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alt title(s): Big Freaking Gun; Big Fancy Gun 
"My cause is just... my will is strong... and my gun is very, very large." — Doomguy, the Doom comic
"Say 'Hello' to my little friend!" — Scarface
Big. Fucking. Gun.
In modern settings this will likely be an unfeasibly large machine gun, anti-tank rifle or shoulder-fired missile launcher. In Sci Fi, it can be a motor-driven rotary mini-gun, man-portable plasma accelerator, or shoulder-fired nuke.
Typically a Freudian phallic-symbol, often mocked as " compensation:" as saying goes, "the bigger the gun, the smaller the pud.")
In the real world, such weaponry is normally carried and used by a team of two or more soldiers. One may carry the weapon itself, the second normally carries ammunition and helps the first to reload, a third might carry more ammunition plus tools and spare parts to fix the BFG if something goes wrong with it, a fourth might carry more ammunition plus a pair of binoculars to help the team spot targets, and so on. If the weapon is really big and heavy, like some antitank weapons, or the light artillery pieces called "mortars," half The Squad may carry parts and help assemble it when they get into position.
In more fantastic stories of any settings, a hero can wield a weapon designed for mounting to a truck frame as if it were a rifle... and still fire it accurately.
Humongous Mecha occasionally carry BFGs, which range from a scaled-up version of a regular BFG (an anti-tank rifle becomes a tank's main gun), to something halfway to a Wave Motion Gun, capable of wiping out entire mech squads, or a battleship, in a single shot. Some even carry full-sized Wave Motion Guns.
Named for the various versions of the weapon bearing the same name in id software's Doom and Quake series of First Person Shooter video games.
This applies only to non-handguns. For big pistols see Hand Cannon.
BFGs are known to cause the following effects:
See also BFS, Impossibly Cool Weapon. Not to be confused with Roald Dahl's book and character The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) or TNA Wrestling's show Bound for Glory. Maybe we are Compensating For Something.
Examples:
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Video Games
- Doom is the Trope Namer, wih the BFG-9000 appearing in all the games. It offically stands for "Bio-Force Gun" in the Doom movie, and "Big, uh, freakin' gun" in the Quake II manual, but, really, no one is fooled, are they? It's still mostly called by its real name in the movie though.
- Quake 2 and 3 had the BFG 10 K and 20K in II, but just called BFG in III.
- In Quake IV it was named "dark matter gun", but is still essentially a Big Friggin' Gun. You know, a BFG by any other name...
- The Quake III BFG was very different from previous incarnations, being essentially a rapid-fire rocket launcher. Much fun can be had with a BFG-only deathmatch.
- A mod for Unreal Tournament 2003 took the Q3 BFG to its logical extreme with the "OMFG Gun" — a 30-round rocket launcher with a fire rate of 30 rounds per second. Oh My Friggin'/Fuckin' God indeed.
- The Unreal Tournament series also features the Redeemer, literally a shoulder-mounted nuclear warhead launcher. Launching this puppy in a clearing full of enemies is one of the best ways to get a MONSTER KILL or HOLY SHIT.
- Crysis has the TAC Launcher, a thermonuclear grenade launcher. Unfortunately it's an event item in the single player campaign which means you can't even use it until a certain scene (in which before that one, it would've been more useful). But in multiplayer (and you can cheat to get it in single player), it has similar, devastating effects to the Redeemer.
- The expansion pack introduces the PAC Cannon which you can freely use (bonus points for infinite ammo), but you only acquire it some 2 minutes before the end of the game...
- Tomb Raider 3 has the rocket launcher, an extremely powerful weapon collected about halfway through the game. There is a very small amount of ammo for it in the entire game (and that's if you explore almost everything), so the player must use it very, very wisely. Since most enemies are too weak for the gun to be used on them and only a couple of the bosses are vulnerable to weapons (although it is very effective in those instances), the rocket launcher is Too Awesome To Use.
- Every game in the Grand Theft Auto features one of these, which can, against all the laws of physics, can be fired by the player while standing still. And yet the player characters are supposed to be average humans. "Average human" goes out the window the first time your character gets flung out of a windshield and stands up without a scratch.
- Vulcan Raven of Metal Gear Solid. His codename is based on the fact that he wields an M61 Vulcan gatling gun
 ◊ from a downed F-16 Fighting Falcon. A normal Vulcan gun is 188 cm in height and weighs 112 kg, and he not only hefts the gun but also its ammunition: an ammo drum the size of a refrigerator. In Metal Gear Solid 2, we have Fortune, also known as Lady Luck, who carries a rather large railgun. Her motion actor said that the dummy gun she had to point around was so big and heavy she 'had bruises all over [her] body' from handling it. It was made of wood and cardboard — one can only imagine the weight of the real thing. To top it off, Colonel Volgin wields a Davy Crockett miniature nuclear warhead in the third game, even though he only uses it once in a cutscene.
- Fortune's gun was only previously seen on Metal Gear REX, so its likely it wasn't meant to be man-portable.
- In the fourth game, Snake finally gets his own hands on one after defeating Crying Wolf, which is the one Fortune has on MGS2 and was given to Wolf by Vamp, which can take down almost anything in one shot. Snake can also purchase a Barrett M82A2, a semi-automatic bullpup version of the famous M82A1 Anti-material rifle that can take down just about anything. It can kill five to ten lined-up enemies in one shot, it can take down a helicopter in two, and kill Gekko in one, so long as you aim for the neck.
- Parasite Eve 2 allows the small-framed heroine, Aya Brea, to pick up a shoulder-mounted railgun in New Game Plus — it's as long as she is tall, made from solid metal, takes several seconds to charge, and the recoil sends her skidding back several feet each time she fires it.
- The OICW from Eternal Darkness is the best gun when it comes to tearing apart Eldritch Abomination monsters.
- A full-sized rocket launcher pops up repeatedly in the Resident Evil series, often used to defeat a particularly indestructible monster towards the end, and later obtained in an "infinite ammo" variant in the New Game Plus. Resident Evil 2 upped the ante by adding an infinite-ammo Gatling gun to the arsenal.
- Resident Evil 5 ups the ante even further by having two BFGs exclusive to boss fights: when fighting Excella you use a laser satellite tracker similar to the Hammer of Dawn of Gears of War fame; and of course the traditional RPG finisher on Wesker in the final boss fight, and of course since this is a co-op based game, Wesker gets TWO rocket launchers to the face. With a quick-time event and everything.
- The Ratchet And Clank series, where nearly every gun (and there are a lot of them) is at least half the size of the protagonist. As they upgrade, they soon match the name on the firepower scale, too.
- This didn't stop them from making a big fraggin' gun so big and fraggin', that it actually warranted a new acronym: the Rip You a New One. What's more, the RYNO was only the first in a series of four guns (RYNO, RYNO II, RYN 3 O/RYNOCERATOR, and RYNO IV/RYNO 4-EVER). Mind you, the last one never past the blueprint stade because it was deemed too powerful. This coming from a company that created a portable black hole launcher and Colony Dropping handguns.
- Also, let's not forget the Harbinger/Supernova from Ratchet: Deadlocked. Apparently Dreadzone, the evil game show the eponymous hero gets kidnapped by, felt that the RYNO guns were too sissy, and design a gun that calls Frickin Laser Beams down from space like it's the damn wrath of god, and can be upgraded 99 TIMES.
- And you have yet to see the RYNO V, best described as two interlocked gigantic gatling guns along with a huge ass missile launcher in the middle. This thing is the friggin Cosmic Horror of weaponry, three times bigger than the character that use it.
- To sum it up: Ratchet is the new god of Engineers. "Use more gun", indeed.
- KOS-MOS in Xenosaga wields a number of BFGs, notably a triple-barreled tri-gatling gun (that's three sets of three barrels each — and it's her weakest special weapon).
- Chris Stone in Freedom Fighters can wield a Kalashnikov PK-74 machinegun like a normal assault rifle.
- Final Fantasy X-2's Gippal has a Big Fragging Pink Gun. With a sawblade on the end.
- Breath Of Fire III 's resident Gadgeteer Genius, Momo, uses this as her weapon.
- Zone Of The Enders has the Vector Cannon, huge even by the standards of most of its Humongous Mecha and forcing the protagonist's Super Prototype mech Jehuty to actually land before it can be charged and fired.
- Serious Sam has a
chain minigun, yes the type with the spinning barrels, almost as long as Sam is tall and a man-portable cannon firing explosive DU cannonballs. The ability of Sam to use either while running and jumping has led to suggestions that he be "upgraded" from Badass Normal to Charles Atlas Superpower-user.
- In the second game, the above-mentioned cannon is so large Sam actually rides it while it's equipped.
- The Turok series is known for its big bad guns. Some of the more notable examples include the Quad Rocket Launcher, Fusion Cannon, and Chronoscepter from the first game, the Scorpion Launcher and Nuke from the second game, and the PSG (Portable Singularity Generator) from the third game.
- Makai Kingdom allows you to equip your forces with Gatling Guns, Bazookas, or Flamethrowers.
- Rozalin from Disgaea 2 utilizes a Gatling gun in one of her special attacks.
- Sasha, the Heavy Weapons Guy's primary gun in Team Fortress 2, which weighs 150 kg and fires up to 2,400 $200 rounds per minute. And its sister, Natascha.
- Gauntlet: Dark Legacy's Archer had a Turbo-attack that, while not strictly speaking a gun, was the biggest, most complicated automatic repeating quadruple crossbow this troper has ever seen. And that includes Van Helsing!
- And Gauntlet: Legends did the Archer one better by making her fully-charged special a huge cannon. The narrator's voice calling the attack actually named it B.F.G.
- Maya Schrödinger in Wild ARMs 3 has a gatling gun hidden up her skirt. She wriggles her hips and it just falls out.
- The Super Scope item in Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl can be charged up for quite the shot given the opportunity, and the Cracker Launcher from Brawl can be aimed for firecracker shooting fun. And then there are the Dark Cannons used by the Subspace Emissary bad guys, that automatically turns any Smash fighter into a trophy!
- Samus's fully-charged Arm Cannon possibly counts, and if not her Final Smash definitely does. There's also a BFG on the Halberd stage, as well as one featured in Subspace Emissary that takes down said battleship in one shot.
- The agents of Syndicate Wars (and to a lesser degree Syndicate) have a whole arsenal of BFGs, including miniguns, pulse lasers, plasma lances, graviton guns and nuclear grenades. They need upgrades to their skeletons to wield them effectively.
- The Gauss Gun from the original Syndicate definitely counts. It's a rocket launcher that can fire a rocket, instantly, across half the map and will kill nearly anyone in one hit (or destroy cars, etc). Also tends to set things on fire a lot. Pity they didn't keep any of these around for the sequel...
- The Spartan Laser in Halo 3 is a huge shoulder-mounted anti-tank beam weapon. One shot can burn straight through three Warthogs lined up back-to-back. Not to mention tanks, enemy dropships...
- Also from Halo, the Fuel Rod Gun fires green, highly explosive energy that can deal very severe damage, has a five round clip, and can fire pretty freakin' fast for something that powerful.
- Spartans (and Elites) can also wield gigantic Tri barreled minigun from the hip. This is a weapon that is about as long as the average UNSC Marine is tall.
- The "AIE-486H Heavy Machine Gun" (the minigun) only uses 7.62x51mm SLAP(Sabot Light Armor Piercing) ammunition.
- Let's not forget the fact that all UNSC capital ships are "built around a gun,"-that being a giant Magnetic Aceleration Cannon (MAC gun). Puny Humans may not have the technology of their adversaries, but they definitely have more firepower.
- Done with a twist in the System Shock games. In the first game, the strongest energy weapon is the LG-XX Plasma Rifle, which fires refracting orbs of plasma that leave glowing marks where they ricochet. In the second game, the Fusion Cannon takes the title, taking up 1/3 of your view and firing huge green balls of death. The problem with both weapons? You're more likely to kill yourself than your enemies, especially in cramped quarters, and more conventional weapons prove to be more useful in later stages of the games.
- The Fallout series features a slew of BFGs, even getting their own skill set for use. They range from the mundane Bazooka to laser Gatling guns and plasma rifles. The third instalment has the "Fat Man", essentially a handheld nuclear catapult. Since There Is No Kill Like Over Kill, there is a unique Fat Man that fires eight mini nukes at once. Can kill anything with one shot, but the 8 mini nukes have a combined cost of over 2000 caps.
- The indie game Shadowgrounds has a few. For one, the minigun can be upgraded to have a shorter spinup time and can be placed on the ground as a sentry. For two, the rocket launcher's alt-fire is a dirty bomb. For three, the lightning gun can fry even the biggest mooks in a second.
- Shadow The Hedgehog has a few of these, obviously. Most notable is the chain gun, probably the most broken weapon in the game. It gets more ammunition than any other, has the best firing rate and is one of the more powerful weapons as well. Oh, and he wields it in one hand.
- Seraphim characters in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel can learn an ability called BeeEffGee which summons, well, a BeeEffGee. Its strength scales with both the character's level and the BeeEffGee ability level and is usually more powerful than other weapons you can acquire at the time, but the ability takes up one of your very limited "buff" slots. It's also available in the original.
- In Devil May Cry 4, Dante sports the Pandora, a suitcase which can transform, among other things, into a bazooka, a stationary laser turret and a flying craft equipped with roughly twenty rocket launchers, all of which fire at once.
- And let's not forget Lady's BFG, Kalina Ann: a rocket launcher with a rather large bayonet attached. It's about as big as she is, and yet she can not only lift it, but somehow whip it out in time to stick the bayonet in a wall after being dropped off a tower.
- General RAAM from Gears Of War carries a fragging troika/shotgun combo for his weapon of choice in the first game!
- Iji has several BFGs.
- The MPFB Devastator
- The Velocithor,
- The Plasma Cannon
- The insane Phantom Hammer, which is capable of shooting through several kilometers of rock. While they are usually mounted on space ships, the final boss carries one of these.
- The Massacre is the grand king of BFGs. How powerful is the Massacre? This powerful.◊
- The first Max Payne game, near the end, gives you a Pancor Jackhammer, which is an fully-automatic shotgun that the PlayerCharacter still fires semi-auto. This is because it can kill any Mook you can see in one shot. Combined with the slightly less powerful Colt Commando, the bulk of the last level basically consists of running up a staircase and occasionally stopping to shoot. The second game had a much more realistic automatic shotgun, but the Kalishnikov and M4 could kill a standard mook in three or four body shots. The AK-47 was, realistically, somewhat inaccurate, so the player didn't even have to aim properly.
- Planescape Torment features a level 8 spell, ''Mechanus Cannon'. Casting it fires a giant energy cannon on the plane of Mechanus, with the blast passing through a portal to strike your target.
- Jak II: Renegade. Near the end, you power up A GUN THE SIZE OF A SKYSCRAPER to punch a hole in the Metal Head nest.
- In Jak 3, there's a gun actually had to be shrunk so Tess could hold it.
- StarCraft has a gauss rifle designed to be fired while wearing Power Armor.
- Star Wars: Empire at War and its expansion. The original didn't really have any (besides the Death Star and planetary turbolasers), but the expansion was rife with them. First, besides the Death Star II and planetary turbolasers, there's the Aggressor-class Destroyer that has, not one, but TWO: A giant freaking Ion Cannon and a giant freaking Plasma Cannon that can take out enemy ships and hardpoints in one shot. Then there's the MZ-8 Pulse Cannon, basically a treaded tank built around a superzised BFG 9000. Zann Consortium space stations also get a giant plasma gun starting at Level 3. Then there's the quad tri-barrel Mass Driver cannons of the Vengeance-class Frigate.
- Marvel Vs Capcom. Say it with me... PROTON CANNON!!!
- Monster Hunter has a couple of different classes of BFG-like weaponry. Heavy Bowguns are technically supposed to be crossbows, except that they're about as long as the wielder is tall, clip-fed, and capable of launching cluster bombs. In a similar vein, Gunlances are essentially a one-handed gauntlet with a cannon - yes, a human-sized cannon - mounted on it, and a bayonet mounted on that. The Gunlance is actually more of a melee weapon, although it does have some ranged attack capability, but come on - it is what it is.
- Harman Smith of Killer7 wields a Barrett M82 anti-material rifle, which he holds aloft from his wheelchair. Keep in mind that such guns weigh about 13kg and are used to destroy lightly armoured targets, but have recoil mechanism that allow it to be fired from the shoulder.
- The Coffin in Gungrave, which the main character carries strapped to his back, can transform into either a heavy machine gun/gatling gun, a bazooka, and a missile launcher. Grave can also smack the bad guys with it as a melee attack.
- Ciel in Tsukihime wields the Seventh Scripture, a harpoon gun that fires holy scriptures designed to prevent reincarnation and also kill things. She weighs around 90 pounds, the Scripture weighs around 130. And that's without all the optional bits added on, which can double the weight. Yea, a gun that weighs 250+ pounds carried by a 90 pound girl. It doesn't seem to slow her down much except in Melty Blood during a sub boss fight so she's actually still possible to beat.
- The Conduit has two. The SMAW rocket launcher technically qualifies as a BFG due to its size, while the Carbonizer Mk16 is a big, flashy, high-tech Energy Weapon that cooks enemies in seconds.
- In Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, most VS weapons can be used on foot. Gatling gun? Check. Massive shotgun? Check. Four barrel homing laser? Check. Insanely large rocket launcher? Check.
- Wolfenstein (the 2009 game) has the Leichenfaust 44, a Nazi superweapon powered by extradimensional energies. It fires large globules of said energy that cancel out gravity within their area of effect and reduce enemies to piles of scorched bones.
- In possibly the first ever example of a man-portable firearm in The Legend Of Zelda series, Twilight Princess introduces us to Auru and his weapon of choice - a shoulder-fired mini-cannon that shoots bombs.
- Uncharted2 lets Nathan Drake walk around with a GAU-19 avenger cannon (obviously not the real GAU-19, which is a tank killer and weighs several thousand pounds). It's the most powerful weapon short of explosives, but suffers from accuracy issues and weight. Still a lot of fun to use.
- The John Woo game Stranglehold has two of thse — the M-249 machine gun for those who prefer More Dakka, and the Rocket Launcher for those who prefer to BLOW THINGS UP. Both of them can be used to devastating effect with the Tequila Bomb Barrage attack, and using the latter weapon with Barrage is the best way to take out the helicopter miniboss in the final stage.
- The Contact Beam in Dead Space is powerful enough to vapourize any non-boss Necromorph with one hit. It's meant to blast through dense rock strata. It's also probably meant to vapourize pirates too.
Anime and Manga
Film
Comic Books
- In the Transmetropolitan series, Yelena Rossini briefly picks up one of these at a gun shop. She is acutely disappointed when she is not allowed to take it home, and asks whether it's because of her sex, but it turns out that the weapon is "designed for people with two backup spines."
- The GAU Avengers used by the trolls (and Shiro) in Samurai Cat in the Real World.
- In the Superman Elseworlds comic At Earth's End, Superman uses a comically oversized gun (it's twice his size!) to kill twin clones of Hitler.
- In the first arc of Wildstorm's Gen 13, the newly gen-active Fairchild picks up a massive laser/rifle type weapon she obtained from one of the fallen I/O ops to brandish in her fight to save her new comrades....though it seemed to be more of just a chance to see a hot spandex wearing redhead brandish a gun considering she was now about 6'5 and superhumanly strong regardless.
- Gene in Kingdom gets his hands on one when he falls in with the Wild Bunch. In his own words:
Gene likes the new kill-toy.
- Don't know how we got this far without mentioning Rob Liefeld in general, and the way he drew Cable in particular. Third image from the bottom in this hilarious article:
“I think Cable should be holding a BIG gun on this cover.”
"Well yeah he usually is."
“Pffffft, no, I mean a REALLY big gun.”
- In [1] Brianna is VERY fond of this trope.
"Don't worry, it's got a stun setting!
"A fifty milimeter gatling cannon with a STUN setting?!"
"Uh...Yeah.
Western Animation
- Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons have a duel where they come up with bigger and bigger guns; eventually Itchy has the good sense to actually shoot instead of getting yet another larger gun from hammerspace(his gun is already the size of planet Earth), and sends scratchy flying into the sun - improbable targeting skills at work, too!
- Roadblock (and his Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Heavy Duty) from GI Joe.
- Roadblock's gun is identified in the original comics as carrying a M2 Browning machine gun, a gun that is usually operated by a squad or vehicle mounted, and weighs up to 120 lbs.
- While not completely fitting with this trope (it's more of a Wave Motion Gun), the Justice League watchtower has a large laser that is quite literally called the Binary Fusion Generator. This was not unintended by the writers.
- A lot of Transformers have these.
- The Requiem Blaster from Armada, which changes hands a couple times over the course of the series.
- In Robots In Disguise, Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Hightower, Mega-Octane, and Rollbar had weapons which would qualify as BFGs. Optimus' was shoulder-mounted, though, and Mega-Octane had both a hand held one and a back-mounted pair of cannons.
- Ironhide's blasters in the live-action movie. According to the modelers, his guns have more pieces than some of the other Transformers in their entirety.
- Both Generation 1 and Animated Swindle have a giant gun that can mount on top of their vehicle mode.
- Megatron's fusion cannon from Generation One (and Megatron himself in at least one scene). Once he was upgraded to Galvatron, it became even more powerful - in a couple of the post-Movie episodes, it was used to destroy planets.
- The Animated Megatron also has a fusion cannon which is almost identical (if not a little bit bigger!) than the original and even uses the same sound effect.
- Meanwhile the Armada version of Megatron had a waist-mounted cannon which is so powerful it blows him backwards along the ground◊. Of course, most of the other Armada characters have similarly ludicrously powered weapons when they power up with Mini-Cons — Starscream's first test of his Null-Laser cannons leaves a huge crater.
- Rampage's Hellbelcher from Beast Wars.
- Another one is Rhinox's "Chaingun(s) of Doom,".
- And the ones on the base in this exchange:
Megatron: (walking up to the Maximal Base, when half a dozen turrets come from out of nowhere) Ah! I come in peace!!
Rhinox, through megaphone: (turrets fold away. twice as many turrets, three times as big unfold and point at Megatron) You'll leave in pieces.
- Remember the quad-guns the Millenium Falcon had? The ones that Han and Luke used to shoot down TIE Fighters in the first Star Wars film? In StarWars: Clone Wars, a ARC Trooper carries one of those guns mounted on his chest. (See image at the top of the page.)
- Almost subverted, but not quite, in the CGI-animated Action Man, when Coach gives Alex Mann a device called the BSU 10000. Alex thinks that this stands for something more sophisticated than the bazooka-like gun that it looks like at first glance, but Coach fires the gun at a pile of scrap metal (blowing it sky-high) and reveals that it really stands for "Blow Stuff Up". (Possibly a G-rated version of "Blow Shit Up", considering the show's audience.)
- C.O.P.S. featured Mace, who carried a laser bazooka, and uses it in the opening to slice a hole in a reinforced concrete walkway.
- Also featured Buttons McBoomBoom who, along with having THE GREATEST NAME IN ALL OF FICTION, kept a pair of BFGs in his chest.
- There's some debate among ReBoot fans as to whether Bob's guitar in the mindbendingly awesome guitar duel episode, which he refers to as a BFG, is a reference to this trope or not. The guitar is actually a Gibson BFG Les Paul, but that doesn't necessarily rule out a Doom reference.
- The unofficial ReBoot Episode Zero (a compilation of every cutscene from the PlayStation videogame) plays this a bit more straight. After Hexadecimal reveals that Dot is trapped inside one of her mirrors, Bob goes berserk. He brutally kicks Megabyte's ascii, then stares right at the mirror-slash-vidwindow above the Tor looking into Hex's lair. His next line, with progressive camera zoon-in on each letter: "Glitch: B.F.G.!". His already big gun turns into the poster child of More Dakka, then he points it straight up at the mirror, says his Catch Phrase ("Stay Frosty."), and blasts the crap out of it. (Watch the epic scene here, starting at 3:14.)
Literature
- This trope even shows up on the Discworld, which is largely free of firearms, in the form of the massive 900 kg ballista siege weapon carried by Sergeant Detritus (an enormous troll made of rock) as a crossbow, "The Piecemaker." It is called this because the iron stone-piercing spear it used to fire was replaced with a bundle of arrows, which was presumably supposed to allow it to operated as an area weapon but unintentionally results in the arrows disintegrating into an expanding cone of burning wood fragments when fired, making it more like a (very inaccurate) shotgun that can blow holes through walls, doors, and presumably people.
- When the Piecemaker is first used, it uses a ballista bolt. The results were so horrifying (And probably expensive) that they just tied a bunch of bolts together instead. The results were even more horrifying.
- Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash features "Reason,", a gatling gun firing depleted-uranium slivers at incredibly high velocities. It's a little hard to move around because its nuclear power supply, utilizing radiothermal isotopes, uses an outboard heat-disperser that drops into the ocean.
- Neal Stephenson also features a Vickers machine gun in the World War II timeline of Cryptonomicon, which is less futuristic than Reason because of the lower-tech setting, but noteworthy because of the (characteristic) pages-long description of its badassery.
- Piling up plasma cannons and other big guns in Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons, Cheradinine Zakalwe says he'll need "FYT" weapons for a mission. His Culture handler says she doesn't recognise the term; it stands for "Fuck You Too".
- Another Banks novel, Against a Dark Background has as a Mc Guffin the "lazy gun". Among other peculiarities is the fact that it weigh three times as much when it's upside down as when it's right side up. Its effect on its tend to be ... humorous ..., such as materialising a free-falling ship's anchor directly overhead, or a spear, piece of tsunami, small nuke, or asteroid. When researchers attempted to disassemble one its self-destruction took out a fifth of the city and killed half a million people.
- One of The Executioner novels has Mack Bolan fighting the giant Igor Baibakov, a big and psychopathic ex-Spetsnaz terrorist who uses a Barrett Light Fifty as his weapon of choice. Not only does he use this .50 BMG monster in its primary role as a sniper weapon, but he's so big and powerful that he can use the thing at close range like an assault rifle, which is more justified by his impressive size and strength and the Rule Of Scary than anything else.
- Not to mention Mack's favourite sniper rifle, the Weatherby Mark V Rifle (.460 Magnum calibre).
- Happens in the Star Wars novel Wraith Squadron, as part of a ludicrously complex plan to capture one of Zsinj's corvettes: Gamorrean (think the guys guarding Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, but smarter) pilot Piggy uses an X-wing laser cannon as a personal weapon. It blows clean through a floor/ceiling (and the officer above it) with one shot. Wedge even points out how implausible the weapon ought to be.
Wedge: "A laser cannon is nine meters long, Five."
Kell: "Not the essential components and housing, sir. Strip out all the computerized aiming and synchronization equipment, the diagnostics, the flashback suppressor, I think we could chop it down to a meter and a half, two meters."
- In Phule's Company, one of the sluglike Sinthians tries to shoot a full-auto shotgun... but since said trooper is half the body mass of a human and riding a Hover Board at the time, the resulting blast sends him into a rapid spin— fortunately Phule had the foresight to disable the "full auto" feature beforehand, so no further shots are fired and the surrounding soldiers remain unpunctured.
- The Prince Roger series, by John Ringo and David Weber, features a lot of BFGs, but the giant four-armed Mardukans really take the cake. They can "off-hand" wield cannons meant to serve Humans as crewed support weapons and capable of blowing large concrete buildings and stone walls to dust. When some madman decides to equip a squad of them with a species-appropriate version of Powered Armor, the standard issue weapon that goes with it is more typically the main gun of a tank.
- Taken to the extreme by Erkum Pol, The Big Guy even by the standard of the nine-feet-tall-on-average Mardukans. He likes BFG's, and can carry the aforementioned tank gun without Powered Armor. On the other hand (one of them, anyway), his aiming skills aren't even up to Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy standards. When he takes the tank gun along on a hostage rescue mission, Hilarity Ensues (for "hilarity" read "an entire city block being set on fire").
- In John Barnes' Timeline War series, The Alliance issues its soldiers the SHAKK. It's only rifle sized... But the ammo is self propelled over a six mile range, seeks its target so aggressively it can even be fired from behind cover using a remote camera, delivers enough kinetic energy with each round to liquify a human being, and comes in a 6000 round magazine that can be emptied in a few seconds on full-auto. Exploits include shooting down barely-visible planes and ripping modern-era tanks to scrap. The weapon can also manufacture more rounds from random trash. So... Yeah. At least in spirit, it is one very, very, very B.F.G.
- The later Dale Brown books give users of the Tin Man Powered Armor the ability to wield railguns.
- A more realistic depiction appears in Harry Turtledove's Hitler's War. A Czech expat fighting for the French scavenges an anti-tank rifle and spends the rest of the book wrecking light armor and blowing people in half.
- "Starworld" by Harry Harrison. One of the Israeli commandoes is firing a handheld .50 calibre recoilless machine gun during the attack on Spaceconcert.
- The M-300 grav rifles from John Ringo's Posleen War Series qualify, using gravity drivers to fling antimatter-loaded pellets (or, later, when supplies are low, regular uranium pellets) around at just below the speed of light.
- The Guide is not very specific about its size, but it's definitely not a gun to be trifled with: "The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."
Web Comics
Tabletop Games
- Many of the heavy weapons in Warhammer 40,000 are BFGs. It is worth noting that normal humans have to mount them on mobile platforms and use them in teams of two — it's only the superhuman Space Marines who can use them like traditional BFGs, and even then most of them have to stay still and brace themselves before firing. Of course, there are some Badass Normal humans who can lift said weapons by themselves, and those are realistically seen as abnormal.
- It is worth elaborating that the standard Space Marine weapon is a fully-automatic gun firing rocket-propelled explosive-tipped "bolt" rounds, each of which is capable of punching through most infantry armor to detonate within the target, or with sustained fire blast apart lightly-armored vehicles.
- Special mention goes to the Tau Railgun, the main armament of the Hammerhead Tank and XV 88 Heavy Crisis Suit: "The tiny munition had passed through the vehicle with such speed that everything within the hull not welded down had been sucked out through the exit hole. Including the crew." Keep in mind that the "Vehicle" is a freaking tank.
- Kaptin Badrukk has a particularly awesome example - it was taken from an Ogryn (basically an Ogre IN SPACE!) and is loaded with highly unstable plasma cylinders. Standing near it is a death sentence. Though this is less due to its firepower, and more because it's hotter than Chernobyl. (Indeed, it's statistically more likely to put Badrukk at risk of injury than it is to actually hit anyone, thanks to how the Gets Hot rule works.)
- Paranoia had the "plasma gun". It would also occasionally malfunction, and some of those malfunctions would cause the entire thing to explode; naturally, it being Paranoia, you couldn't tell which malfunction was which, and neither could the rest of the party. And you had to strap the thing on to use it; taking it off suddenly (say, to get away from the now-it's-a-bomb strapped to your back) was not easy.
- It also had nuclear hand grenades... and the explosive radius was classified above your security clearance.
- Rifts has a number of heavy weapons, from railguns to missile launchers, with a perennial favorite being Plasma Cannons. One of the most infamous is the "Boom Gun", the railgun used by the Glitter Boy Powered Armor, which is so powerful the armor has to anchor itself to the ground before firing. A different style of Glitter Boy has a gun that can only be used by it because, without its unique stabilization system, any other mecha or vehicle would eventually shake itself apart with the recoil. Another weapon of note is the ATL-1 laser cannon, which is so powerful it drains an entire energy clip for a single shot. In Russia, the troops of the warlords there are so enamored with BFGs that they actually designed and used a servo-harness to allow normal humans to carry them around.
- The Proteus expansion set to the now mostly forgotten Netrunner trading card game paid homage to the concept with the 'Big Frackin' Gun' icebreaker card — a powerful 'gun' for the Runner player to use in cyberspace to blow away the Corps's virtual sentries, cheap to install but with a hefty activation cost per 'shot'.
- Traveller has the PGMP (Plasma Gun, Man-Portable) and the even more OTT FGMP (Fusion Gun, Man-Portable) for when there's No Kill Like Overkill. Some models can only be used if you're wearing Powered Armour.
- The Heavy Disintegrator Cannon fromGURPS: Ultra-Tech is powerful enough to vaporize a building in one shot while you sit safely in the gunners seat hundreds of miles away. Rather than the long reload times of many BFGs this one can fire ten shots a second. The most powerful kinetic weapon is the Grav Railgun which can be carried by people in Powered Armor, it "only" fires with enough force to punch through a couple tanks and then kill the target... twenty times per second.
- As below in Real Life, Call of Cthulhu has the Elephant Gun. It's used a lot, I hear.
Web Original
Live Action TV
- Jaffa staff weapons in Stargate SG1 are pretty big on their own, but at one point Teal'c wields a dismounted anti-ship version taken from a Deathglider.
- In The Prisoner's spy spoof episode "The Girl Who Was Death", the title character Sonia, having failed to kill Number 6 with various elaborate death traps, finally decides on the direct approach, escalating from a machine gun to hand grenades and mortars before finally drawing a bazooka on him.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki: Kamen Rider Zolda (Kitaoka Shuuichi) wields a gun twice as long as he is tall (picture◊), and two pretty big guns mounted on his shoulders, too. And that's nothing compared to his Macross Missile Massacre Finishing Move...
- Let's not forget Kamen Rider Faiz's Faiz Blaster. That thing was HUGE. Sad its gun form was rarely used.
- Also, for that matter, Faiz's Final Form Ride in Kamen Rider Decade is the Faiz Blaster. Of course, this time it's human sized due to being the transformation of a person. Dunno if this makes it bigger or smaller than the original though...
- Combining unique individual weapons into a BFG is a near-staple of Super Sentai and Power Rangers. Of course, so is the revival/enlargement of the monster by the enemy bosses right after it's been taken out by said weapon.
- BFGs are the weapon of choice against Daleks in the Doctor Who episode "The Stolen Earth". The one Rose carries looks like it weighs half as much as she does, and Mickey and Jackie wield equally impressive versions. They were first used in Season 2, though, by the Preachers.
- Jack Harkness, of both Doctor Who and Torchwood has always been fond of them. His weapon of choice is a modified defabricator that is the size of a minigun.
- The Special Weapons Dalek in the old-Who episode "Remembrance of the Daleks" was basically a self-propelled BFG that first blew down a large metal gate before taking out an entire rival Dalek squad. And they say its gun is fifty times more powerful than the normal Dalek gun.
- Harper in Sharpe carries a Nock Volley Gun.
- Where would this article be without Jayne of Firefly, who never left Serenity without enough firepower to take out a ship?
- In Star Trek: First Contact, Worf takes a REALLY BIG gun, shouts "Assimilate this!", and blasts a group of Borg into oblivion.
- In the Buffy episode "Innocence", the gang has to defeat an enemy called the Judge who "no weapon forged" could kill. However, that declaration was made before Christ, and humanity has much bigger weapons. Buffy decimates him with an anti-tank gun.
- Although the Cylon Centurions in the new Battlestar Galactica have built-in automatic weapons, Cylon boarding parties can be seen hand-carrying heavy machine guns in "Razor" and "Daybreak".
Real Life
- Real life example, which ultimately is just about as impractical as the fictional ones: High Impulse Weapon System (Reminds this troper of something Seras would use) Remember to keep 80% of your weight on your front foot!
- The weapon fires a 76mm tank shell.
- In WWII a Soviet soldier, Sgt. Antipkin, was documented to carry an enormous PTRS antitank rifle — a monster gun weighing 20 kg, about two meters long, and served by a crew of two at best — all by himself, as if it was an ordinary hunting rifle. He also used it to shoot down German planes — while standing. The guy was a veritable giant, though.
- Who can forget the Barrett M82A1 Anti-Material rifle? shoots a machine gun round, can disable parked aircraft, and in one case, pierce through tank armor and vaporize an unprotected gunner. Did we mention that, according to Metal Gear Solid 4, it's endorsed by Hideo Kojima?
- Less known but even more powerful: the South African Mechem NTW-20 shooting either 14.5mm armor-piercing ammunition or 20mm (!) high explosive, fragmentation or incendiary shells. Depending on the version it weighs 29 or 26 kg.
- For scale, consider that the sniper rifle in Halo was based off of this one, and it's still a pretty sizable weapon when used by a powered armor.
- Also in the 20mm camp: the Croatian RT-20, which is a recoilless sniper rifle, firing a cannon round.
- Speaking of dual M-249s...
- The M-388 Davy Crockett tactical nuke, and the aforementioned M134 minigun, all of which are actual weapons, though the M134 is normally mounted on aircraft rather than carried by infantry. Attempts to produce man-portable rotary weapons have been made as well, though none have entered production.
- The Beo Wulf .50 Caliber Assault Rifle as seen on the Future Weapons TV show.
- Recoiless Rifles are man portable artillery pieces that have shoulder fired, tripod mounted, or vehicle mounted versions. One version the Carl Gustav 84mm is still in use today.
- And then there's the Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25, which uses the power of six D batteries to launch darts from a plastic belt at a staggering rate of...about three darts per second. May not seem like much compared to real weapons (or paintball, or airsoft...), but if this thing had better range it would pretty much be the BFG of Nerfing.
- There do exist Nerf guns with far more firepower than that. Most notable is the gun with 20 darts, and two fire settings. One setting is fully-automatic fire...and that's the slow one. If you prefer, it can just launch all 20 darts at once.
- Wouldn't a better name be the Nerf Heavy Bolter?
- Meanwhle, the Super Soaker equivalent is the Monster XL, a double-barrelled monstrosity with a range of up to 41 feet, capacity of 3500 milliliters of water (or your liquid of choice) and six settings for each barrel. Takes a hell of a lot of pumps to get up to pressure though...
- From WWII-era Finland comes the Lahti L39 20mm anti-tank rifle. The weapon was so large (it weighed 50 kilograms) that Finnish troops nicknamed it the Norsupyssy ("Elephant Gun"). It was even used as a sniper rifle. A fully-automatic version was used as an anti-aircraft weapon.
- The Dillon Gatling Gun. Nobody has quite figured out how to fit it into a shoulder holster, yet.
- The Barrett M109 Anti-Material Payload Rifle is, other than one-off prototypes, the closest you're going to get to the Harkonnen Cannon. An M82A1 scaled up to accept 25mm ammunition, the M109 is currently capable of penetrating 1.5 inches of rolled homogeneous armor at 1200 meters. Long-term optimizations are projected to result in a rifle that can penetrate greater than 2 inches of high-hardness armor at up to 2000 meters.
- Lets not forget the GAU-8 Avenger, the main gun of the A-10 Thunderbolt II/Warthog. 30MM, 7 barrels, 3900rpm, depleted uranium ammo.
- This is a rare case where it's the plane that has been built around the gun. Anonymous quote : "This gun is so awesome ! We needed to make it fly !"
- This troper, an eight year US Air Force veteran, once heard the A-10 described as "a gun with a plane mounted on it."
- Oh, and it's the size of a Volkswagen.◊
- The Nock Volley Gun: 7 .52 caliber barrels fired together. It frequently broke the shoulder of the shooter.
- The punt gun, known for killing ducks, a lot of ducks......in one shot.
- The AA12 Shotgun: looks like a tommygun, but fires 12 - gage shotgun shells and microgrenade rounds.
- The .700 Nitro Express.
- Topping even that is the .950 JDJ. It is based on a 20mm Vulcan cannon case, shortened and necked up to accept the half-pound bullet. Most rifles chambered for it weight about 100lbs, and the recoil will still probably break the shoulder of anyone who fires it standing. It is probably the most powerful rifle cartridge in the world.
- Elephant guns (Fun Fact: in WW 1, soldiers would use elephant guns against tanks since they were the only guns that could pierce the tanks armor)
Good men! But we do not have anywhere near enuff!
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