“Might work better if the robot has a water hose. Wet electronics no worked”
This is the only thing I was referring to. Even in the link provided by msmith537, they aren’t just hosing down the electronics to get them wet to fry the electronics.
“6h minutes?!”
Nicely done.
Then there was a different comic where Firestorm took a spear through him or something…
Green Arrow: “And you know what happens when a nuclear reactor is punctured.”
Anyone: “Nothing? Water comes out? Did water come out of Firestorm?”
of course Firestorm went up in a nuclear blast. Much unlike a nuclear reactor.
I have to disagree. The fusion detonation depends on the fission detonation, which depends on a certain geometry of fissile material, which they disrupted with said crowbar. Almost certainly it made an horrific mess, and they both probably would have died from radiation poisoning, but it wouldn’t have wrecked more than a city block. If you were faced with a thermonuclear warhead, wouldn’t you make the same choice?
There was a standard ‘Defuse-The-Bomb’ movie from the 1970s called Juggernaut. I didn’t see the movie, but I read the novel (I think it was a holiday read - maybe at Grandma’s house).
Anyway, when it came to Cutting The Wire, the hero was on the radio back to HQ about how to do it.
- The diagram the hero had was black and white.
- The original diagram (back at HQ) was miscoloured - (ie red was blue, blue was red etc). I think the hero knew this, but HQ didn’t.
- The guy back at HQ had a grudge against our hero (I think involving The Girl).
- Someone else involved (hero’s sidekick - or The Girl?) was colourblind.
I know I read the crucial scene about 4 times and couldn’t work out WTF was going on - was our hero being double-crossed? Did he know he was being double-crossed? Was the Red wire really the Blue wire? What was The Girl doing (was she a double agent?). Utterly, stupidly. un-necessarily overly complex.
Anyway, he survived and got the girl in the end - I guess that’s why he’s a hero…
All bombs have a helpful digital countdown display. Why don’t they ever hit the stop button on the timer? Or maybe they should put electrical tape over the display so that it can never show zero? If I’m making a bomb, I’d use the same color wire but when I’m building it, mark the ends with numbers on masking tape. When assembled, I pull the marks off. Or maybe when I’m done wiring, I fill the entire cavity with expansive non-conducting foam so you can’t even see the wires.
My take is that bombs can be designed to explode if they are tampered with, and just yanking components out might not be the best idea. For example, if I just ripped a wire and the blasting cap fell out and landed on the floor, it could easily blow a piece of my foot off. (A sophisticated bomb will have several stages, moving from the easiest to initiate - eg the blasting cap - to the most inert bulk explosive) I once heard a story of a person who needed to hold a blasting cap while he worked with his hands, and so he absentmindedly stuck it between his teeth and it blew his head off. I would not want to just go yanking components unless I absolutely have to.
Real-life EOD teams sometimes use kinetic disruption to detonate the explosive, because it is just easier and safer to blow it in place than to attempt to disarm it. Most movie defusing scenes happen in places where there is no opportunity to just evacuate (which is the most logical response).
Also, if bad guys would stop putting blinking red lights on their bombs, like 99% of movie heroes would be dead. After several years in Iraq, not once have I seen a bomb with a blinking red light on it.
Then there’s that MacGuyver episode where a blackmailer has placed three identical Rube Goldbergian bombs on a cruise ship and demands ransom. A previously unseen and unreferenced friend of Mac’s (i.e. a disposable) dies while trying to defuse one, though he shouts a critical clue about the bombs’ construction before kablamming. Mac works on a second bomb while talking a crew member via radio through the third. During conversations with HQ with a previously unseen and unreferenced acquaintance (i.e. the bad guy), Mac figures out the plot so when it finally comes down to which switch to pull, green or yellow, HQ guy says green, Mac cleverly pulls yellow and saves the day.
See, that’s what the Bad Guys did in True Lies. After they initiated the countdown sequence, they filled the cavity the nuke was in with cement. That way Our Hero couldn’t get to it to disarm it, which leads to a nice mushroom cloud and the sudden lack of a Florida key.
As for my reference to The Peacemaker - I was mistaken in calling it a fusion bomb. On rechecking, it was just a plutonium-based fission bomb. My point about beating on it with a crowbar still stands, however.
Your recollection isn’t correct.
First, the guy making the bombs was really out to fuck with people, specifically, bomb defusing people. He made them full of deliberate booby traps, designed to trick experienced bomb disposal experts. (Like having open contacts that tempt you into putting a non-conductor between them, but in reality there is a fine wire already connecting them, and when you do what you think is the correct procedure, the bomb blows.) The bomb maker didn’t care if they went off accidentally - that was what he wanted.
Secondly, Richard Harris’ character was a former colleague of the bomb maker, and knew all the tricks. But he also knew that the maker knew that Harris knew all the tricks (shades of Vizzini in Princess Bride), so he couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t one special trick left that Harris might miss.
So when it came down to the end, and he asked the bomb maker which wire to cut, and the maker told him, he picked the other one, because he guessed (correctly) that the maker was trying one last gotchya.
And there wasn’t even a girl to get. Great movie. Richard Harris is da bomb (so to speak).
Or:
Which shows that there are no new ideas! Hollywood just rips itself off.
There was a story in Knights of the Dinner table where Bob created his character loaded with flaws so he could use the build points to make his character badass. It came down to the disarming scene, and Bob’s character was the bomb expert. He just had to cut the red wire. But the GM reminded him his character was color blind. Aaaaand… they all died.
So, would someone else like to have the actual functioning of a detonator in their search history? How do they set off the explosive? With an electrical charge? With a heating element? With a small powder charge set off with an electrical charge? And what voltage/amperage is required to get that to happen? And how do dynamite caps differ functionally from C4 detonators?
It isn’t a secret. Homeland security won’t come knocking:
Blasting caps.
Two wires (because you need a return path), connected the detonator/timer/cell phone/whatever, take an electrical current to the blasting cap, which is a relatively small (as noted: don’t hold them in you hand, or between your teeth!) explosive that sets off the primary explosive. While the examples shown have two colored wires, they aren’t traps. Cut either or both, and the detonator can’t fire. Pull the blasting cap out of the explosive, and when the detonator/cell phone/whatever goes off, the only bang will be from the BC, not the primary.
You can also use det cord, but it is better suited to demolition.
As with all explosives they should be handled carefully, but they won’t go off if you drop them. The big risk is accidentally putting current through them, such as from static discharge, so best practice is to twist the wire ends together when they are stored.
Unlike C4 bombs. pipe bombs, with homemade explosive, are another story. Generally, they don’t use the most stable explosives. The explosive can be set off from compression, so make sure there is nothing in the threads! Many an amateur bomb maker has met a premature end in the act of closing the bomb and having a trace of explosive go off in the threads.
If you see a pipe bomb, on the other hand, don’t try to defuse it - leave it alone. It could go off from handling, dropping, or even being looked at sternly!
What often runs through my mind when people in movies are failing to simply pull the detonators out of the C4 is that maybe there is some residual danger from the clay-like C4 clinging to the detonator.
I had already played around with an electronics set when I first came across this trope, and I knew you could design a circuit where a capacitor would discharge if a certain part of the circuit were opened, triggering a current in another part. I took it for granted that this kind of thing could effectively make simply unplugging a bomb very dangerous and you’d have to think carefully about where it was safe and effective to cut, effectively working out the schematics in your mind. Sometimes you get mercury switches so that once the bomb has been primed, any attempt to fuck with it is hazardous just because you might close a circuit that triggers detonation. But those don’t show up most of the time, so there never seems to be a good reason not to just extract the detonators.
Isn’t that what they did in the end though? She knocked off part of it with a screwdriver. The bomb blew up still but it didn’t go nuclear.
As I recall, yes.
But the filmmakers still forgot the atomized plutonium flying around.
It was an implosion type nuclear warhead (like Fat Man). She knocked off part of the explosive shell so that the explosion would be off-balanced and not properly compress the radioactive core to achieve a nuclear reaction.
The detonators are pretty dangerous too. Not blow up a building dangerous, but I imagine they could take your hand off.
The little bit blue one.
Your points are valid.
But, in the case of a small bomb like this (you know, it is surprisingly difficult to find a picture of a simple bomb, hence this clock photo) once you can see the wires going to the blasting cap (red curly one in this picture (note: no current return wire is present)) it’s simple. Cut the wire, no boom.
Prior to that, such as in the Juggernaut bombs (another case where I can’t find a picture of the inner mechanism, which was quite complicated), you can make the circuit you are describing, where the circuitry can be designed that cutting the wrong wire will detonate the bomb. But at the core, once you see the blasting cap, you’re clear of booby traps, and can either remove it or cut the wire safely.
It’s all what you intend to do, as the bomb maker. If you truly want to make the bomb so it is absolutely impossible to be disarmed, you make it that the entire mechanism, including explosive, is encased in a sealed box. Then you make the inside have an air pressure that is either higher or lower than atmospheric, and have a switch that closes when the pressure changes. Any action to open the bomb case, including even drilling a spy hole, with equalize the pressure and set off the bomb.
There is no way to know what the internal pressure is, so an intrepid bomb disposal expert can’t simple place the bomb in a chamber where the pressure can be raised or lowered, because he won’t know which way to go. Foolproof! Also, very difficult to create, but hey, Hollywood shows us that genius maniac bomb makers are everywhere.