I always think its funny how bullets never seem to penetrate anything in movies. Like, guy hiding behind a barrel? Nope, cant penetrate, even with a rifle. The newest Batman movie had me shaking my head as he shrugged off multiple rifle rounds to his armor.
Bullets are insanely dangerous and powerful. A .223 round can penetrate a solid brick wall pretty easily, and can destroy a cinderblock wall with some effort. Even if it doesnt penetrate, the amount of force applied is incredible. Plates designed to stop bullets have to be made in specific ways to make sure a bullet doesn’t penetrate, but even with that plate, the sheer force of an impact can break bones.
Okay, so if we are going to give batman flack for having super-alloys, where do we stand on Tony Stark putting a reactor in his chest with no concernable heat sink. (He wears it without the suit)
Simple, stark is a semi latent technomancer. His arc reactors might actually work, but the mini ones don’t. They are effectively conductors for magic. They turn magic into electricity with zero heat output. This also explains the suits momentum damping capabilities, and why they can’t be copied easily.
What do you think the effective power generation and heat production is for whatever that reactor is producing, when not in a suit?
If memory serves correctly, the entire outer shell is a round metal cylinder, so that’s a fairly large surface area to transfer heat to the body. Tony might not need winter clothes if he’s got a portable heater in the chest.
Well since it’s on a small scale, maybe 500 million gallons of water per year might cool it off. So we are definitely in a skin melting blood boiling and non breathable hot air situation rising towards his face. -mostlu joking, I haven’t done enough math to back up these claims, but it very much seems like it would be so.
You can’t really dial down output from it, so I always assumed the one in his chest also has the energy to power all of the suit features.
Reminds me of a story I heard about a friend of a friend (so grain of salt and all) who worked as security at a nuke plant. They’ve got a well-stocked armory and he liked to borrow guns to shoot with in his back yard.
He had brought a .50 cal rifle home and was shooting cans or something with a hill as a backdrop.
Then the cops showed up. Turns out the bullets were going through his targets (assuming he was hitting them), then passing right through the hill and hitting a house on the other side whose occupants called the police because they thought someone was shooting at them from the hill.
Not sure if anything came of it afterwards, though I remember he wasn’t allowed to borrow guns from that armory anymore.
So many movies show people getting into gun battles indoors, and they will jump behind a couch or flip over a coffee table and take shelter from a hail of bullets, like that thin furniture is going to stop anything.
I recently watched Hunter-Killer, and one of the good guys was killed while swimming underwater and the bullets kept coming. They did it right at least in that sense
Actually, MythBusters proved that one couldn’t happen, unless the bullets were sub-sonic or low-powered and the diver was within 1 or 2 foot of the surface… water’s just too dense and depletes the power. And something higher power just made a big splash and bits of shrapnel that didn’t have much penetrating power.
That last part is bullshit. If the force distributed across the plate were enough to break bones, then firing the rifle would dislocate the shoulder of the shooter.
The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.
A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.
Just because a plate stopped a bullet, doesn’t mean the plate then distributed that force evenly across it’s whole surface. The bulge on the back side of an impacted plate doesn’t form gently.
Backface soft armor also catches spall, which can be very dangerous itself. Even ceramic plates can have a danger of ceramic shards. I believe modern ESAPIs, XSAPIs, and such modern plates are designed stand alone, but original SAPIs carried a warning that their rating was only in conjunction with soft armor.
I always think its funny how bullets never seem to penetrate anything in movies. Like, guy hiding behind a barrel? Nope, cant penetrate, even with a rifle. The newest Batman movie had me shaking my head as he shrugged off multiple rifle rounds to his armor.
Bullets are insanely dangerous and powerful. A .223 round can penetrate a solid brick wall pretty easily, and can destroy a cinderblock wall with some effort. Even if it doesnt penetrate, the amount of force applied is incredible. Plates designed to stop bullets have to be made in specific ways to make sure a bullet doesn’t penetrate, but even with that plate, the sheer force of an impact can break bones.
Okay, so if we are going to give batman flack for having super-alloys, where do we stand on Tony Stark putting a reactor in his chest with no concernable heat sink. (He wears it without the suit)
Simple, stark is a semi latent technomancer. His arc reactors might actually work, but the mini ones don’t. They are effectively conductors for magic. They turn magic into electricity with zero heat output. This also explains the suits momentum damping capabilities, and why they can’t be copied easily.
What do you think the effective power generation and heat production is for whatever that reactor is producing, when not in a suit?
If memory serves correctly, the entire outer shell is a round metal cylinder, so that’s a fairly large surface area to transfer heat to the body. Tony might not need winter clothes if he’s got a portable heater in the chest.
Well since it’s on a small scale, maybe 500 million gallons of water per year might cool it off. So we are definitely in a skin melting blood boiling and non breathable hot air situation rising towards his face. -mostlu joking, I haven’t done enough math to back up these claims, but it very much seems like it would be so.
You can’t really dial down output from it, so I always assumed the one in his chest also has the energy to power all of the suit features.
Reminds me of a story I heard about a friend of a friend (so grain of salt and all) who worked as security at a nuke plant. They’ve got a well-stocked armory and he liked to borrow guns to shoot with in his back yard.
He had brought a .50 cal rifle home and was shooting cans or something with a hill as a backdrop.
Then the cops showed up. Turns out the bullets were going through his targets (assuming he was hitting them), then passing right through the hill and hitting a house on the other side whose occupants called the police because they thought someone was shooting at them from the hill.
Not sure if anything came of it afterwards, though I remember he wasn’t allowed to borrow guns from that armory anymore.
So many movies show people getting into gun battles indoors, and they will jump behind a couch or flip over a coffee table and take shelter from a hail of bullets, like that thin furniture is going to stop anything.
Just got reminded of the silencer gun battle scene in one of the John Wick movies. That was perhaps the most unrealistic thing I’d seen in those.
And notably, plates that do stop bullets often still only work once.
Also, among rifle calibers, .223/5.56 is quite weak on purpose. Many common rifles are far more powerful.
I recently watched Hunter-Killer, and one of the good guys was killed while swimming underwater and the bullets kept coming. They did it right at least in that sense
Actually, MythBusters proved that one couldn’t happen, unless the bullets were sub-sonic or low-powered and the diver was within 1 or 2 foot of the surface… water’s just too dense and depletes the power. And something higher power just made a big splash and bits of shrapnel that didn’t have much penetrating power.
That last part is bullshit. If the force distributed across the plate were enough to break bones, then firing the rifle would dislocate the shoulder of the shooter.
Okay, neat. Fire a rifle with the stock held just in front of your floating ribs instead of welded to your shoulder and get back to us.
The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.
A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.
In modern body about it’s spread over the area of the entire 8lb plate, which is way, way more area then the butt of the rifle.
Just because a plate stopped a bullet, doesn’t mean the plate then distributed that force evenly across it’s whole surface. The bulge on the back side of an impacted plate doesn’t form gently.
To add to your point, trauma pads exist to help mitigate this. Blunt force trauma is no joke.
Backface soft armor also catches spall, which can be very dangerous itself. Even ceramic plates can have a danger of ceramic shards. I believe modern ESAPIs, XSAPIs, and such modern plates are designed stand alone, but original SAPIs carried a warning that their rating was only in conjunction with soft armor.
Maybe on a plate from 1965 that is just a sheet of steel inside cloth. Modern ceramic plates spread the energy of the impact.
Here’s a video of a Level IV plate taking a 30.06 AP round followed by like 6 5.56 AP rounds and a 7.62x54R AP round so powerful it jammed the rifle.
There’s no significant plate bulge even after all of that.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D1qLZwBeMuM