Hollywood Stupid

Michael Everett wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Sound carries in vacuum.

That is a lot more complex than people think.
If one defines sound as kinetic energy (compression waves) propagating through a medium then no, it doesn't. However, things like engines and explosions expel particles which can then impact on things (such as a space station), thus generating sound from the point(s) of impact. This means that while sound doesn't travel through vacuum, there can be sound in space.
However, it wouldn't sound anything like that in the movies/tv shows.

You mean the Enterprise doesn't make that low frequency rumble as she cruises past or that "winding up" sound as she jumps to Warp? Oh my stars!!! I've been so misled!!!

Thanks for the chuckle guys! Been a long day, I needed it.

Jonathan_S wrote:Well now you could spend the money to post-process the film and replace the reflected film junk with CGI of the surroundings. But that's still a lot of work to avoid showing your actor's face.

(Actually it'd probably be easier in that case to use a green screen material for the face mask (but one the actor can see through sufficiently to hit their marks) and CGI in the whole glass and 'reflections')

Way, WAY more trouble and expenses than it's worth.

Then the sounds we're hearing wouldn't be traveling through space - they'd be artificially created within the spaceship to assist the occupants situational awareness.

Wouldn't actually surprise me even the slightest if someone did that.


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All ex-military have hidden arsenals of weapons.

And if it's an action movie, then 4/5 of them are paragons of virtue with a tragic past.

All cars are made from gasoline and molded explosives except the doors that are made from inches thick titanium and can stop .50 cal bullets.

Add to that, that faceless mooks always shoot bad enough that they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn even if they were standing inside it.

Many TV shows like the A Team have two groups with automatic weapons blaze away at each other at short range, with the end result of the baddies getting a few flesh wounds, and the goodies unhurt.

Daryl wrote:Many TV shows like the A Team have two groups with automatic weapons blaze away at each other at short range, with the end result of the baddies getting a few flesh wounds, and the goodies unhurt.

There are many real-life tests of how accurate one can be when firing full-auto from the hip. Not very. So this may not be so Hollywood Stupid.

Daryl wrote:Many TV shows like the A Team have two groups with automatic weapons blaze away at each other at short range, with the end result of the baddies getting a few flesh wounds, and the goodies unhurt.

IIRC correctly, only two people actually got shot in all five seasons of the A-Team. The first was BA (shot offscreen and needed a blood transfusion from Murdock as a result) and the second was the officer who could have proven the innocence of the A-Team (he got sniped and killed).

It takes either a lot of practice or natural skill to be able to manage the recoil enough to be accurate with multi-shot/automatic weapons.

Daryl wrote:Many TV shows like the A Team have two groups with automatic weapons blaze away at each other at short range, with the end result of the baddies getting a few flesh wounds, and the goodies unhurt.

While horribly poorly showed, that actually DO have some realistic potential.

If you look at the real world histories of military commanders that excel at capturing enemies rather than killing them(and some that just happen to do it right anyway), you really can find situations essentially similar.

Rommel during WWI does this any number of times, sometimes very spectacularly so.
Including several times where both sides shoot at each other, noone is killed (sometimes noone even hurt at all), but ends with one side surrendering.
My "favorite" is the time he has a platoon, and captures a company defending a fortified barracks. With zero casualties on either side.

There's another famous event where a Soviet nurse and her patients got captured by a German patrol, before they got back to German lines, while stopping overnight she freed herself, commandeered the 2 least injured of her patients and after a few hours forced the German squad to surrender. They thought they had come under attack by at least a platoon, as the nurse in question had been VERY good at positioning herself and her 2 crippled allies before starting the fight( she refused to leave the other patients behind ).
Several hours of more or less frequent shooting(mostly during night/dawn), using up most of the ammo on both sides, yet no serious wounds(and only on the German side at all).


So yeah, while it looks really stupid and silly and unrealistic, it's actually got real world history going for it.

Michael Everett wrote:
It takes either a lot of practice or natural skill to be able to manage the recoil enough to be accurate with multi-shot/automatic weapons.

Being built like a tank also works.

My friend once proved on a bet that yes, he COULD fire what is roughly a M240 from the hip, full auto and still hit more than 1 shot in 10(large targets, but still impressive).
It helps that he's ~100kg muscles.

Also, considering the A-Team specifically, they mostly use 5.56 weapons, those are EASY compared to fullscale 7.62.
Anyway, it's not supposed to be perfectly accurate, it's psychological warfare.

I've fired full auto AK47, Steyr AUG, Bren, M60, and Owen & Sten. Despite being large myself I concede that it is difficult to maintain aim when on full auto, thus most militaries either have semi auto or triple tap as the default option. That said the ATeam shootouts (plus original old US shows) tended to be at ranges where you could throw the gun to hit. I do remember an old saying though, "Couldn't hit a barn from inside unless the windows were shut".

Daryl wrote:I've fired full auto AK47, Steyr AUG, Bren, M60, and Owen & Sten. Despite being large myself I concede that it is difficult to maintain aim when on full auto, thus most militaries either have semi auto or triple tap as the default option. That said the ATeam shootouts (plus original old US shows) tended to be at ranges where you could throw the gun to hit. I do remember an old saying though, "Couldn't hit a barn from inside unless the windows were shut".

Yeah, range makes a BIG difference of course.

About militaries, it's kinda funny how here the military taught how to shoot the M/45 single-shot as the primary way of using it.
As M/45 is a regular 9mm submachinegun, pretty much optimal for autofire...
OTOH, the normal training was for 50, 100 and 150m...

As much as a lot of people denigrate John Ringo's Ghost series there is a lot of truth to Mike's observations during the series while he's in combat.

You see a lot of 'spray and pray' out of the Middle East and 'freedom fighters'. Sticking guns around the corner on full auto, not aiming your shots and so forth. A great combat multiplier Americans, and most western trained soldiers have, is their fire discipline.

American's were highly guilty of this during Vietnam. The figures vary but not one of them is a reasonably hopeful number.

In WW1 for every combat casualty there were around 10,000 rounds fired.

By WW2 this figure rose to about 25,000 rounds.

In Vietnam it was about 50,000 rounds.

We only improved this by improving training. There's a ridiculous sounding number, 250,000 rounds per kill, going around for current soldiers. From my research this number goes back to training ammunition used, as well as rounds on the battlefield. me, I'd rather spend 2 million bullets in training and carry a lot less ammunition in the field because I was accurate and good at my job.