Fire-Breathing Weapon



"-"...But we have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself: 'Gee, I'd sure like to set those people on fire over there, but I'm way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something to throw flame on them'.""

- George Carlin on the line of thinking that led to the invention of the flamethrower.

Sometimes, you have an opponent, structure, device or other target which you just got to Kill It With Fire. If you have to do this multiple times, you would wish you have an actual weapon which can burn things for you instead of rigging something on the spot all the time.

You will need the Fire-Breathing Weapon; a gun-like weapon which creates fire. Pull the trigger and a gout of fire will appear, covering your target in burning goodness. Most games use a form of directional Splash Damage to implement this.

Of course this is not limited to the flamethrowers alone: various (directional) bombs, traps, improvised weapons and even vehicle cannons can fall under this category. The common similarity between all the weapons here is they all use "Kill It With Fire" as their main form of causing damage, and they are all "point and burn" weapons.

Weapon of Choice for the Pyromaniac. Sometimes used for lighting cigarettes.

PS: If you use this weapon on your target, and it stands up uninjured yet on fire and quite pissed off... well, it's nice knowing you.

See also Flaming Sword, Aerosol Flamethrower, and Video Game Flamethrowers Suck. Compare Playing With Fire, for people who make fire themselves.

Anime and Manga

 * Black Lagoon: the character Claude "Torch" Weaver specializes in these.
 * When things start to look bad for the Lemures in Baccano, their leader Goose arms himself with one.

Comic Books

 * DC Comics
 * The villain Firefly
 * The Flash has a villain called Heat Wave who has this as his gimmick. He's often teamed with/fights against Captain Cold.

Film

 * The Weapon of Choice for The Exterminator.
 * The Comedian gleefully used one in Vietnam in Watchmen, even lighting his cigar with it.
 * In the Alien series, an effective weapon against Xenomorphs because fire is one of the few things they don't like.
 * In The Five People You Meet In Heaven, The Protagonist was "the flamethrower guy" in his squad of soldiers. This becomes a significant plot point in the film.
 * The Tank Dragon Tank in Dr. No.
 * Used by The Men in Black in Men in Black to create "evidence" of a swamp gas explosion.
 * For an Antarctic research station, the Americans in The Thing seem to have an awful lot of flamethrowers lying around.
 * Useful for unfreezing things. Naturally.
 * The Weapon of Choice in Don't Go in The House.
 * The armored assailant in Lethal Weapon 4's Action Prologue uses a flamethrower along with a uzi.
 * Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and The Holy Grail apparently has one built into his staff.
 * The Johnny Depp film The Rum Diary manages to feature a human example. Depp's character manages to fend off an angry mob (and accidentally set fire to a police officer) by drinking "470 proof alcohol" and breathing on a lighter. The results are as expected.
 * Used by the Stalker Fireball in The Running Man.

Literature

 * Older Than Feudalism: In The Iliad, the hero Diomedes (the one who stabbed Ares) is described as having a fire-breathing shield.
 * The grandaddies of 'em all: the Martians in Wells's The War of the Worlds had tripods armed with a deadly heat beam which could set almost anything on fire, and if not, melt it.
 * In Mark S. Geston's novel Lords of the Starship, the book's entire Twist Ending is that.
 * Rapier in The Five Greatest Warriors uses a flamethrower at one point to incinerate several men who were ambushing his allies.
 * Most Secret by Nevil Shute is about a fishing boat during World War Two that is fitted out with a large flamethrower in a plan to destroy the German escort vessels keeping an eye on the French fishing fleet. The Kill It With Fire trope is specifically lampshaded.

Live Action TV

 * Rito Revolto of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers has a flamethrower in his arsenal. He tried to destroy the Ninjazords with it, but it was punched off his arm by the Ninja Megazord.
 * Forever Knight had a Villain of the Week who torched homeless people with a flame thrower. At least until Nick got through with him.
 * Hunter used a similar plot, with the villain using the weapon to commit arson as well as burning the occasional Innocent Bystander. Naturally the song played during the teaser was "Burning Down the House".

Tabletop Games

 * GURPS has a slew of them. Flamers and fusion guns from Ultra-Tech. Flamethrowers and aerosol flamethrowers in High-Tech. Low tech flamethrowers for clerics in Dungeon Fantasy. Heat rays in Spaceships. The fire lance from Fantasy. The cheirosiphon and eruptor style weapons from Low-Tech.
 * The flamer is so ubiquitous in Warhammer 40000 that just about every race, even the super-advanced Eldar, use some variant of it. In game terms, flamethrower-type weapons are useful because they 1) use a long teardrop-shaped template to resolve hits, meaning a well-placed burst can hit over a dozen models, and 2) they ignore the effects of cover, making them useful for clearing foes from bunkers or ruins.
 * The Skaven from the Low Fantasy counterpart have Warpfire throwers, basically Steampunk flamethrowers, though like most Skaven technology it's rather unreliable and prone to backfire.
 * Dungeons and Dragons has, besides the obvious example of red dragons, the Tongue Stud of Firebreathing which allows the user to use a breath weapon attack 3 times a day.

Toys

 * The weapon of choice for Torch, one of the Dreadnoks from G.I. Joe.

Video Games

 * The Brotherhood of Nod from Command and Conquer often has infantry armed with these, among other weapons included in their arsenals. It should be noted that the realism of fire-based weaponry in the series tends to vary from game to game.
 * Nod's love affair with flamethrowers has, several times, extended to flamethrower tanks. In Tiberian Sun, this extended to the bizarrely improbable Subterranean Flame Tank. Over in Red Alert, the Soviets have been known to use flamethrower turrets for base defense.
 * And Generals gives us the Chinese, who love (nuclear) fire just as much. "Dragon" Flamethrower Tanks, fire-shelling artillery, fire-bombing Mi Gs and various nuclear weapons are all present in the game.
 * The Fire Rod from several Zelda games, including The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past, The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening, and The Legend of Zelda Four Swords Adventures.
 * Battle Tanx: the Flamethrower powerup and the Inferno tank
 * Worms
 * Ratchet and Clank
 * Halo
 * Gears of War
 * Team Fortress Classic
 * Team Fortress 2: the Pyro has a normal one and a special one called the "Backburner".
 * With the Polycount update, he/she gains another flamethrower known as the Degreaser, which trades a weaker afterburn for a faster switching time.
 * Dead Space
 * Call of Duty: World At War
 * Grand Theft Auto
 * Flamethrowers are a Fallout series staple. The Broken Steel add-on to Fallout 3 adds the Heavy Incinerator, which rapid-fires gobs of napalm over long distances.
 * Mass Effect 2 has one for Shepard in Zaeed's DLC.
 * The Blood Pack mercenaries also sometimes deploy vorcha troopers with flamethrowers. Like most Blood Pack weapons, it's exceptionally deadly up close and exceptionally vulnerable from far away.
 * Strife
 * Fire Shark
 * Obscure NES strategy RPG Just Breed has one that's also a Flaming Sword; every time you attack with it, it hits nearly half the battlefield with an absurdly massive area-effect cone of fire.
 * Starcraft has the Firebats, armored soldiers with twin flamethrowers on their arms. Really, really great against the Zerg. Not so great against anybody else, though...
 * Starcraft II gives us a vehicular update with the Hellion.
 * Protoss Colossi, meanwhile, are known for their heat rays.
 * Deus Ex and its sequel.
 * The Naval Ops allows you to mount flamethrowers on your ship, and they are quite effective against the Habbakkuk boss, an aircraft carrier made of ice.
 * One of the weapons Samus Aran from Metroid frequently has in her Arm Cannon is the Plasma Beam. In Metroid Prime and the Super Smash Bros. series, she also has an actual flamethrower.
 * Toy Soldiers: The Chemical Thrower of the first game could be upgraded into a flamethrower, and in Toy Soldiers: Cold War,it returned in the form of a Aerosol Flamethrower.
 * Metal Slug flamethrowers belch a fairly short-ranged blast of flame that can torch multiple enemies. Especially handy against mummies, which require a lot of pistol rounds to take down.
 * Skylight has flamethrowers, which can deal a lot of damage against anyone afflicted with the Douse status effect.
 * The flamethrowers in Alien Hallway.

Real Life

 * Flamethrowers were used in several wars as well as for commercial clearing of land. Plus, they're pretty much the first example of gunpowder being used for, well, guns instead of rockets.
 * Improvised Weapon: Supersoaker flamethrower
 * The Dragon's Breath shotgun shell.
 * The earliest use of a flamethrower in war could be seen as far back as the Byzantine "Greek fire" (with simple pumps full of a flammable liquid), and it could be found even earlier in myth and legend.
 * FPS Russia demonstrates.