Here’s a compilation of clips of a bunch of people shooting a particular rifle:
The recoil seems absolutely insane. For comparison, here’s Destin shooting a 50-cal rifle (cued to 4:14):
The recoil from that 50-cal is substantial, but manageable - although to be fair, if you watch to 4:28, you see that the rifle has a built-in recoil system that helps cushion the blow to the shooter’s shoulder.
So what sort of gun is knocking everyone over in the first video?
It’s a T-Rex .577 stopping rifle.
It’s a big game rifle.
The idea of a “stopping rifle” is that if something big is charging you, like a lion or an elephant, you don’t want to just kill it. If you kill it and it still plows into you then you’re still going to get hurt. You want something big and powerful enough to stop it in its tracks.
.577 Tyrannosaur, thanks.
Why would they not include a recoil absorber like Destin’s sniper rifle? Seems like it’d be hard to line up a second shot in a hurry if the first shot has knocked you (the shooter) on your ass.
Two important things,
Compare the way the rifles ‘interface’ with their stocks.
The first has a barrel that isn’t well aligned with the shoulder/stock interface it’s slightly higher. The second rifle is in line.
The recoil from the first rifle is going to be back and up while the second is going to be almost pure back.
The other thing to note is the large brake on the second rifle’s barrel it ain’t there for looks it’s designed to reduce recoil.
“Destin’s sniper rifle” is as big, bulky weapon designed to be fired from a bipod. You can line up a second shot more quickly, but it takes a while to emplace it for the first shot. If you’re being charged by a rhino, you’re never going to get a chance to use that fancy recoil suppression system. It’s an “anti-material” rifle designed to be used by a trained sniper.
The .577 Tyrannosaur rifle is a big game rifle, designed to be used by a hunter, and to be usable for “snap fire”, where you bring it to your shoulder quickly and line up a shot on a target that sees you and is about to charge or flee. That means it has to be lighter and handier, and can’t have the fancy recoil suppression system. And, BTW, sheer weight of the weapon is a recoil suppression system, but makes it harder to line up shots from the shoulder. Everything’s a trade-off.
BTW, stopping rifles are nothing new.
Here is a video of Ian from Forgotten Weapons firing an old 4 bore stopping rifle:
Here is a longer video on 4 bore rifles:
There have been larger and more powerful rifles than these, but 4 bore was the largest and most powerful rifles that you could get that were designed to be mass produced. Larger rifles were one-offs designed to set records or very limited production runs designed for people who just wanted bragging rights to have the biggest and most powerful rifle around.
This 2 bore rifle for example is a one-off exhibition piece:
If you want bigger and more recoil, there’s always the punt gun. This isn’t a hand held rifle though. It’s designed to be mounted onto the front of a punt boat (hence the name) and the point of such a huge gun is to take out an entire flock of geese all at once.
The german Tankgewehr (literally, “tank rifle”, it’s an anti-armor weapon) and similar anti-tank rifles also have a fair amount of recoil. They were originally designed to kill tanks, but then they just made tanks with thicker armor, rendering the rifles obsolete. The anti-tank rifles still saw a lot of use against troop carriers and other vehicles that didn’t have armor quite as thick as that of a main battle tank.
Ian firing a Tankgewehr at a steel plate to simulate tank armor:
A Soviet PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle:
Enough with the popguns. 
And here is the follow-up video showing it in action:
The video explains that that rifle was commissioned and registered as a sporting rifle, but that sport obviously is not big-game safari hunting, because nobody would actually haul, let alone try to fire, such a 2-bore-class rifle.
That was what I was thinking too- with the barrel aligned with the very top of the stock, and the sights so low on the rifle, it looks like what’s happening is that when they fire it, the recoil is actually in line OVER the shooter’s shoulder. So what happens is that when the rifle is fired, the resistance from the shooter’s shoulder is there, but the force is over the shoulder, so the stock basically pivots counterclockwise around where the stock and shoulder meet, giving the effect of a lot of muzzle climb.
I bet if they installed some kind of raised sights or some sort of different stock, the recoil would be transmitted more straight back into the shoulder, and it wouldn’t look so dramatic.
1866, a time of wooden ships and iron men and Sir Sam says the 2-bore was still too much for 'em. Modern effete 21st Century girly-men don’t stand a chance!
I am also guessing that in the first video the recoil effect is exaggerated because the guy has no fucking idea what he is doing.
I believe the original context of the video was that a gun club in the UAE was pranking people by telling them they were firing a normal rifle bullet when really it was a exceedingly heavy recoil cartridge, which is why theres a lot of people with casual stances.
Am I the only one who suspects that this thing was actually designed to have recoil as bad as possible, as a way of flimflamming rich but ignorant buyers into thinking that it was more effective than it really is? The concept of “stopping power” is meaningless unless your weapon is either rocket-propelled, or mounted on something significantly more massive than the target. A man-held weapon stopping a rhinoceros? Ridiculous.
The muzzle brake on the .50 rifle is extremely effective. A muzzle brake essentially shoots gas out in opposite directions in a way that takes a lot of the energy from the explosion and basically cancels it out by blasting it in opposite directions. Without the muzzle brake, the .50 sniper rifle would look a closer to the other rifle in terms of recoil impact, although not as much because it’s a better designed rifle with a weaker round and probably weighs more. But the presence of a very big, very efficient muzzle brake is a big factor here.
The .577 makes around 10,000 ft-lbs, the .50 runs mid to high 13,000.
That sounds like a dangerous prank to me. Witness the broken window.
Agree completely about “stopping power” in the sense of an (in-)elastic collision. As a matter pf physics you’re of course 100% spot-on*.
The gunfire idea of “stopping power” is more like
Deliver enough total KE to penetrate the armored skin and enough inches of muscle meat and still have enough residual KE and enough bullet integrity to do enough organ damage such that the animal loses consciousness, or balance, or something else vital before it closes the distance to you.
You’re not stopping it as a massive object; you’re stopping it as a functioning organism or at least a self-mobile organism. The bigger, ornerier, and more thick skinned it is, the more KE you need to start with to finish the job.
I’d add that ‘stopping’ usually means ‘Target dropped where it stands.’
Unlike movie ‘physics’ where the target is blow ten feet backwards.