The Latin writing indicates that the MCU blade still comes from the 6th century, and by the looks of it, it seems that the weapon still holds its magical properties. However, another hero seems to be Dane's guide in his journey to become the Black Knight. Marco Vito Oddo is a writer, journalist, and game designer. Passionate by superhero comic books, horror films, and indie games, he writes for Collider and develops games for Mother's Touch Games. Image via Marvel Studios.
Kobus Marx Boris as Boris. Stephan De Abreu Liev as Liev. Tanya Finch Ingrid as Ingrid. Lize Jooste Natasha as Natasha. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. This movie charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighborhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son.
This movie also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined INTERPOL Agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.
The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise. Rated R for strong violence, drug use, language and sexuality. Did you know Edit. Trivia According to writer and director Andrew Niccol , the filmmakers worked with actual gunrunners in the making of this movie.
The tanks lined up for sale were real, and belonged to a Czech arms dealer, who had to have them back to sell to another country. They used a real stockpile of over three thousand AKs, because it was cheaper than getting prop guns. Goofs When narrating the story about early stages of his business in s, Yuri Orlov mentions that he has carried several passports at that time, including the Ukrainian passport.
Ukraine didn't get to issue its own passports until Quotes Yuri Orlov : [Narrating] Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of Post : 2. Thanks to Bakuryu the Mole for entry rewrite. Lord Darkovia for monsters information.
Jay for rewards information. Karika for corrections. Stridoom for corrections. Post : 3. Page: [1]. Icon Legend. The gun brought about a revolution in warship design, partly because the galley was so vulnerable top gunfire, partly because the combination of guns and rowers baffled the designers. First the Venetians tried putting a few fixed cannon in a forward deckhouse. However, the guns wrought such havoc among hostile rowers that the admirals clamored for more guns.
For the Battle of Lepanto in , therefore, the Venetians had prepared eight galleasses, oversized galleys with an upper deck mounting many guns. The guns made the galleasses so heavy that their rowers were barely able to move them.
Hence they were towed into position ahead of the Christian line, and when the Turkish galleys advanced, the gunfire of the galleasses did great execution among them. Still, the gallases was not the answer because of its immobility. This ship had gone with a Venetian squadron to demonstrate off the Turkish-held harbor of Preveza in Greece, and the Turks had come out and chased the Christians away—all but the Galleon, immobilized by a sudden failure of the wind.
The Turks rushed upon the Galleon, but their gunfire failed to penetrate the high, thick sides of the ship. When the surviving Turks drew off, the Christians returned and towed the Galleon home. Such invulnerability made such a ship worthwhile, even if it stood the risk of being occasionally becalmed.
Therefore in the years following Lepanto ships of the new type were built in large numbers, while galleys were retired. One reason for the English victory over the Spanish Armada in was that the Spaniards, not having assimilated the revolution in naval warfare, persisted in trying to fight by ramming-and-boarding tactics.
The new type of naval warfare with gunnery sailing ships prevailed until the middle of the 19 th century, when the introduction of steam power, rifled cannon firing explosive shell, armor, and iron construction brought about an even more drastic revolution.
Robert Fulton began it with his steam-powered catamaran. Demologos , a gunshot armored with thick wooden bulkheads and driven by a paddlewheel in a well between the two hulls. Although this ship was not finished in time for the War of , steam power was gradually applied to ships of all kinds, though sails were not finally ousted from warships until towards the end of the century. Armor was the next improvement. In the Crimean War some armored floating batteries were tried out, and in the British and French navies laid down armored frigates.
A few years later the battle of the Monitor and Virginia ex-Merrimac showed how important the new development would be; neither of these strange new ships could seriously hurt the other, though either could easily destroy any other ships in the hostile navy. The development of new weapons is an interacting process, since each new weapon incites people to try to develop some means of neautralizating it; hence the explosive shell begat iron ship construction and armor, armor begat armor piercing shells; torpedoes begat underwater compartmentation of large ships; and so on.
That is why we hear so much the conflict between the offense and defense. Each offensive arm stimulates the development of a defense against it, and vice versa.
When the U. Navy Department wanted shallow-draft armored monitors for the western rovers during the Civil War, and Ericsson, who had built the original Monitor, said it could be done, Stimers, a Navy Department engineer, guaranteed to do it if given an independent office.
He was told to build twenty. Unfortunately one of his people erred in calculating weights, with the result that when the first ship, the Chino , was launched, she immediately sank with a gurgle to the bottom of the East River.
If the introduction of rifled cannon and explosive shell increased the power of guns against ships, the advent of armor likewise made more powerful guns necessary. The adoption of cylindrical projectiles meant heavier projectiles in proportion to the bore of the gun. Even after the cylindrical shell had been adopted, the solid roundshot was retained for a while for armor-piercing, since it could be given a higher muzzle-velocity with the maximum safe charge and hence greater energy despite its lesser weight.
Another curious result of this revolution was the reintroduction of ramming as in the days of galleys. The Virginia wrought havoc with her. Likewise in the Battle of Lissa in , an Austrian battleship sank an Italian battleship in this manner. As a result, for several decades nearly all large warships were built with ram bows projecting forward below the waterline. The 7,ton ironclad Dunderberg , begun for the U. Navy during the Civil War, embodied an extreme form of the ram bow.
After this war, when Congress let the Navy go practically out of existence, the Dunderberg was old to France and renamed the Rochambeau. As she proved very successful, the French long copied her tremendous snout. However, by World War I guns had so improved that ships would sink one another by gunfire long before they got close enough to ram, except on rare occasions as when the British flotilla-leader Broke sank a German destroyer at night in the Channel in this way.
Ramming is still a good method of attacking submarines. As late as the U. Navy strengthened the bows of its destroyer escorts so that they could ram submarines without crippling themselves in the act. The change to iron and then steel construction after the Civil War made possible much larger warships of finer lines, since a wooden ship of over 6, tons was apt to break up in rough weather.
In general, the efficiency of ships increase with size. Hence there was every inducement to build larger shipsa process that has culminated in the 60,ton Japanese battleships of World War II and the projected U. Ever since the rise of civilization, men have tried to devise an effective fighting vehicle that would combine mobility, protection and fire power.
The war-chariots of the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians were not a very successful effort in this direction because they horses were vulnerable and the vehicles were confined to smooth ground. Elephants, though tried out for many centuries, made poor tanks because of their sense of self-preservation. Although like chariots they could sometimes frighten the enemy into running away, experienced soldiers could usually stampede then back through their own army by noise and missiles.
Indian elephants beat African elephants at Raphia b. Some of the early siege-engines on wheels, pushed by manpower, suggest modern armored vehicles, though their mobility was much less—on siege-tower moved a quarter of a mile in two months.
The Assyrians had invented the movable siege-tower or helepolis, with a battering-ram on the lower storey[sic] and a place for archers above. The art reached its apex with. Demetrios Poliorketes, one of the successors of Alexander the Great. In besieging Rhodes in B. It had catapults shooting stones and javelins though ports provided with shutters on each storey[sic]. There were companionways inside for up and down traffic, water-tanks on each storey[sic] for putting out fires, and eight castor-mounted wheels for maneuvering.
When it approached the wall of Rhoades, the Rhodians knocked off some of the armor-plate with stones from catapults and threw incendiary bombs into the gaps, whereupon the besiegers pulled the tower back and put out the fires. When they had made repairs they started forward again—but this time the crafty Rhoadians had turned the sewers of their town into a field in front of the helepolis, making a bog in which the tower got hopelessly stuck.
Demetrios also built some other remarkable devices during this siege, including battering-rams in wheeled sheds, and monitors made by fastening two to six ships together and erecting a large catapult or a siege-tower on the resulting unit. When he finally reached an agreement with the Rhoadians and sailed away, the Rhoadians sold his abandoned engines and used the money to build the famous Colossus of Rhodes.
During the later Middle Ages the inventive Scots tried to solve the fighting-vehicle problem. Among other devices, they experimented with battle-cars, two-storey sheds on wheels with a couple of horses for motive-power inside the first storey and a squad of musketeers shooting through loopholes above. None of these devices proved practical because they depended upon muscle-power, and men or animals are too bulky in proportion to their strength to combine the necessary protection and mobility.
With the application of the stem-engine to transportation in the early 19 th century the idea of armored fighting vehicles was revived. An armored train was suggested as early as and used in a siege of Vienna in Armored trains are still used occasionally, though they are confined to a vulnerable track.
The first man to mount a gun on motor-vehicle was Major Davidson of the Illinois National Guard, who in combined a machine-gun with a light Duryea horseless carriage. By the outbreak of World War I several European national had armored cars, which skirmished gallantly in the opening weeks of the war. After the front became too cut up by trenches for cars to be of use there, the British armored cars were sent to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, where they proved useful.
Still, like the armored train, the armored car did not solve the problem, being confined to roads or to flat treeless terrain. The problem was finally solved by combining guns and armor with the newly invented caterpillar tractor to make the tank—conceived by Colonel Swinton of the Royal Engineers, mothered by Winston Churchill, and finally designed by Lieutenant William Tritton, to name only a few of those filled the vacant place in the catalog of military tools formerly occupied by the war-elephant and the armored knight.
In a sense, the mechanization of land armies represents a sort of belated catching-up with the methods that have always been used at sea. Many of the features of modern military vehicles and airplanes were worked out long before on ships; for instance, mounting guns in revolving turrets on the centerline. One might say that sea warfare has always been mechanized, in the sense of being carried on in self-propelled, self-sufficient fighting vehicles.
That face does not mean that naval men are more intelligent than others, built that land and air vehicles presented harder problems. Hence one effect of the expansion of air warfare and the mechanization of.
Ever since it arose in the Dark Ages, our Western culture has differed from others in its tendency towards rapid technical development, so that non-Western societies like the Russian and the Japanese have had to copy Western methods in order to hold their own against Western pressure. Since invention is a self-regenerative process, it is likely to go on, faster and faster, until limited by the exhaustion of natural resources or some other factor that cannot now be foreseen.
The development of weapons and the state of society after one another. Some years ago Silas McKinley, a history professor, claimed to have found a regular correlation—democratic government is stable and successful when the fundamental military unit is a citizen soldier armed with a cheap, easily-used weapon. He cited the democratization of Greece when improvements in metallurgy made arms and armor available to the common people, and the French and American revolutions when the cheap flintlock musket was the universal arm.
McKinley thought that democracy would be in danger whenever the fundamental military unit was a highly trained professional soldier, or one using a complicated and expensive weapon.
If he is correct, his principle directly affects the people of the United States, because soldiers today use the most complicated and expensive weapons ever seen. The evolution of weapons, like that of other devices, is a self-accelerating process. Hence it is safe to say that weapons will become more and more devastating, at least in the absence of any effective world government or other international control to stop the process.
And no such super-state seems likely as long as the world is organized into a multitude of sovereign nations grouped into hostile blocs. However, it is easier to admit that weapons will change than to foresee the nature of the changes. For more than half a century, ever since the pace of modern technical change was appreciated, predictions of future weapons and methods of warfare have been favorite themes of imaginative writers.
Some years before submarines became practical, Jules Verne sent one of his heroes voyaging the Seven Seas in one, and Colonel Swinton and H. Wells both wrote stories predicting the tank. But for every correct prediction there have been many absurdly wrong ones. About half a century ago Kipling predicted transatlantic air-mail service in his story With the Night Mail ; while his general prediction has been realized, he made the mistake of going into technical details, nearly all of which have proved wrong.
Before World War I many speculated as to the form it would take; almost nobody foresaw the trench-warfare stalemate except a Polish banker, I. Two sources of error in making predictions seems to be what we may call the Galahad fallacy and the David-and-Goliath fallacy.
Some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants have also been the ablest and most successful military leaders. The David-and-Goliath fallacy is the belief that weakness has some mystic advantage over strength, and smallness over bigness. The development of weapons is by no means free of limitations. For one thing, the first steps in the development of a new weapon are likely to be slow and fumbling.
The evolution of weapons is also restarted, not only by the conservatism of military men or, to put it more fairly, of men in general but also by the fact that for every good suggestion there are many impractical or absurd ones, and not even the wisest can always tell which is which at first sight. And even when an idea is sound, years may be needed to reduce it to working order.
Moreover, the development of new weapon does not at once put all the old ones out of use. One of the most striking features of military history is the persistence of old weapons alongside the new ones. The Chinese discovered gunpowder about year or earlier.
Aside from a few experiments with bombs and rockets, they used it mainly for firecrackers. Knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the 13 th century, and in the early 14 th century the gun, along with rockets, mines, and other military applications, came into use.
To be a gunner at that time was, if anything, more dangerous than to be shot at by a gunner, since the gunner had to mix his powder himself, without knowing quite what he was doing. For over six centuries after the Chinese discovery that a mixture of carbon, saltpeter, and Sulphur would explode, gunpowder what the only known explosive. As an explosive, however, it left much to be desired: it was smoky, variable in performance, left a residue in gun barrels, and delivered in push rather than a shock.
Then in the German chemist Christian Friedrich Schonbein was experimenting on the solubility of various substances in a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids. Among the materials were some strands of cotton. After a prolonged soaking the cotton looked just the same, so the disappointed Schonbein put the strands on the stove to dry and went to dinner.
While he was gone his laboratory blew up: he had accidentally discovered nitrocellulose or guncotton. Chemists immediately began exploring the new field of nitrate explosives. They found that by treating various substances with nitric acid and other powerful reagents they could nitrate these substances, that is, add to each molecule of the substance one or more nitro NO 2 or nitrate NO 3 radicals which would come adrift with great violence under certain circumstances.
Next year, for instance, Sopbrero discovered nitroglycerine, made by nitrating glycerine, and oily liquid that gave, weight for weight, an explosion about eight times as powerful as that of gunpowder. This treatment, whole it impaired the explosive power of the nitroglycerine very little, made it so stable that it had to be set off with a mercury fulminate cap. Thence Nobel went on to invent the even more powerful blasting gelatin by absorbing nitroglycerine in nitrocellulose.
Dynamite proved very little military use, since it detonated too rapidly for a propellant. Whereas a gunpowder explosion merely a rapid burning, the detonation of the new nitrate explosives was the almost instantaneous breakdown of the explosive into gaseous compounds, transmitted from molecule to molecule by shock. Hence such an explosive, used as a propellant, burst the breech of the gun because the projectile could not move fast enough to relieve the pressure in powder chamber.
Neither did dynamite make a good shell-filling, since a drop of nitroglycerine sometimes accumulated at some point in the charge and exploded from the shock of firing. The U. Navy once tried a compressed-air. To that end it built the Vesavius, a handsome little foot gunboat that looked more like a yacht. She carried three fixed pneumatic guns sticking up out of the deck forward, throwing projectiles resembling modern airplane bombs.
During the Spanish-American War the Vesavius invaded Santiago Harbor nightly during the blockade of that port and fired her weapons. The guns shrieked and the projectiles went off with terrific bangs, shattering the already uncertain nerves of the Spaniards but doing little material harm. Since then dynamite has been restricted to the peaceful uses of blasting and mining, while other nitrate explosives have ousted gunpowder from nearly all military uses. Its big advantage is that it makes much less smoke than gunpowder, so that the gunner does not have to wait after each shot for the wind to carry the smoke away before he can see to fire again.
The nitrate explosives include many compounds more powerful than nitrocellulose or nitroglycerine, but not necessarily suitable for general military use, A military explosive should not be too expensive, should not deteriorate rapidly, and should not be too sensitive for the purpose for which it is intended. Tetryl tetranitromethylaniline is extremely powerful, but too sensitive for anything but percussion caps and boosters.
TNT or trinitrotoluene made by nitrating the coal tar product toluol is the most widely used all-around military explosive, since it is both powerful and so stable that it is almost impossible to set it off except by a Tetryl or a mercury-fulminate detonator.
For armor-piercing shells, however, TNT is not quite stable enough; it may go off from concussion before the shell has passed through the armor. Therefore the even more stable ammonium picrate is used in such shells. A mixture of charcoal powder and liquid oxygen has been used for blasting in Europe since before World War I, and was tried out in airplane bombs in the Spanish Civil War. It is a fairly successful explosive, having advantage that in case of a misfire the oxygen will evaporate in half an hour or so, leaving a harmless mass of carbon.
On the other hand it has to be mixed shortly before use, and undue delay will spoil the mixture, so that it seems unlikely to replace nitrate explosives in regular military operations. Before the perfection of the atomic bomb, men had known for several decades that enormous energies were imprisoned in the atom, and had speculated about releasing these energies.
Wells, in fact, used atomic bombs in a novel published before World War I, though these bombs were practically harmless compared to. Early in this century physicists figured out that matter and energy were to some extent interchangeable, and Einstein calculated the amount of energy that would be released by the destruction of a given quantity of matter.
In , just before World War II, the German physicists Hahn and Stassman announced that in bombarding uranium with neutrons they had produced barium. In Denmark Dr. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch inferred from this fact that the neutron bombardment had caused some uranium atoms to split into two more or less equal parts. When the celebrated Danish physicist Niels Bohr reported this fission to a scientific meeting in America, physicists amid much excitement confirmed the experiment and added further information.
It transpired that the split occurred, not in the common form of uranium, with an atomic weight of , but in the isotope U, which occurs mixed with the common form in the proportion of one part in However, when an atom of U splits under neutron bombardment, it gives off not only two or more atoms of lighter elements, together with penetrating radiations of the X-ray type, but also between one and three neutrons. Hence, if enough U could be concentrated together, each explosion would cause on the average more than one more atomic fission in the neighborhood, so that the process would proceed through more and more generations until the material was used up or the release of energy blew the mass apart—in other words, a chain reaction.
Moreover, some of the mass of the original U would be converted into energy in the process, so that the reaction would release something like 10, to 20, times the energy released by the explosion of a similar weight of TNT. Bringing the mass together slowly would cause a low-order explosion that would scatter the material before the chain reaction got more than started.
Therefore, a mechanism was needed to assemble the critical mass at explosion speeds. By the end of these and other groups of scientists had determined that, theoretically at any rate, an atomic bomb would work. With the entry of the United States into the war, the U. Government at once undertook a large program of atomic bomb development. A similar program had been begun in Great Britain, but in view of the greater resources available in the United Sates, the British merged their effort with that of this country.
Research disclosed that the operation of a uranium pile produced a new element, neptunium, which by radioactive disintegration changed into another, plutonium, having chain-reactive properties similar to those of U Since the separation of U from ordinary uranium by gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetic means, and production of plutonium all showed promise, all three methods of obtaining fissionable material were pursued vigorously to the end of the war.
The bombs were finally manufactured between and by a special section of the U. After the war it transpired. However, that the Germans had lagged far behind in atomic work. When an atomic bomb is detonated by bringing the component parts of the mass of fissionable material together suddenly, the release of energy makes this mass hotter than the surface of the sun. The bomb and its contents are instantly vaporized, forming a white-hot cloud so bright that to look directly at it within a distance of several miles may permanently impair the eyesight.
The cloud expands rapidly, first in the form of a sphere, then becoming an irregular column, cooling and dimming as it does so, and finally giving rise to a characteristic mushroom-like top several miles above the actual explosion. The shockwave of the explosion, while not as sharp as that of a detonate like TNT, is strong enough to knock down nearly all light structures within a mile or more of the site. Inflammable materials close to the explosion may be set afire by heat-radiation from the cloud.
Persons quite close to the explosion are not killed by the shock wave, though they may be knocked down; on the other hand enormous numbers may be killed by the fall of houses in the resulting conflagration. Those who escape these fates are injured both by the ultraviolet radiations from the cloud, which cause a violent sunburn, and by the higher-frequency radiations of the X-ray and gamma-ray type.
The latter cause the victims, if they do not die within a few hours, to linger on with strange scars, growths, and maladies. Material objects near the explosion are made so radioactive as to be unapproachable for days or even years.
News of the atomic explosions created a world-wide sensation.
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