Be Excellent To Each Other

Does anyone else want to write to Mr Hollywood?

§5.1 In addition, It seems doubtful that in the future gun technology will have progressed to the level where shooting a keypad will open and/or lock the door depending on your current needs.

The pen-and-paper RPG Feng Shui, based on Hong Kong action movies, granded shotgun-wielding characters bonus damage if their players mimed pumping the gun and made the "click-click" noise. Even for automatic ones. Feng Shui was awesome. The example of play session in the beginning features a battle in a kitchen, with people getting bopped with frying pans full of hot oil, a character killing a foe with a katana after running along the stream of bullets coming from his heavy machine gun, and a Bond-style spy with a special power to make a villain monologue and reveal all his plans.

Ooh, good one. In my film that I have three ideas for, one of the ideas is that the hero will shoot the keypad of a half-open door and it will close. He'll swear, shoot it again, and it'll open.

But not so fragile they explode without fail in every one of said collisions.

4. Police cars aren't magical - if they are chasing a high-performance or a modified sports car, they simply wouldn't be able to keep up.

Not even Volvo T5s?

I'm sure some of the American police cars have Very Big Engines Indeed. Granted they're American and can't go round corners, but still. Police Camera Action never lies.

5. Shooting a door lock or padlock in an attempt to break the lock and open the door will likely only have one consequence, and that is the shooter being injured by a ricocheting bullet.

Unless it's a shotgun, of course - the French police, for instance, have special shotgun rounds for breaching doors, but yeah, a hand gun would do nothing much. A decent assault rifle should be able to mince a padlock, though, I'd have thought.

7. Bullets don't carry enough force to knock someone off their feet. They might fall down out of shock (or because they are dead), but if a bullet could knock a victim flying backward, then the same amount of force would have to be applied to the shooter.

By the same reasoning, the amount of force required to make a bullet go through the target's head would have to be applied to the shooter, and the recoil is nowhere near that, surely?


Continuity errors are my big bugbear. There's a massive one in Jurassic Park (watched this a couple of nights ago), where the T-Rex comes out of the enclosure in the rain, from where the little goat was tied up. 5 minutes later Lex and Tim's car is pushed over the barrier in the same spot, and it's now a 100 foot drop. It's not fucking difficult to not do this sort of thing, for christ's sake, and it's glaringly obvious. The internet has an apparently limitless supply of nerds who can spot them for you for free.

More tits please.

YOU PEOPLE WITH YOUR MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE LAWS OF PHYSICS DEPRESS ME.

They also weigh about 4 tonnes which cancels out the big engine somewhat - but your point still stands because evading the cops in a car chase (in traffic) is surely far more about skill and luck than power to weight ratio.

Write new stories rather than regurgitate our old faves into our sandpapered eyes.

Certainly, but they're also very heavy. Some police cars are very fast, but they are specialist vehicles.


The French web rounds basically don't work that well. You'd get there in the end, of course.
A decent assault rifle might well make a mess of the lock, but that doesn't mean it'll open.


Surface pressure, dude

You've got an equal (And opposite) force acting on two different masses.

Say you have a 100kg (american) cop and a 10gram (0.01kg) bullet.

So the recoil accelerating the person is a factor of a 10,000 times less than the bullet.

Size of the round compared to area of the grip? Yeah, true. Still, having used an assault rifle the recoil didn't seem enough to be equal to the force the bullet applies to the target. I assume kinetic energy is being "lost" somewhere in the mechanism and not making it through to my shoulder. as it were.


Yeah, I engaged brain and realised that.

8. Dinosaurs aren't around now and there are no such things as vampires, werewolves, monsters or Michael Jackson. Stop making flims aboot them.

I disagree there, a bit. You're considering gun+cop as a solid entity ("assume all cows are spherical and hollow"), and considering the cop's interactions with his surroundings; but when people think of recoil, they are mostly thinking of the kick of the gun into your hand or shoulder. There, the mass to use is the mass of the gun, and from there derive the force from conservation of momentum, and consider the surface area of contact between the body of the gun and the firer.

I've heard it's about getting through a set of bollards, down a pedestrianised one way street and out of Headington, and onto the backroads faster than they can clock the plate, which is a moody plate anyway.

9. Bullets can easily pass through a car door. Stop your characters taking cover behind them.

I was going to put this one in, with armchairs and coffee tables too. But I figured I had enough gun stuff.

PhysicsAgree.

Do some guns shoot some of the gases out backwards to cancel out a bit of the reaction? Or am I making that up?

Does not compute.

Actually, there's one:

Hollywood - please include guns and porn in all chick flicks to make up for all the tedious navel gazing neurotic woman shit we have to sit through in the rest of the film. Thanks.

10. When downloading anything on the Innerneh, a large bar graph does not appear and take up 90% of the screen.

Um, I've not heard of that. Doesn't mean it's not true, of course.
But backwards of a gun is normally the person shooting with it, is it not?

8- Mr. Hollywood, mouses were invented 30 years ago and they are much more practical than using only the keyboard. And it's not possible to zoom in and out (at the exact point) and also do picture enchantment with only a keystroke.

Stop inventing magical bedsheets that, even after/during a bout of wild passionate sex, somehow manage to at all times just about cover all the naughty bits.

And if you get the password wrong, a giant flashing box does not appear saying "ACCESS DENIED" along with an hooting alarm.

Indeed.

But energy is expended in kicking out the cartridge and chambering the next round, amongst other things, which reduces the recoil.

How did recoilless rifles work?

Unless it's Bladerunner, then it's allowed and in fact positively encouraged.

Yes, I'm pretty sure it's true. I think some SMGs and other smaller full-auto weapons vent upwards, also, to attempt to compensate for barrel climb. I'll go looking for a citation.

Edit -- http://thegunwiki.com/Gunwiki/FactorsOfRecoil



Lots of springs and sliders inside the rifle body.

If they did, surely that would equally slow down the bullet? You want to be containing the explosion and using it all to force the bullet down the barrel, don't you?

Sure thing Glyndwr. I don't know much about guns, so took the assumption that the way they do that weird stance thing when firing is to lock their arms so they act as 'one' object. It seems a fair assumption to make in a forum reply, but not if I worked at QinetiQ!

It gets the point across anyhow. Just use the mass of the gun instead, and then propagate on.

Also how much do bullets weigh?

Springs in the stock, I would have thought to store the energy and then release it gradually through oil filled pistons.

By ejecting a load of exhaust gas out of the back.
Quite why that didn't register in the first place is beyond me.

The fact that the bullet has a pointy tip and hence exerts maximum pressure on the target area (compared to the pressure exerted by a gun hilt or stock) is the most important factor, I'd warrant.

12. Cars don't blow up if you shoot the petrol tank.

Recoilless weapons are less likely to have these things, as they don't have rear stocks. Think anti-aircraft bazookas.

Sure, but, it might be a compromise if it was a really overpowered gun/bullet combination anyway. I dunno, I was probably thinking of the use of some gas to work the automatics on an automatic (if that's how they work)

Ooh!
13: You can't light petrol with a cigarette - it'll just go out.

RPGs don't have recoil because, well, they are rocket propelled, aren't they?

More from Gunwiki:

No, you're right. Bazooka's do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazooka

<reaches for his DK book of guns>

14. Some ladies enjoy a face full of spoff. Include this in your sex scenes.

Indeed. Unless you heat it up first.

Mr Hollywood - Ignore these boring nerds and their stupid physics and carry on making excellent movies where people can stop bullets with cushions and can stand on clouds.

Probably but then again didn't you also warrant that a hand grenade can be rendered harmless by diving on it?

This thread is the Richard Dawkins of Fun.

Ah ha:

BESA Mark 2: "The BESA fired its cartridge while the barrel was moving forward. Thus, part of the recoil was used in stopping the forward travel of the barrel."

14 ZOMBIES DON'T FUKCING RUN YOU FUCKS!

Die Hard would be fucking rubbish if we were directing it.

I didn't say it was true, I just said that I couldn't work out why it wasn't true. But yes, yes I did.

Between 2 and 15 grams are good working values.