This giant Winchester rifle is not a laser, but was designed to zap tanks (VIDEO)

Tunneling into the Cody Firearms Museum to look for those Forgotten Weapons, Ian poked around until he found perhaps the last example of an experimental anti-tank rifle.

The prototype Winchester dates from 1918, a time when John Browning was working on his .50 BMG round and the Germans had their own giant T-Gewehr 13mm Mauser rifle in the trenches of Western Europe with the aim of sniping early armored vehicles.

The now-99-year-old elephant gun was dubbed a “swivel rifle” by Winchester and looks about as steampunk as the most goggle-wearing fan of Jules Verne could imagine. Termed simply as a “bolt gun” in patent paperwork by inventor Edwin Pugsley, this space rifle is as funky as they came– but predated the Barrett .50 cal by almost a century.

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