Assuming a 600fps bullet, and a sufficiently distant shooter, it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility to move in reaction to a muzzle flash before the bullet arrives.
My question is: what would be your odds of actually avoiding the bullet as opposed to moving into it? How accurate were those rifles at that distance while being fired at an actual human in the field?
I guess that’s a bit slow for a carbine. But even at 1200fps it doesn’t seem impossible.
Mythbusters covered this one. Result: Busted. I saw the episode, they did a pretty good job of debunking it.
Right, there’s no mention of muzzle flash from the story.
He claims to have seen the bullet in flight, at night . How close would the bullet have to be for that to be possible? Then he somehow reacts in time to dodge it.
Nope, i’m sticking with it was a clean miss and wishful thinking.
I have experienced this, so insignificant I don’t think I mentioned it to the authorities.
Well, this railgun looks like it would be pretty nasty to have its projectile pass near you.
In Iraq US snipers would shoot at concrete walls targets were hiding behind. Spalling concrete on the side of the wall opposite the hit can kill you. I imagine other kinds of fragments would too. Shock wave alone? I doubt it.
Tracer bullet, I assume.
That bullet is moving faster than nerve conduction (about 200-300fps).
So what? The distance from your brain to your belly is much shorter than 200 yards.
The key seems to be the distance from which you can see a muzzle flash.
In the mythbusters test, they essentially made two corridors of crystal glasses and fired a .50 cal bullet between them. As I recall, nothing happened to the glasses until they put them close enough together that the bullets actually inadvertently touched them. That doesn’t address the question about heat or sound, of course, but the shockwave impact is apparently negligible in terms of damage.
Our nervous systems and musculature just don’t work that fast, which is part of why guns are so effective. People don’t evade bullets. We are talking about a flight time of <.5 seconds assuming 1900fps (muzzle velocity from my Glock19 tests at 1050-1100fps, a rifle round like an M-1 carbine is approximately 1900-2000fps) .
For comparison, reaction times for road hazards in vehicles average about 1.5 seconds between perception, processing, and acting to mitigate the problem (not counting stopping time, just the time to act.
By the time even an above average human being is able to make that kind of a judgement call, the bullet hit them as long as half a second before they acted.
You should read the Mythbusters summary. The time to move out of the bullet path was much less. The limiting factor was vision distance.
Is a powder tattoo an “injury”?
and they failed to dodge paintballs that move around 80% slower than rifle rounds.
Thanks for your replies. Looks like it’s not likely.
That’s true, but if a bullet re-enters a barrel, it will compress the air ahead of it as the air can’t get out of the way fast enough. The question is then how long must the barrel be before a pressure high enough to cause injuries can form.
That’s a bizarre statement. You’re shooting a bullet from one gun down the barrel of a second gun? Assuming they’re the same model gun (and therefore the same strength barrel), the pressure in the second barrel wouldn’t get anywhere near the pressure generated in the one it was shot from, no matter what its length is. The second barrel would be fine, other than being plugged.
I’d say we go faster, not larger. This:
Passing nearby you would certainly ruin your day.
I was talking about if you fired a bullet through a barrel-shaped hole in the body, the pressures would cause injury. The question is then how long does this hole have to be, if its length is the width of the finger, would that be enough?
Tough to say for certain without testing, but I suppose it might be possible.
Tunnel boom is a concern for high-speed trains: whereas in open spaces the air tends to spread laterally to make room for a passing train, in tunnels it can’t readily move laterally like that; the air gets pushed ahead of the train, and can result in shock wave emanating from the exit end of the tunnel, even though the train itself is subsonic. The tunnel entrances and exits (and the nose of the train) have to be carefully designed to mitigate this phenomenon.
There are claims that tunnel boom has caused damage to train tunnels. Presumably the same phenomenon could come into play for a supersonic bullet passing through a hole with a diameter not much larger than that bullet, whether or not the bullet is supersonic.