"Spy Car: The Revenge": Mildly interesting, but Adam and Jamie seem to be getting the simple and obvious things to test lately. I guess it was impressive how effective both of the movie spike designs were at tearing up the tires, although the Goldfinger one got blunted and bent out of shape pretty quickly, so it was kind of a single-use thing (and of course doesn't have the extension capability of the movie prop, which would add a whole new level of complication).
But naturally Jamie used some engineering knowhow to come up with a more potent weapon. I'm relieved that one was done on the passenger side. After Adam mentioned how close the Goldfinger gadget came to his leg, it worried me that they tested the Green Hornet rig on the same side of the car. But Jamie did evidently concentrate his attack on the back half of the car, at least.
In the hood-mounted guns, I was actually more impressed by the way Adam managed to aim the stationary gun through braking and swerving than I was by the moving gun rig. It's pretty much a tautological conclusion that an aimable gun is easier to aim. The static one required more ingenuity and was thus more interesting.
As for the preliminary test of just shooting out the window, with Adam having very little luck steering and shooting at the same time, I wonder why they didn't do a version with Adam driving and Jamie shooting.
By the way, on the Aftershow for this one, a question asks about the expression "stopping on a dime" and Jamie muses about the difficulty of seeing the approaching dime in order to stop on it. That's not how I interpret the expression. I see it more as meaning the act of braking almost instantaneously, traversing less than the diameter of a dime between the time you start to slow and the time you stop. So if they do that myth in the future and do it as Jamie interpreted it, I'm going to be frustrated the whole episode...
"Spinning Ice Bullet": This was a weird one, but kind of surprising. I was expecting it to be yet another faked viral video. What first made me think they might have something was when they said they'd actually spoken to the guy who made the video. Sure, he could've been lying, but it's more likely that he would've fessed up about how he faked it -- and I'm sure the Mythbusters and their producers/researchers did more than just take the guy's word for it.
It's interesting that, when their ice-block test in the summer didn't work, they actually waited six months to continue the experiment. It goes to show how much time goes into these myths sometimes. Although it's pretty obvious that the host segments were recorded after the whole thing, since Kari was blonde in them and redheaded in the actual testing scenes.
But the conditions at that frozen lake were so horrible that I don't understand why they didn't just postpone again. And why couldn't they find some other option like using an indoor skating rink? Maybe the ice in a skating rink is too thin and they were afraid of shooting up the floor? Anyway, it's rather startling the lengths they'll go to just to test some video they found on the Internet. Grant and Tory said in the Aftershow that this was the worst shoot they've ever done, though Kari placed it second after working pregnant in hot weather. (And there's a deleted scene on the website where they reveal that they were actually near the pass where the Donner Party was stranded. An ill omen there...)
It is surprising that the spinning thing actually worked. I wish there'd been more exploration of why it worked, though, rather than just going "gee whiz, look at that." I get that the rifling inside a gun barrel makes a bullet spin on exit in order to stabilize it in flight. I get that ice is low in friction and thus might not damp the spin. Still, it just seems so pronounced an effect, spinning for such a long time rather than just briefly. How much angular momentum is actually imparted by the gun barrel? You'd think the gun would be designed to impart most of the energy to forward motion, with no more spin than strictly necessary for stabilization. Is the forward kinetic energy somehow being converted into angular momentum when the bullet hits the ice? Is there some kind of effect like how a skate blade works, some kind of thin layer of water between the ice and metal that keeps the friction down? Confirming that this really happens should just be the first stage in exploring it. It's the science behind the results that makes Mythbusters worthwhile, and we didn't get that here. I wish they'd found a way to ensure the bullet ended up in a predictable location -- maybe calculate the velocity and angle with which it lands after ricocheting and then set up an air rifle or something that fires it into the ice at that velocity -- so that they could get it on the high-speed camera and see what's actually going on. Or maybe that wouldn't work -- maybe it's the actual ricochet that imparts most of the spin, rather than it being a carryover of the spin from the gun's rifling as I assumed. So many questions worth asking that they didn't ask.
But naturally Jamie used some engineering knowhow to come up with a more potent weapon. I'm relieved that one was done on the passenger side. After Adam mentioned how close the Goldfinger gadget came to his leg, it worried me that they tested the Green Hornet rig on the same side of the car. But Jamie did evidently concentrate his attack on the back half of the car, at least.
In the hood-mounted guns, I was actually more impressed by the way Adam managed to aim the stationary gun through braking and swerving than I was by the moving gun rig. It's pretty much a tautological conclusion that an aimable gun is easier to aim. The static one required more ingenuity and was thus more interesting.
As for the preliminary test of just shooting out the window, with Adam having very little luck steering and shooting at the same time, I wonder why they didn't do a version with Adam driving and Jamie shooting.
By the way, on the Aftershow for this one, a question asks about the expression "stopping on a dime" and Jamie muses about the difficulty of seeing the approaching dime in order to stop on it. That's not how I interpret the expression. I see it more as meaning the act of braking almost instantaneously, traversing less than the diameter of a dime between the time you start to slow and the time you stop. So if they do that myth in the future and do it as Jamie interpreted it, I'm going to be frustrated the whole episode...
"Spinning Ice Bullet": This was a weird one, but kind of surprising. I was expecting it to be yet another faked viral video. What first made me think they might have something was when they said they'd actually spoken to the guy who made the video. Sure, he could've been lying, but it's more likely that he would've fessed up about how he faked it -- and I'm sure the Mythbusters and their producers/researchers did more than just take the guy's word for it.
It's interesting that, when their ice-block test in the summer didn't work, they actually waited six months to continue the experiment. It goes to show how much time goes into these myths sometimes. Although it's pretty obvious that the host segments were recorded after the whole thing, since Kari was blonde in them and redheaded in the actual testing scenes.
But the conditions at that frozen lake were so horrible that I don't understand why they didn't just postpone again. And why couldn't they find some other option like using an indoor skating rink? Maybe the ice in a skating rink is too thin and they were afraid of shooting up the floor? Anyway, it's rather startling the lengths they'll go to just to test some video they found on the Internet. Grant and Tory said in the Aftershow that this was the worst shoot they've ever done, though Kari placed it second after working pregnant in hot weather. (And there's a deleted scene on the website where they reveal that they were actually near the pass where the Donner Party was stranded. An ill omen there...)
It is surprising that the spinning thing actually worked. I wish there'd been more exploration of why it worked, though, rather than just going "gee whiz, look at that." I get that the rifling inside a gun barrel makes a bullet spin on exit in order to stabilize it in flight. I get that ice is low in friction and thus might not damp the spin. Still, it just seems so pronounced an effect, spinning for such a long time rather than just briefly. How much angular momentum is actually imparted by the gun barrel? You'd think the gun would be designed to impart most of the energy to forward motion, with no more spin than strictly necessary for stabilization. Is the forward kinetic energy somehow being converted into angular momentum when the bullet hits the ice? Is there some kind of effect like how a skate blade works, some kind of thin layer of water between the ice and metal that keeps the friction down? Confirming that this really happens should just be the first stage in exploring it. It's the science behind the results that makes Mythbusters worthwhile, and we didn't get that here. I wish they'd found a way to ensure the bullet ended up in a predictable location -- maybe calculate the velocity and angle with which it lands after ricocheting and then set up an air rifle or something that fires it into the ice at that velocity -- so that they could get it on the high-speed camera and see what's actually going on. Or maybe that wouldn't work -- maybe it's the actual ricochet that imparts most of the spin, rather than it being a carryover of the spin from the gun's rifling as I assumed. So many questions worth asking that they didn't ask.
