Don't try anything you're about to see at home.
That's right. We're what you call experts.
Narrator: On this episode of "mythbusters"...
[ engine turns over ]
[ slurps ]
Jamie, I've got a present for you.
[ grunts ]
[ blows ]
Welcome to hollywood explosions on trial.
Narrator: Who are the mythbusters?
Adam savage...
I got the chicken! [ laughs ]
Narrator: ...And jamie hyneman.
What could go wrong?
Between them, more than 30 years of special-effects experience.
Together with tory belleci...
Let's chop this car up!
Narrator: ...Grant imahara...
Something just touched me!
Narrator: ...And kari byron...
Ah!
Narrator: They don't just tell the myths.
They put them to the test.
-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
[ siren wails ]
Looks dangerous.
It is very dangerous.
This is possibly the most dangerous story
We have ever filmed.
Fire!
It didn't go off.
We have a live grenade.
We cannot leave this bunker
Until we deal with this situation.
Let me guess. It involves a grenade.
You're like a mind reader.
Yes, it totally does!
Pop quiz, hotshot.
What would you do if someone threw one of these at you?
Why, you kiss your ass goodbye.
That is one solution.
Another solution favored by hollywood movie action heroes --
Pull out a gun and shoot it out of the air.
And that is where I think we need to begin.
Okay. [ imitates gunshot ]
It's a standard action-movie move.
To protect yourself from an incoming grenade,
You take it out midair,
Where one of three things can happen --
It explodes safely...
It's rendered inert...
Or it's sent back from whence it came.
Adam: Now, when it comes to shooting objects out of midair,
That's a sport, actually, called trap shooting or skeet shooting.
I think it's this way.
Pull.
And when you want to do that in the bay area...
Braidu: Pull!
Adam: ...You come here, to the coyote valley sporting clay.
You must be dave.
Our teacher today is dave braidu.
Pull.
Adam: He's been an instructor for 16 years,
And he's gonna teach jamie and I
How to rid the world of the scourge of clay pigeons.
It would be an understatement to say we've fired a lot of guns
In the course of doing this show.
You will come across...
Over the years, we've fired pistols...
Rifles...
Cannons.
We've fired from moving cars, at moving cars.
I'm feeling pretty shot up.
Adam: We've even fired bullets at other bullets.
But this time,
We're trying to hit a moving target in midair...
Pull.
You were close, but not close enough.
...Training on clay pigeons
So that hopefully we can hit a grenade.
Pull.
Narrator: If they can't even hit a moving target,
Then the myth falls at the first hurdle.
Pull.
And at first, it's not as easy
As hollywood would have us believe.
Yeah, I was a little, uh, behind it.
But they've got a great teacher.
Pull.
Nice shot.
Fantastic.
Very nice shot.
Pull.
There we go.
Hey! Beautiful shot.
Ooh.
I was just gonna tell you about that.
We've been shooting at these clays from the side,
But if you're trying to avoid getting hit by a grenade,
You're gonna be more concerned when they're coming right at ya.
Yeah, got it!
[ laughs ]
Like that.
Pull.
Very well-done, nice shot.
Narrator: Interestingly, the more realistic
Oncoming trajectory is a lot easier to hit.
So far, this myth is moving in the right direction.
Sweet.
Pull.
Yeah.
[ gunshot ]
[ laughs ]
So, adam.
Yes, sir?
To celebrate our newly found skills,
I'm gonna go over behind that building over there
And toss my beret out.
No way! And let me shoot at it?
You've got one shot.
I'll take it. [ laughs ]
Pull.
I can't tell if I hit -- did I hit it?
I think you did.
Oh! [ laughs ]
Sorry. Let's go take a look.
All right.
Jamie: I think you did.
There's the proof.
[ laughs ]
Dude, I get to keep this
And stuff and mount it in my trophy case.
Well, what am I gonna wear?
Oh, we'll get you another beret.
Okay, you let me know when it arrives.
Okay.
[ beeping ]
"seconds from disaster?"
I'm not sure I like the sound of this one.
No, this is gonna be a good one.
This is that old, cliché, hollywood device
Where the hero finds himself
In the possession of a bomb that's about to go off.
Candygram!
Tory: Ah!
[ gasps ]
Instead of letting it explode, he surveys his surroundings
And then finds a place to stash it.
The question is, is this gonna work in real life?
Can you stash it, dive, survive?
Well, it sounds like
We're gonna have to set off some explosions.
You know how much we hate that.
Tory: So, we're here at the alameda county bomb range
To see what items that you would find in your household
That could protect you from an explosion.
Now, the amount we're gonna be using is a pound of c-4.
When in doubt, c-4.
[ chuckles ]
So, what is c-4?
Well, its technical designation
Is cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine.
When you want a high-velocity explosive
That's also very stable, c-4 can't be beat.
You could set it on fire and it wouldn't go off.
You could hit with a hammer and it wouldn't detonate.
What it does take to detonate c-4
Is detcord or a blasting cap.
Kari: The explosion of the blasting cap
Applies a really powerful shock
That triggers the c-4 explosive material.
As the c-4 decomposes, it releases a variety of gases
That expand at over 26,000 feet per second.
Now, before we can find out if you can contain that explosion,
We need to find out what its power is without containment,
And for that, we're gonna do a control.
All right, buster, the bomb's about to go off.
Jump!
Grant: So, how are we measuring the shock wave?
Safe!
With these, burst discs made by a company called oseco.
Now, what happens when an explosive goes off
Is that you have a shock wave that propagates spherically out
From the center of the explosion.
All right, so, that's 20 feet away from the blast zone.
These are calibrated to burst at a specific psi.
This one is 13 psi,
Which we're using to measure injury
Because, remember, it's not whether the hero lives or dies,
It's whether he walks away unscathed.
Kari: Ready.
In three, two, one.
Tory: Whoa.
That was a good one.
I felt that one.
Look at that.
That's perfect.
So, we've successfully identified the injury zone.
For our experiment, this is at 12 feet.
At 14 feet,
The disc didn't go off, so he'd be safe out there.
We're gonna set our guy right here at the 12-foot marker
And try it again with our first household item,
A filing cabinet.
[ beeping ] [ gasps ]
Narrator: Coming up on "mythbusters"...
Bad baby! Run!
Pull!
So, we're done with skeet shooting,
And we didn't do too bad.
Yeah. But that was skeet.
Oh!
Now we're gonna try our hand
At hitting something that's more like a grenade
And see if they're any harder to hit.
Sweet.
Narrator: To do that, it's back to the shop,
Where an old favorite is resurrected...
I call it my "little pop-gun."
Narrator: ...And rejigged to launch paintball grenades...
That looks badass.
Narrator: ...The same distance as if they were thrown.
Gun is hot.
Three, two, one.
[ pop ]
[ both laugh ]
That was an awesome sound.
With a little more air pressure and some room to play with,
They'll soon be lobbing their fake grenades
Realistic distances.
That's my little pop-gun.
And back on location...
This looks like a good spot.
All right.
...The pop-gun is lined up and ready to launch.
Jamie: Just like with skeet shooting,
We're using a 12-gauge shotgun and bird shot.
All right, sir. Loading.
Jamie: Why bird shot?
Well, because it doesn't travel very far,
And so it doesn't pose a hazard
For anybody outside the immediate area.
Narrator: This is it.
Gun is hot.
Narrator: It's all very well hitting a harmless clay pigeon
That's designed to float, but how about
A less-than-aerodynamic paintball grenade?
Pull!
Jamie: Nice!
[ laughs ]
Adam: That was the most satisfying trapshooting ever.
Well, our skeet-shooting training paid off in spades.
Pull.
[ laughs ]
I was able to knock four out of five paintball grenades
Right out of the sky,
As evidenced by their carnage here on my board,
But a paintball grenade doesn't kill ya...
Pull.
...And I have no idea what,
If anything, bird shot would do to a real steel grenade.
Yeah!
Nonetheless, I still feel pretty satisfied with myself.
Jamie: So, the thing is that bird shot
Spreads out in this large pattern
That makes the odds relatively high
You're gonna hit your target, and on top of that, I'm betting
That that bird shot's just gonna bounce off a steel grenade.
It's not gonna do anything to it.
So, what we really want to know
Is what the odds are of actually hitting an incoming grenade
With a single bullet,
And then, of course, what's the likelihood
Of you being able to disable it, as well.
Adam: All right, sir.
I'm ready.
Narrator: 12 feet away from one pound of exploding c-4
Will result in serious injury,
But hollywood
Would have us believe you could walk away unscathed...
You got this from jamie's office?
...By dropping the ticking time bomb in a handily located,
Supposedly boom-proof container....
I'm trying to find my contract right now.
Narrator: ...Like a filing cabinet.
Okay.
So, this is our same 13-psi, injury-indicating burst disc.
I don't remember agreeing to washing jamie's mustache.
And remember, with no containment devices,
One pound of c-4
Caused this disc to go off at this 12-foot range.
Well, I'll be damned.
I guess I have to wash his mustache.
The goal here is to see if the containment devices
Serve as some kind of protection.
And to indicate that, if this disc does not go off,
Then that means, you know what, there's no injury at this range
And they did their job.
You're probably asking yourself,
"why do you guys have these styrofoam, cut-out blue guys?"
Well, those are our shrapnel catchers,
Because if the shock wave doesn't injure you,
The shrapnel might.
In three, two, one!
[ laughter ]
Well, there goes your files.
Oh, god. Wow!
That is a mess of paper.
It's just confetti! Pssh!
All right. Let's see if it helped.
Narrator: Well, as far as the pressure wave goes,
The filing cabinet did offer some protection.
The disc at 12 feet, the dive-to-survive zone,
Did not burst.
Tory: Okay, so, the cabinet did save you from the shock wave,
But you're gonna be killed by the shrapnel.
I mean, look at that guy's head. It's been ripped off.
Oh, putting the bomb in the filing cabinet...
What was I thinking?
[ groans ]
Kari: Will you take this?
Tory: Now we're gonna move on to a bed.
Oh, I kind of want some red, silky sheets now.
This is nice!
Oh, these are fancy!
Now, you might be asking yourself, "how would you
Use a bed to protect yourself from an explosion?"
Cue the dream sequence.
Wait for this. It's a little disturbing.
[ beeping ]
Ah!
[ screaming ]
That could work.
Here we go.
In three, two, one!
Oh, ho!
That was really interesting.
All the energy went up,
And I didn't see any shrapnel go out towards the guys.
I will be so shocked if stuffing a bomb under your bed
Actually saves you.
You've got to be kidding me.
I think we might've found something
That's actually bombproof.
Yeah, I mean, look.
The burst discs aren't even burst.
Narrator: And the shrapnel catchers?
Well, they caught nothing
But a gentle rain of mattress stuffing.
I'm absolutely astounded
At how well the mattress worked at both absorbing the shock wave
And preventing deadly shrapnel from hitting our guys.
And if you look at the high-speed,
You'll see exactly why.
All the energy went straight up into the air.
But up next is a fish tank full of water,
And that is a totally different animal.
Welcome back. It's guns versus grenades...
On "mythbusters."
[ laughs ]
And, truth be told,
If someone has just thrown one of these at you
And you have enough time
To see it and pull a gun to try and shoot at it...
Pull.
...The kind of gun you're gonna have ready access to
Is gonna be something like this.
But unlike a shotgun,
This only fires a single round, a single piece of lead.
Can you even hit this in midair with this?
Well, that's what jamie and I are about to try and find out.
We've chosen this spot because it's miles away from habitation,
But, even so, we're loathe to shoot anything
Straight up in the air other than bird shot.
And with that in mind,
We've chosen paintball pistols to do our test.
Because if we can hit 'em with those,
We should be able to hit 'em with a real pistol.
All right, sir. I'm ready.
Narrator: Equally...
Jamie: Okay, here we go.
Throwing the grenade in three...
...If they miss with the paintball pistol,
They're likely to miss with a real one.
Totally missed it.
Let's try again.
Narrator: The myth is hitting its first hurdle...
...Because adam's certainly not hitting any grenades.
I ran out of ammo.
I got close, though.
Narrator: They've proven
The wide spray of shotgun shot works.
But the silver-screen scene in question
Usually involves a weapon firing a single bullet at a time.
And that's...
Proving very, very difficult...
Adam: Oh!
I got it!
Narrator: ...But not impossible.
Adam: [ laughs ]
There is paintball paint on that puppy.
It can be done.
I'm ready.
Adam: Look, if someone's throwing a grenade at me,
I'm gonna use anything at my disposal
To try and save my life.
If that means fruitlessly shooting a whole clip of rounds
At that thing with a 1% chance of hitting it...
Jamie: I got it.
...I'm gonna take those odds.
Nice.
Right in the middle. Beautiful.
But the real question is, what happens to a grenade
When you hit it with a real bullet?
That's the question we're gonna answer next.
We're testing different household items
That can mythically contain the blast of a bomb.
You've got to be kidding me.
This test, we're using a pound of c-4,
And we're throwing it inside of a fish tank.
Candygram.
Oh! [ beeping ]
To measure it all,
We have our oseco burst discs and our shrapnel catchers.
This will tell us if a fish tank
Is enough to take on one pound of c-4.
Grant: So, what do I think's gonna happen here?
Well, I see an incompressible fluid
Surrounded by a 3/8-inch acrylic tank.
The water is not gonna really absorb the explosion.
Rather, it's gonna transmit that
Out to the edges of the tank, which is gonna shatter
Into a million razor-sharp acrylic pieces.
In three, two, one!
Oh! [ laughing ]
Oh, my god.
That was awesome!
[ laughs ]
Narrator: That did not look good for our diving,
Would-be survivor, but what's the evidence say?
Wow.
That was spectacular.
Dude, look at this mess.
The damage is not nearly what I thought it was gonna be.
And the oseco disc survived, which means our hero
Would've survived the shock wave.
Yeah, and look at the guys.
I mean, there's no shrapnel in them.
They look relatively unharmed.
Kari: I think all of us are pretty surprised by this result.
We thought this was gonna shred,
And so there'd just be frag and shrapnel in all our guys,
But that's not what happened.
And it looked like all of the energy
Was focused on the front
And the back of the tank, which was elevated.
So if you hit the deck,
You might walk away from this unscathed.
I think we can actually call this plausible.
Agreed. I think it's plausible, as well.
Shocking. That was awesome.
Narrator: Welcome to angels camp quarry,
Because next up, the team is ramping it up.
[ horn honks ]
Grant: Now, what's the scenario?
That's right.
It's a garbage truck.
Imagine this.
It's early in the morning.
You go to your mailbox, and you find -- what is it?
A bomb! What am I gonna do with it?
Oh, I know. It's trash day.
Throw it in the garbage truck.
Now he has two options.
He can jump away from the truck, dive here,
Or he could jump off to the side
And let this steel wall protect him.
Because of that, we're gonna have two different setups.
We're gonna have a shrapnel catcher with a burst disc here
And another shrapnel catcher with a burst disc here
And see whether or not this garbage truck will protect him.
Kari: All right, here we go with one pound of c-4
In the trough of a garbage truck.
In three, two, one!
Fire!
Grant: Oh!
Yeah, that was a pretty big pop.
Well, I think it's obvious
You don't want to stand behind the truck.
This guy's blown to bits, and the oseco disc is blown.
All right, well, over here on the side,
Looks like you'd fare a whole lot better.
In fact, you'd survive without injury.
If you jump off to the side, you would survive.
This one's looking plausible.
So, plausible by proximity.
Grant: So, what have we learned from this experiment?
Well, when selecting a household item
As a potential bomb-disposal area,
It's important to look at where the energy's going to go.
Completely containing all that energy is a very bad idea,
But if you find an item
That can focus the energy in one direction,
Like the mattress or the aquarium
Or in the garbage truck
And you jump away from that direction and hit the deck,
You significantly increase your chances of survival.
You guys, we're here, we have a truck,
We have experts, and we have a lot of explosives.
I say we do this "mythbusters" style.
Let's make it disappear?
It's time to go boom.
Man: Fire in the hole.
Five, four, three, two, one!
Please, do not try what you're about to see at home.
The things that we do on this show are extremely dangerous.
We have experts to keep us safe.
Pull.
Jamie: We're done with our target practice
On fake grenades...
...So now it's time to break out the real ones.
Looks pretty innocuous, doesn't it?
It is, in fact, pretty small compared to some of the things
We've blown up over the history of "mythbusters."
But in fact, these grenades are incredibly dangerous
And have all of us and our bomb techs quite nervous.
So, in order to properly experiment with these,
We have come to a large tract of private land in gold country,
East of the "mythbusters" shop,
Where we have thousands of acres of clear land
All around us in order to experiment with these.
God, I love operating the big machinery!
Countless times on this show,
We have armored ourselves behind these blast chamber panels
To watch dangerous things happen,
Hopefully right on the other side.
Perfect. That's perfect. I love it.
But this setup, where our blast chamber panel
Is bordered on both sides by inch-thick plates of steel,
This is the most armored
We have ever required ourselves to be out in the field.
Narrator: That's because it's not
Just an explosive pressure wave they're dealing with.
The steel body of the grenade
Is designed to spray lethal fragments
At over 25,000 feet per second in every direction.
And the nightmare scenario is a misfire.
To prepare for that, jamie's recreated his own nightmare.
Normally, bomb-disposal robots cost around 100 grand or so.
This is my version.
Behold the bomb baby.
[ beeping ]
[ baby crying ]
This is about a $200 remote-control truck.
I put some servos for arms, a baby head,
And most importantly, through this camera,
I'll be able to see what's going on
From the safety of our reinforced bunker.
[ laughs ]
Narrator: Those are the safety precautions,
But what's the first test?
Time to wire up a little control.
Before we get to shooting guns at these things,
They have a timed fuse.
All right. Go ahead and, uh, make it go up.
I.E., after you pull the pin and release the spoon,
There's a few seconds before they blow up.
How many seconds?
That's what we need to determine by blowing one up.
I knew that was a dud.
Narrator: But this one isn't.
Blaine, the bomb tech, pulls the pin
And then traps the spoon of the live grenade in the tube.
When it's raised, the spoon will pop...
And we're hot!
Narrator: ...The delay fuse will light,
And we'll find out exactly how long it takes a grenade
To go boom.
I feel quite tense about this.
We're all ready? Yep.
Everybody's clear?
Here we go.
Going up.
I heard the cap go.
Wow.
I heard stuff hit us.
That was intense, man.
The key reason for this test was to check our timing
Because we need to know how much time it takes
For the grenade to go off once the spoon pops up.
That was five seconds exactly.
[ laughs ]
Time for some guns.
Adam: We're just about to start firing guns at grenades,
And we've been thinking about it,
And we think one of three things
Is going to happen for each of these shots.
Either the round will render the grenade inert
And maybe decimate it -- that's one.
Two is, it could actually detonate it
And explode it in midair.
Or three, it could bring enough energy into the equation
To actually send the grenade back to where it came.
I'm curious as to what the result is actually going to be.
Narrator: To find out, the setup is simple.
All right, then.
It's been established an oncoming grenade
Can be taken out,
But with live ammo, they're taking no chances.
Three, two, one, go.
Perfect.
These are the weapons we'll be using on our grenade today,
And we'll be firing four kinds of ammunition
Out of these three weapons.
We've got a .308 round, a .45-caliber pistol round,
And a 12-gauge double-aught buck round.
That looks pretty dead on.
I'll leave the rest to the bomb squad.
Now, here's where things get interesting.
I think the .308 round is going to be by far
The most effective round against the grenade,
But its rifle is by far the most difficult one
To hit a grenade in midair with,
While at the other end of the spectrum,
We've got the shotgun, used for trap shooting,
The easiest weapon to use to hit a grenade in midair.
But I think this, the double-aught buck round,
Will be the least effective against the grenade.
Narrator: First up, the shotgun and the lightweight buckshot.
Jamie: Okay.
Arming.
Will it detonate
The electronically triggered grenade...
Armed. ...Or render it inert...
Three...
...Or even knock it back 30 feet...
...Two...
...Cartoon style?
...One, fire.
Where'd it go?
I don't know.
It didn't go off.
Crap.
We've got ourselves a situation now.
The grenade's delay fuse was remotely triggered,
Adam fired the shotgun,
And the grenade was knocked off the stand.
But there was no explosion.
And now, somewhere out there, we have a li--
We have a live grenade.
We cannot leave this bunker
Until we deal with this situation.
You want to fire up the baby?
[ baby crying ]
Turns out that the garbage truck is plausible.
Our hero would have survived that blast.
But now it's my favorite time, where we ramp it up and see
If we can make that garbage truck not so bombproof.
So, we're going to load it up with 200 pounds of anfo
And see if we can make this thing disappear.
Now, does this remind you of anything?
This is like cement truck all over again.
And this is the quarry where we actually blew it up.
Now, one thing everybody complains about is,
"you guys don't have a high-speed shot."
We don't have to worry about that this time.
We have our high-speed camera standing by,
And we're going to get that shot.
Isn't that right, willie?
No pressure.
This is garbage truck versus a whole lot of anfo
In three...
...Two...
One.
Grant: Whoa!
Oh, my god.
The shrapnel got up to the same height as us!
Whoa!
Woo-hoo! [ laughs ]
That was intense.
Narrator: Now, that's an explosion.
No cgi, no unlikely survivors, just a whole load of big boom
In glorious,
5,000-frames-a-second high-speed.
Wow. Way to ramp things up, guys.
Well, that's one way to take out the trash.
You know what the best part about all this is?
Through the magic of editing,
We can watch this experiment over and over again.
Since this story is about grenades,
I'm going to map out how these things work.
This thing on the outside is called the spoon,
And it's retained by this ring and a pin.
Now, underneath that is a spring-loaded striker,
Which, once the spoon is released,
The striker is also released,
And it flips over and creates a spark, like so.
Underneath that spark is a fuse.
It's called the delay fuse,
Which is engineered to burn for a specific period of time.
Once it burns to its end,
Which is down somewhere in the middle of the grenade,
It ignites a small amount of high explosive
That's relatively unstable.
That creates a small blast,
Which ignites the rest of the high explosive
That fills the grenade.
At this point, you've basically got a small pipe bomb
Which has a kill zone of about 45 feet.
Fire.
Where'd it go?
Adam: It didn't go off.
Narrator: But why?
Before they fire up the bomb baby,
Adam fires up the high-speed camera.
Oh, criminy. Jamie, come here.
Dude... Watch this.
[ laughs ]
No -- no more grenade.
Well, we don't have a live grenade out there.
We've got a bunch of dust.
Wow.
I totally did not see that coming.
Darn. I wanted to wake the baby up.
[ laughs ]
That's a result.
Unbelievably, it seems that you can indeed shoot a live grenade
And render it inert.
It's amazing.
It disintegrated the outer casing and then,
Even though this was within its five-second range,
Did not let it explode the cap,
So the tnt didn't blow up.
Wow.
I would not have called that.
That is amazing.
Jamie: The double-aught buck
Completely disintegrated the grenade,
And that, frankly, surprised us all
Because double-aught buck is --
They're little .38-caliber lead balls,
And you wouldn't think it would be able to do a whole lot
To a steel grenade, but it did.
It took it completely apart, and it even took apart
The blasting cap before it could go off.
Narrator: An astonishing result.
The fuse was lit electronically, but before it could detonate,
The buckshot broke up the tnt party.
Next up is a .45-caliber round pointed at the grenade.
If you remember, only very recently
We discovered it's a lot harder to hit a midair grenade
With one of these
Than it is with one of those easy shotgun rounds.
As to what it's going to do to the grenade...
You ready?
Okay, .45 acp, three...
...I expect it to have a very similar effect
As the double-aught buck. ...Two...
I think that the .45-cal round
Is going to turn that thing right into dust.
...One, fire.
Hey.
It shot it right off the thing.
The cap went off, but the grenade didn't.
We knocked the grenade off the stand.
It looks like we split it in half.
So, we didn't stop the cap from going off,
But we did stop the grenade from blowing up.
That's cool. That is very cool.
Narrator: Compared to the buckshot,
The .45-millimeter round
Removed the blasting cap with surgical precision.
Either way, it's another myth-confirming result.
What's next?
Adam: Now we're going to bring some real energy to the equation
By using a .308 sniper round, full metal jacket.
There we go.
Adam: As to what this is going to do to the grenade,
I've been wrong for everything so far,
So I'm going to say I have no freakin' idea.
Three, two, one, fire.
Adam: The grenade went boom.
We didn't disintegrate it. It blew up.
I think so.
Let's look at the high-speed.
Okay.
Narrator: The high-speed camera, the scalpel, the microscope,
The light, the multi-tool for tackling time.
There it is.
And what it shows is...
The grenade ignited the second that it penetrated.
That is a thing.
The blasting cap inside a grenade
Is actually somewhat shock-sensitive,
And the .308 round is a very, very high-speed round.
And that speed translates directly to a certain amount
Of energy being brought to the equation.
And in our case, the .308 round,
The very instant it touched the exterior of our grenade,
That shock caused the entire thing to detonate early.
It was a very, very powerful reaction
And an instant one.
Narrator: Yep.
It's the second of three potential results
And the most common of the cinematic techniques,
The midair explosion.
But let's think about that for a second,
Because if that ignited the grenade
At any closer than 45 feet,
Which is the kill zone for a grenade, you're dead.
Further than 45 feet, it starts to become almost impossible
To make a shot like that.
Yes, in theory, it's possible, but...
I would duck. Personally, I would just duck.
[ laughs ] that worked!
Adam: So, to recap our final results,
The high-powered rounds, the .308,
Actually detonated the grenade,
Which means that if it's within 50 feet of you,
You're dead, sucker.
But the low-powered rounds,
The .45 and especially the shotgun,
Both rendered the grenades inert.
The shotgun's even kept the blasting cap
From going off, pretty much the exact polar opposite
Of what we thought was going to happen.
Isn't that cool?
So, where did we stand with the original question
Of whether you can protect yourself from a grenade
Using a gun?
I think we found handily that that is totally the case.
Moreover, the weapon that rendered the grenade
The most inert
Was the one that was easiest to shoot it out of the air with,
The shotgun.
Yep. So, it's plausible.
Totally plausible. Let's get out of here.
[ baby crying ]
Uh-oh. Bad baby.
Run!
[ crying continues ]