Could something like Wonder Woman’s bullet deflecting bracelets work IRL?
It’s really a two-part question
1-For people who know about guns: Is it possible to make a piece of metal or plastic light enough to be worn on the wrist/forearm area, yet strong enough to deflect bullets. My WAG is that it would be for low caliber bullets, say up to a .38, but not higher.
2-For people who know something about martial arts: Would it be possible to develop your reflexes to the point where you could actually position the bracelet in front of the path of a bullet such that you could reliably use the bracelets to deflect bullets if someone is trying to shoot you. My WAG is that it might be possible after years and years of training (“Wax on, wax off”), though how you would work out a way to test yourself with live bullets is beyond me.
Well… there is an advertisement for a brand of titanium dive knife which shows several successive .45 caliber rounds fired at the blade from point-blank range. The bullets split off and do little damage to the blade. Can’t tell at what angle, although I suppose it would be enough to dodge a mortal shot.
The usual problem brought up with the whole bullet-deflecting bracelets thing is that the impact of the bullet is likely to injure/break the wrist. I don’t have a cite on this, but I’m guessing that unless the things are made of extremely shock absorbent material, the wearer could only deflect one bullet with each wrist before heading to the doc for plaster.
Well, there are some practical difficulties. They can be summed up by “bullets move really, really fast”. This means
a. You can’t see the bullets in order to block them.
b. Impulses travel down nerve paths too slowly to react to something happening that rapidly.
(Let’s pretend the bullet is moving 1000 ft/sec. If you’re ten feet away, you have 1/100 of a second to react. Most reflexes, as I recall, operate on the 1/10 second time scale. Things get worse if you reflect that the bullet arrives about the same time as the sound of the shot. So you don’t have that clue that the gun has been fired.)
c. The moving of limbs fast enough to block the bullets would probably rip the muscles and tendons off your arm, particularly if your opponent is discourteous enough to fire more than one bullet at a time.
Well, yes, I realize that. I had more or less assumed that you would position your arms in response to the aiming of the gun rather than waiting until the trigger is pulled. Sort of like the way a batter swings at the arm motion of a pitcher (in baseball) rather than the pitch itself.
What Dragonblink said–it’s not just a matter of strong material for the bracelet; there’s a lot of kinetic energy that has to go somewhere. And since I don’t recall WW getting knocked on her ass when she did the deflection thing–or even her arm recoiling from the shock–I have to assume the braclets themselves have some sort of scientific (or magical) properties that we know nothing about. Therefore, the answer would be no, it wouldn’t work in real life.
It has nothing to do with this, but there is currently a program called Witchbladeon TNT that has the heroine pulling the same stunt.
Apparently, you have never heard of The Matrix. Weird_Al, I will boot up the macros sometime and log you in to try it. Once you learn to ignore Keanu, it’s pretty simple.
It’s obvious you have no idea what a rubber bullet is*. They don’t often penetrate skin, but if WW put her magic bracelet up in front of herself to stop one, it wouldn’t do any good since most rubber bullets are larger in diameter than the apparent width of her bracelets.
*It’s a rubber donut-looking projectile shot from a special adapter on the end of a rifle. Non-lethal is a misleading description; Hurts-like-hell-but-you’ll-survive-if-it-doesn’t-hit-you-in-the-head is a better term.
As long as the bullets don’t penetrate or deform the bracelets, damage to the wrists underneath is going to be kept to light bruising, at best.
I can hear it now, “But in the movies people go flying all over the place when they get hit!” This is pure Hollywood, folks. Most bullets do their damage from penetration and the tissue damage inherent in this. The person who fires the gun doesn’t go flying back, does he? If the gun’s recoil isn’t enough to knock him on his ass, how is the projectile acquiring MORE energy after it leaves the barrel?
Reflecting the bullets would be easy. Ever shoot at a windshield? Glass does a pretty good job deflecting even large rounds. I’m sure a nice chunk of metal covered in teflon or something would work just fine.
the hard part would be moving your arms at the speed of sound to deflect the bullet.
OK, first problem I’m going to tackle is the kinetic energy of the bullet. If you know anything about real guns as opposed to the Hollywood kind you know there is this thing called “recoil”. It doesn’t usually knock the shooter off his/her feet although, with a large gun and a small shooter it can. Let’s just assume small hanguns here.
A kevlar vest can stop a bullet - but there’s usually a hell of a bruise underneath the point of impact, and perhaps even broken ribs. I don’t know of any material you can wear on your wrists that is going to do any better, so at the very least you’ll probably have a hell of bruise and more likely broken or shattered wrist bones - particularly if you do this with more than one bullet in a short period of time.
Next problem - speed. IIRC, human nerve impulses travel no slower than the speed of sound. Bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, the >bang< being a mini-sonic boom. This makes interception extremely difficult.
OK, the comment about basing the bracelet position on the way the gunperson is aiming - well, maybe. Except, of course, you can fire from cover, making this observation difficult. Also, guns do not always fire with accuracy, particuarly cheap little handguns. So even if you stick your bracelet where the bullet should be, the bullet may arrive someone else.
But in the very first episode of the series, Wonder Woman is on stage at some show and is surprised by an “old woman” who comes up from the audience, pulls out a machine gun, and begins firing it at our heroine. (Don’t worry – Wonder Woman managed to deflect them all! Whew!) I could see a real-life Amazon being able to predict the aim of a thug with a pistol, but a wildly-moving machine gun?
And would it really be possible to make a lasso that causes people to slow down as they run away from you so the lasso can drop over them?
And how about clothes that change into a patriotic unitard when you spin around? What happens to the street clothes?
You’re thinking in terms of stopping the bullet, dead. As I recall the ricochet noises from Wonder Woman, we’re looking at deflecting them, which would involve less kinetic energy, surely? The idea would be to angle the bracelets at something fairly close to parallel to the angle of bullet travel.
Not that this in anyway gets around the slight problem that for this to work, your martial artist needs to be moving their arms at something like the speed of sound, all the while doing very quick calculations on the right position and angle for their bracelets in. If the guy or girl could move this fast, who the hell would have been able to shoot at them in the first place.
Something I’ve always wondered about Wonder Woman, besides that, is where do all those bullets go? They never hit anything besides her bracelets. I guess the bracelets vaporize the bullets.
I read once that otters have quick enough reflexes to dodge bullets. So forget about Princess Diana hearing the gun fire or watching how the gunman aims the weapon; all we need to make this work in real life is a woman with keen eyesight and a genome enhanced with otter genes.
This way, not only will we wind up with a crime-fighting woman who can deflect bullets, but also one who eats shellfish while swimming on her back.
MAD magazine some many, many years ago did a parody of Wonder Woman. This was in their first year or so of parodies when they were really funny.
ANyway, at one point he bad guys goons shoot at wonder woman and she proudly deflects the bullets and tells the reader she is doing so.
Wherupon the bad guy calls time, and protests that the bullets would doubtless shatter her wrists, even if she could deflect them in time. He then refuses to continue until she removes the braclets and end the absurdity.