INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS

 

Haha, some people have way too much time

Originally posted by blike

Haha, some people have way too much time

 

I wish I was one of them :/

it makes me think of the endless times I've had to explain to people why laser weaponry won't work over long distances....

Haha, guess you're going to have to explain yet another time :x

 

"weaponry won't work over long distances...."

 

Why? What exactly is "long distances". I was under the impression the US government was starting production on 5 or 6 of these planes that are equipped with lasers that can shoot down enemy missles, etc.

Effective distance of a laser should theoretically be limited only by the power input?

I'm talking about the diffraction limit really, as being the most significant factor, since it would expand a beam so much that you would have to dump incredible amounts of power into it to make it effective over even a few hundreds of kilometres.. the people who were suggesting this thing were considering orbital weaponry, and shooting things from light seconds(!) away.

In space, diffraction should only be caused by the aperture; but in an atmosphere, couldn't more precise methods enable coherency at an effective range? I know laser defense tests over a few hundred kilometers have been successful.

Wouldn't they aim the laser with mirrors since it would be pretty hard to track a target with the laser itself?

Just aman

aah, the sorts of beams these people were talking about were realy thin ones. If you have quite a wide beam to start with it's not so much of a problem, though the lasers almost invariably end up being pulsed then.

 

aman: you could probably direct it using a mirror, you'd still run into the problem of aperture size from the source itself though. all the mirror does is fold the beam up.

I saw a video where some guys stood spray shooting full auto AK47s with 30 round clips at 50 yds at 9 man sized targets 5 ft apart. They averaged 2 non lethal hits per clip. Then they went semi-auto and aimed hitting up to nine targets lethal in five seconds with nine shots.

They also fired tracer bullets into a full car gas tank and the bullets just went out. Over and over and they never got an explosion.

They showed the engine block was the only part of a car that will stop a 50 cal. machine gun bullet.

It was fascinating stuff to see what really happens.

Just aman

aah that reminds me of the infamous explosion scene at the beginning of Swordfish . for those who don't know, basicallt the terrorists strap blocks of explosive (C4 I think) to a person, and also strap several cartons of 2cm ball bearings to them, armed to a location sensor that detonates it if they leave a certain radius. essentially once of the people explodes, throwing cars in the air, and turning alomst everything in the street into a sieve. while it looks nice, it's complete rubbish, since the cars would not have been thrown into the air, and also, at the distances seen in the film, and assuming a hemispherical spread of ball bearings, hardly anything at all should have been hit, at the very least, not with the severity that it was. I'm not entirel sure about the assumption of hemispherical projection on account of the way the ball bearings were strapped to the people, but most of the debunking seems pretty sound. A great site for this sort of thing is

 

ww.nitpickers.com

I read The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss... quite surprising to see how the physics is alot better than you would expect, and the technologies are actually explained with proper terminology. Great reading.

Don't you just hate it when they try to explain fake physics in movies. Example: In "The Core" they said that the core stopped spinning, makin' the magnetic field not work...oy. But, the rest of the earth was spinning, 'cause there was day and night, so wouldn't the rest of the earth spinnin' make the core spin, too? Gosh.

That's because the people who make those movies are ****ing retarded.

The people who produced The Core certainly were.

The Core?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/

my god! just the description of the core:

"The only way to save Earth from catastrophe is to drill down to the core and set it spinning again"

makes it sound totaly against physics in every single way!!!

 

by the way, blike, that site is really old now and swansont often mentions it when people talk about flashing bullets and movie physics, still its always a good read the 1st time.

Lolly Roffles

by the way, blike, that site is really old now and swansont often mentions it when people talk about flashing bullets and movie physics, still its always a good read the 1st time.

 

He posted that 2 years ago, so I'd cut him a little slack.

He posted that 2 years ago, so I'd cut him a little slack.

 

OMG!!!!

 

i never saw!!

 

someone awoke an OLD thread!