There was an arc in the webcomic Girl Genius (highly recommended, by the way) where a couple of the characters were in a tight spot in a dungeon somewhere. Surrounded by bad guys and running thin on options. So one of them pulled out a wine-bottle-sized glass bottle labeled "bottled ocean". (I might be getting one or two small details wrong, but stay with me here.) He threw it on the ground and a big-ass tidal wave worth of water emerged and swept the characters, along with a bunch of the bad guys, all the way out of the dungeon. It was quite perilous, of course. (There was a chance they could bang into a lot of shit on the way, for instance.) Definitely a reckless move. But it worked, carrying the characters to safety. Risky, but an ace-in-the-hole if you really need it.

I was DM'ing a Pathfinder game at the time, and of course I had to make sure my PC's got a "bottled ocean" in their inventory.

(My version, rather than stoppered, was fully sealed. Like, an ampule rather than a wine bottle. Still wine-bottle-sized, though. And my version had a label on it that said "bottled ocean.")

Upon receiving it, they reasoned that if it was a "bottled ocean", it must be under tremendous pressure. They decided they'd try to construct a "gun" out of it. Mount the ampule in the gun, somehow (very carefully?) drill a small hole in the bottle, and rig a trigger to where they could open the "hole" on command. They figured with the amount of pressure it was under, it would create a stream strong enough to cut through enemies. Like an industrial CNC water cutting machine. Or like that one puppet-master Akatsuki guy from near the beginning of Naruto Shippuden who used high-pressure water jets as a weapon.

They never made good on their threat to try to engineer such a thing. Never used the "bottled ocean" for any other purpose either. But I had to admire their creativity.

Had they succeeded in making such a gun (and it would definitely have involved a pretty high roll), I might have ruled that even if it worked, the shooter would have to roll a... maybe athletics check or be pushed back, say, 5 feet in the direction opposite the direction they fired. (Unless maybe there was a sufficiently strong wall or whatever behind them, or unless they were prone. Maybe make that 10 or even 15 feet if fired by a small creature.)

Edit: Found the specific Girl Genius comic where the "bottled ocean" (or as the source called it, "ocean in a bottle" -- I misremembered) was mentioned: https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20030827 . That one and the next three or four show how it's used.