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MYTHBUSTERS 2015 Season Thread

The A-Team episode was pretty interesting. I'm impressed by how effective the manhole-cover approach was at disabling a car nonlethally, though of course it didn't succeed in flipping the car like it did in the clip. I think this is the second time they've built a fake sewer out in the boonies somewhere so they could set off explosives in it, although I think it was the junior team that did it last time.

It was neat what Adam said about how perfectly attuned he and Jamie are when working on something like laying the trench plates. People wonder about whether they're really friends or not, but that's really incidental to their relationship; it's as coworkers that they mesh well, despite their differences in other ways.

On the tree cannon thing, I guess the problem was the use of propane as the explosive, because they have done successful wooden cannons before. I wonder why they didn't try for more of a sabot rather than just that little disk, which didn't seem to seal the barrel all that well.

But the "pitching machine" rig that they slapped together in an hour was really effective and kind of scary. They have the advantage over the A-Team of being actual engineers, and they really scored impressive results. It might have been an exaggeration to say they improvised it, since Jamie had time beforehand to think about the problem and come up with a plan, but the specific design and construction work was evidently done in an hour, and they got effective results with a far simpler rig than the A-Team used. Let us be grateful that the Mythbusters would never use their powers for evil.

Nice touch, too, that they licensed the theme music and used it so much. I was never a huge fan of the show (although I enjoyed it more once I realized it was a parody of ultraviolent action shows and basically a live-action cartoon), but I've always liked the theme.
 
I was a kid of the 80s and The A-Team is one of my favorite shows along side Knight Rider. As you can imagine I was grinning like a fool all the way through the episode.

As for why they didn't use a sabot, my guess is they wanted to replicate the A-Team's rough and tumble build methods.
 
What puzzles me is why they even tried it without a sabot or disk. They've done this enough times to know going in that the expanding gases would just go around the plank rather than pushing it out. I knew that beforehand just from being a regular viewer. Maybe they did know but just went ahead and did a test that they knew wouldn't work in order to demonstrate the principle.
 
Are we even sure that the car would actually have been disabled in the second test with the manhole cover? The explosion only dented the underside of the car and didn't puncture or seriously damage anything, so if it had been a working vehicle, I'd be curious to see if it could have driven off from that point, albeit perhaps hobbling a bit (I don't recall if the front tires maintained their inflation or not).

I know the point of the test was to see if putting the explosives in a covered sewer would protect the occupant of the target vehicle and any bystanders from serious harm, but if it's not even a vehicle disabling blast, it's kind of a moot point. It would have been a nice corollary test for curiosity's sake to see if a working car would have been able to continue driving afterward, or if the shock of the blast would have knocked the internal mechanics out of place and rendered the vehicle inoperable.

Their improvised 2x4 weapon at the end was pretty neat, and the loading mechanism/magazine reminded me a lot of the old Chinese repeating crossbow (minus the string firing mechanism, obviously), which was cool.
 
I think that even if the blast didn't disable the vehicle, it would probably have disoriented or incapacitated the driver long enough for him to lose control and end up colliding with the alley wall or something.
 
I think Jamie mentioned the catalytic convertor was damaged. I find it hard to believe the car wouldn't have suffered some serious mechanical damage from the impact, but as Jamie said it's likely the manhole cover shattered from the ecplosion or impact, so the car may have been "drivable" it likely needed some work on the exhaust system.

It seem incredible to me Jamie the Adam built their semi-automatic block chucker in an hour. It seemed the idea/planning occurred in the garage so that, gathering materials and the construction in an hour? Ehhh.......

I trust Jamie, Adam and the show enough to believe it took an hour when they say so it's just seems like a lot to do in only an hour.

Like, Christopher it seems odd to me they didn't automatically go for the sabot with the cannon, they had go know it wouldn't work and that the "gasket" they made wasn't substantial enough to work. Since they're more about showing the science and physics this season, it would have been nice to show the need for a sabot and the barrel to be sealed.
 
I trust Jamie, Adam and the show enough to believe it took an hour when they say so it's just seems like a lot to do in only an hour.

These guys have been doing this for decades now, though. They already know the principles, it's just a matter of putting them together.

I guess you could say that they weren't just testing the specific weapon, but the more global premise of The A-Team -- that a small group of experienced, mechanically adept people could improvise an effective weapon in a short amount of time using whatever materials happened to be on hand. Well, as long as they were in a place that had a lot of materials on hand to start with. If there was any cheating, it was in choosing a location that they knew would have suitable raw materials. Plus Jamie said he'd been thinking about possibilities in advance, so he had kind of a headstart.
 
I think that even if the blast didn't disable the vehicle, it would probably have disoriented or incapacitated the driver long enough for him to lose control and end up colliding with the alley wall or something.

Yeah, I definitely think that the explosion would have been enough to incapacitate the driver long enough to allow the "A-Team" escape. And the test had already shown that the explosion would not have killed the driver or the pedestrians. So it conclusively met the 2 criteria of the scene in the A-Team episode (allow the heroes to escape in a non-lethal way).

I was very impressed with the pitching machine, how lethal and accurate it was, given the relatively simple construction.
 
I haven't seen the show in a while but A-Team sounds fun. I read today that there going to do an episode related to the game Doom (next week I believe), my mind kind of boggles where they're going to with that one.
 
Glad I read this thread otherwise i'd have to go searching for an episode guide.

for some reason Discovery Canada lists the Raiders ep which is on tonight as a repeat so my pvr didn't pick it up (set for record new eps only).

knowing the eps was supposed to come after the simpsons so I made sure to check.
 
The only thing I question about the plank-thrower was that the impact wrench had to be hooked up to an air compressor. We saw the hose attached clearly, but it looped behind the fork truck and was hidden immediately. It was probably why they didn't drive the forklift any farther out than the doorway. It seems to me they were trying to hide the fact that their rig needed an umbilical chord and could drive around freely. But still it was awesome. :)
 
Or maybe they kept the hose behind the truck so that it would be safe from any welding sparks or debris or flying wood that might damage it.
 
I'm sure. And it's a minor point, but I think they were going for the illusion of more mobility than the rig had.

Of course an on-board air tank would solve that, and that would be easy enough for them if they wanted to take it that far.
 
The video game special was rather mediocre. The questions they were testing weren't really that interesting, and seemed to be more about giving Adam and Jamie an excuse to play around than anything else. Wow, it's hard to carry a bunch of weapons and it's hard to slash flying fruit with a sword. Who knew? And I'm totally uninterested in first-person shooters, and could've done without being shown all that gory imagery from the game.

Although it was kind of impressive and unexpected that the pro athlete actually was able to carry all that weight without slowing down.

Anyway, it looks like the whole season isn't going to be media tie-ins. Next week is a Transformers-based episode, of all things, but after that will be "San Francisco Drift," which apparently has to do with myths about auto "drifting." That might be a tie-in to the Fast and Furious movies, I suppose, but the episode guides don't say so.
 
^Yes. Why does that surprise you? Just because many people today are desensitized to images of extreme violence, that doesn't make it wrong to find depictions of violence unpleasant.
 
The video game special was rather mediocre. The questions they were testing weren't really that interesting, and seemed to be more about giving Adam and Jamie an excuse to play around than anything else. Wow, it's hard to carry a bunch of weapons and it's hard to slash flying fruit with a sword. Who knew?
They actually did better "playing" Fruit Busters than I would have expected given the different force of gravity in the game. I thought that was neat to see. But I can see how if you're not a fan of the game, it might not really be interesting.

Agreed on the Doom segment, though. I am a fan of the games, and I was geeking out over their using the sound effects from the games. But overall it wasn't one of their more interesting myths. (Especially since games have moved away from the "carry everything" paradigm to a more realistic 2-3 item limit. In fact, I think that all of the games they showed clips from, except Doom 3, are of that ilk.)
 
Honestly, I was more impressed by the way that game designer was able to model the actual location in his level editor program. I wonder how long it took him to program that, and how he did it. Did he just feed in the blueprint that Adam and Jamie gave him, with the program automatically interpreting it, or did he have to recreate it piece by piece?
 
Honestly, I was more impressed by the way that game designer was able to model the actual location in his level editor program. I wonder how long it took him to program that, and how he did it. Did he just feed in the blueprint that Adam and Jamie gave him, with the program automatically interpreting it, or did he have to recreate it piece by piece?

I'm sure the company has a more sophisticated CAD program that can recreate the basic layout from a scan of the blueprints (he'd still have to add color, texture, lighting and so forth), but if you're interested, you can check out the tutorial videos for the basic Doom map editor anyone can download. The one he was using on the show to add the finishing touches looked fairly similar.
 
^Yes. Why does that surprise you? Just because many people today are desensitized to images of extreme violence, that doesn't make it wrong to find depictions of violence unpleasant.

I just find it a bit needlessly... prudish? I guess is the term I'll go with. I mean, it's a video game, graphics, computer images, why should "violence" in that be disturbing? Further more I don't get why many find violence in movies disturbing. It's Karo syrup and spirit gum.

I can understand not wanting children to see it, they don't have as much of a grasp on reality and the fiction in movies and video games. But adults? I've never understood why adults are often put-off by violence in video-games, TV, movies or whatever. It's fake. Why should the image of red corn syrup covering someone be seen as needlessly violent?

Why should a few red pixels from a video game be needless?

I dunno. I don't get it, it's never bothered me and I'm not desensitized to violence, I've seen some the aftermath of some violent or bloody things and it's certainly bothering when it's going on right in front of you, for real. It's for those reasons I find watching real-world reality shows based in hospitals and such to be more disturbing.

I can watch The Walking Dead all day and not be bothered one bit by all of the latex and Karo syrup in it, people eating human flesh made out of pork meat. Doesn't bother me one bit.

Show me a true-crime series with pictures of a murder victim in it? Disturbing to look at.

Customer who a few weeks ago at work had fallen and cracked open his head on the floor and a pool of blood forming under him (guy was drunk and passed out. Fell, hit his head on the floor/side of a bunker)? Unsettling to see.

Again, no judgment, I just find it odd thing to point out and show trouble over. IIRC, you said something similar about clips from "Breaking Bad" from a season or two ago in an episode centered around that series.

I just find it odd, especially since I more often see women in their 60s who're are fairly staunch church-goers say stuff like that. Less so men in their 40s or so who's presumably a bit more lenient about such manners given the time he grew up in.

---

Anyway, I've not watched the episode yet. Got tired really early last night and crashed. Will give the episode a watch this evening.
 
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