Please tell me I didn't see this in that movie ad

Cafe Society
1

I just saw a commercial for the upcoming ACTION ADVENTURE THRILLER[sup]TM[/sup] “Transporter”. I was largely ignoring it, of course, but I did happen to see one scene out of the corner of my eye that made me do a double take:

Bad guy fires a rocket out of a rocket launcher.
Next shot: good guy grabs one of those ubiquitous movie silver serving platters. The four foot long, 8 inch thich rocket then bounces off the half-inch thick platter, saving the good guy’s life!!

Please, please tell me we haven’t reached this level of idiocy. Whatever happened to “you canna change the laws of physics”?

2

Yep, you saw it, and so did I.
Suspension of disbelief nothin’, when they think I won’t notice a tray deflecting a rocket, that’s suspension of credibility.

(Although it does appear that he’s trying to change its trajectory rather than stop it, which he could possibly do if a) he were the Hulk and b) the aforementioned tray was Kevlar/carbon steel/Flubber laminate).

This also from a movie that would have us believe a man can do a flying kick at a twelve-foot high door and knock it off its hinges with enough force to incapacitate the henchman behind it. Riiight.

3

Eh, who cares. Shu Qi is in it, It’s got my money (granted, i expect it to be terrible terrible terrible, but then again, i like that in a movie…)

4

You know, I was going to post on GQ and ask if this made even the slightest bit of sense, physics-wise…

I may have a go at some calculations myself, although my physics is awfully rusty…

I guess there are three questions:
(a) would being hit by such a missile destroy the tray?
(b) would being hit by such a missile break the guys arms/knock him over backwards?
© would the missile hitting the tray cause the missile to detonate?
I’ll leave © to someone more knowledgeable than I, but as to (a) and (b)…

I did some googling and came up with the following for a WWII bazooka (hey, there’s some chance that whatever bad guys he was fighting had very old surplus weaponry):

weight of projectile: 3.5 pounds
muzzle velocity: 275 feet per second

I don’t care if these figures are relatively inaccurate, because we’re just trying to get an idea here…

So suppose the rocket hit the tray at a 10 degree angle. That means that the velocity normal to the tray is 275 fps multiplied by sin(10degrees), which comes out to about 47 feet per second, or about 32 miles per hour.

So could you hold a metal dinner tray at arms length, have someone throw a 3.5 point weight directly at it at 32 MPH, and expect both it and you to survive relatively unharmed?

I’d say so… (let’s see… a major league fastball weigh 5 ounces and travels at 100+ MPH… 4 times faster means 16 times as much kinetic energy, 16 times 5 ounces equals 5 pounds).
So it would be relatively similar to holding up a metal dinner tray and having a major league pitcher throw a fastball directly at it.

I think.

Anyone more knowledgeable about physics want to point out any glaring order-of-magnitude errors in my math?

5

If it is a typical warhead, before it got deflected, it would explode either on contact or proximity, rendering the person, platter and question moot.

6

Maybe is was a potato gun… Nah, can’t see spuds in an action flick.

7

Maybe it was a dud? and then when it hit the plate, it got fixed and armed, so when it hits something a second later, KA-BOOM!!!

8

If it makes y’all feel better, the early reviews on “Ain’t It Cool” all mention that the scene isn’t in the movie.

An attack of common sense, perhaps?

9

Gesundheit.

10

I thought at one time, rocket launchers were equipped with a arming device that would arm it outside a certain vicinity from the tube to prevent a misfire or dropping a rocket.

Maybe the guy shot it up close and him knowing it was not armed yet, deflected it.

Course I am just trying to think using the mind of a director/screenwriter…which is near to insanity as you can be without a nice jacket with arms that go all the way around your body.