In Star Wars, the Death Star was destroyed by a well-placed shot at its sole, “weak” point. Other movies also reflect similar themes - objects, machines, etc, - that are eradicated by a well-timed or perfectly-placed shot to some structurally “weak” area.
Is there any truth to this theory in real life? Could I take down a submarine, car, plane, aircraft carrier, train, etc. if I placed/shot the ___ at exactly the right place?
Well, yes and no. There are a lot of things you could shoot, smash, or otherwise break which would completely disable almost any complex machine. You won’t get runaway explosions, though - not even on a nuclear submarine. Of course, the Death Star (and evidently big Star Wars vehicles in general) used a ludicrously energetic power plant, so given that it’s a Science Fiction movie, it’s not unreasonable.
Story tellers are stuck with this problem:
The solution is for the apparently overwhelming opponent to have a small vulnerability. This allows the hero to defeat the opponent with having to match him on equal terms or rely on factors beyond his control.
But the real world doesn’t have to comply with the rules of good story telling.
Hell yeah.
I have it on good authority that a person with a rifle can take out a tank with a single shot. Tank shells have two fuses. One is armed by impact when the shell is fired, the other causes the shell to detonate when it hits a solid object. In theory, a single bullet fired down the barrel of a tank at exactly the right time can deliver enough force to arm the first fuse. The impact of firing the shell will then cause it to explode, inside the breach of the cannon, and that is more than enough to kill all occupants of the tank. In reality the chances of pulling off such a shot are so ridiculously low as to ensure that it never happens. Apparently you would need to fire the rifle from extremely close to the tank, while the barrel is pointed directly at you, while the shell is being loaded but before the breech is closed. It’s theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
In practice, battleships have been taken out by a single torpedos launched by a light aircraft. In fact that event was reputedly the original inspiration for the “Star Wars” ending.
Does the name HMS Hood mean anything to you?
HMS Hood didn’t have one weak spot that Bismarck just happened to precisely hit; HMS Hood WAS a weak spot. The ship was fundamentally flawed in that it was underarmored for combat against a capital ship, and it could have been torn apart from shots all over it.
More importantly a battleship, with a crew of a thousand men, firing with three dozen guns, and scoring a multiple direct hits, is not in any sense an individual taking it down with a well-placed shot.
It would have to be a pretty great shot though. I wouldn’t like to estimate the odds but they must be somewhere in the region of one in a million…
They couldn’t hit an elephant from this distance…
Never tell me the odds!
Two attempts were made on the World Trade Center. In the first they thought they had found the weak spot but not quite. In the second, we all saw what happened.
If you watch the documentary which was done by [I believe] the Discovery Channel about the architecture of the buildings, the weak spot was found.
Nicely put!
And the Bismarck itself was disabled by one guy in a biplane, slowing it sufficiently that the British fleet caught up with it and pounded it to hell.
Biplane, X-Wing, same thing, really?
I’m sure there were such cases.
The Death Star Trench sequence in Star Wars undoubtedly owes a lot to the film The Dam Busters (some shots are obviously taken from it, as is some of the dialogue). The real-life situation of The Dam Busters did demand getting a bomb in the right spot, but it wasn’t just any bomb, and they actually got the bomb to the right place using a couple of low-tech “targeting computers” (NOT by turning them off). Have a look at my old Teemings column on this:
I wish I had said that. 
Design tradeoffs almost always make this kind of thing inevitable-in the battleship examples you couldn’t possible cover every square inch of the ship in thick armor, so you have to concentrate it in places where it would do the most good. That said, designers still made (and make) errors, such the Scharnhorst class BC’s and their vulnerable boilers which jutted above the armored belt. The early German Panther tanks had a “shot trap” on the front of the turret which would deflect incoming shells downward into the turret ring, often blowing the turret completely off (or at best disabling it).
It’s called a ‘golden BB’…and yeah, it happens in real life. The odds are long, but anything that humans make have flaws or weaknesses that could be exploited by a single, perfect, lucky shot.
-XT
It was my understanding that Al Qaeda’s leadership expected the airplanes to do some damage to the towers, and hoped it would be extensive, but were surprised that the towers had collapsed to the ground.
first off the Bismarck did not have three dozen main guns.
From the Wiki On the battle of the Denmark Straight
Note the the term a shell. Not hours of battering that finally beat her to submission, but a shell, as in one.
The proverbial golden BB. A 15" diameter BB that weighed as much as a Volkswagen, but a golden BB nonetheless.
Why, that’s no bigger than a womp-rat.
One in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten…
Si