Just saw the movie "Shooter"

[General Geoff]

^^ sound byte from the movie

 

[benEzra]

They were doing that pendulum thing when I was attending Texas A&M back in the day. I was taking a...okay, this will date me...Fortran IV course (waits for laughter to stop) at the engineering building and they had it hanging from the ceiling in the building's atrium swinging all semester. I was under the impression it was supposed to rotate around a full 360 in a year. I don't know why that would be, though. Someone that probably didn't know told me that.

Actually, it rotates 360 degrees in roughly a day (usually a little more than a day because the precession isn't 100% at typical latitudes). The one in Paris does 360 degrees in 32.7 hours, or 11 degrees of precession per hour.

I still have a hard time understanding how the rotation of the earth could affect my toilet. I understand something big like a hurricane, but a toilet????

It doesn't. The rotation of the water in the toilet is caused by angled jets of water that impart a spin; the same toilet would spin the same way in the Southern Hemisphere.

 

[Schleprok62]

I saw this movie, own it, and I do enjoy watching it from time to time. FWIW - You gotta watch the extra's stuff... they explain why they did things in the manner that they did them. They sent Mark Wahlberg to a shooting school and had him train with a real former Marine Sniper... The guy explained all the inaccuracies in realistic portrayal and why they had to do them the way they did them... Good info in the interviews/making of section...


Think they're gonna do the other book???

 

[Coronach]

A number of times, the story relied on unfair surprise elements - as in we as viewers were given absolutely no indication something critical to the plot had been done at a time we could/should have known, nor could we have reasonably expected it to happen. This, in storytelling, is cheating. A good thriller may make such critical subtleties subtle indeed, and identifiable on second (or even third) viewing, but "deus ex machina" solutions are a sign the author wrote himself into a corner he couldn't get out of without making stuff up.

Bingo. Anyone can write a mystery novel if you are allowed to just introduce crap to make the reader surprised. The rule is that you have to have seen the answer already, preferably the whole time, and just failed to add it all up.

The firing pins, audio recorder, and a few other little things crucial to our hero's survival just kinda magically appeared after the fact as if we all should have known/expected, but we (a reasonable audience) didn't.

The firing pin is exceptionally stupid since the first thing that would have been done in a real criminal investigation was to test fire the gun. When the planted sniper weapon fails to go bang, the investigators would be left scratching their heads.

Some day I want to drive a car thru a chained chain-link gate. So many movies (not all!) show it so easy that I want to see how likely it is.

Seen it. The whole gate falls down, after it lands on/drapes over/scratches up the car driving through it. The chain did not break, but the gate deformed until the hinges broke. All in all, it was much less pretty than the movies, but it worked just as easily. A chain-link anything is not going to deny a 2-ton can driving 40 MPH.



Mike

 

[Art Eatman]

benEzra, water draining freely through a drain hole will rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and CCW "down south". Same rotation opposition for tropical storms.

I learned this from my grandmother's old washtub. The whirlpool would begin, I'd stir it the opposite way and when I quite interfering, the original rotation would resume. Years later, I learned about the Coriolis force that similarly affects tropical storms. And trade winds.

Coronach, you're quite right about the chain link gate. But don't even begin to think about driving through the middle portion of a lengthy reach of such fence. The car will run out of "go" before the fence runs short of "stretch".

 

[Coronach]

Just last night we had a car do that. Took us a while to figure out what happened. Car hit the fence....fence gave...car ended up going UNDER the fence, and the fence popped back into something really close to it's original form. Close enough that, at 4:30 in the morning, it took us a few minutes to figure out how it got on the "wrong" side of the fence.

Mike

 

[another okie]

In the book he had weakened the fence in advance, if I remember correctly. As far as the firing pin, they deliberately did not test fire the rifle because they were sort of half way in on the frame. I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how these points are addressed.

 

[ctdonath]

In the movie he went thru the fence (assuming we're talking about the same fence) because it just happened to be between him and where he needed to go (somewhere cops weren't).

Yes, the FBI was in on it. Musta not occurred to them to test fire it, just because they knew it hadn't been fired.
...which also begs the question: how many people would have to be in on that conspiracy to pull it off? On reflection (usually a bad thing in conjunction with action movies) it's starting to sound like a few too many were involved to go unconfessed for long.

 

[Pilot]

Yep. Great read. I want to see the movie, but am not expecting it to be as good as the book.

Couldn't agree more. The book was outstanding the movie was OK.

 

[possum]

i watch it for the old man, he is the best the guy that is supposed to be the best gunsmith east of the mississippi. he is a hoot, and i have managed to memorize his every line, and happen to make alot of folks laugh when i do his impersonation here in the desert. i even get his voic pretty good.

 

[Art Eatman]

I guess I've read the book maybe three times, now. (And all the other books). The first time through, I kept trying to figure out how Swaggart could have the foreknowledge confidence about a trial. That stood out for quite a while in the later chapters. The main problem was him living through all the chicanery in order to get to trial. It hadn't occurred to me as to how early his mistrust of the whole deal actually began.

Somewhere I have a video tape of Bobby Allison's ride along the chain link crowd-safety fence at Talladega. He was lapping at 208 when the right rear tire went away coming out of Turn 4. After getting airborne, he rolled along the fence for well over 100 yards before sliding on down into Turn 1. The fence "mostly" held.

 

[benEzra]

benEzra, water draining freely through a drain hole will rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and CCW "down south". Same rotation opposition for tropical storms.

I learned this from my grandmother's old washtub. The whirlpool would begin, I'd stir it the opposite way and when I quite interfering, the original rotation would resume. Years later, I learned about the Coriolis force that similarly affects tropical storms. And trade winds.

The washtub would have to be perfectly round to thousandths of an inch, the drain perfectly straight, the approach to the drain perfectly radially symmetrical, and all preexisting water motion resulting from filling/washing completely damped, in order for Coriolis to determine the spin direction, if it would spin at all. The effect is vanishingly minor on short distance scales (1 to 2 ft radius). It only becomes noticeable at radii measured in hundreds or thousands of feet.

The fact that it resumed spinning the "right" way after you manually stirred it the wrong way says it definitely wasn't Coriolis, it was the shape of the tub/drain. If the tub were symmetrical, Coriolis effect would not be strong enough to overcome initial stirring in the opposite direction.

I suspect that if you took that washtub to South America, filled it exactly the same way, did the exact same things to the water in it, and then drained it, it would drain the same direction it did in the Northern Hemisphere. But if you could build a perfect washtub and tested it under lab conditions, you might get it to go one way at northern latitudes and the other way at southern latitudes, and drain straight down with no spin near the equator.

 

[buck00]

Okay, know, it's Hollywood. But, being Hollywood, I was looking for technicals in that movie I could take issue with. I suspect more than I noticed was wrong with it.

There may have been some inaccuracies, but after the slew of action films of the 80's and 90's- which often showed guns that never ran out of bullets... or a gun that could hit a person in the head from 400 yards while shooting from the hip - I think Shooter did a fairly good job.


Oh and yes, I agree.... Kate Mara is one you take home to Mom!!

 

[Gunnerpalace]

The Books are always better, (believe me)

The characters in the books IMO are better than the movie ones (except for the lady in the above picture), it's either that or they cast some anti-gun person to do it.

 

[oldgold]

1000yd bench record. I can't find the reference to it right now but I remember the guys name was Tom Sarver , five shots and 1.397".

I'll have to check my sources. I'm pretty sure this was just set and remember it only because of the drastic improvement from the 4"+ record.

Record set 7/7/07.

Source; IBRSA

 

[ceetee]

I've actually tested the way the water goes down the drains in ALL my sinks (3) and the bathtub. In each, you can control the direction of the spiral of water with your finger. Spin it one way, and it stays that way. Spin it the other, and it reverses.

Back to the thread...

 

[Navy_Guns]

"I have my doubts about the remote-control platform. It may or may not be precise enough, and much of "sniping" is that innate feel that goes beyond straight mechanical precision."

(Sorry, I haven't yet figured out how to do a real "quote" in my posts)

The platform can aim to 0.2 MOA precision. The remote in the movie is a Precision Remotes T-250D and the website they give out www.precisionremotes.com is the companies real URL, although they "Holywood" up the website in the movie. The system is integrated with a multi-function laser unit called the SLAM-R from Insight Technologies - we had it developed specifically for the T-250 and it is based on Insight's STORM laser. The unit currently has ballistics programmed in for the .50 caliber M33 round and the 7.62mm M80 round, with 5.56mm coming soon. The current ballistics corrects for range and "spin drift" out past the max effective range of the weapon.

 

[rero360]

There is also the CROWS, the remote controled turrets on HMMWVs, I got to train on one for two weeks last spring. while I won't go into the exact capabilities of the system, lets just say its pretty cool.

making a cold bore headshot at 1800 meters though....probably not going to happen, maybe with better optics and ammo from what we were using.

 

[Schleprok62]

The IBS World Record 1000 yard group, with pics:

CLICK HERE

Said he was using a Lapua 338 necked down to 30 cal with Sierra Match King 240 gr

 

[ctdonath]

The platform can aim to 0.2 MOA precision.

Excellent! Not sure that's good enough to assure what's depicted in the movie, but certainly enough to make the story viable.

Kinda makes one wonder how such a device may obsolete the classic sniper: if mechanics & computers can make such shots point-and-click simple, and the package isn't that far from being one-man portable, when will technology overtake skill?

 

[LoadedDrum]

Nope, they clearly show the action and it's an M82. He doesn't even reach up to recock it on each shot, they just dub a cocking noise over the action.

He DOES reach up and yank the charging handle back between shots. The reason this is so ridiculous is that you can see it cycle on its own each time before he does that.

OT-FWIW Kate Mara is nice but I will take Rhona Mitra instead.

 

[ctdonath]

But if you could build a perfect washtub and tested it under lab conditions, you might get it to go one way at northern latitudes and the other way at southern latitudes, and drain straight down with no spin near the equator.

"Alright," said Ford, "forget that. I mean ... I mean, look, do you know — do you know how the Universe actually began for a kick off?"

"Probably not," said Arthur, who wished he'd never embarked on any of this.

"Alright," said Ford, "imagine this. Right. You get this bath. Right. A large round bath. And it's made of ebony."

"Where from?" said Arthur, "Harrods was destroyed by the Vogons."

"Doesn't matter."

"So you keep saying."

"Listen."

"Alright."

"You get this bath, see? Imagine you've got this bath. And it's ebony. And it's conical."

"Conical?" said Arthur, "What sort of ..."

"Shhh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out ... are you listening?"

"I'm listening."

"You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole."

"I see."

"You don't see. You don't see at all. I haven't got to the clever bit yet. You want to hear the clever bit?"

"Tell me the clever bit."

"I'll tell you the clever bit."

Ford thought for a moment, trying to remember what the clever bit was.

"The clever bit," he said, "is this. You film it happening."

"Clever."

"That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector ... backwards!"

"Backwards?"

"Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?"

"And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur.

"No," said Ford, "but it's a marvellous way to relax."

- Douglas Adams, Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Sorry. Couldn't help myself.

 

[lamazza]

Stephen Hunter books are excellent-you can tell he is a genuine 'gun guy'
As for the Chey Tac-I actually got to shoot one these at the range 2 days ago and wow wow wow. Incredible rifle. The generous soul that let me try his out said he put 8k into it and the bullets are $5/each. He had a night force mounted on it.

 

[ROMAK IV]

The movie was good enough to overcome my annoyance with Wahlberg, and the not so subtle references to the War in Iraq. I'm no longer a big Bush Fan, and never was, but I don't like the deceit associated wth what has been characteristic of some politicians, who voted to go to war, but undermine the effort. Anyway, for movies, this one wasn't too bad technically, and was at least entertaining.

 

[308sc]

yep good movie