Bomb on a Stick

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What's more destructive than a Blade on a Stick and almost as simple?

An explosive device used in contact, rather than more common lobbed or planted varieties. In the hands of someone who isn't a suicidal attacker, the pole provides (barely) enough range to avoid being caught in the blast, while still allowing very direct "guidance". Thus, the answer is "Bomb on a Stick".

Subtrope of X on a Stick. See also Ramming Always Works and Boom Stick. Compare and contrast Action Bomb.

Examples of Bomb on a Stick include:

Anime and Manga

• One Piece has Don Krieg with his Great Battle Spear — a giant spear that releases an explosion when swung with sufficient force. Luffy even calls it a "bomb on a stick" after he manages to break it.

Literature

• In Without Remorse, this trope is pulled off with a shotgun shell primed to explode on the end of a stick, which blows a lethal hole in the target's chest; a cop later remarks that the uniqueness of the wound would wind up in a medical journal.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000
  • Ork "Tankbustas" use a Tankhammer, which is a rokkit on a pole. Orks are lousy shots, but reasonably good in melee, almost fearless, and have a good chance to approach the target vehicle without being mowed down due to being numerous and tough. They become casualties on the attack, however; this does not necessarily mean all the way dead, but this puts even an Ork out of action. Not as good as plain rokkit spam, but it works.
  • Human Rough Riders attack tanks and heavily armored infantry with Hunting Lances, which are indeed bombs on a shaft (though there are variants). Those are single-use, obviously, but the rider and mount survive and can go engage something less armored with a laspistol or saber.
• Spelljammer has the Goblin ship Urchin, which is a closed shell covered with pole mines.

Video Games

• In Team Fortress 2, the Demoman has the Ullapool Caber, a community-made "melee weapon" that's literally just an elongated "potato masher" grenade.
• According to the game's wiki, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator has a secret suicide unit called "Bomb on a Stick".

Real Life

• Pole mines, or spar torpedoes, were actually used on 19th-century ships, but became obsolete once self-propelled torpedoes improved enough to actually hit things merely twenty times longer than a barn, while defensive artillery was souped up enough that approach to ramming range became unlikely. It's not quite as outlandish as it sounds: while it would be very close to suicidal against a flotilla in the open sea (as a larger ship could blow such a vessel to bits in one good salvo, or a few gunboats could intercept rather reliably), taking out a lone raider and/or hit-and-run near the shore where such boats can lurk behind islands and bluffs are much more favorable scenarios, since larger ships cannot maneuver freely. And if a few little steamboats are launched by a cruiser that's still around… the opponent probably won't give them as much attention as they could attract on their own.
  • Purpose-built spar torpedo boats became the first type of fast attack craft. One implication of payloads as small as a single bomb was that the minimal platform for it amounts to "generic fast steamboat used as a hopefully-reusable manned torpedo". There were many purpose-built ones in the range of 8.4 to 16 tons of displacement; later on, many of these were refit with torpedo tubes, and some launchers not built for a spar torpedo still could mount one as an option. Very limited range and seaworthiness of such boats led to the creation of torpedo boat motherships, which didn't change much in the era of self-propelled torpedo… and were forebears of aircraft carriers — La Foudre (1895) was even refit as a seaplane carrier later on.
  • On the somewhat more seaworthy end, there were mostly Russian and Scandinavian vessels weighing 40 to 70 tons or so — fast and small vessels that eventually grew up into the destroyers and torpedo gunboats of later eras. Those could double as patrol boats and were used more like warships than manned munitions; Lift the mine out of magazine, affix to the pole, move the pole forward in its guides, switch the galvanic fuse on, and you have an explosive ram. A partially destroyed pole is easy to replace as well (if the boat itself didn't crash or get crippled in the attack, that is). Reloading is a long process, but how often you can make ramming runs, anyway? The wide range of sizes made classification of such vessels rather wobbly, however.
  • Two wars where the spar torpedo played a significant role were The American Civil War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. The difference is that this time the Russian Navy had naval mines of good quality mass produced, and all technologies involved in the ram version already polished to respectable levels, while Confederate mines were improvised and mostly bad (hence "Damn the torpedoes!": even after Tecumseh ran into one good mine, Farragut gambled that the ones on his way were duds… and won). Obviously, reliability matters even more for munitions used in Death or Glory Attacks than mass deployed ones, even if they can be checked regularly — and this contributed to the outcome.
    • A specific example from the former: the H. L. Hunley, the Confederate submarine, was the first combat submersible to sink an enemy warship, the USS Housatonic, which was part of the blockade of Charleston SC in 1864. The Hunley was armed with a "spar torpedo" that consisted of an explosive mounted on the end of a spar extending from the front of the submarine. The Hunley was sunk when the torpedo exploded before they could detach the spar after ramming it into the Housatonic‍'‍s hull, and went down with its target.
    • Of the latter, Stepan Makarov, then Captain of Velikiy Knyaz Konstantin (the first torpedo boat carrier, if converted from a passenger vessel) was an enthusiast of torpedo boats; he was the first to sink an enemy ship (Turkish steamer Intibah) with self-propelled torpedoes… that is, those were still a semi-experimental weapon at this point.
• The "potato masher" style of stick grenade mentioned above originated as a standard hand grenade for the German Empire during World War I, distinguished by its wooden handle - the Germans called them Stielhandgranate (literally "stick hand grenade"), while the "potato masher" name originated from slang used by British soldiers.
  • The anti-tank grenade was an Improvised Weapon composed of the aforementioned "potato masher", with two or three more high explosive heads taped to the end to create one larger grenade. It was used by arming it and throwing it on top of the slowly advancing tank where the armor was usually thinnest; later anti-tank grenades used by nations during World War II would go for more of a Sticky Bomb approach.