We all seen bad action movies where somebody has a shotgun and shoots a guy and the person shot flies like 10 feet back in the air. Now obviously that isn’t realistic due to the whole “equal and opposite reaction” part of physics.
However I was wondering could you do this? For example if you had a shotgun like weapon that fired little rockets (similar to the gyrojet) could you actually hit someone with enough rockets to actually cause them to be propelled backwards after being hit for a fair distance?
Maybe a multi stage type of round fired from a long barrelled gun could gain enough velocity in steps? No good idea how to do it. Initial expansion and velocity, then another explosion, more velocity, etc… The operator would get a series of recoils instead of one huge one. The target would receive the energy all at once.
The target would need to be wearing very good armour to avoid the round simply punching through.
Sure, just use the same principle behind a recoilless rifle:
Something like this would do the trick:
The British, whose efforts were led by Charles Dennistoun Burney, inventor of the WallbusterHESH round, also developed recoilless designs. Burney demonstrated the technique with a recoilless 4-gauge shotgun. His “Burney Gun” was developed to fire the Wallbuster shell against the Atlantic Wall defences, but was not required in the D-Day landings of 1944. He went on to produce further designs, with two in particular created as anti-tank weapons. The Ordnance, RCL, 3.45 in could be fired off a man’s shoulder or from a light tripod, and fired an 11 lb (5 kg) wallbuster shell to 1,000 yards.
Well if we’re going down the gyrojet route, why stop with blowing them back? Just go full 40k and explode them from inside with your mass-reactive rounds from your bolter.
The .577 tyranosaur might do it as it already flings the shooter back several feet as seen in a number of videos. The problem is getting all that energy to be absorbed by the target. I found some videos of the gun used against ballistic gel torsos and it just rips a big hole and the torso does not go flying. Here is someone shooting the beast:
How about a bullet that delivers an electric shock?
A shock can send someone flying. Muscles contract or relax based on electric signals. It’s their own muscle power that causes them to make a big jump.
Come to that, is it totally inconceivable that an ordinary bullet could do the same. If someone is shot in the spine, could it possibly send a bad signal to the leg muscles? I don’t know, but the Mythbusters test doesn’t disprove it.
I don’t think I’ve ever observed that in any Taser videos, whether news or training. If a tasered victim flies, it’s because they already had some momentum in that direction (i.e., they’re falling forward because they were running).
