What is the best handheld/portable weapon for a person who is 1 inch(2.5 centimeters) trying to take down an 6 foot man?

Question

I am back in a 'shrinking/being small is neato' phase, so I have been thinking about things at small scale.

Anyway, my question is what would be the best choice of weaponry for a 1 inch tall man that can be held or ported by a person in general, to fell a 'giant'/6 foot man(or woman if you had so liked)?

Of course, here is some clarification context:

1. Any real/realistic(no fictional weapons) weapon type such as explosives, guns, or bladed weapons are allowed as long as an average 6 foot tall (shrunken)man can wield and lug it around.

2. The target is asleep/unaware of his assassin's presence.

3. The shrunken/small man is unaffected by the negative or positive ramifications of being that small. He has the same proportional strength and speed as when he was 6 feet tall. The weapon(s) also still works despite being shrunk.

So what would be the wisest weapon to use to slay the 'giant'?

Answer 1

A poisoned needle

You only need to puncture the skin of your victim in order to deliver enough of the humanity's best poison to kill the target. And since a mosquito is a lot smaller than one inch and still does penetrate the skin, a scaled down human can do that too. Finally, the assassin does not need to apply their own force to the needle, just simulate that a mosquito has just landed on an open skin, and then the person would whack self there, hitting the poised needle. There, target eliminated.

Answer 2

The shrunken/small person is unaffected by the negative or positive ramifications of being that small. They have the same proportional strength and speed as when they were 6 feet tall.

By this, I think you're saying to ignore the square-cube scaling laws. That is, the small person does not have the high strength-to-weight ratio that a creature his size would normally have; their strength-to-weight ratio is the same as that of a full-size person. If a full size person can just barely carry a load, then the little person can just barely carry the same load scaled down to their dimensions. This is the same as saying that their muscle tissue is weaker per cross sectional area than a full-size human's.

So, if they can just barely carry around a 100 kg object at 6 ft (182.9cm) tall, they can just barely carry around the proportionally shrunken object when they're 1 inch (2.54 cm) tall. The proportionally shrunken object weighs (2.54 / 182.9)^3 * 100 kg = 0.27 grams.

Also suppose they weigh roughly 0.27 grams themselves, based on 100kg weight for a muscular six-foot tall soldier.

This means they're a lot weaker than an insect of similar size.

With regard to mobility, say that when full size they could jump 0.5m, which is a good vertical jump. When shrunk therefore they can jump 0.7cm. They can't easily climb objects the way insects can.

• Explosives? Possible, if circumstances are perfect. 0.27 grams of TNT will release 1130 J, a potentially fatal amount of energy if directed properly. It would be like a moderately large firework. Perhaps if they could glue the explosive to the target's temple before running away and detonating it, it would be fatal. However, climbing up to the target's temple while carrying their own body weight in explosive would be an impossible task if the target is standing up. This could only be possibly effective if the target is lying down. ("wedging" the explosive underneath is not possible with only 0.27 grams-weight of force).
• A knife? No. 0.27 grams-weight of force is completely insufficient to drive a scalpel through skin.
• Poison? Possible. 30 milligrams of tetrodotoxin is a potentially lethal dose if ingested, and to the shrunken person this would be like a 10kg weight, a bit heavy but easily carried. The difficulty would be administering it. Climbing the target's coffee cup would be a monumental task, probably not possible with a smooth cup, to say nothing of getting on the table to begin with. They cannot inject the poison, because they do not have the strength to penetrate skin with a needle. Perhaps they could use a small explosive charge to drive the poison under the skin of the victim's ankle. This would, of course, be a suicide mission, since the poison wouldn't work instantly, and the little person is too slow to escape retaliation.

Answer 3

Now, I think it might be possible for your tiny murderer to take down a regular sized human with bladed weapons, but it isn't going to be very nice. You're gonna be needing a rebreather, some hooks, some sharp cutting instruments, maybe a crowbar and a willingness to crawl into confined, hot, slimy spaces. And then you're going inflict traumatic brain surgery, by going in through the nose whilst the victim is sleeping. It's is going to take some time, the nose-owner is going to be trying hard to get you out, and it is possible they might be able to get surgical assistance before you actually inflict enough damage to kill them promptly, but it remains possible.

I can think of a couple of better options though.

First is poison. Injecting the poison is largely impractical because skin is thick and tough and you'll have a job driving a mini-hydrodermic through it, but there's some scope for ingested stuff if you can get it into the victim's food or drink. The right kind of chemicals can also work if instilled into the eyes, but perhaps the most straightforward approach would be to use a powerful neurotoxin that can seep through skin.

Chemical weapons like VX are perhaps the best known example of such a thing. Only a few tens of milligrams of the stuff can kill an adult human, it is effective on skin contact, and protecting the assassin from the stuff requires relatively well-established protocols and fairly easily available protective equipment. Squirt some of the nerve agent into the victim's ears, nose, eyes or mouth for best effect (but even an exposed ankle or toe might be enough), leave promptly. They might never notice.

Other things like ricin, botulinium toxin, radiotoxins like polonium-210 and perhaps some biological weapons are even more dangerous but present significant difficulties when administering the stuff, and protecting your assassin from their dangerous effects. Wearing a hazmat suit and wielding a squirt-gun with some low-vapor-pressure neurotoxin seems much safer and more reliable.

The second is demolition.

You can't really treat something that's 72 times taller than you as an opponent you're going to fight with... its a large, complex, pretty solid structure that can nonetheless be damaged in some critical areas. Humans have been making military and industrial demolition charges using shaped exposives for decades now, mostly for use against tough things like rock, reinforced concrete or metal. A human target, being made largely of meat, seems likely to be easier to attack this way.

Consider something like the M150 "Penetrating Augmented Munition", intended to be a device that can be deployed by a single soldier capable of disabling a hard target. With a bit of careful design, a shrunken shaped charge might be made that's capable of being attached to the right spot on the scalp of the target and blasting through to the brain stem. Maybe several such charges would be needed to be certain, but a team working together could be fairly certain of killing a target with the right demolition charges.

Or, as Glen Yates said in the comments above, just nuke your way to success. You've already extended the middle finger of authorial fiat to the laws of physics, so of course your mini-nuke will work as expected. A shrunken Davy Crockett might just be powerful enough, with the scaled yield of 56g of TNT, the same as a hand grenade. For a bigger punch, the Special Atomic Demolitions Munition could deliver 10-1000 tonnes of TNT-equivalent in a single-person-portable form, and even when scaled down that's the equivalent of a couple of kilos of regular-scale TNT... much more than enough to kill a human. In either case, the amount of prompt radiation released by the nuclear reaction should be enough to inflict lethal damage to a nearby human even if the blast didn't. Even larger warheads can be brought in and still potentially deployed by a single person, eg. W82, etc. As luck would have it, there was another question about scaled nuclear weapons recently, so you can read my answer to that one, if you were interested, though it wasn't concerned with human-portable devices.

Answer 4

Based on your requirements - you are realistically limited to ingested poisons.

Your 1 inch human lacks the ability to puncture the skin using any bladed weapons - and any projectile weapons would have a projectile so light and tiny, it wouldn't be able to do any critical damage.

Since you can't reliably puncture the skin, Venoms and Toxins are out, which leads to ingested poison. Something like Cyanide or similar that can be Lethal in small amounts.

Even then, it's debatable whether our 1 inch human could carry enough poison to reliably kill a human.

Answer 5

In Dungeons & Dragons, the sprites (very small flying people) have weapons that do only 1 damage (due to their diminutive size), but they use poison on them to do more damage. This would probably be your best bet here.

I would suggest using the poison of a poison dart frog, perhaps dripped from a vial or stabbed with a dagger-like weapon. It is a good choice because even small doses ─ as small as one microgram, according to sciencedirect.com ─ can cause muscle paralysis/convulsions or death. Your theoretical inch-tall person, being around 1/70th the size of a human, thus has 1/343,000 the muscular capacity of humans (because muscles are three-dimensional), and could (with work) carry over 100,000 micrograms of things, easily allowing enough to drip the poison on the person.

Answer 6

A rocket-propelled grenade with a batrachotoxin- botulotoxin- or something-injection warhead should do the trick. The injection warhead would have to be custom-designed, but well within physical laws.

Best used from a vicinity of a mouse hole for bonus to own survival.

Answer 7

If we're operating in the realms of realism as much as possible, the best way might actually be to use something like fentanyl, or a derivative of it.

It's something that you could realistically find in just about any town or city simple by looking in the obvious places, and it only takes a very small amount of it to render someone unconscious, or even dead.

It can be injected, put in food or drink, or even administered directly such as through the ear or eyes.

Answer 8

Since it's sci-fi, I'd go antimatter.

I gram of antimatter, is "like one nuclear bomb".

Our 1-inch guy can only carry 1/4 gram of anything, so, he can in theory have an antimatter bomb that is powerful enough to easily kill one human, or say small building.

How he delivers it, I have no idea. He's far to weak to throw, climb, etc.

I guess, some sort of micro-mine-like device, a timed bomb. He attaches it and runs.

Again, the ONLY thing (in the universe) with any power at the scale of a tenth of a gram, is anti-matter.

AIM - Antimatter inch man!

Maybe there's some sort of plot twist where indeed he himself "is made of" antimatter. In some unimaginable way, he does NOT just immediately self-destruct. But when he say spits, pees or defecates, in some way ("quantum!") enough time passes for him to clear the area, and then the left-behind item becomes un-encased (or whatever) and there's a matter-anti-matter annihilation event - destroying the enemy.

Answer 9

If you aren't using poison

High explosives

Insert into ear cavity. Or put on temples. Etc

A sharpened telescopic pole

Insert up nostril or into ear of sleeping victim.

Electricity

This will take a little setup, but while the victim is asleep, wire mains electricity to them. A circuit without an RCD, or a cable on a 2 pin plug will be required.

Hypersonic rocket

This basically becomes a conventional bullet.

Answer 10

Miniature sized self inflating raft

Assuming the target is asleep, wait until their mouth is open, and then drop into their throat and deploy the self-inflating raft. This will clog their airway and unless someone is nearby to perform a tracheotomy or the Heimlich maneuver this should be relatively effective. As an added bonus, after the target has expired, the raft can be deflated and removed, leaving little evidence of the cause of death (aside from asphyxiation).

Seriously though, poison is probably the right answer as basically everyone else has pointed out.

Answer 11

The most obvious response would be "poison", but that may be exactly the reason to not use poison. If it's so obvious, then it won't be nearly so interesting. So there are a few other options.

As a tiny person, they actually have a distinct advantage. One major reason we cannot make objects any sharper than a fine razor is because we are big and our machines are big. A tiny person with a tiny file could easily make something sharper than a razor, so much more if they have a proper whetstone. A blade this sharp would easily open softer flesh, and being such a small, thin blade, it would be almost painless. Moreover, the tiny person may even be able to see the smaller nerves, so they could avoid startling the giant.

Option 2 is infection of bacteria, fungi, or parasites. Note that this is a slower, more subtle approach. To a person 1 inch tall, a standard 2-micrometer germ will look about 1/7th of a millimeter. Now that might be tiny, but it's big enough for a tiny person to collect the microorganisms on a tiny razorblade and deposit them wherever needed.

Option 3 is fireworks. Readily available, and often far too powerful. It only takes 1 well-placed spark to set it off, and if a tightly held firecracker can take off your hand, what will it do up your nose or down your throat?