From the Bronze Age to armored vehicles
Weapons catalogue & comparison
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From the Bronze Age to armored vehicles
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53 conflicts · 149 unique items. This is a growing selection, not a complete list of weapons from every war. You can compare items from different conflicts; filtering does not clear your selection.
Unknown does not mean zero. A dash is not a score. Effective weapon range, maximum range and vehicle operating range are separate measurements. There is no universal winner or invented firepower score; variants, loads and test conditions make many figures difficult to compare directly.
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Go to the catalogue ↓35 unique items found · 0 selected
1939 – 1945 · 35 catalogue items
A German anti-aircraft gun that was also feared as an anti-tank gun. The Condor Legion already used it against ground targets in the Spanish Civil War; a tank gun derived from it armed the Tiger I, among others.
🧪 Prototype36 built
Design: Erich Bachem (1944–1945)
A wooden rocket interceptor that took off vertically from a tower, fired a salvo of rockets at bombers and then broke apart: pilot and engine came down by parachute. The only manned launch, on 1 March 1945, killed test pilot Lothar Sieber. The aircraft never saw action.
A German battleship. In May 1941, together with Prinz Eugen, she sank the British battlecruiser HMS Hood in the Denmark Strait; three days later she was herself sunk after a massive pursuit.
A four-engined American bomber with thirteen heavy machine guns, the backbone of the daylight bombing campaign over Germany. Engine power is the total of four 895 kW engines.
A light automatic rifle by John Browning, introduced in France in 1918; the support weapon of the American rifle squad until the Korean War.
An American air-cooled machine-gun family.
A semi-automatic pistol by John Browning in .45 ACP; the standard sidearm of the US Army for more than seventy years.
The most-produced American military aircraft ever (18,482 built). Henry Ford's Willow Run plant built thousands of them; at its peak a bomber rolled off the line roughly every hour. Engine power is the total of four engines.
🧪 Prototype3 built
Design: Reimar and Walter Horten; Gothaer Waggonfabrik (1943–1945)
A jet-powered flying wing with no fuselage or tail. The second prototype flew in February 1945 and crashed on its third flight; the unfinished third was captured by American troops and is in the Smithsonian. That it was intended as a 'stealth fighter' has not been demonstrated.
A German standard bolt-action rifle.
A British bolt-action rifle family; models and dimensions varied.
A German pistol with a distinctive toggle-lock action. The 9×19 mm Parabellum cartridge developed for it is still the world's most widely used pistol cartridge.
An American semi-automatic service rifle.
An American medium tank; engines, guns and armour varied considerably by variant.
The most-produced fighter aircraft in history (34,248 built); it first saw action with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Figures are for the G-6; top speed is measured at sea level.
The world's first operational jet fighter: far faster than any propeller fighter, but deployed too late and in too small numbers. Jet engines deliver thrust (2 × 8.8 kN) rather than shaft power, so engine power is left blank.
A German general-purpose machine gun.
A German general-purpose machine gun with a high cyclic rate of fire; there is no universal combat-performance score.
A British fragmentation hand grenade; mass and fuze varied by model.
A German submachine gun designed by Heinrich Vollmer, with a folding stock for vehicle crews and paratroopers. The Allies mistakenly called it the 'Schmeisser'.
An American fighter whose British Merlin engine and large fuel tanks let it escort bombers deep over Germany; it was also used in the Korean War. Range is with drop tanks.
🧪 Prototype
Design: Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (1943–1944)
Two wooden wheels three metres across, driven by cordite rockets on the rims, with a drum of explosive between them: meant to be launched from a landing craft to blast a breach in the Atlantic Wall. In trials on the beach at Westward Ho! rockets came loose and the contraption careered in all directions. It was never used.
A German tank with a 75 mm gun; performance varied by model.
The workhorse of German armoured divisions, upgraded with a longer 75 mm gun.
📐 Paper design onlyNever built
Design: Geoffrey Pyke, Combined Operations (1942–1943)
A plan for an unsinkable aircraft carrier made of pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp that is far tougher than ice and melts slowly. The ship was to be 610 metres long and give convoys air cover in mid-Atlantic. A thousand-tonne scale model was built in Canada in 1943; the plan was then dropped because long-range aircraft and escort carriers had made it unnecessary.
A French light tank and the first production tank to carry its armament in a fully rotating turret – the layout of almost every later tank. After 1918 it was used by many countries and in many conflicts.
A British submachine gun.
The first successful assault rifle: an intermediate cartridge made automatic fire controllable. It influenced post-war weapons such as the AK-47.
A German assault gun without a rotating turret: low, cheaper than a tank and the most-produced fully tracked German armoured fighting vehicle of the war.
A British single-engined fighter; figures are for the early Mk I, while later variants were faster and more heavily armed.
An American submachine gun with model and magazine variants.
A heavy German tank armed with the 8.8 cm KwK 36; heavily armoured but complex and expensive.
A German heavy tank of almost 70 tonnes with the long 8.8 cm KwK 43 gun and up to 185 mm of armour. Powerful but mechanically fragile; because of Allied bombing only 492 were built.
🔧 Limited production
Design: August Coenders, Röchling steelworks (1943–1944)
A multi-charge gun: side chambers with extra charges accelerated the shell further as it travelled up the barrel. The battery at Mimoyecques was meant to bombard London from 165 km away, but Tallboy bombs wrecked it in July 1944 before it could fire. Two shorter guns shelled the city of Luxembourg around the turn of 1944–1945.
A British water-cooled machine gun.