I’m aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?
I don’t have a particular scene, but a here’s a funny conversation I had with an acquaintance:
Huh, this thing takes just 12 volts. Could run it in a car.
Wait, a car’s electricals are just 12 volts?
Yeah. The battery and most wiring around a car is 12 volts.
Wait… then what about those scenes in movies where they torture people with car batteries?
Yeah, those are fake.
looking into the distance as the realization dawns on him Those movie directors deserve jail time.
“We got their hard drive!” *Holds up a power supply.
And even if it was a hard drive, what were you going to do with it? You went in there guns blazing with no warrant after you knocked on the wrong door. The evidentiary chain is well and truly broken at this point. Nothing from that scene would be able to be entered into evidence.
The Dark Knight trilogy really wanted to be a realistic, grounded take on the Batman mythos, so they dropped the more fantastical elements of some characters’ backstories. Ra’s Al Ghul was no longer immortal, Bane didn’t have super steroids, the Joker wasn’t permanently bleached by chemicals…then there’s Two-Face.
I guess they thought acid burns were too unrealistic, so they gave him regular burns…apparently without knowing that burns that severe would be so painful that he wouldn’t even be able to remain conscious, much less run around the city on a killing spree. I mean, you can see exposed muscle in some places. There’s a line where Gordon says he’s rejecting skin grafts, and I remember thinking, “WTF are you talking about? He should be in a medically induced coma, not making healthcare decisions.” Half of his body was an open wound; I’m amazed he didn’t die of infection 15 minutes after he left the hospital.
It always bothered me that two-face has no pronunciation problems with only half a pair of lips
The pseudo-realism in those batman movies and comic book movies in general is a huge part of why I detest them. It’s like an uncanny gap or something. Comic book characters are inherently ridiculous and absurd so I can’t take them seriously. They ask me to suspend too much disbelief.
One specific example from the batman movies is at the end of one of them, I forget which, I think a few hundred cops charge a bunch of guys with machine guns or something? And I remember thinking in the theater they are about to get mowed down World War I style. But somehow they win, they all live, and the streets aren’t flowing with a river of blood. You want me to take them seriously, while having absurd characters and situations, and then you put them in situations where they absolutely should be massacred…I just…I’m out…
They also bankrupted Bruce through theft.
That was one of the biggest things that took me out of that movie. They stage this huge operation at the Gotham Stock Exchange or wherever, everybody knows this giant crime is happening there, but woops, looks like Bruce Wayne has been magically bankrupted, there’s nothing we can do about it. It just took me out of it thinking, “I don’t think you can just bankrupt a billionaire like that.”
He could also talk normally despite half of his lips being gone.
The Nolan movies always cared more about giving the appearance of realism by making everything dull and monotone than actually being realistic.
First time I saw the Jurassic park I thought no way would intelligent people just run around a huge and therefore dangerous Brachiosaurus or jump out of the car and run right to the ill Triceratops. That would be Darwin’s award kind of madness.
Then I studied biology, got to know some zoologists and paleontologists, and yeah, this is exactly what would happen.
Space Flight.
I walked in on my roommate watching “Don’t Look Up” right during the space shuttle launch scene. Literally every single thing was wrong. The trajectory the shuttle took off the launch pad. It flying RIGHT SIDE UP as it did the gravity turn like a fucking airplane. The fact 50 other rockets were in formation with it despite that being stupidly dangerous, them all having different TWR ratios, there not being nearly enough launchpads anywhere in the world to do that, etc. Just everything.
We have existing video footage of shuttle launches. It’s not some crazy mystery. This isn’t Gravity where they add a window that doesn’t exist on the ISS for dramatic tension. It’s not Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft for visual appeal. This was deliberate negligence.
A very common one is spacecraft seem to always launch in a direct line away from the planet. They just go straight up. That’s the least efficient way to get into space. But I usually let it slide because explaining orbital mechanics and Hoffman transfers isn’t necessary for good story telling.
We just watched “The Trap” last night. There was a major pop concert that ended in time for family dinner time during daylight. In the concert, they were depicted having time to make multiple trips to the merch tables and concessions, and in one of those trips, they talked like it was an intermission to change the stage set between songs.
When someone’s falling hundreds of feet and when they’re inches from the ground a super hero swoops in from the side to grab them.
Sure, they didn’t hit the ground but not only did you catching them slow down their vertical velocity just as fast as the ground would have, now you’ve accelerated them horizontally so fast that they’re now twice as dead as they would’ve been otherwise
My head canon, at least with Superman, is his powers. He doesn’t have multiple unrelated powers, but only 1 main one. Instinctive momentum control.
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Flying - Momentum control
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Bullet proof - Momentum stopped at the point of contact.
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Heat beams - Changing the momentum of particles he’s focused on.
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Holding a plane by a thin aluminium sheet - Adjusting the momentum of the plane directly.
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No sonic booms, or massive wind - momentum nulling on the nearby air.
In this case, catching a falling person safely makes complete sense. He just nullifies their momentum before they hit.
I guess you could explain it like that, but I’d really prefer it if they just started writing Superman stories with a more realistic depiction of the world around Superman in mind. It would add more drama since, while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t, so Supes should have to be extremely careful with how he uses his powers if he’s actually going to save anyone.
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Every once in a while, it’s subverted. IIRC, that’s how Gwen dies in Spiderman comics.
I appreciated The Amazing Spider-Man 2 for that reason. Gwen was falling so fast that when she was caught I honestly thought her neck snapped and I didn’t notice her skull hitting the floor
Similarly- when a person is hanging off a building or cliff by one arm, and holding something heavy or another person with the other. It requires an INSANE amount of strength to hold that position, let alone actually haul them back up.
A proper way to handle this would be the hero catching them and then immediately rolling a ton of times while still in the air, turning the downward velocity into angular velocity and gradually reducing the momentum. The person may still pass out from the g forces, but they won’t be a pancake.
Another way that works is just to catch them on a downward tangent to their current fall trajectory, but rapidly slowing down and then turning back up. It means your scenario has to have enough vertical space to perform this maneuver, but not necessarily a lot–even a very small downward deceleration will turn death into bruises, because it’s like falling into padding.
Only the “speed force” or maybe Pym Particles can counteract inertia like that
Wait how exactly does rolling help? I can understand catching the victim sooner to accelerate upwards over a longer time period.
Catching and rolling is physically similar to landing on a curved vertical ramp and sliding down it. The motion is not altogether stopped but instead redirected. Rolling is like hitting a tiny tiny ramp so your velocity is redirected at a very high rate, but it’s still better than just instantaneously stopping
No offense but why do you think it works that way at all?
The way I’m imagining it:
Hero swoops in, matches velocity, grabs person, immediately starts spinning with them and slowing down, thus converting their downward momentum into centripetal momentum?
Where in countless mystery/thriller stories bad guys arrange meets in huge open deserted buildings, to be uninterrupted. In the real world, the place will securely locked and gated, or multiple houseless people will have already moved in there.
That’s why I always have my criminal conspiracy meetings at Starbucks or Wendy’s.
Kingsman
Training scene where they shove a shower hose down a toilet and use it to breathe…
There would be no air (or even sewer gas) to breath in that case. Toilets work by raising the water level in the bowl above the water level in the S-bend/siphon. Since the room was full of water, those toilets would have been flushing constantly, and the whole pipe would be full of water.
Better(ish) solution. Use the body bags that they each had to fill out and place in their trunk/locker to capture an air bubble. That would at least give you some time to attack the door, or figure out how to drain the room.
Maybe the constantly flushing toilet would drain the room.
There’s a scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where Tom Holland is fighting the Green Goblin. Goblin grabs Spidey, jumps with him, and then they both smash through the 23rd or so floor of the apartment building they’re in and they land on the floor below.
Sure, they’re both super strong but neither of them used their strength to push through the floor. They just jumped and reached no more than like a foot off the floor, implying that gravity pulled them both through the floor. Okay, so the floor was built poorly, but then why did falling 10+ feet from the 23rd floor to the 22nd floor not make them smash through the 22nd floor?
That movie’s a lot of a fun but that scene makes me upset lol
Sprinklers react to heat, not smoke and they don’t all go off at once. Also the water that comes out is brown from rust, not clear.
War bows are so heavy that you can barely hold it for the moment it takes to aim. There’s no way you’re holding it for minutes before told to release.
Fire sprinklers have two requirements: to be able to turn on immediately if they’re ever needed, and to dispense something capable of extinguishing a fire. In order to accomplish this, the pipes that feed them are constantly, 24/7, full of water, providing constant pressure on the sprinkler head to be ready to feed it with water in case it ever needs to go off. These water pipes are generally not used for anything else, so the water does not tend to circulate. In fact, there’s usually a sensor in them that detects if the water is flowing (and thus if any sprinklers have been triggered, providing somewhere for it to go) and activates the building’s fire alarm. When a fire sprinkler goes off, the water that comes out has been sitting in that pipe (an iron pipe if you’re lucky, a lead pipe if you’re not) basically since the building was built.
That stuff is NAS-T.
When replacing thermostat valves or radiators in buildings with steel-pipe radiator lines, the water that comes out is often as black as ink. It’s surprising how dark it can get.
And for anyone wondering why steel is used, yes, it does rust, but only while there’s air in the water. As the pipes start rusting, that air gets used up, and the rusting stops. Same applies to sprinkler lines. Steel pipes in radiator lines can easily last the building’s lifetime, whereas copper pipes for drinking water usually need replacement every 30 years or so.
I think a good common one is explosions that throw people at least 10 feet without killing them. If the shockwave is strong enough to do that, isn’t it strong enough to tenderize and completely disable all of your internal organs as well?
Related: outrunning explosions, ugh
Myth Busters did that one. Even attaching big sail to a dummy, the shockwave is so thin that you can’t catch much momentum at all.
Plus if it’s military, it’s usually the shrapnel that kills you, not the shockwave. Fuel-air devices are a different story
I think you are probably right but I always imagine it like wind in a sail. It’s strong enough to push a ship but not rip the sail due to surface area. I can at least pretend that’s the case. 😆
When something or somebody is injected into space, they always freeze in seconds. The logic is that “space is cold” but space is mostly a vacuum and vacuums don’t have temperature. Vacuums insulate against conduction, so you’re not going to freeze anytime soon. (You’ll lose heat via radiation but that will take a while).
Not to mention the effect that zero pressure has on freezing/boiling points. If anything you’d be steaming as all the water on you evaporates!
The evaporation cools the remaining stuff down. And steam is not visible. What we consider visible “steam” is fine liquid water dropplets suspended in air, as the saturated air cooling down demands for some of the water to become liquid.
So you can be steaming and freezing at the same time.
It’ll cool you down a bit but I’ve never seen any evidence of freezing. There’s been experiments on animals and also people have survived vacuum exposure before. According to this animals will survive 90 seconds of vacuum. No mentions of turning into ice like the movies.
And the odds of rescue in that time are one in 2276,709
You mean 2267,709?
Funny… that’s a phone number I know.
I’m not smart but I believe this human.
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.
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.
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.
And notably, plates that do stop bullets often still only work once.
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.
Also, among rifle calibers, .223/5.56 is quite weak on purpose. Many common rifles are far more powerful.
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.
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.
Electrical shocks applied to asystolic hearts to restart them is a classic.
The shock serves to stop fibrillation and to induce a rhythmic firing of the neves, that’s why it’s called defibrillation. Fibrillation is random firing of the nerves, asystole is no firing.
If I recall correctly my father told me you use an injection of adrenaline for asystolic hearts. Kind of like in Pulp Fiction. Though I think injecting directly into the heart isn’t the preferred method anymore.
I watched a show talking about adrenalin and injecting it into the heart, the doctor was saying how it would be the worst place to try and go first because damage but also because you’d be more likely to hit a rib or puncture a lung then actually make it through the heart.
