Libyan Rebels Turn Toys Into Weapons Of War

scrapyard_weaponry

They say all’s fair in love and war – trust us, you don’t have to tell these guys twice.

With the war in Libya raging on, the rebels have turned to anything and everything to help give them the upper hand. Engineers and engineering students have put aside their work and studies to become the architects of the Libyan revolution. In a school playground-cum-weapons facility people from all walks of life work together creating powerful weapons from scrap parts.

[Rajab], the group’s chief weapons engineer, used to drive trucks for a living. Now he is directing his fellow fighters on how best to re purpose scrap materials and recovered military weaponry into effective killing machines. As you can see in the video below, everything is fair game. Their creations range from pickup trucks fitted with recovered fighter jet machine guns, to a Power Wheels chassis that has been converted into a remote controlled machine gun turret.

It’s amazing the things that can be produced with some scrap materials and a bit of ingenuity.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyRBUAEneM&w=470]

66 thoughts on “Libyan Rebels Turn Toys Into Weapons Of War

  1. this is amazing. the things the human spirit can accomplish under stress and oppression still astounds me. I really feel for those people, but I also don’t condone war or the senseless murder of people. “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” — John Adams, 2nd President of the United States.

  2. On the one hand I’m slightly envious that they get to let their imaginations run free with dangerous and/or illegal Tony Stark projects that would land most of us in prison. On the other hand, they’re doing it in the face of much more advanced weaponry because their friends and families are being killed. Everyone back to their garage door openers and pet feeders, now.

  3. And they think that remote control weapons will keep down civilian casualties how? Let’s face it if you are being shot at by a remote control weapon you have no idea who is controlling it so you would need to take out all possible combatants no matter Gender or age to be certain you got the operator. They may be smart enough to weaponize toys and such but are not much in the common sense department.

  4. pfffft we did that in 5th grade in our science fair

    but bit seriously i had no idea that was going on … the media had the impression of an unorganized group of pissed off people but this is really sophisticated

    kadafee is a f&%$ing nutjob

  5. “Everyone back to their garage door openers and pet feeders, now.”

    Yeah I don’t even bother with those posts. Like I care about yet another display of technical frivolity from yet another adult-sized child:

    “Bob was tired of having to expend an extra calorie doing something or lose time for making his daily 500 texts a day about nothing so he spents months making changes to….”

  6. @Drake and fm I lol’d

    I’m amazed that the UN hasn’t done more to stop kadafee from attacking civilians. Lets just hope that the right people take over. Maybe they will put some of those engineers in charge. Imagine how well engineers could run a country

  7. Hahaha! I made almost the exact same conversion of a Power Wheels when I was a senior in high school. Except replace the actual gun with an air soft version.

    I cannot imagine that being any good for actual fighting though.

  8. @Drake @Pete S

    What a bunch of morons. If you don’t have a idea of what is going on there at least get a fu**ng clue. I’m not Libyan, I’m not arab either, but at least I have the respect for the people that have the guts to fight for liberty. Most of you guys receive liberty from a tray without any effort.

    If you really want to comment, please read:
    http://blogs.aljazeera.net/liveblog/libya
    since the first day of the revolution.

    I’m following the uprising from the beginning and I must tell you, its nothing to joke about. More people were killed there than 9’11 alone. So please, think a little before opening your mouth.

    AGAIN: I’m not Libyan, I’m not Arabic. I’m EUROPEAN.

  9. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
    -John Stuart Mill

  10. This is just awesome. Probably one of the only wars I will ever fully support. I just wish the U.S would jump into this one like it’s jumped into every other war it had no business in.

  11. Worth noting: the Libyan rebels are one of the reasons WHY the war in Iraq is going more poorly every day: they’re a primary source of the insurgents.

    Some conflicts don’t have a good side and an evil side. Sometimes it’s evil fighting evil, and it’s best not to step in.

  12. This is what makes San Francisco basically un-invadable. Those maker faire types would overrun any conventional army with giant flamethrower wielding robots within days.

  13. “This is what makes San Francisco basically un-invadable. Those maker faire types would overrun any conventional army with giant flamethrower wielding robots within days.” -MARK-

    I think that explains why the movie was named “World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles” and not “World Invasion: Battle San Francisco”, can you imagine maker faire pwn-ing alien tech, talk about awesome… ^_^

  14. @Mark, San Francisco is a coastal city. All it would take to invade would be to pull up on shore with a fleet of ships and dot the city with mortar fire and a few missiles. If it’s sudden enough, no amount of DIY maker faire tech will help.

  15. Yeah, right, toy weapons… Propaganda. They use USA and NATO air force, and they are playing with toys because they don’t know what else to do with their miserable terrorist lives.
    They ruined Libya with their “revolution”, so toys are all that’s left..

  16. does anyone remember the old movie “Toys” with robin williams? if so, remember the part with the toys that concealed real weapons in interesting ways? somebody recreate a bunch of those and send those out into the field. that’ll really give em something to think about. but in all seriousness, its good to see at least some people are trying to find ways of winning without fighting. but too much is happening for that to work 100% of the time XP

  17. A war that was started by the US pulling some strings in the background and totally misleading the people. What a cock of shit..

    Its a bit like the recent “war on hacking”. It’s about as genuine as the war on terror. US government hacks a bunch of big companies, blames it on the chinese and then gets to create a bunch of new oppressive and over the top anti-hacking laws while the people continue to think their government is looking after them.

    The sooner the US is wiped off the map, the better.

  18. @Volfram, what the f**k man do you actually have any idea what’s going on, Iraq and Libya are the best part of 2000 miles apart.

    The insurgency, and sectarian violence in Iraq and the rebels trying to overthrow their despotic leader in Libya are different issues.

  19. @zacdee16: No. The US should stay on the sideline. The people need to free themselfs to be really free. If they need the US to get freedom then they also need the US to keep that freedom.

  20. They could use radio frequency wave in high enough doses to stun people, which effectively takes away the need to kill someone. Or high-powered lasers to disable tanks. There are many alternatives to using lethal force, if they are real engineers..

  21. @Cooper “high-powered lasers to disable tanks”
    I friggin wish somebody could DIY a laser that powerful. It would take something like an FEL to disable a tank, although you might be able to create strong enough plasma bursts from a laser to detonate reactive armor. But still, you won’t be able to get that fine of equipment in Lybia during a war.
    RF stun blasters sound cool. Those could probably be made with cheap materials.

  22. There is a great movie about the invasion of San Francisco, it’s the first remake of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Pod People. (the one with Leonard Nimoy, made in the 70s) Its the creepiest one of all, with its references to pop psychology, and the war appeared to be lost very early on in the film. Its basically about the invasion of San Francisco by Borg-like sentient beings who live in drops of water and reproduce by somehow cloning somebody vegetatively. The original version was made in the 50s and set somewhere in the Southwest, and the “pods” are Napa cabbage…

    The most recent one stars Nicole Kidman is also good. But the second one, the first re-make is the best one. It came out during the pop-psychology era.. people were saying the stuff that Nimoy was saying.

    Basically, the films are all about narcissism and narcissists and the dangers the growing numbers of them pose to society.

  23. Infrasound. Very loud sound at around 7 Hz can make people feel very sick and they don’t know why. It can be directed by means of a directional array of sound sources. There was an evil mad scientist who worked for the Nazis on all sorts of evil mad scientist-like projects and one of them was an infrasound cannon that could cause objects to vibrate apart. But for some reason, it was not utilized in warfare. Oh, now I remember, they wanted it to be able to shoot planes out of the sky but it would only beam horizontally along the ground, not up.

  24. I have a magazine “Amok Journal” that collected a number of papers on infrasound. But its old and out of print, I suspect.

    The Nazi researcher’s name was Zippermeyer and he called his huge weapon a “whirlwind cannon”

    Googling on his name brings up quite a bit of stuff. This is kind of a fun subject to read about. I think that if used in Libya it might have more of a psychological effect, but that could be useful as it would cause resentment in the rank and file about not being allowed to escape down into Khaddafy’s bunkers. Infrasound penetrates most wood or metal buildings with little attenuation.

    Another kind of sound weapon uses two strong ultrasonic transducers tuned slightly apart from each other to create an audible beat frequency in the ears. That can be very painful.

    These weapons can be built with very inexpensive parts and a little imagination, I would bet. Although people should be aware that normal speakers cannot reproduce these frequencies at all because their wavelengths are so long.

    It might also be possible to cause some of the opposing forces to have epileptic seizures by means of rapidly flashing bright strobe lights.

    :o That would be quite dramatic.

    http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/256/sonic_weapons.html

    http://journal.borderlands.com/1996/the-sonic-weapon-of-vladimir-gavreau/

    http://journal.borderlands.com/1997/infrasound/

    http://wayback.archive.org/web/jsp/Interstitial.jsp?seconds=5&date=1190970238000&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atcsd.com%2Fpdf%2FLRAD_SellSht-0728-2.pdf&target=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20070928090358%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.atcsd.com%2Fpdf%2FLRAD_SellSht-0728-2.pdf

  25. “In a schools playground”
    Yeah so that when ghaddafi’s forces strike they can have those stupid journalist go on about how they attacked a playground no doubt..

    How about using the schools to educate kids instead?

  26. “I a good guy because I do not carry a weapon. I just design them.” Those guys are full of sh*d!

    They have started a civil war. They are terrorists and the North Atlantic Terror Organisation is supporting them in the name of democracy. In what kind of sick world do we live?

    Yes, I forgott there is oil in Lybia.

    Just try to make a demonstration against something in your place without asking for permission. You will see how tolerant your government is.
    Then think about what will your government do if you would start to use weapons to fight for your view of democracy/freedom.
    I am more then sure there will be not much difference to what Gadaffi has done.

  27. This reeks of military propaganda. but it does provide some food for thought. I’d like to open the discussion up a little: Does anybody have an opinion about whether or not U.S. National Guard training (which is basically Marines training with less sleep) combines enough sophisticated brainwashing techniques so as to actually permit soldiers to override their conscience? Would military groups in the U.S. kill U.S. citizens, violating the law and constitution they swore an oath to protect?

    Can anybody prove that world governments are even still real? Or are they just a sophisticated dog-and-pony show for our amusement, courtesy of the military industrial complex?

    Isn’t the 4th reich the most beautifully constructed postmodern mind-fuck that you’ve ever seen?

  28. Since whne we call bunch of terrorists rebels ?!?

    Guys stay off the politics, religion, etc. please !!!

    We all are here because of all sorts of wonderful hacks, not the politics !

    Please …

  29. It is indeed a pity to see the NATO change from a org made to end war into one that aggressively wages wars with third parties, pretty sad how fascism is always right under the skin and will pop again sooner or later.

    Still, it interesting to see the libyans hack stuff that way, I wonder if they had a hack community before the mess that we just didn’t hear about.
    (I know they had a whole nuclear program that nobody knew about so I guess they had a hard time getting noticed when they were hacking :))

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