The Bad Inventions thread

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

Nuclear weaponry. Agent Orange.

[Armeattla]

The SA80/L85A1 and Porsche tanks

[Zul-ar]

Nationstates 2

wait wait wait can someone explain what NS2 was?

[The New California Republic]

Nationstates 2

wait wait wait can someone explain what NS2 was?

http://nationstates2.com/

[Countesia]

Those toilets where they burn waste in the bowl

Imagine the smell

[Arab Republic of Botswana]

This Carand they made it even bad that the guys who created the Flying Pinto namely Smolinski and Blake were killed

[Ellbonnia]

The A13 Mk III Covenanter cruiser tank, in pretty much every possible way... we've been getting a lot of British tanks on this thread, haven't we?

Firstly, it was designed mostly by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, a train company with no prior experience designing anything with tracks or armor up until this point. Maybe they should've stuck to running a railroad instead of inventing an entirely new tank.

Then, through a rushed design process, they decided to revise their design from a welded to a riveted design, not only resulting in a more dangerous armor layout for the crew due to potential spalling, but more weight that meant the tank couldn't take any more upgrades in the future without busting its transmission.

Speaking of its transmission, it was supposed to be built with a Wilson transmission and a Wilson epicyclic steering system, as would be expected. But because they were rushing and decided to cut corners, they went with a cheap Meadows "crash" gearbox instead to avoid having to wait to acquire the right transmission; resulting in such a cramped transmission space that they couldn't fit more than a tiny little cooling fan inside that didn't work at all.

Any cooling problems weren't helped by the fact that someone at Meadows went with a strange horizontally-opposed flat-12 engine just to meet the British War Office's requirements without further design work, which was so weirdly-shaped that the radiator couldn't actually fit in the engine compartment (it was flat and wide like a big metal pancake). Instead, some genius just slapped the radiator on the front of the tank and called it a day; not within the front of the tank, mind you, but literally just sitting completely exposed on the front glacis of the tank, right next to the driver's position.
Not only did this mean the radiator was fully-exposed to all the dust, dirt, and/or enemy fire that would be thrown at the tank, but the radiator would easily overheat and bake the poor driver and other tankers inside the crew compartment if the tank was pushed to its limits... which was unfortunate, considering this was meant to be a "cruiser" tank and be pushed hard on a regular basis as its job.

Needless to say, combined with a pathetic 2-pounder main gun and armor only as thick as 40mm at the most, the Covenanter was a complete disappointment. It almost assuredly didn't see any combat whatsoever, except for some bridgelayer versions that didn't see any direct fighting. No gun-equipped Covenanters remain except for one, as the British rightly saw the design as trash and a complete waste of time and money and either scrapped or shot up most of them as targets.

[Greater Cosmicium]

All the physics defying attempts at extracting water from air, case in point: Waterseer and the Fontus "self-filling" water bottle. Come on, there's something called rain if you want to get water from the air!

[Romextly]

My life

[The New California Republic]

The A13 Mk III Covenanter cruiser tank, in pretty much every possible way... we've been getting a lot of British tanks on this thread, haven't we?

Firstly, it was designed mostly by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, a train company with no prior experience designing anything with tracks or armor up until this point. Maybe they should've stuck to running a railroad instead of inventing an entirely new tank.

They eventually got their act together with excellent tanks like the Cromwell, which I've always had a soft spot for.

[L-453]

It almost assuredly didn't see any combat whatsoever, except for some bridgelayer versions that didn't see any direct fighting. No gun-equipped Covenanters remain except for one, as the British rightly saw the design as trash and a complete waste of time and money and either scrapped or shot up most of them as targets.

After they built nearly 2000 of the damnable things for some godforsaken reason. You would think they'd actually see the thing is shit BEFORE wasting precious wartime materials on them, but nope, time to build 1,700 terrible toaster mobiles that make the horrendous Matilda Mk. I look like a good and totally not obsolete tank.

Sometimes I question the sanity of my own country. How the actual fuck did we bugger up this poorly?

[The New California Republic]

Sometimes I question the sanity of my own country. How the actual fuck did we bugger up this poorly?

Colossal weapons fuckups by the UK are hardly rare. We spent over a billion on the AEW3 in the 1980s until we realised that it was an unsalvageable mess and cancelled the whole thing, and bought a tried and tested off-the-shelf AEW aircraft from the States instead, which we should have done from the very start.

[Shepherd isle]

does a flying tank count as a useless and bad invention that never really worked out?

[A-Series-Of-Tubes]

Those toilets where they burn waste in the bowl

Imagine the smell

Better than trying to burn it before it gets to the bowl ... poo pew pew pew! poo pew pew pew!

In actually good inventions: the toilet seat with a smaller hole so cats can shit in a human loo.

[A-Series-Of-Tubes]

([url=https://i.postimg.cc/Pqk7QDt7/flying-tank.jpg]Image)[/url]

does a flying tank count as a useless and bad invention that never really worked out?

Ugly but not necessarily useless, eg A-10

[L-453]

Sometimes I question the sanity of my own country. How the actual fuck did we bugger up this poorly?

Colossal weapons fuckups by the UK are hardly rare. We spent over a billion on the AEW3 in the 1980s until we realised that it was an unsalvageable mess and cancelled the whole thing, and bought a tried and tested off-the-shelf AEW aircraft from the States instead, which we should have done from the very start.

Yeah, we tend to think ourselves as the greatest at everything and then we fuck up really badly and what we make ends up being a total mess. I suppose the best example of British overconfidence in British design is the TOG II, a completely obsolete tank that would've been good about 25 years before it was designed. Yet we still for some reason decided to not only design it, but build a prototype, despite the fact that by 1940-41 we had already seen modern tank designs and how effective they had been in France.

[Earthbound Immortal Squad]

Most of Thomas Midgley Jr's inventions, with the best ones being leaded gasoline, Freons (CFC's) and his final invention which coincidentally was also the death of him after trying to get out of bed while in hospital after falling ill from what some believe to be the repercussion of his stunt years earlier of trying to prove leaded gasoline wasn't dangerous. Sufficed to say the fallout from his inventions are still being felt today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.


My second choice would be Fritz Haber who was responsible for designing many of the chemical weapons used in the first world war used in the trenches. But in my opinion that wasn't the worst thing he did in his time. He also discovered the Haber-Bosch process which converted nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia which could then be converted into fertilizer. That probably sounds good on the surface however with this process far more crops could be produced and such caused a huge population boom which then comes to the arguments made now about overpopulation. Another consequence of excessive fertilizer use was eutrophication which is the process which is destroying many rivers, lakes and other pools of water current life from plants to fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication

So all in all I think those two, at least from an environmental point of view, did the most damage in the long run.

[North Cromch]

One thing I would like uninvented; the Atari 2600 game, ET the extra terrestrial.

But then half of the good games back in the mid-80s to the mid-2000s wouldn't exist.

does a flying tank count as a useless and bad invention that never really worked out?

God, that's amazing.

[Elejamie]

To those who mentioned the Juicero, may I present to you its kind of sequel in the Alchema Cider Maker. On the upside, you aren't given packs that you can easily squeeze by hand and it's probably cheaper (£250 or $329). On the downside, it's another gadget that requires the internet to work (and a guy I watch who otherwise gave it a positive review to it said that he needed to do a number of firmware updates just to get it to work and, during a windy night, it kind of stopped working), it doesn't have a heating element despite it working better when it's warm, for that price you'd expect a glass jug instead of a cheap plastic one and, overall, there are DIY kits that while a bit harder to master would probably get you better results.

[A-Series-Of-Tubes]

Most of Thomas Midgley Jr's inventions, with the best ones being leaded gasoline, Freons (CFC's) and his final invention which coincidentally was also the death of him after trying to get out of bed while in hospital after falling ill from what some believe to be the repercussion of his stunt years earlier of trying to prove leaded gasoline wasn't dangerous. Sufficed to say the fallout from his inventions are still being felt today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.


My second choice would be Fritz Haber who was responsible for designing many of the chemical weapons used in the first world war used in the trenches. But in my opinion that wasn't the worst thing he did in his time. He also discovered the Haber-Bosch process which converted nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia which could then be converted into fertilizer. That probably sounds good on the surface however with this process far more crops could be produced and such caused a huge population boom which then comes to the arguments made now about overpopulation. Another consequence of excessive fertilizer use was eutrophication which is the process which is destroying many rivers, lakes and other pools of water current life from plants to fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication

So all in all I think those two, at least from an environmental point of view, did the most damage in the long run.

Wow, both of those were really interesting. I'd heard of Haber, and don't really agree that ammonia fertilizer was an unmitigated disaster, but in the grand scale I suppose it is.

[Kromi]

Theranos, the invention never actually existed; but it was basically a scam. They just took blood samples and tested them using normal methods and then claimed that their machine did it.

Here's the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The question is, is it really a bad invention if it was never invented?

[Grinning Dragon]

The smart phone.

[The New California Republic]

The smart phone.

More specifically the phone zombies they create. Although it hasn't been as much of an issue over the past year, since coronavirus has stopped people from going out as much, but I'm sure they will come back with a vengeance once some kind of normality returns.

[A-Series-Of-Tubes]

The smart phone.

More specifically the phone zombies they create. Although it hasn't been as much of an issue over the past year, since coronavirus has stopped people from going out as much, but I'm sure they will come back with a vengeance once some kind of normality returns.

It could have been worse, if 3D goggles for smart phones had caught on.

Or, better. If mowing down zombies in your car sounds like fun.

[A-Series-Of-Tubes]

Theranos, the invention never actually existed; but it was basically a scam. They just took blood samples and tested them using normal methods and then claimed that their machine did it.

Here's the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The question is, is it really a bad invention if it was never invented?

That would be an unvention I guess.