Currently, the ammo of choice is Thornax, a kind of fruit. Hey, don't laugh; would you like to get hit with a coconut? A spiky, potentially explosive coconut?
  • An editor's error in a Polish video game magazine Top Secret resulted in a description of a "grenade-launcher launcher". Nifty.
  • With Second Life having tons of user created stuff, there are certainly guns out there that shoot weird stuff. This troper seen one gun that shoots more than 15 Red Shells that seek out other avatars nearby and makes a big firework-like explosion upon impact. Then there's another gun that shoots Stars by the truckload and all of them have the starman theme playing at the same time, which sounds freaky when the sound gets distorted due to how fast they fly when shot out.
    • Also Watermelon Rifles, Cat Cannons, Heart Crossbows, and a dildo gun.
  • This troper has a character with a superpower-any non-weapon placed in his hands will become a weapon (ie a roll of quarters will become a set of brass knuckles, a bottle of any state of repair will become a knife of sorts, toy guns become real guns, etc.), though he can use them as normal if need be. The question then becomes, what happens if a weapon, which is already a weapon, is given to him? Easy-it becomes a ridiculous weapon. Swords get chainsaw blades, axes become rocket powered, and guns fire anything that could conceivably fly through the air, and no longer need loading. His favorite weapon is a .357 Magnum that fires squirrels. Also in his current arsenal-a lemon shotgun and a homemade gun carefully designed to be nonfunctional (allowing it to become a real gun and fire bullets without putting him to the expense of actually buying bullets).
  • Uncyclopedia's list of weapons that shoot other weapons that don't exist, but should.
  • Years ago, one of the Star Wars fan boards out there on the internet had developed a cannon that shot Ewoks. Sadly the schematics or specs or backstory are no longer available, but they were even developing different types of ammo for said cannon.
    • One would think that shooting Jawas would be as effective as buzz droids.

Real Life
  • During the nuclear test sequence Upshot-Knothole in 1953, test Grable fired an 11-inch nuclear warhead from a specially constructed artillery piece known as 'Atomic Annie.' This is fairly unconventional in itself, but more so if it's noted that the W9 warhead used was of similar construction to the 'Little Boy' bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This therefore marks one of the few times in history that a gun has been fired out of a gun. Another was the ludicrous 910mm mortar "Little David" which was used by the US to test bombs during WWII.
    • To clarify: The design of 'Little Boy' featured a core of barely sub-critical reaction mass, with an additional radioactive slug stored separately with a gunpowder charge. At a certain altitude the gunpowder would be detonated, propelling the slug into the main core, causing it to reach critical mass and explode. Thus, the Grable test featured a bomb, set off by a gun, fired from another gun.
  • Corpses have often been used as catapult ammo. In fact, the Black Plague is thought to have originated in 1346, when the Mongols launched bubonic plague-infected corpses over the walls of Crimean city of Kaffa (now Feodosia) that was besieged. Six years earlier at Thun l'Eveque, decomposing animals were used as ammo. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (these days called Tallinn).
  • In 204 B.C, Hannibal of Carthage had clay pots filled with venomous snakes and instructed his soldiers to throw the pots onto the decks of Pergamene ships.
  • Some of the older types of cannonballs inclued grapeshot, exploding cannonballs, and chainshot, which was two cannonballs chained together, usually used to destroy sailing masts.
    • Screw that, just fire a big wad of chain out of a cannon. It will tear a man to pieces.
    • In fact, the word "shrapnel" comes from the British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel, who invented a cannon ball that would explode in mid-air unleashing a rain of musket buckshot-buckshot.
  • In the American Civil War, when ships still used wooden hulls but steam power became common, gunners sometimes heated their cannonballs red hot using the engine furnace before firing at the enemy. Using "hot shot," as it was called, could easily set the target on fire. Captains used this sparingly, since mishandling the red hot cannonballs could easily burn down their own ship. ("Hot Shot" is a couple hundred years older than that, it just was only used by fortresses—most of which would have a ready furnace, and no hull or sails to worry about. Steam just made it ship-deployable.)
  • An early hobby for many tinkerers is designing such weapons. Probably the most common one is the potato gun.
    • And the marshmallow gun, a more contemporary example.
  • And then there are the famous demonstrations/competitions of the physics of catapults and trebuchets, where people use them to fling watermelons, pianos, cars...
    • This troper once referenced that after making a model trebuchet by using it to launch a piano-shaped pencil sharpener he had.
  • Also not meant to be lethal - a Japanese company sells air guns that shoot teddy bears with parachutes. It's for weddings, apparently.
  • The flamethrower, a gun that shoots burning liquid! On fire!
  • The incredibly awesome Dragon's Breath shotgun round fires a gout of flame about 20 feet long for about 3-5 seconds from a manually operated shotgun. (Incidentally, the fact that it shoots a 20 foot long gout of flame for 3-5 seconds is the reason you DON'T want to use Dragon's Breath rounds in a semi- or fully automatic shotgun. Rather, one of the reasons, the other being that as a very low power round, when used in automatic weapons it does not produce enough recoil energy to cycle the next shot, causing the weapon to jam. If it did, the round would be ejected while it's still burning.)
    • In fact, the humble shotgun manages to provide quite a few examples of this trope, just check out some of these.
      • But for one particularly crazy example, the Taser XREP, which is miniaturized taser fitted within 12 gauge shell for long distance wireless delivery of electric shocks.
  • Large-bore shotguns are sometimes loaded with rolls of coins. Makes a big, big hole at close range.
    • Supposedly, during Stepan Razin's rebellion one of their supply squads reported about being caught by tzar's troops and having to "buy off". And clarified that they quickly ran out of bullets, but still had lots of coins... and powder.
  • A South American country gained its independence from the Spanish by, in one battle, firing rock-hard balls of cheese out of its cannons at enemy ships.
  • Used at many a sporting event: the infamous T-shirt cannon.
    • It has already claimed one fictional victim: Maude Flanders of The Simpsons
  • The SPP-1 pistol and the APS underwater assault rifle ...err... smoothbore are specially designed underwater weapons with their own underwater ammunition — long and slim bullets. Yeah, it's a nailgun. Modern ADS uses standard issue ammo for AK-74 (in the air) and its new underwater cartridge looks much like the same 5.45x39 — but isn't.
  • The steam catapults on aircraft carriers can be considered big, spinal-mounted guns that fire airplanes.
  • The M712 Copperhead, which is sort of like an artillery shell - except it's really a laser guided killer robot!
  • Not a weapon, but one of the ways they test jet engines for durability against bird airstrike hazards is to use a specially designed cannon that fires whole chickens. It's important to remember to defrost them first, though.
  • No one has mentioned the BAT BOMB? Developed during WW 2, it was a bomb casing that contained literally hundreds of kamikaze bats strapped with napalm suicide belts. It apparently worked disturbingly well, but was never deployed.
    • Though that's a [secondary] delivery system, not exactly ammo. Also, it was sort of tribute to Princess Olga (one could say "pigeons Best Served Cold").
    • It worked for a given value of worked. The bats certainly did what they were expected to (went and roosted someplace), but failed to do what they were supposed to (roost in something politically important).
    • It didn't work at all. The bats would either suffocate or freeze to death during any trip to an actual target, and it wasn't exactly an improvement over conventional incendiaries that didn't require the military to breed and care for hundreds of bats.
  • The Gyrojet line of weapons deserves to be mentioned here. Designed and built in the 1960s they fired gyroscopically-stabilized 13mm rockets looking much like normal cartridges. Gyrojets were supposed to be very accurate near-recoilless near-silent armor piercing weapons working underwater  *. The system didn't saw widespread use due to reliability problems  * and consequences of the low muzzle speed — that is, less accuracy than expected and being weaker than some slingshots at point blank range  *. They are considered collectors' items today and can cost as much as $1000 per round to shoot because of the rarity of the remaining ammo.
    • If a Gyrojet weapon is not added in a future Team Fortress 2 update I will be very sad.
  • For more incredibly weird weapons, see this list from Cracked.
  • Similar to the Mythbusters example above, several Areonautics and engineering companies use air cannons that fire chickens and other organic debris at a high velocity to test the resilliance of various Aircraft skins against, well, organic material (Birds) hitting at a high velocity.
    • Not just skins, either. They gotta (as in: Federally mandated) test their engines for 'em, too.
  • During the siege of Pelusium in 525 BC, the Persian general Cambyses was known for hurling live cats over the walls of the Egyptian fort to demoralize the defenders (to whm the cats were sacred). He also instructed his men to drive cats before the army, and even tie cats to their shields to further deter the egyptians. He was not a nice person.
  • This troper recalls a real-life story of a Middle Eastern army using guns loaded with quick-drying cement to disable flamethrower fortifications.
  • Not sure if this counts, but an early ancestor of the machine gun called a Puckle Gun (named for its inventor) fired both round ammo and special square bullets for use against non-Christians.
  • The U.S. Air Force once tried to make a "Gay Bomb." The idea was to load it full of sex pheromones and neutralise enemy forces by making them make love, not war.
    • ...and just like that, 90% of all Fan Fiction suddenly makes sense.
  • Double A batteries make for a very dangerous projectile.
    • At a high school near where This Troper grew up, a physics class once used leftover fetal pigs as ammo for their potato cannons.
  • Somewhere in the UK there is a man with a carrot cannon. He takes it to schools.
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