Watchmen remains the gold standard, I guess, catching a .38 police special bullet aimed at your chest from a distance of three or four feet while you are aiming a kung-fu kick at the shooter.
As for catching bullets in your teeth, having seen Penn & Teller do it, I’m reasonably suspicious of slight-of-hand unless proven otherwise.
Catching a bullet underwater introduces more potential problems. The bullet will be slowed greatly by the water, but refraction affects depth perception, so you might miss. Also, if you and the shooter are underwater, the concussion might deafen one or both of you (sound travels four times faster underwater, and since water is not compressible, your eardrums get the whole effect).
Uh, no. Airguns fire pellets that are far lighter than .22 bullets, so they require far less power. Shooting a .177 airgun pellet at 1100 fps takes ~18 ft-lbs energy, while shooting a .22LR bullet at the same speed takes ~120 ft-lbs.
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speed/reflex issues aside, it shouldn’t be at all hard to think of a device that will enable the catcher’s hand can absorb the kinetic energy of the bullet. after all, the shooter’s hand absorbs the same energy.
Well, if you could move your hand at 400 feet per second just ahead of the bullet, so that it hit your hand at a measly 100 ft/s, you could probably catch it. The problem then would be that your hand would still be travelling at 400 ft/s, so would rip your arm off. Then again, your arm would rip off just trying to accelerate your hand that fast in the first place.
I’m skeptical that the bullet would be hot. It’s in contact with a heat source that, while pretty hot, lasts only a tiny fraction of a second. And the bullet has a significant amount of thermal mass. It reminds me of the popular misconception that meteorites would be hot (or even warm) when they hit the ground.
Nah. A rifle bullet has a pretty aerodynamic shape so air friction is minimal. We’re not talking Friendship 7 slamming through the atmosphere at Mach 25, here.
A large hollow-nose pistol bullet would generate considerably more friction, but even then not enough to be significant compared to the heat the bullet gets just by being fired.
You can (reasonably) safely go out and try catching paintballs with your bare hands if you want to get a scaled-down feel for the reflexes/reactions that would be needed.
You can definitely see them coming at you, and as long as you’ve got goggles & a mask on you’re unlikely to suffer any real injury.
It’d sting, and it would take really “soft” hands to catch one without it breaking…
A .45 cal slug weighs about 250 grains or 0.036 lb. The specific heat of copper is 0.093 and that of lead is 0.032. An all copper slug would be equivalent to 1.5 grams (.054 oz.) of water and an all lead one 0.524 grams (0.018 oz). A lead slug with copper jacket would be somewhere between. The specific heat of steel is on the order of 0.1-.15 so a steel slug would be at most 2.5 grams (0.086 oz.) of water.
Not an equivalent comparison. A meterorite gets rid of most of the heat by ablation of the exterior.