Would a 12 gauge gatling gun loaded with birdshots be a good weapon against locusts?
Would a 12 gauge gatling gun loaded with birdshots be a good weapon against locusts?
Would a 12 gauge gatling gun loaded with birdshots be a good weapon against locusts?
Oh yeah.
Not for the biggest storms. There was one recorded at being 198000 square miles with an estimated 12 trillion locusts
locusts are apparently quite nutritious.
Literally the food of the future.
just grind them up and form them into tasty little bricks---
ah, frick.
When I lived in MD and they came out ever so many years you couldn’t take a step without “crrrrrrrunch”.
man those are cicadas... not a grasshopper and not really any problem... just hang in trees, and have bug seggs, dont really dmg anything... and how do you not know that its 17 years.... how do you miss such a weird fact that god made
nah. absolutely mogged in both efficiency and palatability by fungi. "eat ze bugs" is mostly from sunk-cost fallacy investors at this point
fungus has frick all caloric density. The modern mixed system is the most efficient because some land is suited for animals others for crops and fungus grows off the garbage.
don't locusts contain chemical residues like phosphorus?
Chitin is toxic to humans.
>Chitin is toxic to humans.
Stop getting your health advice from facey. Chitin is indigestible fibre that also occurs in mushrooms, a food source people across the world consume to this day.
I wonder if you couldn't just find one of those massive swarms before they get to farmland and hit them with thermobaric rockets, like the ones that the TOS-1 uses.
It's inflammatory, not toxic. Don't ask me about the difference tho, I'm just parroting what an allergist friend of mine has relayed.
It would be ideal if a swarm of birds could fly through, or several. But I think it might be too hot for them now or something.
>locusts are apparently quite nutritious.
What ethnicity are you?
Israelite.
bugs are le bahd though same as human meat
But human meat tastes just like pork, anon. It’s not kosher, that’s why they don’t want you to enjoy its delicate flavor.
>delicate
>manflesh
Maybe if you're eating a Tibetan monk or some shit. Most people in the modern day glut themselves on garbage. Do you expect me to eat a typical American? Or a Brit? Or - may God forgive me for saying this - an Albanian?
>Reddit man
You just need alot of rounds. I know.
That's insane. They must be super hardy bugs to even survive.
You'd want something that would cover as much area as possible, so dustshot would be superior
Also maybe shot from a short, rifled barrel so you'd get a big frickoff spread, since you're trying to damage a lot of little things instead of one big thing
Also also you'd basically be tainting your land with lead forever so good luck with that
I was about to say just use salt but then I briefly stopped being moronic.
>salt rock
Large grit sand load with be highly efficacious
yes, it would be highly efficacious... at doing SOMETHING.
Sand and rocks aren't that bad for fields.
>t. rural Noreasterer
Dust just wouldn’t carry enough momentum through air resistance. You might want to find a balance between shot size/quantity and the rate of fire to maximise the area covered.
if it can kill a rat it can kill something with an exoskeleton, moron
I’m saying it has less range moron. You must be a nogunz
if you're 'fighting' locusts I'm assuming you're doing it at point blank range like the guy in the OP image.
What, you plan on fricking... digging in and keeping them at bay?
You assume wrong, the locusts are everywhere and you want to maximise your kill rate
maximize the kill rate? idk fricking fuel-air explosives probably, you dickhead lmao
I imagine bugs don't like getting blown the frick up so any HE with no frags to make it "safer" would probably obliterated as much as possible.
OR you do what the whack ass russians did and strap two jet engines to a tank and drive it around shooting shock cones 20 feet out, while you spin the turret/chassis... and just make like 100 of em
What if you use steel dust shot?
Also what if instead of puny 12 gauge you take a Mk19?
No moron, decreasing shot size increases surface area. More surface area, more air resistance. This is amplified by density. If anything you’d want tungsten/DU dust.
>Replace lead poisoning with 20 types of cancer and not asbestos lung.
What about having teams of guys with flamethrowers clearing the skies of locusts? That seems like the most efficient way to remove them
Just get a really big net my dude
Dragon’s breath would be better
>Setting flying insects on fire in dry cropland
Well, tbf to the other anon, even if the fire doesn't kill the locusts, burning off their wings will hinder their mobility.
>12 gauge
My homie you're gonna need autocannons that can fire 120mm XM1028 or better.
Setting fields on fire means you can set all the locusts trying to eat it on fire. Win.
unlikely, .22 will just bounce off them
you probably want a .50 at least
YOU WILL
EAT ZE BUGS
Just use a flamethrower
Unironically the only answer. Flamethrowers, fuel aerosol bombs and other fire/shockwave weapons of mass destruction. Using a shotgun would solve jack shit.
Believe it or not the US army tried that in catastrophic locust swarms in the Midwest in the 30's and found both flamethrowers and explosives ineffective against the hordes.
They ended up mounting flamethrowers on trains to burn the locusts off the tracks so locomotives could gain traction.
It was a particularly bad swarm though, there were accounts of people literally watch locusts eat the clothes off of the women wearing them as they desperately tried to get laundry in off clotheslines.
Then fuel air bombs and perhaps acid dispersion through nozzles on airplanes or a system of sprinklers perhaps.
if you're going to use chemicals you might as well just go with bug spray.
Frick off with your ridiculous fantasies. We're gonna drop a bunch of thermobaric bombs and douse the land with acid using cropdusters and that's the end of that.
Kek we’re so lucky cropdusters exist for our acid spray technique and nothing else
Apparently in 37 they resorted to poisoned bait.
They had to use 31 million pounds of it to kill the swarm off.
Fricking nuts.
>acid dispersion through nozzles on airplanes
Instead of using acid, what if there was some kind of chemical that specifically targeted bugs?
>there were accounts of people literally watch locusts eat the clothes off of the women wearing them
That's hot though why would they stop them
How did the Americans beat them in the end? Could it be replicated in Africa?
They didn't.
There have been no NA locust swarms since ~1900.
Last one got caught by cold weather and lack of habitat after plowing.
>lack of habitat after plowing
Why not simply plow the entire continent of Africa?
see:
. The answer was 31 million pounds of poisoned sawdust bait.
They spread 31,000,000 lbs of poison everywhere the locusts were, and it killed the entire swarm.
Apparently the smell from the rotting horde of locusts was so bad people had to leave their homes and go somewhere else for a while until they decayed.
>"We tried dynamiting," Ardourel told The Denver Post at the time. "They kept right on flying - just bounced a little and went on. These hoppers are terrible."
https://www.nationalguard.mil/news/article-view/article/575751/in-1937-colorado-guard-used-flamethrowers-and-explosives-against-plague-of-locu/
>Motorists in eastern Colorado faced similar problems as crushed grasshoppers could suddenly make roads as slick as ice.
Shit gets like that in St. Clair Shores, MI when there's a mayfly outbreak.
Wild
You would need to shoot hundreds of billions of shells to stop a swarm
An airsoft gun would be much cheaper.
Let me preface this by saying that I am NOT Klaus Schwab.
But that's a lot of indigestible biomas being turned into protein with high bio-availability for humans.
>Let me preface this by saying that I am NOT Klaus Schwab.
That sounds exactly like something that Klaus Schwab would say.
You all vastly underestimate the amount of locusts in a locust swarm and the efficacy of anything that's not a pesticide against them.
Is chlorine gas a pesticide?
Not an effective one. You don't want a gas as a pesticide, it just diffuses below lethal dosage too fast. You're not killing several square kilometers of locusts with gas.
You want a liquid that you can spray onto the plants/ground that stays effective for at least several days and will kill the animals when they take it up from food or through their exoskeleton. Ideally it's a systemic poison that the plants accumulate in their tissues.
Agent Orange? Will deny them food too.
okay how bout we just nuke it, like tac nuke the swarm, what could go wrong? drop a MOAB on it maybe? that's gotta kill like a frickin billion of them
>oh wait there's 12 trillion of them
>one billion is only 1/1000th of a trillion
frick we need a lot more bombs, guys....
Wouldn't Flak munitions make more sense. Or Fuel air bombs ?
Anon, what volume would a fuel bomb kill locusts in. A sphere of 300 feet perhaps? A typical locust swarm occupies several hundred square kilometers in area and volume, with 40 to 80 million locusts per km2. The amount of bombs you'd need to eradicate it is ridiculous.
Like I said, you all SEVERELY underestimate the amount of locusts in a locust swarm.
So nuke em?
Yes
fried locust isn't bad tbh
doesn't taste like much except crunchy fried thing tho
>the ones that survive mutate and resist future nukes
>enter Terra Formars
>Joji?
imagine if they were carnivorous
they are, partly
if presented with easy protein they take it, including cannibalizing injured or weakened individuals
how very morbid
Fire is the only solution.
crunchy outside with a gooey center
Dragons breath rounds?
How the frick do locusts still exist?
So we can exterminate flies and bees and shit to extinction by accident but we can't kill horny crickets?
Also wouldn't the cycle of the locust be counter productive to it's survival. You're effectively promoting the killing of your species and also feeding them.
Grasshoppers ARE locusts. It's a critical mass pheromone mutation, when enough grasshoppers start letting off pheromones that say "holy frick there's no food we've got to gooooooo". They form swarms and migrate, usually following seasonal rains.
No. Other way around
Locusts are a type of grasshopper. Most grasshopper species never swarm.
High energy microwave/radio would work but is currently quite hard to make a large effective device portable.
During the 60s Soviets experimented with mobile nuclear reactors on modified tank chasis. And you're not gonna be killing bug swarms with hand held weapons.
Yes you'd need something with the power of a large static radar installation.
Why not just strap a giant butterfly net to a plane (or stretch it between multiple planes) to scoop up all the locusts at once?
Would going through a locust field produce enough drag to lever you into a ground?
I said airplane not helicopter
Just need more thrust
just use a giant fan/jet engine
Could you laser them?
This.
A small but powerful anti-missile like laser should do the trick, picking them easily and killing with small bursts.
What if you beefed up the blades on a couple of giant commercial fans and just sucked the locusts in and mulched them? Maybe put a few blades back to back, or a set or two of counterrotating blades…. Just mulch them into bug pulp and put the nutrients back in the land.
what about just miles and miles of glue traps?
If you’ve been to the flyover states you’d know those won’t work.. you’d be forever peeling the Hicks back off of them..
An industrial vacuum would be better
ATV or offroad vehicle with a gigantic net would be more effective.
I'd either use a flame thrower, or if I were forced to use a firearm for the job, I'd use shells loaded with diatomaceous earth.
>would a really big bucket be a good way to empty an ocean?
Colt 1911 chambered in good ole .45ACP. That should do the little bastards in.
Dragons breath but instead of an incendiary component it's pesticide.
I know it won't work but I'd like to tell people that racist scarecrows are the solution.
>12 gauge
Punt gun loaded with dragons breath a whole fricking wall of them
Friendly reminder that the man who baptized Jesus himself ate locusts.
Eating locust makes sense in a drought or some other agricultural emergency. Eating beetles for fun is like snorting ground toenail clippings. It doesn't have to be harmful to be unhealthy.
Would a microwave field kill them without setting the surrounding environment on fire? I'm picturing a setup on a self-propelled vehicle chassis with onboard power generation.
Probably not as effective as a flamethrower tank or WP grenades.
I would say some sort of insulated armored vehicle with a GMG RCWS that shoots White Phosphorus rounds for long range, and some sort of tesla arcing electrical discharger for close range.
Or you could just put two long metal poles on two trucks and strech a long net betveen them
then light it on fire
also electrify it, THEN light it on fire, with MAGNETS
grow black pepper, eucalyptus or plant peppermint along with your crops, locusts/cicadas/grasshoppers all hate it
weedeaters (fast spinning sharp wire)
bottles of carb cleaner (diethyl ether)
whatever the large mechanized military versions of these things are.
What if you used a really big subwoofer
My gramps had a small locust plague in 85' in styria, austria. The way he and his neighbours solved it, was to build a metal cage with a lot of lightbulbs in it and then electrify it. Shit fried 2/3 of the locusts in the first night. The rest was eaten by local bats and birds.
No idea if this is feasable against large invasions.
>just build a massive bug zapper bro
Based. Hearing bugs fry on those things is peak summertime.
Frog Army
Nein OP, ich haben ein better plan.
add a few upward firing flamethrowers and a
windscreen
Could you fire seeds at them?
That way you plant crops and kill the locusts in one go, it's win-win
What crop's seeds would survive being fired?
I'd go with this personally just for the fun factor
Assuming you mean the spray and not impact via airplane, but if you’re talking airplane then eventually the amount of bug would clog all pitot static systems, possibly break windshield, and ruin the flow of air over the wings, still badass though
Could you use huge fans to basically mulch them?
Like with human beans, chemical warfare is far more efficient than just shooting them.
Just get two flamethrowers, run into the swarm then spin in place
they use this evidently
they (national institute of health) mix spider venom with insect kill fungus to make it more insect kill. they use it mosquitoes but works for roaches and locusts as well
we should not be playing god
Make sure nothing lives to reproduce.