I’ve never, to my recollection, seen a tv show or movie in which guns used their real firing rate. They always seem to be at half or less. Is there something about blanks that make them inherently slow to cycle?
For semi-automatics watch the Lethal Weapon movies to see Mel Gibson squeezing off clips lickety-split.
As for machine guns there are all different types with different rates of fire. Some of the little Uzi’s in movies seem to spew bullets in a rip. An M-16 I think might be slower (or at least maybe set to three-round bursts). Depends on the gun really and as Swede Hollow mentioned there is always the cinematography to consider.
The real problem in movies with guns is the never-ending ammo clip, heroes with perfect marksmanship and enemies who can’t hit anything and people firing weapons they would never have a hope of firing IRL (i.e. the dude in Predator with an auto-cannon or Rambo in one of the later Rambo movies toting an M-60 [I think]…Schwarzenegger in T2 with an auto-cannon is ok though since he was a robot and he is Ahhhnold]).
because it gives the hero of the tale a chance to escape , i mean theres 10 guys with AK-74s firing at a car , now this gives a good fire rate something like 400 rpm on auto (its been a while since i checked the figures but stay with me here) which is like 4000 rounds due to the x10 men factor
but they are reduced and unrifled so that your hero with the (usually) colt 45 or 9mm berreta 92F can take them all out with ease , if it were real the second the guy sticks his hand around the corner to blindly fire back , he’ll get his hand shot off , = not a good hero second he sticks his head up he’ll take several rounds in the head which is an even worse hero ,
What do they use to accomplish the rate reduction, if it is for cinematic purposes? Mechanical rate reducers?
Btw, ak-47s and 74s fire at around 550-600 rounds per minute, and m16s do about 600-650. That’s 9-11 bullets a second, and in typical movies, you’d maybe see 4 or 5 coming out of them.
With most submachine guns, the difference is much more pronounced. Uzis have a rate of around 1000 RPM, I think, and mac 10s have maybe 1200-1400.
I’ve actually seen all of these guns go in full auto, and using a mac 10 as an example, they exhaust an entire 32 round magazine in about 1.3 seconds flat. It’s really remarkable. It’s just a “bzzzzzzt” rather than ‘boom boom boom’… but in movies, they seem to fire maybe 400-500 rpm.
The M-60 actually can be fired by a person standing up, although it’s not a recommended way of obtaining best accuracy and effectiveness from the weapon…
What irks me about movie/TV weaponry is that invariably they get the sound of a Minigun (or Gatling-style multibarrel weapon) totally wrong. It ought to sound like a long, continuous BBBBBRRRRRRMMMMMMM due to the extremely high rate of fire that six barrels or so can produce. Instead we get RAT-A-TAT-TAT.
Only notable exceptions I’ve seen are Predator, where the electric whine of the barrel rotation motor was sometimes louder than the report and -possibly- Terminator 2.
I think it might have something to do with firing blanks.
With real bullets there is more pressure inside the chamber as the explosion is pushing the bullet dowm the barrel. With blanks there is no bullet to push down the barrel, therefore less pressure from the expanding gas.
When we fired blanks in field training in the army we used blank adapters, which screwed on the end of the barrel, effectively sealing it off. Without a blank adapter an M-16 won’t have enough pressure in the chamber to push the bolt completely back and chamber the next round.
I think the studios use weapons that have been modified to function under the decreased pressure from blanks and/or they load their own blanks with more powder to provide a more forceful explosion in the chamber.
I think the same applies to the ‘neverending ammo’ post too – if a gun can empty its entire clip in 1.3 seconds, who wants to see a guy reload every 2-3 seconds??? We have to remember that EVERYTHING in a movie is done to dramatic effect (well, they TRY for dramatic effect anyway! :D). Even when the are trying to be extra realistic, they are doing it for a reason!
During combat training in the Marines shortly after boot camp, we go a little demo of this.
Of course, if you are a young stud in the Marines, and you’re messing with M-60’s and similar stuff, vision of a Rambo type assault naturally spring to mind. The instructor knew it too. Their solutions…
They picked the biggest guy out there in our platoon. Gave him the M-60 and had him try to use it Rambo style. It wasn’t pretty. He could barely keep it pointed even roughly in the right direction. One of the most memorable lessons we ever got. This guy was MUCH bigger than ol’ Sly. Of course, the recoil is much less when firing blanks. <g>
But to say that it was done on purpose is not enough. It doesn’t mean that the gun cycles slower (I’ve fired blank and real cartridges and can’t define any difference), it means the shot is shown in that exciting “whoa” floating technology used for many years in the entertainment industry well before CGI:
BTW; When I said that I couldn’t define any difference between firing a real cartridge and a blank, I meant I didn’t notice any difference in cycle speed.
I’ve learned that I have to be pretty specific on this board…
To be fair, I think Swede Hollow was answering the question in the title of the thread, not the substantially different question in the sunstantive part of the post. Confused me too
Joe Moviegoer has been accustomed to the “RATATATATA” sound and immediately knows it should be decoded as “machine gun fire”.
If a movie instructor starts using realistic rates of fire in (tactically correct) short bursts, he’ll have to use time and shots (heh) to demonstrate that the “BRRAP-BRRAP-BRAAP” sound isn’t a noisy sewing machine, but the actual sound of a machinegun.
The traditional sound brings the message across: Machinegun, right. Now, let’s move on with the plot.
I’ve been to several SMG matches in Phoenix where a freind loans me one of his “extra” machine guns. Nice to have friends who are generous with their expensive toys.
His Uzi is a full size and fires at about 550rpm, pretty slow as SMGs go. It’s a registered reciever so it’s functionally identical to the original. I’ve seen one shooter with an Uzi who used the buffer from the semi-auto version which really speeds things up, the opposite of what most try to do. His sten fires at about 550-600 rpm and the H&K MP5K about 750rpm. The H&K is a registered auto-sear conversion from an SP89 and I’m told fires a bit slower than a “true” MP5K.
Shooting machine guns in competition is the opposite of Hollywood. In general the one who fires the fewest bullets (and manages to hit all the required targets) wins. The H&K my friend lets me use is particularly good becaus he installed a trigger pack with a two shot burst position. Recoil causes the muzzle to rise and it’s easy to keep two shots on an IPSC cardboard but a third shot is nearly always wasted above the target.
BTW I saw a doocumentary about SEALS or some other special forces and they were shooting the M60 from the shoulder like a normal rifle. Cyclic rate appeard to be half that of even a slow SMG and it looked quite controllable. The stock is inline with the bore so there isn’t the muzzle rise of most shoulder weapons.
I was going to say only idiots like Rambo shoot from the hip but at the last SMG match there was stage that had to be shot from the hip. It was very difficult as no one practices that way. It had three small knockdown steel poppers and four IPSC cardboards with three required hits in each. The poppers were hard but at least we could see when they went down and the bullet strikes in the dirt berm helped in aiming. The papers were a bitch because they were just far enough away so we couldn’t see if we hit them or not.
On a slightly related note, its amazing how far backwards the person being shot goes when hit by a bullet, fast enough even to shatter a car windscreen as one film would have you believe.