I didn’t realize a new Mythbusters season was about to start, but there’s a new one tonight and the premiere has some potential. One of the segments revisits the ‘M60 in the trunk’ gag from the Breaking Bad finale, apparently with cameos from Vince Gilligan and Jonathan Banks.
Just a heads-up if anyone is interested.
ETA: title should have read (7/18)
The Breaking Bad M60 in the trunk? Well, it’s as good a way as any to thin out the crew; at the 14-season mark, their salaries have probably climbed to fairly budget-straining levels…
Never have seen Myth Busters (well clips here and there), but as a huge BB fan, (and one who’s basically confined to the apartment all weekend due to illness!), I think I have to check this out.
Apparently they did a previous BB episode as well where they tested the mercury fulminate thing, and busted it. (I didn’t see this episode I just read about it, though I’d like to see it)
ETA: Found a clip. Looks like they only used 1/10th of the amount supposedly used on the show - the clip only shows them blowing up a pumpkin with it and explains that they’re going to try throwing it on the ground next, which I guess is the busted part.
They already got rid of all the cast besides Jamie and Adam.
Cool, thanks! 
That’s what I was thinking of. But consider all the behind-the-cameras people: their ranks could be thinned out, too! (:eek:)
I remember their previous BB episode where they tested melting a body in a tub to see if it would eat through the floor. (It didn’t.)
It looks like they kinda cleaned things up since last season. New graphics, more footage of the two of them working together, I liked it.
What I didn’t like, however, is the same old schtick of “Welp, we made one attempt and it didn’t work…busted”.
Not even talk of setting that bomb lower or using less charge…nope, all mighty Jaime decided that it couldn’t possibly work, therefore busted.
Yeah, that was remarkably sloppy. There was no indication as to how they decided that a charge of a thousand pounds of ANFO was the right amount (it surely wasn’t). Seems like they certainly could have made a couple of tries of different charges without the boat before doing the full test.
I was pleased to see the ‘gun in the trunk’ worked pretty much as advertised, however.
Well, they did do a small scale test first, but ya know what (Jamie and Adam), sometimes when you start with plastic toys, a 36 inch tub and firecrackers, it doesn’t ramp up perfectly and you move to a 60 foot deep pond, a real boat and 1000 pounds of ANFO, even if that’s what the multiplication said you should do.
Also, because I considered it, if this experiment was so expensive that they could only make one attempt, then maybe they should have found a different one.
The also have a bad habit of going really big really fast and sometimes I think that’s a downfall. I recall many years ago my uncle telling me that sometimes small underpowered guns can be more dangerous because the bullet can enter and bounce around (or breakup) instead of just passing through the person. With that in mind the myth that more pirates were killed by shrapnel/splinters from cannon balls going through the wooden hulls than the balls themselves, I had a problem with. They sent the cannon ball through the hull, didn’t cause enough fatal injuries and they kept making the cannon more and more powerful. I wanted to see them make it less powerful. Slow the ball down so it doesn’t just blast right though, it has to push it’s way through.
Think about a small/thin piece of wood, are you going to get a cleaner edge if you crack it over your knee really fast, or just push it over your knee? The slower method is going to cause more damage.
I’d like to seem the revisit that myth. But back the cannon off or lower the charge to see if causes more damage rather than less.
I think the real problem with this episode is they were taking a myth about fighting warships and forcing it into their pirate special. They used a six pounder cannon and a mockup of a lightly built pirate ship. Now if they had used a 24 pounder and a heavily built mockup of a ship of line, their results would have been different.
The BB part:
Note that the trunk lid didn’t pop open. Of all the rigging they didn’t bother to pop open the trunk as part of it? Also, didn’t Walter’s rig also spring up a bit (so that it would shoot over the fender rather than thru it)?
The Blowing the Ship Out of the Water part:
The narrator kept repeating that the explosing should be halfway down. What??? In the context of blowing a ship of of the water in the ocean, “halfway down” would be incredibly deep in most situations.
Based on the scale model, it seemed that it would be most effective if the “bubble” was a bit wider than the ship when it reached the surface. The depth to the bottom isn’t the issue.
I have no idea how they thought they were going to adequately test this in a small body of water. They got a straight on geyser. The narrow water column being shoved up destroyed the boat directly before the bubble had a chance to lift it.
A completely pointless demonstration.
No, it shot through the fender on the original BB episode as well. Given that, there probably was no particular reason (in the BB ep) to open the trunk at all except to let the audience see the cool machinery in action.
Reports of ships being ‘blown out of the water’ I’ve read, mainly from World War II, generally talk about freighter or destroyer-sized vessels, several times the length and many times the tonnage of the 50-foot boat they used for the test. As I recall, a typical mine or torpedo of the era had about a 1000-pound charge, so from that standpoint alone, one would suspect that a thousand pounds of ANFO would be way more than necessary. As was obviously the case.
No, it actually shot through the fender in the show, too.
And yeah, considering the myth was about BIG ships in open ocean, the whole thing was just a waste. It looked like they were on the right track with the small-scale, then they went and jumped full-scale on the explosive while nothing else was “full scale.” “Halfway down?” I don’t even.
