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Poor little turtle

I dont get it. What killed the Shelly boi ?

The bullet

Bullet. What goes up, must come down.

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oh wow

use this as a 4th of July/new years eve PSA for people who think it's safe to fire a gun in the air

This is funny. But starting pistols fire blanks.

Apparently they live in a vacuum

This is why we use blanks!!! Rip tortoise

Getting a squirrel to shoot a gun was challenging enough, now you want me to teach it gun safety?!

ah shit i didnt even think about that, squirrels are notoriously hard to train. (good comic)

Oh, at first I thought the squirrel got fed up with the turtle and did it intentionally (but also regretfully). Now I see the vertical lines indicating the falling bullet.

It's pretty safe to fore a gun in the air. When the bullet comes back down it will only be traveling at its terminal Velocity, not at the extremely high Velocity it has exiting the gun.

Terminal Velocity for a bullet would be around 45fps, feet per second, its muzzle Velocity would be between 900 and 1500fps for most hand guns.

If a 9mm were fired straight up and came down on someone's head, it would hit with the force of a very small rock being rather gently tossed. A good baseball pitch is roughly three times the Velocity.

In order for the bullet to pose a significant threat it needs to travel a ballistic trajectory and stay within an effective range, given enough time it will always decelerate to its local terminal Velocity.

I like THIS version better....

You should teach it to draw a thin line to illustrate that said bullet was coming back down. Otherwise the only two other options is the rabbit sent a second bullet into the turtles brain or he used mind control to burst the turtles brain.

I feel like the turtle...Crushed hopes and dreams

Alec?

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Eh?

Bullets fired straight up reach terminal velocity on their way down due to air resistance, so this would only happen if there wasn't air resistance. i.e in a vacuum.

(not to undermine lots of people being hurt my stray bullets fired into the air, but they aren't fired straight up)

The terminal velocity of a bullet is far lower than its muzzle velocity. While it is still enough to kill if it hits you in the right spot, it wouldn't shatter your head as the illustration suggests.

A vacuum implies the absence of air resistance, which would allow the bullet's fall speed to reach its muzzle speed and actually explode heads.

Tortoise vs Hare (trigger)

Terminal velocity for a 9mm is 50-90 m/s … Tortoise still going to smushed

So many people misunderstand this. A normal sized bullet falling on your head....from any height....would certainly hurt and might draw a bit of blood, but won't be fatal.

Sure but anything going 50-90m/s (rough terminal velocity of a 9mm) is still going to leave a hell of a mess of the tortoise

I mean that's pretty slow. Might draw blood for a person. But I suppose for a tortoise might be a bit worse.

And not on a rotating planet with a Coriolis effect.

Does Coriolis effect work on things shot straight up? I thought it was just north/southbound. But its been a while since learning it.

The comic is good but I would maybe illustrate the bullet better so we have better context for the last panel

I came for the funny and now I'm having a existential crisis about the futility of life.

Listen. I saw an episode of 1000 ways to die that said it’s a real way to die and I’ll believe what I want

"Up" is relative. Looking at the earth, you're shooting outwards from the sphere (or really irregular elipsoid). By the time the bullet reaches its destination, the planet has turned, resulting in an offset.

The Coriolis effect is a "fictitious force", meaning it's not an actual inertial force, but is calculated as a force based on a frame of reference. In this case, the frame of reference doesn't include the earth's rotation - you can't see that happening, and yet even though the bullet went straight up, something caused it to come back down in a different location, a force, a fictitious force, a Coriolis force.

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War thunder be like

Same. I also felt bad for the turtle, looked like a happy dude.

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What am I missing here? What's funny?

you dont see the lines added in the last frame?

I see them. I just think the way they were stylized they don’t look like the path of a single bullet. A simple single line (and black) would be more effective.

Happytreefriends.com still a thing?

The physics don't work.

Yes so up would mean radially outward. And yea I usually just hear it referred to as the Coriolis effect instead of force.

I'm familiar with doing calculations for an object south/north bound but I don't recall with one travelling vertically upward.

So if I think about it since the angular velocity is constant as you travel vertically but the tangential velocity is not, that would mean a bullet fired up would eventually be travelling slower then the air around it with its East/west component of tangential velocity. Which would push it, but then on the way down I can't help but feel it would have the opposite effect and kind of cancel out.

SO in the northern hemisphere if I shoot a bullet up (radially outward) which direction would it land? Perhaps I'm not understanding it.

Well he was 1 day from retirement

Lebanese turtle on New Year's?

no ones talking about how he got the GUN!!

I didn't notice them. I guess my brain filled them in as just being some twigs or tiny tree in the background. What with being brown and sticky.

Same. Seemed like a really weird and grim punchline.

I'd go with "It will die, but the head won't explode."

Death, maybe, but it certainly wouldn't explode its head like that.

I'll agree there. A rather dark twist on the old tale, but it stays consistent with it and explains how the slow turtle could win.

This is why you use blanks and not real bullets in the starting pistol

Nothing thats why it's posted to this sub

And infinite gravity

Well ACTUALLY, that bullet would not have enough energy to kill anyone if it fell on almost exactly the same spot it was fired from. Bullets shot into the air can be dangerous, but not if fired straight up, only if fired at an angle. (Don't ask me the angle at which it can become deadly, i don't know and it probably depends on many factors)

If you would fire a bulltet like this, the maximum velocity it can have is the terminal falling velocity and since pistol bullets are pretty light (a few grams), it will only have enough energy to cause a bruise. If you looked staight up, maybe you could loose an eye if you are very unlucky.

It's the same as throwing a coin down a really high skyscraper. You can't kill somebody like this.

But DON'T Shoot Bullets into the air. It Won't harm YOU really. But if you shoot at an angle, it might kill somebody half a mile away.

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Who trusted the squirrel with the gun in the first place

The other version is where the squirrel aims for the Hare’s future position instead. It’s slightly less funny and more suited to 16:9

Bullet it shot directly up would be falling down at its terminal velocity, which is potentially very survivable.

So should movie props, but tell that to Alec Baldwin.

Also in movie props you shouldn't have either...

Cough rust cough

The bullet wouldn't fall as fast as it was shot. It would just fall like a tiny pebble. Maybe hurt a bit, but not kill.

But... starter pistols don’t have bullets?

A bullet doesnt have the terminal velocity to be fatal

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WTF

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Man the people who died to celebration shots in the air are gonna be pissed to find out.

Dude just look this up i cba explaining basic science. If someone died it will have been because the bullet wasnt fired straight up.

Between the years 1985 and 1992, doctors at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, treated some 118 people for random falling-bullet injuries. Thirty-eight of them died.

Yeah, totally not fatal. Guess they must have been allergic.

You must be allergic to physics and common sense...

If they were seriously injured, it was because the bullets were not fired straight up. They might have been on a downward trajectory, but were still carrying velocity from being fired.

If you doubt this, it is very easy to calculate the energy of a...say...125 grain bullet falling at terminal velocity. You will find it is a tiny fraction of a bullet's muzzle energy, and insufficient to cause serious injury, if the bullet is propelled purely by gravity. That is the point of this discussion, which you missed.

Or, you can continue to make pouty/petulant little arguments with little or no bearing to the topic being discussed. I'm sure that's easier.

A bullets’ terminal velocity required to penetrate the skin is between 45.1 and 60.0 m/s (148 and 197 ft/s) and bullets traveling at <60.0 m/s (200 ft/s) can penetrate the skull.

In the launch angle region of 80º…90º the bullet basically lands the base first. The terminal velocity might vary between values 40…85 m/s. The result depends on possible Magnus-moment caused bullet instability or the bullet/flow resonance. The buffeting-like phenomenon described is new to the authors of the current paper at this particular context. However, the flow time-dependent phenomena detected were found out to have negligible effect on flight without matching of the natural frequencies (flow/bullet).

Experimental result found for an upwards fired 7.62 mm bullet terminal velocity is about 90 m/s, which is near to the base first landing case simulated result. The typical terminal velocities given in literature for spent bullets are from 300 fps to 600 fps (90...180 m/s).

In many simulated cases through the launch angle region the bullet possessed the estimated minimum lethal energy 40 J at the end of trajectory. The skull penetrating speed 60 m/s was mostly clearly exceeded. A preliminary value for shooter-centered danger zone diameter obtained was found out to be approximately 8 km.

A bullet fired straight up on Earth, assuming there’s no wind, might still be able to reach a maximum height of around three kilometers (about 10,000 feet), and will then fall back down to Earth. However, just like a human skydiver only accelerates for a few seconds before reaching terminal velocity, the air resistance acting on the bullet will prevent it from reaching speeds even close to muzzle velocity ever again.

Instead, a falling bullet comes back down with a speed of only around 150 miles-per-hour (241 kilometers per hour), which is just 10% of the speed it was fired with. Because of how energy works (proportional to your speed squared), a bullet that falls from high in the air only possesses 1% of the energy of a bullet newly fired from a gun: the equivalent of a brick dropped from a height of just 50 cm (about 20 inches) off the ground.

In terms of speed and energy, this simple treatment does, in fact, correctly give us the properties of a bullet fired up into the air when it hits the ground. But in terms of location, bullets that are fired even straight up can actually come back down up to two miles (about three kilometers) away from where they were fired.

A 150 mile-per-hour bullet won’t be lethal in most instances, but there are two factors that can change the equation dramatically.

Bullets that are fired at an angle, rather than straight up, may never stop and begin tumbling; instead, they can maintain much greater speeds: many hundreds of miles-per-hour.

If a bullet has enough speed to break the skin, it can potentially be lethal; this occurs at different speeds for different bullets and different individual people.

So guess we just cite our sources, piss on em shake hands and call it a day?

Lol...no...I admit I was partly wrong. In that while falling bullets are certainly highly unlikely to be fatal, it is possible if all the variables align correctly.

I would contend they are a bit more dangerous than I first thought, but certainly not as dangerous as the initial stats you posted implied....for bullets propelled only by gravity.

For sure those stats it's pretty much assured they didn't account for angles and just that the location and trajectory showed them that they were from a "celebratory shot".

All I know is if someone is shooting in the air at any angle imma head inside cause I definitely won't rely on those variables not coming together, even in the very unlikely chance that it will hit me as well.

Yeah. We're on the same page.