Here's just the opposite... they walk into a building with windows, during the daytime, bright enough to see, and pull out a flashlight. I remember the X-Files used to have these super bright flashlights that seemed like floodlamps whenever they used them.
Things you're tired of seeing in movies
- Thread starter Joosh
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Here's just the opposite... they walk into a building with windows, during the daytime, bright enough to see, and pull out a flashlight. I remember the X-Files used to have these super bright flashlights that seemed like floodlamps whenever they used them.
p51
Sr Member
Actually, bullets do ricochet off sand. I heard it many times in the Army, when we were shooting on a range that had a beach sand base. The first time I heard it, it surprised me.Almost as bad as bullets making the ricochet sound off dirt and wood!
This might be more for TV shows than movies, but hackers using a drill to destroy hard drives by drilling a hole or two. That will do some damage but most of your data is still there. There is a whole industry dedicated to recovering data from damaged drives. If you are hacker and want to destroy your drive then open it up, take the platters apart, and go at them with sand paper. Or better yet, melt them down with thermite.
Actually, there is one federally accepted level of destroying a platter drive: Degaussing. It scrambles all the magnetic storage in the drive, including the servo control data track, which is essential to determine where data is read from and written to. Without that track, the drive is just a hunk of metal and the data is completely unrecoverable. For added security, the degaussed drive is usually physically destroyed as well.
Now solid state media (SSDs, flash drives, microSD cards, etc) cannot be affected by degaussing because the data is not stored magnetically. You have to shred the drive itself with a shred width of 1/2" or less to ensure the individual data storage areas are cut through.
Thermite works as well, but there are inherent risks involved with it, not the least of which is a visit from the FBI, Homeland, and the ATF. Any type of burning of hard drives releases toxic fumes into the air, the same risks involved with soaking the drives in diluted hydrochloric or muriatic acid. The sandpaper solution just takes too long.
Jaitea
Master Member
Has a the reveal of the bulletproof vest been done?
Just watched the third episode of the latest series of Homeland....(TV show, sorry).....our hero gets shot by sniper, & as soon as the action calms down, camera goes in close and he reveals to us as though we are there a very unnaturally lit, clear view of the vest he's wearing
does this normally happen?
usually after the reveal the take it off, because the danger is certainly over
J
Just watched the third episode of the latest series of Homeland....(TV show, sorry).....our hero gets shot by sniper, & as soon as the action calms down, camera goes in close and he reveals to us as though we are there a very unnaturally lit, clear view of the vest he's wearing
does this normally happen?
usually after the reveal the take it off, because the danger is certainly over
J
Laspector
Master Member
I don't know much about thermite, but I know the first time I got married, I figured it would be a good idea to destroy the hard drive (yeah, you know why..) and I took a blowtorch to it....Damn thang exploded in my face!! Not good.
Riceball
Master Member
It depends on a variety of factors from the caliber of round/rifle, the exact make/model of the round (how much powder is in the round), the bullet type (how many grains it weighs, whether it's armor piercing, hollow point, or plain FMJ), the distance from the target the shooter was, then there's the type of vest (hard or soft and what level). But what's not a factor is that it was shot from a "sniper rifle", any rifle can be a sniper rifle and aside from range and accuracy, there's nothing particularly special about a sniper's rifle, certainly nothing that makes it any more deadly than any other rifle chambered for the same caliber; a 5.56 round fired from an M16 is no deadlier than the same 5.56 round shot from a "sniper rifle".
As far as the ability of a vest to stop a rifle round, there's actually footage out there from Iraq where a US soldier is shown being hit by a sniper but then getting back up almost immediately. Chances are that this guys was hit by a rifle chambered in either 7.62x39 (the same caliber as used by an AK-47) or 7.62x54r (caliber fired by Dragunov rifles and Mosin Nagants) both of which are .30 caliber rifle rounds with a decent punch behind them so a vest can most definitely stop a rifle round. The biggest factor in determining whether a vest can stop a rifle round or not is the type of vest, most soft armor won't defeat any rifle caliber rounds except for maybe .22LR, but there are hard armor inserts out there (ceramic and steel) that can easily stop rifle rounds. One of the most common/popular types out there is AR500 steel which, in addition to being used as body armor inserts, is also commonly used as shooting targets.
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Another good, and fun way, of destroying a hard drive is to use it as a shooting target. A few rounds of anything from 5.56 on up will easily any hard drive completely unrecoverable.
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Not necessarily true. The point of physically destroying a hard drive is to make the recovery process so difficult that the financial cost of doing so is just not worth it. Since HDDs use magnetic media to operate, let's use a magnet as an example. If you shatter a magnet, the individual pieces are still magnetic. The same is true of a hard drive platter. You can shatter a platter, but the data is still there, so someone can, with enough time, money, and expertise, put together all of the contents on a drive except the sectors that were physically broken. Degaussing is the only way to ensure that all data is obliterated. The shredding done afterwards is not really to prevent data recovery (as all data is unrecoverable due to the servo motor data track being obliterated as well) but to just get rid of the drive entirely and prevent it from being accidentally installed elsewhere and have a completely dead drive.
p51
Sr Member
I destroyed my hard drive on our last computer by hammering it on my concrete front doorstep. It created a pattern of divots which looked like a small-scale contour map of the moon's surface. I then hammered it suspended between the tops of 2 railroad rail segments, so it was a 'V' shape.
I'm no expert but I'd give mad props to anyone who could get info out of it then.
Besides, no vest helps against something aimed where the armor isn't.
I'm no expert but I'd give mad props to anyone who could get info out of it then.
Those vests are for the most part designed to slow down a pistol or low-velocity rifle bullet enough so it won't penetrate the vest and the wearer. the military for the most part has suckered servicepeople into thinking they'll simply stop whatever is shot at them. Just like the flak vests we wore on grenade ranges, a SGT of mine said it best, "A vest is good, but situational awareness works even better, most of the time."
Besides, no vest helps against something aimed where the armor isn't.
Riceball
Master Member
As I said previously, it really depends on a lot of factors, like the caliber of round, what type of gun it was fired from, hard or soft armor, level of protection the armor is rated for. In general, soft armor is only really good against pistol rounds and low velocity rifle rounds. Hard armor (ceramic or steel plates) are proof against rifle rounds somewhere short of .50 but you pay for it in extra weight. Of course, most body armor depicted on TV & movies is generally of the soft variety, esp. the ones where they show being worn underneath a person's clothes and not showing.
That's the other thing about Hollywood body armor, you almost never see someone who's shown to be wearing body armor actually look like they're wearing body armor. Any body armor capable of accepting an insert to stop rifle rounds is going to show unless you wear (extra) baggy clothes to hide it and if it's thin enough to wear underneath clothes and not show then it's not going to stop much.
p51
Sr Member
Those 'wear under your clothes' soft ones can't take many hits, that's for sure. Also, you can easily get broken ribs from being shot while wearing one. I helped train some cops before Y2K when we all thought the world would go off the grid (seriously, the government was really worried about that) at our base and we took a good look at one. They let us take it to the range and we riddled it with small arms. Some of the newer cops were told it'd stop anything. We broke that notion really quick. Made one almost hurl when I told him that it was perfectly legal to buy armor piercing ammo in .30-06, and I had plenty of my own...
For movies, how about someone gets shot and they clearly are wearing normal street clothes, then we find they had a vest on all along. Even someone not familiar with such things would immediately spot someone wearing one. I remember reading about a bank robbery where the tellers hit the alarm just from watching a few twitchy guys walk in and obviously wore vests under their shirts.
For movies, how about someone gets shot and they clearly are wearing normal street clothes, then we find they had a vest on all along. Even someone not familiar with such things would immediately spot someone wearing one. I remember reading about a bank robbery where the tellers hit the alarm just from watching a few twitchy guys walk in and obviously wore vests under their shirts.
Axlotl
Master Member
I'm well aware that any rifle can be used as a "sniper rifle", but on the same token there's a reason US Army snipers are issued Barrets and Remington 700s and not M16s.
Hence why I said "4,000 feet per second" - to try to avoid confusion that I meant anything less than something that's deadly accurate from half a mile away. (I know 4,000 fps is a stretch - again, trying to clarify that I didn't mean just any rifle)
I made the mistake once of shooting the last match in a CMP competition with a friend's AR-15. I couldn't hit crap with that toy at 100 yards. Lousy choice for a sniper rifle.
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Axlotl
Master Member
This is what I was trying to say: that bullet-proof vests are meant to stop low-velocity rounds.
@Riceball - If you say you saw a guy take a hit from a .308 (or comparable) and shake it off, I believe you.
But I've got a .303 Enfield that I shoot pretty regularly, and I have a hard time believing those 180-grain FMJ bullets won't penetrate any wearable armor you choose to put in it's path.
Talking of bullet proof vests
I wouldn't want this guys job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x59iN4KMz4<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x59iN4KMz4" target="_blank">
I wouldn't want this guys job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x59iN4KMz4<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x59iN4KMz4" target="_blank">
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Riceball
Master Member
Sounds like your friend's AR had issues since the AR platform, even in basic military issue configuration, can accurately hit a man sized target out to 500 yards. Put high end parts and match grade ammo you've got yourself a rifle capable of at least 1 MOA if not sub-MOA, you're just not going to hit much beyond the 500 yard mark is all, as opposed to a .308 or larger that's capable of hitting out to 800 - 1,000 yards accurately.
It's not something that I personally witnessed, but on a video taken in Iraq of an insurgent sniper that shot at and hit a US soldier, who then got up almost immediately after the shot and proceeded to (attempt to) return fire. You have to factor in that the soldier wasn't wearing just a flak vest, but almost certainly an ITOV (or something similar) with a SAPI or ESAPI ceramic plate insert. Ceramic plate inserts like the ESAPI are perfectly capable of stopping .30 caliber rounds, it just can't take too many before it's completely shattered and useless. Now a days you can buy AR500 steel inserts that act more like traditional armor and will stop most rifle caliber rounds and will take many more hits than a ceramic plate will since the AR500 plates don't shatter on impact.
Vacformedhero
Sr Member
Nearly every American movie characters are sleeping with their curtains fully open , no blinds .......once you spot this it's everywhere
also in U.S action films , when a lot of cars are being damaged in a scene like Transformers etc, majority of cars being destroyed are old European cars.....
also in U.S action films , when a lot of cars are being damaged in a scene like Transformers etc, majority of cars being destroyed are old European cars.....
Yeah I noticed that too... personally I don't like having my curtains open and knowing that anyone could be watching what I'm doing inside. I usually keep them shut (especially in the bedroom... definately don't want no one to see what's going on in there!)
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