Not to mention then getting up and flicking off the dust from their jacket for the men and the ladies tossing their hair
Things you're tired of seeing in movies
- Thread starter Joosh
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TazMan2000
Master Member
OMG, Yes.
The concussion is not a nice slow push that knocks you off your feet. It's a an intense pressure wave (blast wave) that will immediately cause damage to anything sensitive to pressure change, ears, eyes, nose, lungs... You wouldn't get up from it and say "Wow, I'm glad we weren't in that vehicle" and then charge off to find who tried blowing you up. You would be bleeding from your ears and other soft parts and immediately would need a lot of medical attention. That's if you're lucky... if there is any shrapnel coming from the blast (which there usually is) that tears off limbs or gets embedded in your body. The chances of you surviving are slim to none. The farther you are away, the greater your chances of survival.
But, it's all good entertainment. I'm not one of those guys who sits in a theater and ruins it for everyone else. I like the action, just like everyone else does.
Here is a real explosion. The orange ball is probably the gasoline. If it was just the bomb, there would be no orange rolling smoke.
TazMan2000
Riceball
Master Member
But the thing is, the vast majority of the time it's being used by humans, from Earth. Things like the D7 are often referred to as a Klingon battlecruiser for no good reason other than the writers like the sound of battlecruiser. Another examples are the Prometheus and Daedalus, those are quite often called battlecruisers despite there being nothing particularly battlecruiserish about them.
Riceball
Master Member
The interesting thing about the concussive force of bomb explosions is that it was found (relatively) recently that the shockwaves that make up the concussive force of an explosion can actually bounce around. This was discovered during testing of full faced ballistic helmets, it was found that full faced ballistic helmets, while good against fragmentation and bullets, actually made shockwaves worse, Instead of simply passing through one side of the helmet and out the other, they tended to bounce around inside the helmet and causing more damage than an open faced design would.
In the deleted Tatooine Biggs scene, they (particularly Biggs) overdo miming drinking out of obviously empty containers. Biggs "drains the last drop" out of his space soda TWICE.
Axlotl
Master Member
I've been told that the reason GIs in WWII never fastened their helmet straps was because the concussive force from bomb and artillery explosions could take their head clean off if their helmet was strapped under their chin. Don't know how much truth there is to it, but it's what I've heard, and I don't think I've ever seen a picture of a GI in combat with his helmet strapped on.
The Goon
Sr Member
A good friend of mine was a former firefighter, paramedic, and EMT. He once told me that it's surprisingly easy to separate a human head from it's body, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn what you've heard is true.
TazMan2000
Master Member
Very interesting. When you think about how a shockwave propagates, I guess it is easy to understand how dangerous they are when passing through different material. When I was doing a stint in EOD when I was in the military, we had to wear these heavy suits which were layers and layers of kevlar, basically a flak jacket multiplied by three with a long tether. (The older suits had 2 layers of armor plate separated by a void). Basically it was designed to keep the big chunks together so there was something to bury, if things went awry. The tether is for your Man 2 to drag your body back to the van, so that others don't have to enter the cordoned off zone.
Here is an even better example of a shockwave. Keep in mind that the propellant designed to move those shells down the barrel are considered a low explosive. So you can imagine the effects of something that is a high explosive.
Copied from Wikipedia.
TazMan2000
Maybe he was miming a Slushy...
There's no truth to the taking the head off bit as such. At the time the prevailing story was that it could snap their neck in a blast. However it was another example of a military urban myth that was widely believed.
In fact the T-1 release buckle was brought in to reassure soldiers. Which isn't used these days and both the US and UK militaries, unfortunately have enough experience of people caught in explosions with helmets clipped on, to disprove the myth.
If you were that close to a blast big enough, you'll have more immediate problems with surviving anyway.
Concussive forces of weapons like Charlie Gs, or breeching charges are a big issue coming to the fore in veterans these days.
I do remember reading a story of a Vietnam soldier who said his buddy would "fish" with grenades. One day another soldier was standing in ankle deep water when the other guy through a frag in and it broke the guy's ankle from the concussion in about 4-5 inches of water.
CT1138
Sr Member
One of my favorite movies where this in fact doesn't happen is the remake of True Grit. One of the characters spots another firing his his pistol through a spyglass. You see the muzzle flash through the spyglass, and then hear the gunshot about a second or two later.
TazMan2000
Master Member
Perhaps I should restate that instead of always, I should have said usually. Obviously the visual effects and sound effects people are actually working together in that movie. You have to admit that is a rarity. Perhaps they wanted to emphasize how "slow" bullets were back in the old west.
TazMan2000
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p51
Sr Member
"Generation Kill" did an excellent sequence of what I assume was about a 1000-pound bomb hitting a structure. the editing is flawless, as the civilians are there and a split second later you see the correct type of flash and lots o' dust with an expanding shock wave through the dusty area. Looks like real HE they used.
When I see someone in a WW2 movie grabbing the wood crate for .50 caliber rounds I always wanna throw something when the actor picks it up like the empty crate it is. Ever picked up one loaded? They're freaking heavy!
Yeah, that's a story they told to GIs with no basis in reality. Several Marine units demanded the straps stayed on and the 29th Infantry Division all wore themn through the Normandy campaign.
Yeah they also told WW2 American soldiers that the German MG42 was just loud and don't worry about it... I always love seeing that training film clip on documentary shows.
p51
Sr Member
Two military things that drive me nuts:
1. When the Sarge character yells, "Lock and load!" In anything taken place in WW2. Actually, in WW2, it was Load and Lock! It refers to putting the en bloc clip of eight .30 caliber bullets into an M1 rifle. You pushed them all the way down inside the action (load) them snap the bolt forward to engage the first bullet (lock).
2. When throwing a grenade, someone yells, "Grenade!" when that's for only one when one has landed among you that you might want to get out of the way of. You actually yell, "frag out," as all US grenades are fragmentation by nature.
They also never get the explosion of one right in movies. Modern frags go off with a puff of smoke that looks sort of brown with a slight purple tint. I ran a grenade range once and watched several go off from the tower with it's very thick armored glass view port. I left that position when a piece of shrapnel came right for my head and scratched the glass right where the space between my eyes was. Without that glass, I'd have died with just enough time to think I realized it was coming. Anyway, even most people who've thrown them have unlikely watched them go off several times, I'd think.
1. When the Sarge character yells, "Lock and load!" In anything taken place in WW2. Actually, in WW2, it was Load and Lock! It refers to putting the en bloc clip of eight .30 caliber bullets into an M1 rifle. You pushed them all the way down inside the action (load) them snap the bolt forward to engage the first bullet (lock).
2. When throwing a grenade, someone yells, "Grenade!" when that's for only one when one has landed among you that you might want to get out of the way of. You actually yell, "frag out," as all US grenades are fragmentation by nature.
They also never get the explosion of one right in movies. Modern frags go off with a puff of smoke that looks sort of brown with a slight purple tint. I ran a grenade range once and watched several go off from the tower with it's very thick armored glass view port. I left that position when a piece of shrapnel came right for my head and scratched the glass right where the space between my eyes was. Without that glass, I'd have died with just enough time to think I realized it was coming. Anyway, even most people who've thrown them have unlikely watched them go off several times, I'd think.
Yeah my dad (Vietnam USMC) would be watching movies and would occasionally mention that the grenade explosions in movies were too big. He said it would be smoke and a whooomp, but not a big huge flaming cloud. He was a mechanic, so the only times I know of he used them were boot and then a couple times when their base (Dong Ha) was attacked. He had a bad cyst (forgot the type) and was airlifted out to Okinawa. We were watching a Vietnam show a year or two back and they showed the base and it was clobbered a week after he left. So I might not be here if not for that!
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