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

    Close:

    http://www.theblaze.com/stories/criminals-prepare-to-be-blinded-into-submission-by-the-stunray-gun/

    Rumor has it that this thing “could” kill. Though it’s high wattage with an infra red mode meaning it can be used to cause permanent blindness too. This is likely a derivative or a hopped up version of the Dazzler that also uses incoherent light.
    Incoherent light is basically white light, but I think they are junking it up by taking parts of the whole spectrum and doing something to the phase. Not entirely sure about this. The new car headlights are said to cause headaches and some people are affected by them for hours.

  2. @Doktor Jeep
    “Incoherent light is basically white light”
    Incoherent is incoherent light, that is all the waves are not phase-aligned. Comparing it to white light (convolution of waves of different frequencies) is simply stupid.

    “Not entirely sure about this”
    That is for sure.

    “The new car headlights are said to cause headaches and some people are affected by them for hours.”
    ??? Old car headlights have Fresnel lens to focus the light into one point. New car headlights have the focusing device built into the lamp. They cause headaches in the same way you would get an headache by looking directly to a burst of light coming from any other light source.

    Seriously, when HaD started becoming DumbAday? I can’t believe how much stupidity I’ve been reading here lately.

  3. Also as a real comment . . .

    I don’t know bout the usefulness of the barbie jeep powerwheels . . . it doesn’t appear to be wireless . . .

    If those wires were for debugging then why so many?
    I can debug a fully functioning platform wirelessly or if I need to be tethered . . . through a single ethernet cable.

    It appears they’re going about it always tethered, which IMHO, is much less useful.

  4. It’s a damn pity the UN & geneva has stopped making some ground rules, I really think many of the modern weapons should be outlawed by humanity, but since the US makes so many of them and likes them and the politicians has no morality anymore I guess rules of war are a thing of the past :/
    (They rather spend their effort getting freaked

  5. It seems everyone forgot how easy it is to mount a land mine on top of RC cars. Such contraptions used to be popular in Lebanon.

    Peter, Oimmuk, imp999 and Whatnot are right. Libyans are going to hack their freedom out of Gaddafi’s iron fist into the steel grip of oil barons. In twenty years when Libyan oil is extracted and spent no one will care about democracy, human rights and social justice. Everyone will try very hard not to remember false revolution, victims and violence.

  6. @space landmines have been under a (almost-)worldwide ban for a while now so it would be hard to get hold of them by the insurgents/bored guys/unemployed locals/sadists.

  7. At least some of the people commenting realise that this is no different from other robot competitions elsewhere in the world. We have competitions for unmanned vehicles in the dessert here in the state that are held by the Department of Defense. There are recreational “Robot Wars” competitions. Commend the hackers as you would your neighbor (if he’s a hacker).

  8. good work kids ,children these days !?!, hope they are also sophisticated in the wireless control mechanisms else this would turn into a land mine in their bunker.
    After Gaddafi’s death – whos going to control the vast oil resources or isnt that the reason behind everything

  9. These guys are real geniuses. Making due with what you have to try to get a better life for your children. Yes, the politics are complicated, but I initially had trouble believing that civilians could overthrow a well-entrenched regime, even one of a tin-pot dictator; even with some token help from the Big Friends Of America club. Glad I was proved wrong.

    Of course, the US does have a history of only caring when they can exploit situations, so you have to hope that the better world these engineers fought for (the weapons techs and the pacifists [separate groups, by the way] actually comes about in a sustainable manner.

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