Michael Yon, a former Green Beret turned embedded reporter in Iraq, picked up an M4 when others around him were wounded, and opened up on an insurgent inside a shop.
Good story, but that’s the end of the propane excitement. It spun around and spewed gas but didn’t explode.
Heating a coconut in a fire sounds safer.
I was warned once that the danger with those tall welding tank cylinders was that they fall over, hit something on the way down, and the valve stem breaks off causing the tank to become a rocket capable of crashing through cinder block walls. 2000 to 3000 psi is a decent propellant kick.
The worker safety lesson evryone gets around flamables is - each flamable has a flash point. Below a certain air-fuel mixture, no flames, no bang. In a certain range, “woof” is possible.
The thing that makes ai blasts so spectacular is the size. If you set off a full cylinder of propane after a significant leak, you have an explosive mix dozens of feet cubed. Often in gas leaks, the whole house is explosive and all that’s left is the roof (if it goes up then down) on the floor. Oddly enough, the person inside the house often survives because unlike solid explosives, it’s a large volume, not a small point source, that is going off.
I once shot at a paint spray can with a 303 and the bullet bounced off at a glancing angle. Unless you hit close to straight on or take out the valvestem, a tank will be pretty robust. If you do make it leak, the next trick is to ignite it. As others mentioned, a bullet whizzing by won’t do it, and odds are the bullet’s spark will be gone before the gas mix is right. If you keep hitting metal around the leaking tank, maybe a spark will set it off. Maybe not. Things still have to be just right.
IIRC, Isaac Asimov had a mystery set in a university where someone attempted to murder a professor by smearing glycerin (or petroleum jelly?) inside the vlave stem of an oxygen tank. If it had been exposed to pure oxygen at 2000psi that would have blown the valve stem off. Flashpoint relates to the partial pressure of oxygen and fuel.
Mythbuster time … propane tank, trebouchet, flaming ballista bolt?
A case of … Budweiser?
When you are that stoned, why bother with good beer?
Ah, good point.
I thought maybe they were going to use it to pick up teenage girls.
In other words, this might happen.
Best answer ever! Even took the Mythbusters several episodes to realize this.
Would the concave bottom of many tanks be the best target?
Here is a guy shooting one with armor piercing bullets. Not your everyday gun, of course.
I just saw that episode. I suppose “gas leak” is technically correct, but I think “high pressure jets of gas shooting from both sides, forming a dense and expanding fog” gives more of a feel for the effect.
Not likely to be lethal to any gunmen standing next to it, probably, but I dare say it would put them off their aim a bit.
To be fair, that was written in 1972. Choices were more limited then; Heineken was considered high brow brew.
Probably not surprising, but that was another Mythbusters episode. (2 minute clip) They were just using air, but at typical welding cylinder pressures, and were quite successful at punching a hole through a cinder block wall and damaging another wall behind the cinder block wall.
this is anecdotal but I know someone who managed to get one to explode. Maybe explode is the wrong word but the tank popped like a balloon, lots of noise, huge fire ball and eventually a car with flashing lights and people asking questions.
I once shot one with a Boys a/t rifle-based gun with .50 API ammunition. It flared up for a moment or two, but no explosion. I doubt there was much gas left in it, anyway.
Pressured gas cylinders with the valve knocked-off will go through walls in their flight. Which is why most of them have guards around the valve to try to stop that happening.
OK, now, what if the propane tank were on a treadmill?
What’s that blueish beam going straight up into the sky around 0:26?
Lens flare, or maybe a digital artifact. Doesn’t exist outside the camera.