Grrl Power #330 – Action zeroing the needle
I don’t know a ton about guns, but I know enough that a standard car door isn’t going to do much to stop a bullet, especially not something coming out of a rife. Now I don’t know if your standard police cruiser has slightly tougher doors – I assume they’re at least a little bit armored. Every movie and TV show ever has cops popping out of their car and taking cover behind the doors. I guess it’s better than nothing even if it isn’t armored as it kind of hides you, but even if they’re armored like battleship plating it seems like a good way to get shot in the feet.
Most cop/detective/etc show have people being moderately intelligent about using cover, but as soon as you stray anywhere near action hero territory, it seems like the good guy never wins because he uses his environment tactically, he wins merely because the bad guys can’t hit squat. How many times have you seen a hero running down a hallway or across a clearing while multiple people fire automatic weapons at him? Can you think of a single scene like that where the guy even tries to zig zag? No, he runs in a straight line, usually in slow motion cause it looks more dramatic. If no one firing at him had ever handled a gun before, ok, then I’d buy that the hero could escape unscathed, but usually he’s up against mercenaries or soldiers of some sort, and presumably they’re familiar with their weapons.
I may need to tweak Peggy’s dialog a little on this page as “Firearms 101” isn’t the name of an actual course in the military. Also I’m pretty sure “technical manuals and regs” isn’t the right lingo either, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Asking about this stuff on Twitter gets a lot of different answers as it seems every branch does things a little bit differently.
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Peggy caught on quick on how to deal with sydney
YES!
Not only that, she is exactly right about firearms in the media.
Sydney has a LOT to unlearn. Some nice dry technical manuals, and practice assembling and disassembling her gun will help ground her.
Once you learn that a gun is just a machine, no magic whatsoever, you are ready to learn it’s uses and it’s limits.
Once you learn that an apostrophe is just a punctuation mark, not magic whatsoever, you are ready to learn its uses and its limits.
*I’tz
Mmm, I think you are being a bit unfair there. WEKM was clearly caught up in the moment, and seeking to give a prompt reply. So the grammar suffered somewhat, as a result. But I do not feel that the gist of the message was lost. In fact, I felt that the style actually contributed to carrying a feeling of emotion.
Plus I felt that the points made were highly pertinent and even insightful.
As regards the apostrophe, I believe that both are correctly used. They indicate the possessive, and contextually, should be taken as applying to the gun. So the comment is about the gun’s uses and the gun’s limits. And it specified “a gun”, so it is correctly formatted for the singular subject.
Unfortunately not Yorp. When using an apostrophe with a noun it conveys the possessive (“Maxima’s gun, Sydney’s dementia, Arc’s crippling naming policy”). But when using the word “it” the possessive is without the apostrophe.
Its = Belonging to It
It’s = It is
Dang. I use that all the time. It’s going to be a hard habit to break. Thanks for clarifying where I was getting it wrong.
speaking as an EFL teacher who also consults with English to Korean translators fairly often….due to the number of other languages we’ve borrowed from over the 400 year history of Modern English (and the 2000+ years of Middle and Old English that came before)….our language is a fiddly thing of grammatical minefields.
Think of the apostrophe as the shrivelled second “I” from the words “It is”.
The thing that made most sense, checking to see if there are any exceptions, such as regional variations (which there are not), is that you do not use a possessive apostrophe if saying “her gun” or “his gun” so you should not if saying “its gun”.
Mind you, all it will take to distract me is a bright shiny object, and I could forget that.
Sleeping… that might do the trick.
So, as long as I stay in a sensory deprived gloomy room, and don’t sleep, I will be fine.
You have maybe a week before insanity will kick in.
Electric shocks may help.
Whines.
*runs under table, cowers and starts shaking violently*
Is it not also true that “it’s” can also be an abbreviation of “it has”? If so, WEKM’s sentence reads
“Once you learn that a gun is just a machine, no magic whatsoever, you are ready to learn it has uses and it has limits.”
While that sentence could benefit from a “that”, it reads fluidly and is only slightly ambiguous.
If that were the application, ‘that’ would be present. This is one of those cases where the ambiguity of one word necessitates the presence of another to maintain clarity.
“It’s” for “It has” is discouraged to the point of being marked wrong in places. Similarly, double and triple contractions are exceedingly rare to see written.
I wonder…Since Peggy wasn’t around to see Sydney do her previous mental “reset” (ie: head, meet desk)…
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/720
…how did she know the right method to trigger this reset?
…A sniper with precognition…A scary thought.
Snipers know to use every resource available to gain maximum possible intelligence on their target and operating environment.
In this case office gossip.
More like Maxima ranting to her about it.
probably ranted more about that it fucking worked than that sydney did it
Awesome technique! And more importantly Halo understands.
She must’ve heard about the reset to shield procedure already.
i love that peggy does a yoda impression…..but yeah like you said movies and tv are horrible about what is acceptable cover.
Like firing an mini-gun on full-auto from a helicopter into an office where a person you are trying to rescue is sitting tied to a chair with three bad guys. The probability of hitting your buddy while firing from such a mobile platform is absolutely incredible. Really bad idea.
Unless of course it’s all basically a video game and you just unlocked some cheat codes…. Or something.
Side note. I’m pretty sure Miniguns don’t have any sort of semi-auto setting. Just saying.
Ukoyu Kuonji fan by any chance?
Nnnnope. The name is much more convoluted than that.
Although now that I’ve looked her up, I do like her style.
and i love equilibriums gun-kata….even if it is a load of horse manure
In complete agreement.
One of my favorite movies.
That it is. In spite of the fact that that the producer insists that Gun-Kata is a real martial art.
But Wanted and curving the bullet. That’s real, right?
Right?
*crickets chirp*
Hello?
If you have a smoothbore gun or a shotgun where the bullets or pellets have a nick or dent, then the bullet can curve more than normal, but not predictably enough to ‘aim’.
Am I the ONLY one that saw that as telekinesis? Swinging their arms did not make the bullet curve, although it might help them to visualize it. They made the bullet curve with their minds.
I’ll certainly accept that as a reasonable explanation.
A lot of things that people claim are plot holes or problems with movies, comics, manga, games, etc, I can frequently come up with something that sounds reasonable (at least to me) to patch it. Even if they didn’t explain it line for line in the text, I tend to air on the side of giving the story the benefit of the doubt unless it’s really egregious. Writers have to walk a fine line between showing-not-telling and treating everyone as if they are mentally deficient, and it can be tough, especially since they rarely have full control over the final product.
Am I the ONLY one who read the comic and thought that it was WAY more badass? I think they should redo the entire thing and keep the plot of the original now that the marvel cinematic universe has made the idea of super heroes and villains more mainstream.
No Scott, you weren’t. I read the comics long before the movie came out. When I heard that they were making the movie, I was elated that something that bad-ass was going to the big screen. And then they did nothing but co-opt the name and a VERY small amount of the plot.
As a popcorn actioner, it was okay, but it would have been better if they had stuck to the f*cking script (the comics)!!!
I hate when movie studios do that. Like what they did to Nourse’s book “Blade Runner”… bought the movie rights and then the only thing they used was the title, which they applied to a movie derived from a completely different book from another author.
The Blade Runner movie is based on the Philip K. Dick short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.
Telekenesis? Daniel the Human told me a bit about it. Sounds like it could work. Have to swing the gun to “make it work”, when really it’s them instinctively using telekinesis? Plausible. People used to think chemistry was witchcraft till they learnt the actual workings of it, I can see this explanation fitting well…
I think some of my students from this past semester think chemistry must be magic, based on the answers I got on the final exam. Did you guys even read the review questions? (Probably not)
Well that would explain why Mythbusters couldnt duplicate it. Telekinesis. It all makes sense now!
Myths Busted! Both special effects sequences that were tested were declared as having no basis in fact, even when ramped up to ridiculous levels.
I still blame John Woo and his movie “True Colors of a Hero” (aka. “A better tomorrow (1986)”) for starting this “Gun Fu” genre.
Look, anyone who’s had any kind of specialized training will eventually get upset that Hollywood doesn’t stick to the truth with their profession or hobby or whatever. You just gotta accept that MOVIES are made for ENTERTAINMENT and that rule-of-cool trumps accuracy to sell tickets.
So long as it’s not getting to many people killed I’m cool with that, and frankly if you get your safety advice from superstars then the gene-pool is probably better off without you anyway.
Yeah… medicine, science, history, armed combat, unarmed combat… you name it, Hollywood gets it wrong. Repeatedly.
And computers *shudder* you don’t even need to be an expert to spot those mistakes.
Yeah, computers may be tied with science for “most wrong in Hollywood depictions”.
And this is going to keep Mythbusters in business for years to come. We will not be running out of myths to test any time soon.
Don’t forget electricity. All those arcs and sparks. As the son of an Electrician who had 40+ years in the biz before retirement (My dad, not me), I know from all his bitching about it that you just don’t see those kinds of reactions when shit gets broke to do with electrics.
Always takes me out of the moment when I see it.
I know exactly what you mean. Movies tend to treat 110 Volts as though it were 10 kV, 12 V like it’s 120 V and 350 V like it’s 3.7 V. It’s completely out of proportion. But what gets me the worst is the common misconception that people have that “High Voltage” is synonymous with “extremely dangerous”. They treat slightly frayed wires like they’ll shock you to death if you pass within a few feet of them! I even had a shop instructor once, who claimed a tool was “broken” just because someone had cut the power cord. I mean, this guy could weld you a hotrod chassis out of a couple of tubes and a bit of wire, but apparently a trip to the hardware store for a new cord and five minutes with a screwdriver and soldering iron is some kind of voodoo majick. But people are convinced that if it arcs, it must be a lethal amount of electricity. Despite the fact that static electricity regularly exceeds 20 kV and almost never kills anyone. For those of you who don’t know, Voltage isn’t the only relevant statistic for electricity. There’s also Current or ‘Amperage’. Voltage basically measures how much the electrons want to get from the (-) pole to the (+) pole, while Current measures how many electrons are actually moving. If only one electron moves across a gap of 20,000 Volts, there’s not enough energy to do something. But if you move 6.02x 10^25 electrons across a gap of only about 120 Volts, it’s enough to power a light bulb for a bit over a minute and a half (that’s a fairly bright standard incandescent lighting fixture: it would power a comparable LED light for a lot longer).
The easy rule to remember is:
…it is the Velociraptor.
Large metal furniture that’s left in a dust storm can generate enough static electricity to At least knock a person flay on they’re ass. Kill if the storm lasted long enough and the equipment hadn’t a chance to get grounded yet. Farmers using fence wire to guide between buildings And forgetting glovessel were reminded often of this.
…And that even a current of 30 milliamps (that’s 30/1000 of 1 Ampere!), if continuous over a period of about 30 seconds, is enough to kill you. It’s even worse if the current crosses through your heart or brain. Or even if the entry & exit points on your body are through open wounds (bypassing your skin as a resistor); this has to do with nerve-tissue conduction & the fact that the whole of your interior is infused with saline water.
Yet, with low enough current, you can still get hit with 50,000 Volts & it’ll just make your hair stand on end. ;)
for those that have a decent understanding of electricity & the how’s/why’s it works, I refer you to: https://www.powermarketers.com/elec10.html
If you’re working with high levels of current, the 8th Commandment is most appropriate.
all good ones, though i’m hard pressed to understand why number nine is in there at all, for an ELECTRICIAN’S list. it doesn’t really have anything specific to electricity in it like the others do…
I suspect that is because of incompetent management and the past experiences of the writer (be it first or second hand).
Greedy or foolhardy management might choose not to hire suitably trained specialist personnel to deal with equipment, that incorporates or handles those substances. Simply because there are electronics involved, so they rationalise it as being an electrician’s job.
The electrician can then show him the 9th commandment, to disprove that notion.
Ok, the electrician might be called upon, in tandem, to work with such a specialist. But there is a clear division of duty. It is the other guy’s job to deal with those substances, and to ensure that the electrician is kept safe from them too. The electrician will then reciprocate, for his area of expertise.
Actually, before the transistor was invented, cathode ray tubes (radioactive!) were used. As a point of fact, the tubes are immune to EMP bursts!
Tubes are still used in industries even today, for those systems that require more power output than transistors can provide without burning out. One example is…Did you know that when you go to a music concert, those amplifier stacks are mostly built on tube-tech? Yep, the first few stages of power amplification are handled with transistors, but after that they need to switch to tubes to avoid burnouts.
Yea, my dad was a fighter pilot, so any flying movie he had a tendency to rip apart. We used to do it on purpose to watch him rant, it was great entertainment. One of the best was when he watched Top Gun.
As an ex-pilot, I can only imagine!
Let me guess, one of the things he ripped on was the magical disappearing-reappearing missile (due to the use of stock footage, every missile fired from an F-14 was from the left inboard rail).
*chuckles* The government could really use some of those magical missiles… it’d save a LOT of taxpayer money. (Each AIM-9 Sidewinder costs between $85,000 and $664,000 depending on variant, and each AIM-120 AMRAAM costs about $300,000 for the AIM-120C, and almost $1.8 million for the AIM-120D. The AIM-54 Phoenix was retired along with the F-14, but at the time it would’ve cost about $475,000 each.)
“(due to the use of stock footage, every missile fired from an F-14 was from the left inboard rail).”
“Fox 4, fire!” (Klunk!)
“Fox 4, fire!” (Klunk!)
Well, dammit!
What did he make of Independence Day? :P
I know, the factual errors they had inside those motherships were ridiculous! Ok, the exteriors were fine, albeit that they messed up the contrast a bit, when adjusting the stock footage for Terrestrial atmosphere. At least they had the sense to use stock from a planet orbiting a yellow star.
Of course the “aliens” were just the usual humans in a gorilla suit kind of arrangement. Nothing like any of the species using that class of mothership. No research.
um… huh? could you rephrase what you said… i understand the WORDS, but not what you meant… stock footage: from a planet orbiting a yellow star… well of COURSE they used that footage, that’s where WE are… and WHAT research COULD have been done?
Oh, you mean that knowledge of alien spacecraft and civilisations is not general knowledge, in your community? Oops. Just pretend I did not let that slip. We would not want panic to spread, in those communities which have not been adequately prepared for the news.
Keep up the good work DaveB.
I do the same thing whenever a movie or TV show supposedly happens in my home town, Rapid City SD, which comes up surprisingly often. Warehouse 13, Criminal Minds, and many more have all had episodes that supposedly happened here, and they never even look close, not even in the neighborhood of close. the Warehouse 13 episode for example, first thing I noticed was the height of the buildings, there is a city ordinance that buildings can’t be over 10 stories, and multiple buildings were above that on the show.
…When someone from Hollywood tells us that it was “filmed on location,” they can’t even be consistent on where that actual “location” was.
For example, in the Lord of the Rings movie, they actually built Bilbo & Frodo’s home village “on location”…At least to all external appearances. But when they filmed indoor scenes, it was in the studio.
I just laugh at anything advertised as “based on true events”. Inspired by an actual incident, maybe, but anything Hollywood turns out has about as much bearing on reality as Adventure Time does.
I especially like watching when the soldier-type action hero is running through a field under mortar bombardment…He just simply runs around the explosion.
Apparently, even with live military consultants on the set, the directors just can’t wrap their heads around the concept of “certain death zones” that are intrinsic with live artillery explosions.
:P
Well, to be fair, they kinda HAD to do the Shire indoor scenes at the studio – no room in a hobbit-hole for a camera-crew.
More often than not, because it’s cheaper, Canadian cities are used as stand-ins. Producers discovered that Vancouver could double for middle America, Toronto could stand in for New York City (especially if the director avoids wide shots), and Calgary can pass for the American West. The biggest difference is in the cost of labour.
Rather than post a big wall of text, I’ll just link to an article on Slate:
https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_hollywood_economist/2006/02/northern_expenditure.html
Similarly, any time a producer needs a setting that calls for a craggy, desert-like region, very often it’s filmed in or near the Vasquez Rocks in California (aka, the Gorn Battle Rocks).
just like in DR. Who, they used “The Quarry” a lot in the the Classic Who episodes. now days it seems like they just CGI anything they want to…
With advances in video card technology, I’m not surprised. It doesn’t take a Cray X-MP Supercomputer to render CGI anymore. Case in point, remember “The Last Starfighter”? 37 minutes of animation, at 5000×3000 resolution, 24 frames per second, with an average of 250,000 Gouraud-shaded polygons per frame, were done on a Cray X-MP in half the time and one-third to one-half the cost of traditional animation. That’s the reason why the movie “only” cost $14 million.
The Gunstar by itself consisted of 750,000 polygons which took the coders three months just to program into the computer. By comparison, modern video games use between 10,000 and 30,000 polygons per character, rendered at 1920×1080 resolution (or less), at a rate of 30 to 60 fps… on the other hand, modern video cards are much faster. Even an NVidia GeForce 580, which is nowhere near their top-of-the-line, can process approximately two billion polygons per second…
(Keep in mind that I am oversimplifying a bit. There are many other factors to a video card’s speed, such as the number of pixel pipelines, shader units, clock speeds, bus width, etc., so there’s more to it than just video RAM or the polygon count.)
Peggy officially is, and has been, my favorite character.
i gotta agree
The Peggy fan club grows.
I, of course, remain true to Sydney. But Peggy is a firm favourite, alongside Dabbler.
For the non-combatants it is easily Suzy News. Followed by the super barber, for his potential. With an honorary mention for Gwen, as I really want to see more of her.
Where do i sign up?
You can sign up with Archon at any United States Military Recruiting Center in Peggy’s version of reality; just make sure you bring documentation of your super-human abilities. I was going to say “Sydney’s version of reality”, but that might mean something a little different.
Oh, you mean the Peggy Fan club. Right here works fine.
Suzy News is quite awesome, yes.
I’m not sure what the lingo is in English, but when I got the relevant lecture, I got taught about what I’ll call “cover” and “hiding”.
If you’re behind a cover, the bullets can’t get to you.
If you’re behind a hiding, you make it harder for the enemy to know where to aim.
A police car door is mostly the later. While anyone can, obviously, extrapolate from the parts that are visible, not seeing the police man’s body makes it harder to aim correctly.
Shachar
Cover and hiding are basically the same. There aren’t many things that bullets can’t eventually get you through, so true cover is hard to come by. Taking cover is basically just making it so there is more stuff between you and the bullet so it’s less likely that you will get shot. Concrete is actually some of the best and most common you would find. Car doors work on smaller caliber bullets to at least stop most of them, which is why police are trained to use them. However, even solid blocks of steel aren’t perfect cover. Fire a few .50 cal rounds at it and eventually you’ll punch through. It’s all about buying some time to reload, or figuring out where your target is without getting shot.
What about 1 tank round?
This is bullet proof versus bullet resistant again.
I use a Maxima for that.
This could be a good job for Achilles. A walking shield that is ACTUALLY bullet proof, and can independently change position to protect you from newly discovered threats.
He would protect someone from the explosion of a tank round, but the kinetic energy would turn him into another flying object to worry about.
The ultimate point defense would be Achilles in front to take the hit, and Stalwart behind him to brace against the kinetic force.
I think his existing partnership is actually so successful because they work better than the one you are describing. Ie Achilles and Mr Amorphous. I think the stretchy powers are invaluable for such a role.
A car door isn’t great cover, as mentioned, but it IS a bit of metal and other materials that can slow/deflect the bullet a bit before it impacts the body armor the police are wearing. It’s not amazing, but it’s useful in some situations.
As to aiming for the feet/legs, that’s definitely possible, but there are often other things in the way at that level, sometimes including the ground itself, if it isn’t completely level.
A car door is useful against sub sonic .22 short rounds, and by useful I mean they will hurt less…
Unless the door is designed as cover(they do exist)
There is plenty of material that will provide ample cover, even against a Mini gun(rotary auto-cannon, don’t ever call it a chain gun, that’s something completely different),
A mound of Dirt is a good example, have a look at the stop butt of a rifle/gun range, I’ve seen one that been used for 30+ year at ammo test facility, probably got a few 100 more years before there is a problem, soil erosion from rain is faster :)
Aiming at feet or legs is possible, but unless you are Peggy, it wont be very effective..
As shown on Mythbusters, sufficiently deep water is excellent cover. Not only is it harder for a gunman to aim at you (as your image gets diffracted so that you appear just far enough away to avoid the bullet) , but the more powerful the gun, the less effective it is. They even brought in an anti-tank gun and shot it at a target in a swimming pool. Just two feet under the water, and the target was perfectly fine, but the “bullet” from the anti-tank gun disintegrated the moment it hit the water’s surface.
Exactly what I was going to say about Mythbusters being a good idea to also watch. The episode with Kari Byron humping a hoofing great sniper rifle in the “is a phone book bullet proof” episode is more than enough proof especially regarding car doors. Plus….Kari Byron. Nuff said really.
Also awesome Hot Fuzz rendition in the middle there DaveB. Its really like the scene.
Soft….Strong and incredibly long. Absorbs all sorts of crap coming at it :D
So THAT’S why when “it” hits the fan, it just goes everywhere…The fan is made entirely of hard, non-porous, non-absorbent materials!
MB did one on it hitting the fan as well. It was very informative, especially the consistency it needs to be to hit n spray :D
Mind you anybody who can mistake a fan, for a toilet, probably has considerably more issues to worry about. Their everyday survival skills seem lacking.
As for the proverbial moment though, timing wise, that is indeed a poor moment to be covered in a slippery material. Exposed flesh, crouched, and possibly off-balance, slippery surfaces, a sudden distraction and whirling blades of death, do not sound like an enviable situation.
I think that implication of bad things happening, and potentially worse to come, deserves a “confirmed”.
When I was in the Navy, we were told that everybody has an inherent allergy for getting shot at; symptoms include large red spots appearing on the skin, excessive tiredness to the point of passing out & toxic levels in the blood due to lead poisoning.
… sorry, got distracted when you said “Kari Byron humping”.
The funny thing about water and bullets, as Mythbusters showed, is that the higher the energy of the round being fired into it, the faster it breaks up. Presumably subsonic ammunition would remain effective (or at least remain in one piece) to a greater depth than the anti-tank round had.
They did do a bit on Mythbusters about a scene from Burn Notice where the main character said that when being pursued by a car it is better to try to ricochet a shot off the pavement under the car and into the undercarriage as it is easier than going through the engine. The Mythbusters test said it was “plausible” but very hard at speed.
Shachar,
You got it mostly right. We call it “cover” and “concealment”. the best cover in the world is dirt, a lot of it. This is why foxholes exist. Get shoveling!
The PPO would make a pretty effective foxhole generator…
Just remember to allow cooling time. Otherwise, standing thigh-deep in lava probably yields less benefit, than risking the hazards above ground height.
And remember Sydney. You have to reload the gun, you can’t just shoot it fourth times before reloading.
Forty*
I often have to say this to many people who want to get a gun but have never used one outside of airsoft, paintball, or just seeing them used in movies. When I tell them that in the military I used .50 cal, .25 cal, 9mm Beretta, M60, M14, M16, and 12 gauge shotguns, they start thinking that I was out there just firing them all the time jumping around like a renegade cop with nothing left to lose.
Then I take them to a gun range and take 10 minutes to inspect the gun I’m about to use and assume the most boring (yet safe and consistent) stance before I start firing and if they even attempt to do something stupid like dual wield, side arm shoot, or shoot with the gun tilted over, I take their ammo away and make them shoot with no bullets so they don’t hurt anyone. Either respect the gun and fire it correctly and safely, or get treated like child.
So Peggy…you handle Sydney well…and I salute you for it. /o.o
You have them dry fire the weapon? Pretty sure we were taught that’s something not to do.
Trust me…when you have a person that just wants to do all the cool action movie moves at a range, they usually can’t even find the safety. Even if they do, it’s pretty embarrassing to be at a range and having to say ‘bang’ every time you pull the trigger. They quickly let me teach them the proper way to handle the gun.
There are dummy bullets designed just for dry firing so as not to damage the firing pin. They are usually referred to as “snap caps.”
Snap Caps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_cap
https://www.azoomsnapcaps.com/home/
Dry Fire to your hearts content.
We used to have snap-caps with build-in laser pointers. You coud dry-fire your pistol to a photo-sensitive target, and get used to pistol weight and trigger pull before using live ammunition. Some information of similar product can be found in:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYeZdTQIJ34
Fascinating.
That is the kind of science-fiction sounding thing that does get suggested in our comments. And I think to myself “shame some of the feasible ideas do not get put into production.” Lovely to see the aesthetics they used, to retain appeal for their ahem … target audience.
With practical benefit of ensuring a snug fit. Likewise nice to see their simple solution which ensured the latter, whilst not overly compromising the former.
Out of curiosity, presumably this becomes less useful at longer ranges? Where ballistic trajectory would deviate from straight-line targeting. I am guessing that is why they were demonstrating a pistol. I imagine that there is not much deviation within their effective range.
And, how realistic is the red dot on the chest thing, in movies? Here I am talking about snipers who are so far away, that they cannot otherwise be seen. Given that snipers have to factor drop, wind and other factors in, wouldn’t the difference, at sufficient range, make the dot more of a distraction, than an aid? Making the red dot more of an intimidation technique, or even a bluff, than a firing aid.
with no real experience with them as i was a shipboard based Squid, I’d say that the only reason that they’d be using a laser pointer like that out in the field is to illuminate a target for air-dropped laser-guided munitions.
Back in the day, the drills used to say “don’t be John Wayne.” For example, the way you see people throwing grenades in the movies is not the way you throw a grenade. The way you see in movies is a good way to have the grenade slip out of your hand, and blow up something you care about… like yourself. The other thing that you never ever do in real life is “rock and roll” with a full magazine in your rifle, or just keep firing away until the ammo belt runs out with a machine gun. Besides wasting ammunition, it turns out that you’re going to destroy the barrel if you do that. In fact, they have the equivalent of an oven mitt and a spare barrel for the M60.
3 round bursts, 5 rounds maximum. Never spray and pray. Always aim, then fire.
This is true. I used to be an M60 gunner and got to know that pig quite well. If you fire an entire belt of 100 rounds through it in one pull the barrel will be glowing cherry red. This is not a good thing. Fire more and the barrel can actually turn white and start to droop as it starts to melt. This is not a good thing. All machineguns have changeable barrels for when they start to get too hot, with various degrees of difficulty. The M60 has a quick change barrel which has a latch you turn to release it. The problem with the original models was that there wasn’t a place to grab it that wasn’t burning hot, thus the asbestos oven mitt.
In fact, after firing off a full magazine or two some guys would use the barrels of their M16s to light their cigarettes.
“Has anyone got a light?”
“Hang on a second, I just need to reload my ‘lighter'”
“You mean refuel.”
“Nope. You may want to cover your ears.”
I’ve never done that, but a Marine friend of mine once said he got his barrel hot enough to cook bacon on it.
Granted, he said it was the nastiest bacon he’d ever eaten, but BACON.
https://www.troopsofdoomcomic.com/2008/03/26/smoke-break/
‘Nuff said.
Clever name by the way. :-)
Thanks!
If misery loves company, it’s always good to have a friend, even when you’re in the pits.
I know I’ve seen a video on Youtube of some special-forces operatives (I think they were British?) using a rifle-barrel to cook scrambles eggs.
You do not want to know the dual purpose use the British Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre use their cups for. They only have room for the one, as they have a lot of other survival-critical kit they have to haul too.. But it would put you off your food, so I will spare you the explanation.
Suffice it to say it is necessary for survival, but eeew!
Well as Bear Grylls explained to Miranda about in the Artic they would poo in clingfilm and pass it round as a hand warmer. Hmm who would rather be cold?
You say that now- but I like not losing several fingers to frostbite, too.
I remember hearing a story about how in world war 1 or 2 the British would heat their tea on the barrels.
In both wars the English used Maxim water-cooled machine guns: there was a water filled jacket around the barrel to allow longer periods of sustained fire. And yep, there were plenty of records of Tommies firing off a belt or two to provide hot water for a brew-up they otherwise wouldn’t have had. IIRC, there was a ‘Willie and Joe’ cartoon with some GI’s doing the same with a Browning MG.
I was on a live fire exercise, where we fired so many rounds that the plastic handguards on my C7 got so hot that sand started to melt into them. 10 years later they were still visible embedded in the plastic.
OK, now I’m curious on the right way to throw a grenade.
Like a baseball. That’s why the newer M67 hand grenades are approximately the same size as one, the vast majority of American recruits are familiar with throwing a baseball so the training is easier. The older M26 Vietnam lemon shape and the really old M2 pineapple ones fit the hand nicely but weren’t the easiest to throw.
And you really want to throw them as far away as you can. Like the old adage says “once you pull the pin Mister Hand Grenade is no longer your friend.”
And be sure to throw the grenade, not the pin. And, no that is not just a comment for comedic effect. My grandfather used to be the unlucky guy who did live grenade training. And did see that happening. More than once.
Mind you, that was during WWII. So they had to be put through training fast, to get them to the front. I hope that present day training is better.
So he just had to have contingency plans, to deal with the odd guy holding a live grenade in a terrified death grip. On two occasions it required hasty evacuation of the trench.
and a hasty evacuation of bowels for the poor sod holding it.
Yes, I agree that this particular situation would work quite well as a laxative. Works really fast too.
And if you hang on to the grenade long enough, it’ll evacuate more than just your bowels.
i thought that the “spoon” i think it’s called, when RELEASED is the thing that ACTUALLY “lights the fuse” or however its actually activated and primed to detonate… so, until that spoon/lever thing is LET GO, that grenade is actually still SAFE… but when the guys hand cramps up from gripping it so tight, THAT’S when the mistakes happen, because the PIN was HOLDING that lever in the proper place.
Sounds like techniques have changed. I know that when grenades first made their way into the arsenal, troops were trained to throw them in an arcing lob…. then again, this was roundabout World War I, the advent of trench warfare, and ‘getting it into the other guy’s set of ditches’ was rather the idea. Today’s battlefields rarely involve trenches that deep.
Heh, don’t take my “trench” to be too literal. He was a retired soldier, using technical jargon from half a century before. Whatever term he used (which may have been ‘trench’) got stored in my little grey cells as “clearly something like a trench”. It may just as easily have been a couple of lines of sandbags, and they ran out the sides. Either way they had to get out fast. :-D
And, no, I never did ask for any details, of what happened next. I never knew my grandfather when I was young enough that I might have asked tactless questions. Possibly there was a happy ending.
Judging by his expression though, I doubt it. There were some sad memory associations. Maybe those, maybe others. But he did not talk much about any of it. And I never pushed beyond what he felt like volunteering.
He did give me his souvenir grenade though. Deactivated, of course. So I know one model of WWII grenade intimately.
The arcing overhand lob may be a national/cultural thing. I’ve heard people mention throwing grenades ‘as if bowling a cricket ball’, which sounds similar. Obviously that’s a lot more likely to be meaningful and practiced from a British perspective (like mine) than an American (like yours, presumably), and vice versa for the baseball reference.
Bear in mind I’ve no first-hand experience of the subject; even if I’m remembering correctly someone’s correct memories of how they were taught, the recommended method may have changed.
That thing about pulling the pin with your teeth? Yeah, don’t do that. Grenade pins require a lot more pull than your teeth do.
At least, that’s the consensus reached from the discussions between Drill Sergeants & Dentists…
I’m fairly sure that’s not a bug, but a feature.
And while you’re at it, don’t try to pull the pin with your teeth. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but those pins are designed to be hard to pull, to help prevent accidents; it’s a good way to break your teeth.
Darn. Once again, other people beat me to it. xD
So here’s something else you don’t do: You know how a lot of video games allow you to “cook” a grenade before throwing it? In real life, don’t do it. Grenades are supposed to have a five-second fuse, but not every fuse burns for exactly five seconds. Cook the grenade, and it could explode before it gets far enough away.
Reminds me of an old engineer’s axiom.
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
A friend of mine did a stint in the NZ Army (made sergeant at least) and told me of a time a group of visiting American Marines made use of the firing range (he was in charge that day). He warned them to behave themselves, and added that if ‘anyone pulls a Rambo’, he’d shove their firearm where the sun don’t shine. All went well, until the Marine major went all gung-ho and charged the butts, yelling his head off, gun blazing.
My friend said it took three soldiers to extract the gun from the major’s butt.
XD
Night. Made…
…I seem to be getting a mental image like a particular scene in the first movie of The Mask…After Stanley Ipkiss had paid a visit to those auto mechanics that ripped him off.
Seriously though, in the Navy they used a similar “verbal warning” that was referred to as the “8-10-13 Method of Attitude Adjustment.” It involves 8 Medics taking at least 10 hours to remove a Size 12 boot from someone’s @$$.
“HOLD ON T’ YER LUG NUTS, BOYS, IT’S TIIIME FER AN OVERHAUL!!”
A) Waldo, you seem to know what you’re talking about and I salute you.
B) A true firefight is completely hectic, you either have some really good training and routines drilled down or you’re dead, good running legs help a lot too.
C)M60 and barrel change…come to Africa and face a bunch of drugged kids with AK47…It will be funny…not for you.
A) Thank you.
B) Yes it is. It takes a lot of training and even more balls to be able to go into a firefight and NOT have a moment of fear take over you.
C) Sure…I’ll come to Africa. Just let me get my Iron Man suit…oh, I can’t bring that, well then hell no I ain’t going to Africa. Like, ever. Closest I got was being on the ship off the coast of Somalia. And we watched Black Hawk Down. If that movie is even half accurate, that’s the closest I’ll ever get.
Re C) Best not to generalise. Some cities in Africa, you’ll be fine wandering the streets at midnight by yourself. Others, you don’t walk the streets, ever. It’s a big continent.
Ruling out visiting any part of Africa is similar to not wanting to ever visit North America because of bad stories about violence in parts of Mexico and parts of the USA. Except that North America is smaller, and arguably less diverse.
Overgeneralization is what allows us to make quick decisions. I know that there are parts of Africa that are fine. The tourist parts of Egypt. Many parts of South Africa. However, in all honesty, none of them I’d really want to go to. From my understanding, most of Africa is uninhabited, or at the least extremely sparingly inhabited. The denser areas that would be places people would visit don’t have anything I’d really like to see. Thus, unless I’m decked out in an Iron Man suit and going over there to take down the various gangs of thieves, rapists, murderers, and kidnappers that only have power because they have guns, I’m just going to avoid that whole continent.
You’d sooner catch me in Detroit.
Hey, It isn’t that bad…
Low blow, man. Low blow.
Where do you think the kids get the drugs from?
Seriously, Paddy is right, there are many places where you can have a nice comfortable living…Just don’t wander…
Such gangs really aren’t there in much of the continent. And I wouldn’t cite South Africa as one of the safest countries. They have the third highest homicide rates in Africa for a reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_region. There are lots of safer countries, visavis violent crime etc. (Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, most of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Gambia, Senegal Mauritius… to name the first dozen that come to mind based on my very subjective assessment.)
Statement of personal experience/bias: lived in Uganda for three years, travelled in Kenya, Rwanda, the DRC and South Africa. Friends from many other parts of the continent, some of whom have done things like cycle from north to south.
Seriously, your biggest risks in most of Africa aren’t armed gangs. They’re things like malaria (take prophylaxis and you’re fine) or terrible drivers (in many countries, you’ll particularly want to avoid the roads after the bars close). As crime goes, pickpockets and fraudsters are more of a problem, most places, although yes, you’ll want to be careful about where exactly you go. In three years in Uganda, the only crime I experienced was when some guy snuck in and stole my wallet and shoes (and frankly, if you’re desperate enough to steal a battered old pair of shoes, good luck to you). Don’t believe Hollywood depictions, e.g. Blood Diamond, Black Hawk Down etc. Hollywood gets Africa about as wrong as it does guns.
But in real life gun battles are not nearly so cool.
However, If your superpower is “rule of cool, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool ” its ok to do whatever as long as it looks cool, you could do the most stupid things, but everything would be ok so long as it looks cool. Other similar powers would be hot bloodedness, and saying “I will win because my friends are counting on me”.
Remember though, if you don’t have some sort of reality bypassing powers, do what Peggy says.
There are still two of Sydney’s orbs that we don’t know what they do…
;)
Seems to me that the ‘Rule Of Cool’ is something that Sydney has often pursued but never actually caught.
Plenty of Rule of Funny though!
Regarding the text at the bottom, is it because it’s just a bad idea or because the instructor got shot?
Both?
Mind you Maxima, Math and Ren can do Matrix-style bullet dodging.
Maxima can just Superman the bullets though…and TBH…that would scare me a lot more than someone who could dodge bullets. Like, dodging them, I have hope that I may hit you at some point. If they just bounce off you, well I’m just going to stop firing, put the gun down, and say “I surrender…please don’t hurt me.”
I can see that. Battling someone who is fast enough to dodge bullets … well, you can still get lucky, or they can be UNlucky, or there is always the (vague) possibility that you can somehow put one over on them.
But, against someone who is flat-out, no-kidding bulletproof (er, resistant) ….. “Yep. That’s my gun on the ground.. That’s the clip for it over there. I’ll just stand right here with my hands in the air until you say otherwise, shall I?”
And then there is Max, who is BOTH of these things. Yikes.
No, no, no. These are supers we’re talking about. You shoot every last bullet at them and watch them bounce. Then, you throw the gun and run and hide while they’re ducking. :)
I live in the real world. If I fire three rounds and they just bounce off like cotton balls, I’m dropping my gun and pleading for them to show mercy…probably going to be crying while I do it. My pants will probably be soiled as well.
I fire a few rounds and they guy dodges it…then I’m going to keep firing until they take my gun or I hit them. My super power is recognizing patterns and figuring out strategies very quickly to get the upper hand. You dodge a few, I’m going to figure out how to get you to run into a bullet thinking you are dodging.
Okay going to toss the Superman Returns scene. Full size anti-armour gatling gun bounces bullets off his chest. Would you try the pistol to the eye stunt?
Waldo has already proven to be sane. Superman (and Maxima, for that matter) is not someone that normal mortals should even attempt to take on.*
Not unless your death is likely to make them feel remorseful, and give up, before they destroy whatever it was you decided needing protecting!
* The point of this page is that Hollywood script writers put peoples lives in danger, by making them think that they have a realistic chance of doing things that they simply do not. Likewise by feeding false expectations into people. In the Superman example it is harmless.
But other circumstances it is not. Anything which uses a real-life situation can come to pass. And the more people seeing a film, the more who will actually find themselves in such a situation. But the only experience they can draw on is a false reality.
People fail to render assistance in car crashes, for instance, because they have the misapprehension that the car might explode. Even leaving babies behind in their haste!
Only after they have gotten out of the blast radius, and had a chance to reassess, might they return. In reality cars rarely blow up, after a car crash. Something that may come back to them, at that point. But only having lost precious time.
Folks are much better off paying attention to incoming traffic. That poses the greatest threat. By fleeing a minimal risk, in panic, people can, and do, get killed by the real danger!
In some senses I’m sane, and in others I’m quite mad. I’ve been known to take the odds and play them when they are nowhere NEAR in my favor. Been called insane in those instances. However, when they worked out everyone thinks I’m a genius. When they don’t, well, I’ve heard “I told you so.” far too many times than I’m willing to admit.
But thanks for sticking up for me. *pats Yorp* Good dog.
Here is a question for you. What would frighten you more, Max letting three rounds hit her and bounce off, or catching the three rounds in one hand? Personally, for me, it would be her catching them.
Let’s just say that both would cause a puddle of urine to form at my feet.
Yeah, Max catching bullets leaves a greater impression. especially when it kicks into you mind the realization that, in order to catch bullets, the hand itself must be bullet proof/resistant.
Isn’t that when you are supposed to throw the gun at them?
I got all my knowledge about cover from playing X-COM , our basic traning in the military didnt cover it .
( well we did learn do dig a hole … )
I suppose that’s the difference between elite training and being a ground pounder?
DIgging a hole give you excellent cover, and provide you with a good solid firing point to return fire from…
…and a grave if you’re unlucky or stupid.
Man, the USN didn’t even teach us how to dig a hole.
Though, to be fair, it wouldn’t be all that useful out in the middle of the ocean… ;P
They should have taught you! You could put a trench in the engine room! :)
UNS doesn’t like dirt on the decks of ships. Normal basic just teaches you how to dig a hole 16 in berm thank you 20 if you want to be sure. Sheetrock is not cover glass is not cover 5.56 will go through both so will most rounds except bird shot but all you need to stop bird shot is a good jacket.
The rule of thumb for a Cavalry scout is don’t get seen if you do get seen get as much rock and tree between you and the other guy as possible. Then work at not being seen again, vanish in plain sight this is hard to do when you are getting shot at.
When you say you learned about cover from X-Com, did you learn “there’s never enough” and “it goes away really fast” ?
In the middle of panel 2, there are a couple of guys sideways, presumably in mid-leap. Mythbusters actually tested this, and found that it is a fairly effective method of firing while leaping from behind cover, and you can, actually, be quite accurate while doing it, despite firing mid-fall.
Shachar
They are of the movie hot fuzz. A great parody on all police movies. ^^ Look it up and enjoy all its incredible awesomeness.
So who’s the Elvis with the rifle?
Shachar
I am betting a scene from 3000 miles to Graceland where a bunch of elvis impersonators rob a casino and have a pretty violent gun scene. Movie was pretty much a bomb otherwise
Impersonator? That is the King himself! You know he got kidnapped by aliens, right? Everything else was just the cover-up.
Well, Dabbler brought him back. Mind you he does do a kick-arse Elvis impersonator impersonation.
Nope, Elvis wasn’t kidnapped or anything, he just went home.
I thought Elvis traded places with one of the impersonators.
Nah. He’s actually working in a Burger Lord in the Midwest, and is the happiest man in the world.
Until Famine fires him of course.
he also have a secret underground beach kingdom.
Elvis kidnapped by aliens? Wasn’t us, can tell you that right now. Never heard anything like Earth’s music till I got here…
I googled 3000 Miles to Graceland.
The image DaveB drew popped up among the 1st results.
Yeah I found a youtube video of the casino firefight and paused it for reference. There were a nearly unlimited number of movies I could have picked from with crazy firefights, but 3K2GL is one of my wife’s favorite movies, I think largely because she’s a big Kurt Russell fan, which is of course correct.
How long did it take you to get the Hot Fuzz one down pat? it seriously is good Dave.
Thanks! I used the cover art from a DVD or a poster for reference and zoomed in a lot. I’m not so good at likenesses otherwise.
The Elvis with the rifle is Elvis Presley himself. Not only that, it’s him in real life, right now, as he’s fighting the Globloks of Xantar 6 for control over the rhinestone mines of Zeta Island. Obviously that’s not what Peggy was wanting Sydney to forget about. Just the other stuff.
Not a rifle. That’s a shotgun. Rifles are long arms which fire a single projectile down the barrel from each cartridge (no matter how fast it’s firing – single shot, burst, full automatic), and the barrel must have rifling (or it’s a musket). The rifling is a spiral of grooves down the length of the barrel that spins the projectile around its trajectory, making it more stable and, therefore, more accurate and capable of greater distances.
Technically, you can fire buckshot/birdshot/small objects of choice through a rifle, but you’ll make a mess of the gun, and you probably won’t hit a thing. That assumes they don’t wedge up in the barrel.
Or it uses some other means to stabilise the projectile, and improve accuracy. Such as having fins on the munitions. Such weapons can have a wide variety of terms associated with them, other than musket. For instance Advanced Combat Rifle, mortar or ‘M1A1 Abrams 120 mm L/44 M256A1 smoothbore gun’ or gyroget.
By the way, just in case anyone picks up on the word ‘rifle’ in ‘advanced combat rifle’, it is actually a smoothbore weapon.
I think you will find that its a scene from Bubba Ho-Tep, an awesome movie about The King and JFK fighting am evil mummy in a retirement home.
But the other movies are Rambo, Hot Fuzz and Equilibrium.
Great movie, but no. No shotguns in that film.
Yes…you CAN do that. But it’s best to fire stationary with most of your body behind some sort of cover. It is possible, with training to fire accurately while running, jumping, and doing several other crazy maneuvers (saw a guy one time actually fire a pretty accurate shot after doing a run up the wall and flipping over. He took the shot mid flip, upside down and was only an inch off target)
However, that isn’t the norm. Most people, despite how good they say they are at various video games and paintball/air soft, couldn’t hit a stationary target while they were stationary at more than 20 yards. My personal best is 50 yards accurate with a non-scoped M16 in prone position. When learning, best to stick with the basics. Small gun, small caliber, standing straight. Master that at various distances, then get some bigger guns and master it more. If you don’t need to move to take the shot, why move?
There’s also a big difference between doing it on a range and doing it while either running around or when someone is shooting at you. ;-) On a range, I know I can hit the 300 meter target 4 out of 5 times with an non-scoped M16. I also know what I can do at short range. As we learned in training with the MILES gear, all that accuracy goes out the window when you’re trying to get to cover and return fire. It ends up being “shoot in the general direction, and hope you hit something.”
The thing is though is that advance training involves firing at moving and covered targets while things are going on all around you. That is where paintball and air soft actually DO have an advantage as they can train you to fire under duress and narrow your target radius. But in order to do that, you need to be able to quickly and accurately fire under at a target consistently. Firing an M16 at 300 meters and hitting 4/5, not bad. Get that to about 49/50 in a short time frame (we considered quick 1 bullet in .8 seconds on average) and you can call yourself a master on it. Then you start adding in things like moving the target, moving yourself, or leaving an obstruction to aim around. Usually, most people don’t get to that kind of training before they are thrown into something where they would need it, and thus the spray and pray method comes in.
I’m not saying I can do most of this (most of my shooting has been either training on ship or range, but we did do a few obstruction shooting where the target was blocked partially by a wall that we had to avoid, but what makes the greatest shooters in the world is practicing some of the most obscure things under the strangest of conditions.
The key thing with firing at a 2 way range, is not necessarily to hit the other guy… just get close enough to scare the shed out of them and make them duck behind something, when they ducking in fear, they aint shooting back…
A truer statement has never been said.
Covering fire. Not meant to kill the enemy, but to make them take cover and stop shooting for a moment so you or your buddies can move to a new position with less risk of getting swiss-cheesed.
Which is why Ren will make a deadly soldier. He does not take snap-shots. He can carefully consider every moment, and only pull the trigger, when it it optimal.
Or, if he is having to shoot, on the run, and does not have a good angle down the weapon, for targeting, he can put it on semi or full-auto, and just watch where the bullets are headed. Correcting his aim before the first one even hits!
The big difference with the Matrix is that there EVERY opponent had the capability too. Here only a select few will do.
Although, from what Dave said, he is not a top-end super speeder. So his perceptions may well be significantly better than his ability to react. However his reflexes are super human, to some degree or another. Thus he may just be ‘incredibly good’ in a fire-fight, as opposed to ‘invincible’ (versus anyone lacking a suitable counter-super power).
Yeah, that’s the thing. Training to hit a target consistently well takes effort. But if the target is suddenly shooting back, all bets are off.
Doing something like that would take either a lot of practice (either with the gun in general or with that move specifically) or a lot of desperation.
…Or just, ya’ know, Hollywood with it…
I’ve seen a lot of desperation…
That scene is peanuts…
Funny thing is, when you ask the “actors” how they done it, the first answer is invariably…”Done what?”
Only after comes the bragging/playing it down.
That’s adrenaline for you.
The problem there is that they’re dual wielding, and not watching their left-hand fire. I guess that has some intimidation value, but it’s probably a waste of ammunition.
I like Peggy’s untraining technique.
Me too :) The only thing missing was an old priest and a young priest.
There was a Cleric helping her out. Panel 2, on the far right side. The inside man. Grabbed Syney’s attention, then … WHAM! Exorcism.
Have not seen Bubba Ho-Tep yet. need to get to it.
It’s… ok. Not nearly as good as Shawn of the Dead.
yep, you have to like Bruce Campbell., if you don’t then you won’t enjoy it as much… still funny though.
The manual Peggy is likely most familiar with…
https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a4_7/publication/afman31-229/afman31-229.pdf
spot on!
Nice resource, thanks!
They are of the movie hot fuzz. A great parody on all police movies. ^^ Look it up and enjoy all its incredible awesomeness.
A favourite of mine.
Peggy’s right, but all she says about guns (especially as directed by John Woo) is doubly true for knives and swords.
Eh, not quite as much. For knives and swords, the big difference between Hollywood and real-life is effectiveness skewed in the opposite direction. Hollywood guns almost never hit- Hollywood swords apparently slice straight through 18 gauge plate armour.
Also, for whatever reason, people seem less inclined to make mistakes about swinging around sharp bits of metal than they are about pointing loaded firearms at people. To be fair, knives are something humans practically evolved with, while guns are really new- a knife, or a sword, has lore and history behind it about treating it with respect. It’s less common that people take sharpened combat-ready swords out to a ‘swording range’ for fun or entertainment, people don’t hunt with swords- they’re considered a tool for killing, and Hollywood reinforces that, suggesting that they work as well as lightsabers in cutting through anything and everything in front of their blade.
I’d rather (if I had no choice about arming them) trust a hyperactive kid (on my side) with a fully sharpened sword than with even a .22.
Almost right. The basic terminology is similar, and these off the cuff definitions could be a useful guide. Each branch will have slightly different terms for each of these things, so even “Firearms 101” could be a valid name for a set of training or instruction.
In the Army, we typically call classroom based weapons familiarization “Preliminary Marksmanship Instruction,” which should include how to disassemble and reassemble the weapon, how to look down and adjust the sights, body position and breathing, correcting malfunctions, and how it operates.
Technical Manual (TM) describes how to take things apart, operate, or troubleshoot things.
Field Manuals (FM) describes employment of said things.
Regulations are the rules for behavior and administrative procedures.
Navy we had Naval Firearms Marksmanship and Maintenance Training which taught the same things. It’s amazing how many gun owners I know that don’t know how to take apart their gun and clean it themselves. I do it for them sometimes just for practice (and I get paid in beer)
In Air Foce it’s called the “USAF Weapons Handling Manual” (linked above).
Middle panel is from Hot Fuzz. Beyond that I have no idea.
Rambo, Hot Fuzz, Predators, if itt not Matrix it’s got a similar wardrobe.
Equilibrium. Which is the gun kata movie. It would have been an enjoyable wu-xia treatment of guns for me if they hadn’t decided that they needed to explain how it worked.
Elvis with a shotgun is from 3000 Miles to Graceland. Thanks to Sendaz above for the info. Just google the movie title and it’ll come out among the 1st few results.
I really can’t wait until they get the lube outta my near vision eye.
love the little Yoda joke at the end “saying precisely this, I am” lol. Very wise she is, I believe.
So fun much dyslexia can be.
AmIright?
Dave… Can we get closeup of that lovely Mi-24 you’ve drawn here?
Hah, I had to google Mi-24. I always knew them as Hinds from… well, most action movies in the 80’s. I used this image for reference, just found it on google and it was at the right angle. https://wallpapers.mi9.com/wallpaper/mi-24-hind-helicopter-wallpaper_18853/
Mi-24 Hind, A – C models had a more glass-house like cockpit, with a larger crew, while the E & F models had their main gun mounted on the side of it’s cockpit area & a 2 person crew. It’s the D model that’s the most famous, with it’s 2 person crew in almost separate cockpit bubbles later used in the E & F models, & it’s trademark nose mini Gatling gun.
Despite it’s small size, the 1 in the comic has been drawn rather well. My compliments to the artistic team, as large as it is…
Heh. Sydney’s brain-resetting technique might have helped inspire Peggy down this route. As befits a sniper, who is expected to take on supers, she is a keen observer. And knows her target well.
I have a feeling Peggy knows little tricks for every member of the squad to get them to do what she wants in some way or another. Peggy is the Batman of this Justice League.
Naa, him they are going to arrest and throw in jail, with the other vigilantes. Although Peggy can provide an alternative solution.
I think Walso means figuratively.
Fortunately for all concerned I have had very little gun exposure.
“OK, now shoot”.
Bang!
“At the target!”
(It wentt into the ground. Sorry USAF.)
Don’t feel bad. We had a girl in Navy boot camp that couldn’t even lift the shotgun to her shoulder without it dipping towards the ground. She was barely able to hip fire, and even then she was off the target.
They had someone fire a weapon she couldn’t keep steady?
Luckily in Navy boot camp, your first instance holding a weapon is actually loaded. It’s basically a real model of the gun, with the same weight, hooked up to an air compressor with a laser in the barrel. You pull the trigger, it releases a burst of air strong enough to push the gun back realistically just after a short laser fires at the target. This way, you get to feel how a weapon fires without actually posing a risk other than some bruising or maybe a minor injury to yourself.
I believe we fired 9mm Berettas from both hands, as well as 12 gauge shotguns from the shoulder and hip. She barely could hold the Beretta in her hand after each shot, and she couldn’t keep the shotgun pointed at the target from her shoulder. When she shot from the hip, the laser didn’t hit the target where it should have. She didn’t make it much further into boot camp. She just didn’t have the strength or stamina to keep up with almost anything. I don’t say all of this to make fun of her. She did her best, and we kept trying to help her with everything. I give her props for at least signing up to serve her country. But some people just can’t cut it. She was a nice girl though.
Spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.
Unfortunately, Equilibrium broke my suspension of disbelief when they had that scene really early one when the computer voice was explaining how gun-kata works. If they had left out the vocal explanation and just had the people training I would have been fine. But, they had to explain the whole “memorizing common firing angles” thing and all I could think was “anybody who tries to do this is dead.”
Now I need to watch this Equilibrium movie. Never saw it.
Turn your brain off at the door, and it is quite good.
Ever see Ultraviolet? Same guys responsible.
which is funny, because my elder brother who is actually a martial arts instructor and ex-marine praises Ultraviolet’s action scenes.
Someone pointed something out to me one time.
All of the martial arts moves used in old Kung-fu movies, are showy martial arts. They’re still actual moves, but would get you killed in a fight to the death in real life.
The moves that someone would use if those movie fight scenes were real, would kill or maim the actors and stunt doubles.
Both sets are real martial arts. They just have different uses.
Stories I have heard about Bruce Lee movies say the directors kept telling him to slow down his moves and make them more showy because the audience could not follow what he was doing. I can’t remember the exact Bruce Lee quote, but he said something like “If you are in a fight and it goes on for more than ten seconds, you are doing it wrong”.
pretty much.
The advice I’ve been given is that the simplest, most boring moves are the most practical.
Stuff like kicks that go higher than the waist shouldn’t be used much unless you’ve, for some reason, heavily invested in training such kicks.
I also quite enjoy Ultraviolet. I sort of model the idea of the fighting style of the “goddess” agents from the Bystander model on that…just with a single heavy pistol reinforced for melee, often with a hidden blade on it somewhere and other mods each agent added and one hand free for grappling or reloading.
Unrealistic as hell, but cool and I don’t bother to explain it….plus haven’t gotten much chance to show it off yet. The only current novel had a short confrontation between two goddesses but the heroic one dominated.
Here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_revolver
more like the blade-smgs in ultraviolet, heavy pistols instead of light ones, otherwise, cool.
Nooo, don’t compare it to Ultraviolet. Equilibrium is good, (especially the climax fight. That was my favorite part of the movie) Ultraviolet is awful, like I couldn’t sit through 15 minutes of it awful. Ultraviolet is like an action movie written by someone who’s only knowledge of physics comes from watching other super unrealistic action movies. Some of the stuff they try and pull in that movie makes the scene in Austin Powers where he ejects from his car over a helicopter, shoots the pilot, then lands in his car look downright grounded.
what Ultraviolet had that Equilibrium lacked was both sci-fantasy tech and superhuman physical capabilities that stretched boundaries of what I was able to accept….plus, they didn’t try to explain the fighting bits, they just showed it.
Basically, Ultraviolet came across to me as a cheesy, fun-time action movie with no pretention for being anything else while Equilibrium made me feel like I was being lectured at and viewed as being especially stupid. I wasn’t able to enjoy the action elements until I watched a couple of years later.
I will admit that the first time I saw it, I had rented it from a place while living in Korea and assumed that it was just a low-budget made for TV thing.
Agree so much. I heard one blather about “statistically calculated fields of fire” and my response was “relying on that sounds like a good way to end up as a statistic.”
Mind, I do believe there is a place for a martial art combining gunplay and melee, but any sensible form of it would involve the melee techniques being mainly centered around getting yourself back out of melee in order to get off a point blank shot — because let’s face it, if you’re in melee while you’re holding a gun, chances are you did not want to be in melee in the first place.
It’s time might come. We are used to the paradigm of offensive capability overwhelming defence, in personal combat. But the last time the equation went the other way, the response was a variety of melee martial arts. With the likes of knights and samurai. Yet, even then, there was still a demand for ranged weapons on the battlefield.
So gunfu could come to pass if we discover a suitable technology. Dune’s shields are obvious, but well quoted recently. And not likely something that we will discover any time soon, even if they are possible.
But we are discovering miracle materials, like graphine now. Some of which have weirdly exotic properties. If one of those turns out to make personal armour that can stop anything short of an anti-tank weapon, then we will be seeing a seed change in battlefield tactics.
Individuals can only carry so many reloads for anti-armour weaponry. Once those are used up, your options revert to your side-arm (for unarmoured targets) and martial arts. Providing you can evade any armoured opponent, until they likewise have exhausted their primary ammo, then it comes down to a hand-to-hand fight.
And this is where the cheap unarmored opponents come into play. Because a good tactic is simply to pin your invulnerable opponent and place restraints on them. And the more people helping out, the easier that is. So you need the sidearm to deal with those swiftly, before they can overwhelm you with numbers.
All other things being equal, she who has the best gun-fu wins.
You know, I never thought about the presence of effective armour in the development of martial arts. I suppose the big reason is that any effective personal armour is going to have to allow full range of motion in the joints, in which case the grappling and joint-based techniques of martial arts become the only real way of dealing with what is otherwise an invulnerable opponent- like targeting the tracks of tanks when you don’t have anything that’ll go through the armour.
This might not hold true, however, with the advent of powered personal exoskeletons. When a joint will only move when the ‘owner’ tells it to, and mass doesn’t equate to a reduction in speed or mobility, a lot of traditional martial arts become significantly less effective.
the way I handled it for the Bystander “goddesses” was a heavy pistol, reinforced so that it would be able to withstand blocking or giving blows. Most “goddesses” also add a blade somewhere, most put a retractable blade in the handle to have an emergency reverse grip dagger on hand. Others made themselves an attachable bayonet type thing.
The fighting style generally involves keeping one hand free to grapple and or reload. Most of the goal of their style is to line up a shot with the pistol on whoever they might be melee-ing with. Though against groups, they’ll shoot people outside the melee and try to keep enemies in close to grapple/stab/melee/maneuver as meat-shields. So that if they can’t separate a large group out using choke points for some reason, they use the fact that most people aren’t trained to get into melee with a pistol to make the people they’re in melee act as concealment and slight cover while they fire with more or less impunity from within.
That said…after their methods and existence were outed by the Canadians, one of the only ones that remains unburned is one who sort of realized that having signature equipment and fighting styles was a great way to get identified and simply never used any of it once she was in the field. Though she only ever gets referenced.
there is an actual school of martial arts that is developed as a gun wielding fighting style for long arms (rifle) and duel wield (pistol) that replaces standard strikes with buttstock or pistol grip blows instead of standard punches and chops.
Most everything I would say has been said and I won’t be tedious and repeat all the good stuff. One thing I didn’t see about cars that is worth noting, as it relates to cover, however, is the engine block. Engine blocks are good cover.
If someone is firing something at you that renders the engine block as ‘poor’ situational cover…. well… you have bigger problems at that point and need to be reacting very differently.
Umm, an engine block in a functional vehicle is a BAD place for cover as that’s where the ENGINE is, and engines tend to have highly flammable FUEL there. Fire, poison gas, burning fuel, and shrapnel of all shapes and sizes would result from taking cover behind an engine block and having a powerful (or lucky) enough bullet hit it and set it off.
Exceot that, as a general rule, it is difficult to make an ordinary automobile explode or catch fire. Even propane tanks tend to put up a fight. The Mythbusters have covered this one a few times.
This is another movie inspired myth. In reality, shooting the engine in a working car with any commonly available pistol or rifle (we’ll ignore heavy weapons and grenades and such) will at most result in a fire.
Most police departments train their officers to take cover behind the engine block of their vehicle during any armed conflict.
It’s actually rather difficult to set a car off by firing at it, and an engine block will usually stop, or at the very least break apart the round or deviate it from it’s intended course. Fuel isn’t so much the flammable component, it’s fuel vapor. (IE drop a match in a bucket of gasoline full to the top, match will go out. Do that in a bucket HALF full and you’ll get a nice fwoosh of flame) Fuel is mostly contained within the engine and the fuel lines so you’d have to puncture those first and hope that the engine temperature/location of the puncture is enough to begin the process. If this isn’t enough you’d have to take a second shot, but also you’d need an incendiary round to maximize your chance, standard full metal jacket bullet firing through a cloud of vapor won’t do much unless you can aim and hit a surface that will cause a spark. And if the person firing said rifle can do that accurately, well, you were in trouble to begin with lol.
Given all of that, if you were to set the engine compartment on fire, it will most likely just cause a fire in the beginning, a bit slowly at first unless the fuel injection line was punctured under pressure and managed to spray the engine compartment, but eventually building in intensity as rubber hoses, plastic components begin melting and adding to the effect. Engine compartment is a mix of metal, fuel, oil, plastic, and some acid from the battery. Most Hollywood explosions have added a crucial component to the engine compartment to get the effect you want to see and that’s usually some form of explosive.
Given that Max has made Peggy the Range master, and Peggy is an officer, you could argue that she is setting precedent with terminology. These are ARCHON’s first recruits, how they are trained, and how that training turns out, will be what ‘the brass’ use to formalize the procedures going down the line.
“Peggy’s Way” might just become “Best Practices” for training new supers.
I don’t know, I think Math could pull off Gun-Kata.
Too boring for him to even try.
Peggy clearly knows how to handle Sydney in her own unusual way.
I wonder how Sydney will handle recoil?
I suspect with a large number of creative ‘colourful metaphors’. Once they realise that everything knocks her butt, they’ll probably find some way for her to hold the lighthook and brace herself.
Marked as a spoiler in case I’m too close to the truth.
Guessing is never a spoiler :p
Whilst that is true, but when someone comes reading through later, I don’t want to give it away if I’m right.
“My only ‘battlefield’ experience has involved paintballs and lasers (an awful lot of the latter). But even with just that, I cringe at how exposed actors keep themselves.* Just the other night, I was taken completely out of the moment by a movie.
“Omg, you are exposed, in the field of view of armed enemies, whilst having a pally chat ‘sort of crouched down’, and you are not even bothering to use the concealment all around you! If you are not moving, get flat on the ground, and make sure they can’t see you.”
I could not bear to watch more than ten minutes of that drivel.
* Although the directors are the ones mostly at fault. And, yes, it is necessary to see the actor’s face. But you can still find an angle to capture the expressions and emotion.
Plus they need to make more use of actor boot camps. Getting them to sign waivers, so they can shoot their butts with tasers, anytime they leave them exposed! And the directors need a dose of that too!
No paintball or lasers…my combat simulations were limited to amtgard back when I was younger, in college and not 50 lbs overweight…and even with no training in weapons beyond that rather unrealistic game, I still facepalm when I compare an Amtgarder who’s been awarded the title of “Sword Knight” or “Warlord” to a lot of the people who are supposed to be master warriors on movies (unless they get a real martial artist, of course).
Incidentally, to get “Warlord” you have to acquire 10 orders of the Warrior. Your first order is for 3 consecutive tournament wins (or exceptional battlefield performance). Your second order on up require an increasing number of consecutive wins (5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21) and do not include wins that got you prior orders. I’m not sure, but I also think they don’t maintain a count past any given tournament. So to get your 10th order of the Warlord you have to get 21 one-on-one tournament victories with no losses all in one day.
Sword Knight is more nebulous, suggested requirements used to be having already earned “Warlord” but more recently have been acquiring 10 Griffins which are awarded specifically for “being honorable on the field of battle”. Then you have to be nominated by someone who is already a knight. Then the Circle of Knights has to discuss your case and put you up with whoever was recently voted monarch of the Kingdom and then current King or Queen (or similar title if they’ve gone with something like Pharaoh or Shogun) has to decide to knight you. Knight-hood can only be awarded by a kingdom level event, so it is a regional thing rather than a neighborhood or city based thing. For example, the Kingdom I played in included Austin, San Antonio and a lot of Central Texas. So, basically to be a Sword Knight you have to catch the eye of influential players from several major chapters and show a heavy level of battle-skill and honor.
I find it incredibly amusing that games like Amtguard and Dagorhir (and Belegarth) are essentially making all the geeks and nerds that play them into those most proficient and learned at the pinciples of melee combat with things like swords and spears (in this day and age).
I mean, yeah, they’ll never be as skillful as, say, HEMA masters, but a lot of them do utilize HEMA training manuals and techniques.
It’s just… funny.
There is a book series I’ve heard about where all the technology just stops working, including gunpowder. Apparently an SCA group ends up taking over a large section of some city. But then SCA fighters are a bit more hard core dedicated than boffer sword groups like Amtgard.
the Change series by S.M. Stirling.
I’m not familiar with the games you mention, but I do have a mini-rant about SCAers that I’ll throw out here.
I spent ten years studying dueling. Not fencing, dueling. The martial art of Western swordsmanship — how to kill someone with a rapier, a small sword, an epee, etc. Occasionally one of the other students and I would go to the SCA practice and watch the “stick jocks” (heavy weapons, e.g. longsword / broadsword) and the “wire weenies” (fencers) practice.
The things the SCA teaches their fighters are enough to make you cry. The stick jocks in particular; they fling their swords around in wide arcs, they think they’ve parried if they make any contact at all…ugh. The fencers are just as bad in different ways — their en guarde doesn’t actually close the line (if it’s even remotely *in* a line), their arm is floppy, their stance is weighted so far forward they can’t move…ugh.
Olympic fencers are even worse, honestly. These are people who literally train *every day*, more hours than I’m awake, to be the best in the world…and yet, they’re terrible. They get so close that they have to bend their elbow or lift it way up in order to bring their point back far enough that they can hit. They slide up and down the piste, never rooted. They flick their foils like fishing poles because it will make the tip bend 90 degrees and tap the other guy on the back juuuuust hard enough to make the light go off. (Actually, I’ll give them that last one. It’s utter bullshit as far as real swordsmanship goes because a real sword won’t do that, but they aren’t really swordsmen and they aren’t really dueling. For what they’re doing, flyfishing makes perfect sense.)
There’s a reason they call it “sport” fencing. :/
/rant
Incidentally, if you want to see what I mean about Olympic fencers, here are some examples:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/london-2012-olympics/files/2012/07/vezzali.jpg These guys should be almost two feet farther apart. Why in the HELL would you come this close to someone? They’re so close they can barely depress their points enough to hit!
https://www.news-gazette.com/sites/all/files/imagecache/lightbox_800_600_scale/images/2012/08/01/London_Olympics_Fencing__97.JPG Those are foils you’re using, guys; the chest is the only legal target. You on the right there — what the heck were you aiming at? And why are you letting your back foot roll up like that? It means you have no stability!
https://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/13/xin_40208051221205782032169.jpg Guy on the left — extend fully on the back leg and have the front shin vertical! It’ll give you an extra 6″ on your lunge! Guy on the right — put your blade down and never ever touch one again!
And of course, the all-time “holy crap, what are you DOING?!” award goes to these guys:
https://media.syracuse.com/post-standard/photo/2012/08/11397052-standard.jpg
https://www.topfencingclub.com/75.jpg
And, for fairness, here’s one example of doing it right:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/london-2012-olympics/files/2012/08/epee-bronze-medal-match.jpg This one is actually really cool. The woman on the left is performing a flèche — more or less, you stick your arm out and run forward. (No, really, it makes sense in some cases.) The one on the right is doing a volt, pivoting to the side to avoid the blade while extending to hit an advancing attacker. Both parties are doing their portion beautifully.
Remember the movie Saving Private Ryan. The beginning when they were coming into the beach.
The directors did not warn them about the explosions and sounds of bullets. The actors leaped over the sides in reaction and they were weighed down by the weight of the packs that people experienced in WW2. All of the movie was acting of course, but the reactions were real in that scene.
Never heard this, but hope it’s not true. Lots of soldiers on the day died by drowning, weighed down by their packs in the water. Under no circumstances would that situation be a good one to reenact.
Party poopin’.
If we’re going to remind people that things are bullet resistant and not bullet proof, I’ll remind you that tasers are less-lethal, not non-lethal.
Meh, if they want to earn the big money they nee to either improve their skills sufficiently to justify it, or take the risks, until they learn the hard way. And if they don’t make it, well they won’t be ruining my movie experience anymore. Win win.
The U.S. Army terms are ‘cover’ and ‘concealment’. ‘Cover’=’will stop/seriously hinder most bullets’. ‘Concealment’=’makes you hard or impossible to see’. A concrete wall is cover-ish; a hedgerow is concealment. In real life, cover is almost always concealment (NOT in real life, Sydney’s force field would be the former but not the latter), but concealment is not always cover.
In the Navy, we have no concealment and barely any cover. Being on the .50 cal for general quarters I was told 3 things. 1, if shit hits the fan, shoot anything that moves on the starboard side of the ship. 2, protect the .25 cal (it was the gun right next to me) and if the gunner should fall there, take his place. 3, try not to die and stay in communication with the bridge.
In true firefight nowdays (war) there is no real cover, only concealment.
Why? Because dosen’t matter how hard is whatever you are behind, bigger and bigger guns will come.
Ever saw an A10 shooting at a bunker? Not funny, specially if you’re inside the bunker…
Enemy knows were you are? Move out.
There’s a line I found in some guy’s sigline a whole lot of years ago:
“.50BMG. Turning ‘Cover’ into ‘Concealment’ for four generations, and still going strong!”
Dodging bullets like you’re in the Matrix is at least a 300 class.
Yup!
Nah, to pull that off, you definitely need to be “over 9000.”
;)
About the car doors stopping bullets, an acquaintance of mine does the armoring of police cars in Belgium. So I can confirm that the doors have at least some protection against bullets.
Not sure about the level of protection though. If I recall the conversation I had, it’s kevlar, not ceramic plates.
From what I understand of police vehicles in America, it depends on the need of the area. I’ve heard some police vehicles in cities where there is heightened gang violence, they get ceramic and kevlar in their doors and possibly even bulletproofing on the glass of the car. However, in areas where there is little threat of a shootout, the cars are basically just stock off the line with a paint job.
SWAT vehicles are sometimes a little more durable, but again, not always.
From experience i can tell you that a standard car door can be “fairly” effective at stopping 9mm handgun rounds.
Yes…but in areas like Detroit, Los Angeles, and other gang heavy cities, many of them have 45s, 5.56, 2.23 and even some .50 cal guns. A standard car door is basically nothing when put up against those.
Uhm, yeah, gotta nitpick you a little bit here.
First, a 9mm has greater penetration than a .45 ACP being of smaller diameter and greater velocity. The venerable old .45 is fat, slow, and easily stopped. The fact that the bullet starts tumbling after about 10 yards doesn’t help any. Seriously, stand 20-30 yards downrange (behind cover) and let someone shoot one past you. It sounds like a large, angry bumble bee.
Second, it’s a .223 Rem, not 2.23 which would be in the range of light artillery.
Thirdly, any .50 BMG caliber guns in the hands of street criminals will 1) be of the Peggy variety, not the HMG variety and 2) be the most high profile targets on the police “to get off the street” list and so won’t be on the street for long.
Good points. I’ve personally never fired a .223 and I always seem to mess up when I pair that caliber with the 5.56. Either I type it as 2.23 or I type the 5.56 as .556.
As far as the .50s, of course they would want them off the streets, but where there is a will (and money) there is a way to get them.
Also, I’ve never personally fired any round at a car door. But I think Mythbusters has done a lot of these…maybe I’ll go rewatch some episodes on Netflix and brush up on my stopping power of a lot of these.
I don’t claim to be an expert on guns, I just know the guns I’ve used, safety procedures, and general maintenance, so I’m happy when someone corrects me. I do like having facts straight.
Also, nice avatar anifreik. Dat booty.
Just remember that one is metric and one is not.
That way you’ll notice when it looks to be too big or too small for the kind of round that it is.
2.23mm is way too small and 2.23 inches counts as artillery.
I doubt that .50BMG is used by “urban” people. Too expensive, too difficult to conceal and as mentioned by anifreik for sniper rifles only, since HMGs almost don’t exist on the US legal civilian market, and by proxy same goes for the illegal one.
Overall it’s just impractical for criminals.
I’m American…what is this witchcraft you call ‘metric’? LOL
Nah…it’s just a matter of the way they are typed. Hand me them IRL and I don’t ever confuse them.
Also, you guys keep talking about BMGs, but when I think of urban .50s, I’m thinking things like LAR and S&W. Handgun size .50s. Yes, they are larger than most handguns, but they are capable of being concealed under clothing.
50cal in this case would almost always mean a pistol like the desert eagle (and yes I know not all eagles are 50cal) as most gangs want mobile and hard to find/track a rifle or heaven forbid repeater of that caliber would be difficult to hide or move when and where needed without sacrificing a number of members to the police and almost guaranteed to cost the gang the weapon before it can be used.
Also there are other .50 guns besides the BMG & HMG; take for existence the S&W Model 500.
.500S&W is a LOT lower powered than .50BMG. It’s a big pistol round, but still JUST a pistol round: “foot-pound” comparisons are misleading at best, but a .500S&W will put out about 2.8K lb/ft. of energy AT BEST (and most loads deliver closer to 2.4K)…which means you’re applying about 1/5th or less energy of a .50BMG at 13-14K lb/ft.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, no Law Enforcement Agency in the entire U.S. has as of yet been fired upon by a .50 BMG, nor have they recovered one from any suspects.
They HAVE seize .50 BMG from ordinary citizens for BS Reasons. Like the one that got seized by the cops up in Michigan after a woman got caught cheating on her husband and when he filed for divorce she filed for a Protective Order and the cops seized all of his firearms, including the Barret .50 he owned.
The Protective order was denied by the trial judge but he still hasn’t been given all of his firearms back yet.
The first she learns is how painful and awful it can be to load a spring-magazine without an autoloader, just so she learns to respect each and every round in the clip.
If that’s Bubba Ho-Tep then that’s Bruce Campbell and his chin is not nearly epic enough compared to Stallone-Rambo’s.
It’s amazing that they didn’t go “if you see a candle and immediately recognize it’s fire, then the meal has been cooked long ago.”
Okay I like to add a story that some my find hard to believe. I used to have a bullet that didn’t make it through the car door I was driving. It was a 67 Dodge camper/van. The bullet made it through the skin of the door quite easily with the ubiquitous bullet hole but ended up a pancake on the window mechanism with just a small circular rise in the center that I assume was the back end of the bullet. Two things though I believe it was a pistol round and the mechanism was 1/4 in steel.
I can beleive it. One can always get lucky, and older model vehicles tend to have MUCH thicker skin and heavier internal structure anyhow.
Momentum gets slowed down on anything if it hits something. There’s also the “how did that happen?” factor. I’ve seen a few articles over the years about people surviving a gunshot due to some random thing made of metal on the shirt or in a pocket, being exactly where the bullet was about to hit.
Of course there were probably other factors while the bullet was traveling there. But the end result was still that the metal either stopped it or deflected it enough.
I also know someone who survived a low caliber gunshot aimed straight for his heart. without cover, armor, or even a thick jacket. He did spend a night in the hospital for observation, and he had some stitches.
He lived in a bad area in case you’re wondering. This was way before I met him. He has a copy of the x-ray, and notes from the hospital he went home with.
I did find one part of your story hard to accept – the part where you were driving a car door.
The rest, totally believable. :-p
Bullets have to come to rest eventually. If you happen to be lying down on the ground a few yards before the point where a bullet would have, the following morning, been found lying on the ground, it could probably be stopped by something flimsy like a packet of cigarettes in your pocket.
A car door would astronomically reduce the fluke odds of happening to be just the right distance, for that to happen. It has the ‘Plausible’ stamp on it, from me. Upgraded, due to the eyewitness testimony, of a Grrl Power commentator, in good standing with the community, to an “Accepted”.
I can believe it too. From about the mid-60’s & earlier, they used .16 gauge steel for the body panels; nowadays, it’s closer to being two layers of aluminum foil.
At least Sydney will NOT be a Rambo-wannabe..!
Cars make for about the worse “cover” you can find. Even police cruisers. Sure it’s metal but there’s a lot of hollow parts in between. Plus you have the lovely added effect of shrapnel. When a bullet pierces metal it doesn’t just make a nice little hole, it brings the metal with it, plus depending on the round (5.56/223 for example) they fire at such a high speed that usually the initial impact will cause fragmentation of the round which will break it apart.
That said, in the event you ever do have to take cover behind a vehicle you don’t want to be behind the door or the trunk, you want to get low, behind the front tire. Giant metal thing that people call “the engine” is pretty effective at stopping a bullet.
Here’s a pretty in depth guide on cars for cover http://www.theboxotruth.com/buick-of-truth/
Then it will also depend on the round. For instance ‘Bullet resistant’ vests. They’re mainly good for things in the pistol caliber, but not so much for intermediate cartridges such as the 7.62×39 or the 5.56. Forget about full powered rifle cartridges such as .308, for those you’ll need something more along the lines of ceramic plating
A car door won’t stop a round, but it will deflect smaller calibers. Ducking behind a car door against a guy that has a 9mm, you have a decent chance of at least having the bullet deflecting away or slowing down enough to cause less damage to you.
Some police vehicles come with kevlar or even ceramic plating on their doors, so they are better. But yes, if it’s just Joe Blow in his Honda Civic trying to find cover so he doesn’t get shot, put that engine between him and the shooter and he’ll most likely survive longer.
Not even really any deflection, even with a 9mm.
https://www.theboxotruth.com/the-buick-o-truth-3-pistols-and-car-doors/
Basically, a car is concealment, not cover. (unless you can perfectly position the engine block between you)
Though, it probably is better than standing there screaming. Even better would be to find a nice corner to run around really quick then skitter away
If you need to know how something reacts when shot in real life, compared to movies, these guys have covered most of the standard stuff: https://www.theboxotruth.com. Everything from shooting padlocks open, to car doors and engine blocks. Usually with a comparison of pistol vs rifle rounds.
And I see in the time I spent reading the comic, typing my comment, and digging the link out of my bookmarks, MilsurpShooter beat me to the punch.
Thank you. I’ll check that out at some point
Toldja Peggy has it right ^_^