I recently watched two films in succession. One was a Brit film called The Lighthouse and the other was Predator.
Try to remember the scene from Predator. The group of commandos are hunting the alien when Jesse Ventura gets killed (more specifically, roasted from the outside in). His friend Mack gets so steamed that he grabs Ventura’s auto-fire machine gun (I don’t know the technical term for it – you now, the cool one which spits out a hundred or so rounds from a revolving set of barrels attached to one another). He scrams to a nearby opening in the forest where he sees something (or feels something) lurking just on the trees. He opens fire, and the other commandos (including a muscle-bound Arnie) join him in action.
Now they’re spread around three metres apart and they all seem to be armed with automatics or machine guns and the like (I’m sorry, don’t know the exact make or model(s) but if someone can do a little finagling, I’d be much obliged). And for a period of, well, I don’t know, sixty seconds they just spit out hundreds of bullets into this 18-25m radius across the forest.
One of the guys in the team (I think the Native American, Billy) comments, “nothing could have survived that”.
I was wondering how true that is. How would something like that affect a big creature, say like a shark or a blue whale? Would that kind of gunfire blast rip it to pieces? And what are the chances that you could avoid being hit if you were a human? Say I was behind a hundred or so trucks – would I still be hurt?
The reason I mention The Lighthouse at all is coz it’s a film about a serial killer who gets trapped on an island with a bunch of prison inmates, some wardens and a psychiatrist. I was thinking if they had trapped the killer in the castle and done to him a la Schwarzenegger-style in Predator whether he’d be able to survive it.
Assuming it got hit… that scene did not strike me as being an example of terrific marksmanship - a shark would be turned to chum. Sharks aren’t THAT big.
A blue whale, if it was just lying there in full view, would probably have been mortally wounded too. That’s a lot of bullets. But maybe not. Blue whales are orders of magnitude larger than sharks, and a 7.62mm or 5.56mm bullet would likely not penetrate deeply enough to hit a vital organ. If you ever see a whale up close they can have scars deeper than your torso that don’t seem to bother them.
The problem with machine guns is hitting something. They have their uses, but hitting a single man (or alien) who’s smart enough to lie down or run away can be harded than you might think. If you were behind “a hundred or so trucks” then no, you wouldn’t be hit. Machine gun bullets can penetrate a fair amount of armor - your M-16 will shoot through most body armor - but the solid steel of a truck engine or a truck wheel and such will save you. Perhaps more significantly, a bullet that has to go through more than one obstacle will be slowed very significantly. And all you hafta do is LIE DOWN.
Your distance from the guns is also a big factor. Obviously range does not significantly help you until you’re a LONG way away - the weapons demonstrated in “Predator” are lethal to half a mile, anyway - but like light or sound, the intensity of the barrage is inversely reduced by the square of the distance. At 50 metres it’s a wall of lead coming at you, but at 250 metres the density of fire is much lessened. You still wouldn’t want to be standing in the open waving your arms at 250 metres, but your odds of getting hit are much better if you can get some distance between yourself and Arnie & Co.
Those rifles, assault rifles, are not high-powered rifles. Assault rifles were specifically designed to be less powerful than the infantry rifle of WWII, which were .30-06 or .308, or the metric equivalent. If you were behind the engine block of a truck, I would bet money on you surviving. The bullets would go right through a house or a person or the paneling of a truck, but the engine would probably do okay for you.
I’ve seen combat footage from WWI where mortars go off right next to some guys and none of them drop. I’ve seen WWII combat footage of Japanese civilains running through the crossfire between the lines, tracers lighting up area like xmas, without getting shot down. And in reality, at, say, 20 to 30 rounds per magazine times five people (I don’t recall the number) plus a machine gun with a few hundred rounds concievably—recall how much ammunition he spent in the assault—there really wouldn’t be that much lead going down range before everybody had an empty gun and stopped firing.
With the predator’s speed, agility, and intellignece, I wouldn’t expect him to be hurt from that.
Only the shots that hit count. They were firing blind, and so a hit would have been by luck. As the distance from the firing line increases, the density of rounds goes down by the square. (Twice as far away, a quarter the lead.)
Let’s put it this way, how many trees were hit, do you think? Some for sure, most? Probably not. So what are the odds that a bullet would hit the much-smaller bad guy?
If I was on the downrange end of this sort of thing, I would just lie flat. Most rounds go high anyway.
The multi-barrelled gun that Blain (Jesse Ventura’s character) was carrying looked to be some model of a Gatling, perhaps a XM214 or a M134, which weigh about 15-20 kg (33 to 44 pounds). I’ve been told many times that it’s a Vulcan Gatling, but given that those weigh more than 100 kg (220 pounds), I find that unlikely.
The 5.56 mm XM214 and 7.62mm M134 miniguns fire thousands of rounds per minute, and both have mammoth recoil peaks of over 100 kg. A single pull of the trigger and even the biggest, heaviest person carrying one of these weapons would be lying on their back, a long way from where they were standing. The guns are also electrically operated, requiring a weightly power source (generator or battery), and burn through 1.25 kg (2.75 lbs, for 5.56 mm) to 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs, for 7.62 mm) of ammunition every second. Imagine how much you’d have to carry in order to be able to use it the way it was in the movie.
I thought the Predator either was wearing the mother of all space-age body armors, or else it’s invisibility screen also doubled as a kind of force-shield. In the final battle, it was still alive and concious after having a who-knows how heavy tree trunk slam down onto it.
You’ll recall the scene just after that ammo-wasting session… the Predator breaks out his first-aid kit and doctors ONE leg wound. That pretty much sums up how effective Arnie’s team was with their “spray down the whole jungle” tactic.
Clearly, the one slug that found its mark DID injure the Predator, but not seriously. I’m guessing that was a 7.62 or 5.56 rifle round, because I doubt that a 9mm round from one of those little H&K carbines or a buckshot ball from the big Indian’s shotgun would have even penetrated the Predator’s thick hide at that range.
You’ll recall that the Predator that fought Danny Glover in LA was able to soak up multiple shotgun blasts as close range with only minor injury, so they’re clearly well-armored by nature.
How would a man fare? Well, that one rifle round would probably have put him on the ground, screaming and thrashing (although not necessarily). Danny Glover’s full tube of shotgun rounds, in the torso at close range, would basically EMPTY a man’s torso.
If Arnie’s team actually managed to HIT you with every round they fired? They might find a few of your teeth later… if they looked really hard.
Jesse’s not human, he’s the former governor of Minnesota!
Anyhoo, the minigun looks cool and all, but you’re right about it being a ridiculously impractical weapon. Of course, demanding practicality from an action movie is a bit silly.
Then again, the pulse rifles in Aliens were a bit unlikely, too. I mean, they looked cool and all and a lot like the modern OICW, but when the ammunition is described as “ten-millimeter explosive-tipped caseless”, it’s becomes pretty implausible that Ripley could casually slap in a magazine containing 99 rounds. Each of those bullets would weigh ~300 grains (~20 grams) so the entire mag has a minimum weight of five pounds, give or take, not to mention the magazine’s volume doesn’t look nearly sufficient.
I’m not sure how long the fire was sustained in that scene, but I don’t think there’s any way that they could have been carrying that much ammo (and certainly couldn’t have laid down that sort of sustained fire without changing clips, which we don’t see them do even once). I think there would have been a heat problem too.
It all depends on if you hit a vital area of the creature or not. Orwell’s essay *Shooting An Elephant* describes the great lengths he had to go to kill a rogue elephant in India.
His small rifle was a 44 Winchester, and after he ran out of ammo, it took half an hour more for the elephant to die. So as you can see, even having a big ass target doesn’t help if you don’t hit the right spot.
Errr we see at least two of them reload (Arnold and Weathers) and Mac runs out of ammo in his first gun and in the chain gun.
The sustained fire from Arnold was only about 36 seconds (the first guy besides Mac to start shooting) I’d think that they’d have enough ammo to do that much…of course this doesn’t include the earlier fight against the rebel camp.
Jut a minor nit. The inverse square law would work if they were firing in a spherical pattern. The circular pattern (roughly level with the ground) means the falloff is 1/r (inverse linear not inverse square).
No typo. IIRC, the families of the Japanese soldiers were jumping off a cliff to commit suicide rather than be captured. To get there, they had to cross the battlefield between the lines. The clip I saw was particularly shocking because it was a young woman carrying a small child and when she got to the edge of the earth, she just disappeared.
Honestly, the most realistic/believable part of that scene was the fact that the Predator survived. Ground is not level. There is a lot of dead space in a jungle like that. When setting up a Patrol Base, we would do a perimeter recon and find the places where terrain (a hill, a depression, a huge fallen tree) restricted our field of fire. You guys know all about angles and stuff. If someone is behind a small hill or in an area of relief, they can’t be hit. Not until we get some bullets that turn in flight. Knowing we can’t hit things in these places, we’d set up Claymores in those areas. But that’s a Patrol Base. Obviously, Arnie and the gang were just out patroling. It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe the Predator was hit only once in that fire fight. Depending on terrain, he only had to lay down. If the terrain sloped off steep enough, he only had to run really fast in one direction. How hard is that. All the bullets would just fly over his head. Or hell, just climb a tree. I dont remember the scene that well, but were they shooting high as well?
With that said, let’s review all the nonrealistic/ridiculous crap in that scene that made me never even consider the plausibility of Predator surviving:
There’s an alien running around the jungle hunting humans. (ok. still not impossible)
These guys brought MP-5s to the freakin jungle. What moron does that?? (Well actually. . . you know who you are! cough SEALS… cough Panama!)
Patroling with a GE Minigun! (WTF?!)
Firing a GE Minigun with no POWER SOURCE. Doesn’t the fact that it’s made by “General Electric” clue you in to the fact that you need some kind of electricity to fire the damn thing? Forget recoil, weight, and all that jazz. Any of those could be shrugged off by “well this guy is REALLY strong”. What this guy was missing was some damn batteries to fire the thing. He had a minigun, and an ammo box strapped to a ruck frame. But NO batteries!
A buddy of mine had a minigun installed in the back of his SUV. (Cool as shit, I know!!) He had a ROW of extra batteries for the thing. I thing it was like 6 12V car batteries or something like that. This thing definitely needs its juice. So that was the most unrealistic part of the scene. Even more so than a super humanoid alien running around the jungle.
