Shooting into water? How deep do bullets go?!
Question: In the movies heroes always escape when they jump in the water. I just wonder how much resistance water offers against the speed of the bullets. How deep would a bullet go and still have an impact if it hit someone?
Answers: In the movies heroes always escape when they jump in the water. I just wonder how much resistance water offers against the speed of the bullets. How deep would a bullet go and still have an impact if it hit someone?
It depends on where you hit the person, but water provides so much resistance that you can in fact avoid them by going underwater.
I'm not sure of exact depths, but deeper is of course better.
Anything less than 2 feet the bullet will probably still penetrate.
Edit:
I remembered the Mythbusters episode, and that got me to thinking, so I dug around a bit and found the following:
Quoted:
In their first experiment, the experimenters shot the 9mm pistol straight down into the water. At a range of up to seven feet, the 9mm round was effective in completely penetrating the ballistics gel – meaning a person at the same range would be killed. At eight feet, the bullet entered but did not exit the gel, indicating a possible non-fatal wound. Past eight feet, the gel was undisturbed.
The shotgun, loaded with a 3” deer slug instead of buckshot, not only "killed" the ballistic gel target at six feet, it destroyed the acrylic water tank, ending that method of testing.
The team then switched to a swimming pool to continue the experiments – and to make the test more realistic, switched from shooting straight down to an angle of twenty to thirty degrees off the vertical, approximating a shooter standing on the edge of the water and shooting out into it.
The first candidate for this test was the Civil War rifle. At a range of 15 feet, the ballistics gel was completely unharmed; likewise at five feet. Only when the range was reduced to three feet did the bullet finally penetrate the gel, suggesting that diving under water was probably a pretty effective way of dodging slugs during the Civil War.
The experimenters moved on to the hunting rifle, which was loaded with a full-metal jacket .223 round that emerged at roughly 2,500 feet per second. At ten feet, the bullet disintegrated and the gel was untouched. At three feet, the bullet again broke up, with its tip coming to rest on the gel – not nearly enough power to damage flesh.
A bullet from the M1 Garand, with a muzzle speed of 2,800 ft/sec, also disintegrated at the ten-foot range. At two feet, the slug penetrated about four inches into the gel, suggesting a non-fatal wound. The armor-piercing .50 caliber round didn’t do any better – it, too, came apart at distances greater than five feet and lost most of its punch by three feet.
The Mythbusters team concluded that you’d be safe from firearms even if they were fired straight down to a depth of eight feet, and probably safe at much lesser depths, especially if the bullet was aimed at an angle.
as deep as the big blue sea.
It's the movies. Bullets are traveling with such force (depending on which bullets & what they were shot from, too!).. that they can tear through armor and people & bone from 100s of yards away. They're also shaped to fly through the air, and just a submarine or missle does (by the way, torpedoes of the 1940's could travel through water, right?) it pierces the water, too.. again, it depends on the angle. They might veer, but not stop.
If you're shooting a rifle straight down into a pond that's 25-feet deep -- the bullets would speed & rip right through the water and into the muck, very deeply below... before they stop. Let's just say, in real life.. if you shot at guys that jumped in water -- you'd kill them. The movie should end, there. They'd either be hit, underwater.. or, as they surfaced in a few seconds to breathe.
water can slow down a bit, pistols slow faste than rifle rounds... machine gun round already travel iradically they kinda go in figure 8 and may hit you bullets can travel up to 15 ft in water ...
averam24 already synopsized the Mythbusters experiments, and did a great job. After seeing "Saving Private Ryan," I thought the same thing and actually asked a couple of WWII vets who were there at Normandy. One said he saw guys getting chewed up, under water, from the machine guns, which of course have a far higher muzzle velocity than the rounds from pistols and rifles. And of course if the angle is shallow enough, your bullet will bounce right off the water and skip like a stone... I've done this, in my (dumber) youth, with a .22 rifle.
I believe the "dodging bullets under water" cliche is far more realistic than the "hide behind a car door" or even the "duck down in the car" cliche, as if rifle rounds wouldn't go through a car's sheetmetal like knife through butter...