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Bullets HITTING Bullets in Slow Motion - THE IMPOSSIBLE SHOT - Smarter Every Day 287

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SmarterEveryDay

9 months ago

Three, two, one. Fire (BANG!) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I am at the American Museum of Natural History. It's a Smithsonian Museum. And this is something that I saw ten years ago, and it changed the way I think about bullets and ballistics and probability and things like that. It's two bullets from the Civil War that met nose on. Check this out. It's poorly lit, so I'm going to have to turn my phone light on here. Okay. I don't know if you can see this. So these two
mini ball bullets met nose to nose. The plaque here says in Fredericksburg in December 1862. So let me see if I can manage the glare here. But look at that. Two perfectly aligned bullets. Now, the interesting thing is this is not a glancing blow. Like total momentum transfer between the two. So you have a bullet going one direction, a bullet go in the other direction, and they hit and they stop perfectly. I've seen many attempts to try to reproduce this, but they all fail. I'm going to try this
today. It's going to take a little engineering, but let's give it a shot. [Intro music, electric guitar riff] I've actually had some internal conflict about doing this video because Internet video has become sensational and spectacular. The moment I visualized in my head a bullet hitting another bullet, and I thought about all the camera angles. I'm like, I have to make the video, but I want to do it in an intelligent, respectful way, that doesn't feel like I'm trying to win the Internet. I jus
t want to see this, and I want to take you along with me. So I want us to think together about how we're going to do the safety side of this. That being said, please never do this. I worked for 15 years as a missile flight test engineer, and I had mentors that slowly walked me through the safety processes. And I made mistakes, and they corrected me, and they were always watching over my shoulder. So I'm not just some guy trying to do a complicated thing. I've done far more complicated things lik
e this with larger groups of people. And we did it in a safe way. And the way we did that is intellectual humility. So we're going to have an air and atmosphere of intellectual humility about this. Let's get started talking about what we have to do. If we're going to hit a bullet. With a bullet like this, we have to have guns, right? So we have two empty guns. If I go over here and I set up this gun right here, I have to aim it so that a bullet goes right here in the middle, right? And I have to
point another gun from this side. And the problem is, me over there with that gun is in the firing path of this gun. So we have a problem, right? Okay, let's say you figure out how to hold the guns, you got to think about other things. Right? Let's say we load this gun. How do we go load this one safely? Because we're down range from that one, right? How do we pull the triggers? That's a thing. And once we do, we have all these mechanical inconsistencies. Because these things are not repeatable
in terms of timing, which means those bullets might not meet right here in the middle, where we line in that high speed camera. It could be here. It could be here. What happens if this bullet misses? Is this bullet going to destroy this gun? All this stuff means we have to over engineer this. So there were four of us involved in the design of this whole thing. First of all, my buddy Ernie. He's excellent at electronics design. He's got years of experience designing circuitry for explosive syste
ms. You may recognize Jeremy Fielding. He's an excellent educator. He's a fantastic mechanical designer, and he engineers all kinds of crazy contraptions. Jeremy helped design the safety shielding. He also worked on a neat contraption. I'll show you in a minute. Then there's my buddy David, a mechanical designer, who you may recognize from the vortex collision episode. He's really good at everything he does. He also reloads ammunition as a hobby, so this was a perfect fit for his skill set. We s
lowly worked on this project in the background for years. In fact, we even used the shield as a part of the supersonic baseball cannon video. Modern ammunition is quite different than civil war ammunition, so we decided on the 45 long colt cartridge for this experiment. There's several reasons for that. It's a straight wall cartridge. It's very easy to design around, and it looks old, kind of like a civil war bullet. We considered molding our own bullets using an authentic civil war bullet mold.
But ultimately, this stuff was so easy to get, we went with 45 long cold. It's time. Finally doing the video I've been wanting. To do for a long time. This is the spot of dirt for many reasons. Number one, it's a bowl. So if the bullet misses this way, it'll go into the dirt. If it misses this way, it'll go into the dirt. The sun's up there. And then this is the thing that we've been waiting on right here. What do you think about this piece of dirt right here? [David] - Found you a good low spo
t? Yeah. First thing you do when you do a test like this, is you have to establish the center of the earth. I declare this "The Center of the Earth" right here. We made this big I beam, this is our datum. We're going to assume it's rigid and everything is measured from it. Once we got that in position, it was time to grab the gun. This thing's heavy. Well, this feels like a moment. These are the simplest guns we could possibly make. They're very special, and we'll talk about. That in a minute.
But first we have to bolt them to the I beam. Before we dive into how these things work, let's take a second and look at the mechanics, of how a normal gun works. With a mechanical firearm, you have something called lock time. Now, I've got the high speed camera set up right here, and I'm going to set the camera up here. I'm going to go get the high speed camera trigger and the pistol. "Lock Time" is how long it takes the mechanical hammer to fall and strike the firing pin and the firing pin to
engage the percussion primer that's on the back of a bullet. David am I clear to load? [David] - Go ahead. And I'm going to get a high speed camera shot of it when it happens. You ready, David? [David] - Ready. All right. Three, two, one. [gun fires] You'll notice that it takes time for the spring down in the handle to accelerate the hammer towards the primer. That's called the "Lock Time". From the moment you pull the trigger to the moment the primer is struck, that's the lock time. Everything
after that is the "Bullet Dwell Time", how long it takes to ignite the primer for that to ignite the powder and for the bullet to exit. So most weapons have about a ten millisecond or less lock time. In our case, we're going to hit a bullet versus a bullet. So we can't control the dwell time. It's going to ignite the powder however long that takes. But what we can control is the lock time. And the way we do that is replace that mechanical trigger system with an electrical trigger system. In fac
t, we replace the mechanical primer with an electrical primer. All right, so this is how this thing works. So this is the gun, and it's just a barrel. That's all it is, off the shelf barrel. And this is the breach. So the bullet goes right here, goes right in there like that. This right here hooks up right here. So we have a positive side and a negative side, so the whole thing is grounded. We have a stationary plate on the bottom, and you adjust these screws right here to change asthma left and
right. We're pivoting around this point right here. David, what would you say about the elevation technique here? This is primitive stuff we had laying around, just a jam screw. Okay, so how do you load a bullet and then load another bullet without being downstream of the first bullet? Well, I drew something on a napkin. My buddy Jeremy Fielding has a CNC plasma, and so he helped make this, he designed this. We talked about how to do it. All right, go ahead and unblock the first gun. Yeah. Cool
, right? I know, right? [laughter] Okay, so basically, it's an ellipse here in a piece of steel that can take the impact of a bullet. And the idea is we come back here and we load one bullet. We put the breach on, you can close this one, we block it. And then once we block it, you see that bullet would impact there. And so any fragments from the bullet would go that way. I like it way more than I thought I would. Dude!!! [silly chuckling] [Geeking out] It's AMAZING. The engineering is done. It
's time for procedures, which is extremely important. Yes, we have a really cool blocker system, but that's not going to keep us safe if we don't use it correctly. So what I did at this point is I created a checklist that goes into painstaking detail about how these things should be done. And more importantly, I drew up these stick figure drawings to try to explain to myself how everything could be done safely. I'm not going to show you all the safety measures here. There's so much that went int
o this circuitry, voltages, all these things. But if there's anything I've learned over the past many years doing dangerous things, the moment I start to think I've got it figured out is the moment I get myself into trouble. So, at this point, I knew it was extremely important to get other experienced individuals involved so that they could critique what I've done so that I could stay safe. The advantage of living in Huntsville is that you got buddies that test explosives, and they know what's u
p. This is Sheldon. This is Coop. We're going to do a safety checklist, and they're going to tell me what I did wrong.... and they're probably gonna... Y'all gonna be mean... or nice? [Coop] Mean! [Destin] Mean?! [laughter] all right, let's go for it. These men are world class subject matter experts, and conversations like this are one of my favorite things to do. They made suggestions and corrections which were obvious as soon as they said it, and that's why I love doing this. [Coop] - When yo
u approach the south gun to remove the breech... I was gonna say you could.... [Destin] - Disconnect first? [Coop in agreement] - Disconnect first [Destin] - Write it down [Coop] - ust to ask it. [Destin] - Let's do it, so where would that go? [Coop] - Between three and four.... {Destin and Coop's tone indicates they have worked together} [Sheldon] - Well I'm thinking if you got a hangfire on this one and that one's fine.... [Destin] - Yeah..? [Sheldon] -I'm assuming that one's probably fired
and this one hasn't fired then so... so we wouldn't have that issue. [Destin] - So if the high speed camera, for example, says this one fires... (thinking it through) [Sheldon, clearly ahead of Destin] -Yeah. There's still potential for it to fire this way if you're on this side of that shield with it open.... [Destin, starting to understand] - Yes. [Destin] - So.... I need a misfire procedure for each... possible... ["Misfire scenario" is implied] ? [Coop] - Right [Sheldon] - Yeah. [Destin,
understanding their point] - ......Okay. Yes, you're right. This is helpful. Thank you. [Destin Narrating] Get smart people in your life who love you enough to smile and tell you you're wrong. Okay, first shot. We started off by testing each gun independently to make sure all the hardware worked and to make sure our checklist ran smoothly. [Destin, in the field] - Verify there is NO voltage. Three, two, one, fire. [BANG] Our idea was to shoot at a piece of foam board and then align both guns to
the same point in space. We also wanted to test our background colors to see what would work best for the high speed camera. All right, I vote we just go for it. [David, kindly disagreeing] -You want to go look and see where these holes are, though? [Destin, realizes he proposed something stupid] Okay, that makes sense. HaHaHa! [ Both laughing] [David] - I'm pretty sure.... [Destin] - (Sarcastically) You're making sense, David. [David] - Yeah. They're significantly off. [Destin] - Oh, Gah!! N
ot crazy. That's the same hole. [David] - Oh, is it? Okay. Yeah, I was looking at the scrap paper there. Once we looked at the holes, we realized that they were a little bit off, so we got a laser to make some adjustments. We decided not to move the north gun. It was going to be our datum, and we decided to move the south gun so that the holes would align and the bullets would hopefully intercept. So here we go... It took years to get to THIS moment. [Destin requesting] - Two bullets? [David pro
viding] - Two bullets... [Destin] - I'm going to do stray voltage over here. Stray voltage check is good here. Stray voltage check is good. You undercover? [David] - Yeah! [Destin] - I'm loading the north gun. {Light mechanical noises as the breech screws on} {There is a tense silence. Destin and David are shifting to a more disciplined form of communication} [Destin] - All right, block the north gun. [Electric motor sounds] It's Good! Okay. Loading the south gun. We lost all of our light. Al
l right, unblock [Electric motor sounds] [Destin] -Here's the arm plug. [David] - Armed. [Destin] - Ready? [David] - When you are. Three, two, one, fire. [Gun shot] I felt fragments over here. Did you hear it? [David] - uh-uh (no) It happened... [Clearly excited] We're about to see.... This is about to happen. I felt fragments. I didn't feel them.....but I heard them [David] - I was going to say , can you elaborate on that? Yeah. I mean, we're about to see a bullet impact a bullet. David, I thin
k this has just happened. Okay. Wow. All right. Heart beating faster than expected. Whatever it is, this is going to be something to build on. Okay. Those are bullet fragments. [Speechless.....pure excitement] [Gasp] [slap] [laughter] Look at that. That was only, like, five or six inches to the right or center, wasn't it? Oh, David, we know what we're doing now. Oh, dude, it's pretty dramatic. Yeah. Third time's the charm. David, we did it on the third shot. You could almost say it was on the fi
rst shot. Yeah, it's the first time we tried it, there was this little feeling inside, like, did we really just do it? Maybe we can skip the part of the video where we struggle to figure it out because we just did it on the first time because we're so good. No, we're not. You'll see that in a minute. Another thing to think about is those bullets exploded, which is amazing and all, but that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to fuse them together like the Civil War bullets in the museum.
So what do we do? My answer to this is to zoom in and try to get a better feel for what's going on. To do that, we need to move the slow motion camera closer and I need the lowest exposure time possible and the highest frame rate possible. And I decided to make what's called a "fiducial". This is a measuring stick of sorts, and I decided to put Smarter Every Day on it, because a lot of times people steal slow motion footage like this. And I just thought it would be great to be able to measure t
he velocity of the bullet. And if it says smarter every day, like a physical watermark of sorts, at least people will know that they're doing something wrong when they steal the footage. So my goal at this point was to get as tight and as fast as possible and to just see if we could understand the phenomenon that's going on. [soft guitar music plays] Three, two, one, fire. [gun shot] Only saw smoke on the left side. Yes, we had a misfire. Only the south gun fired. It's a good thing we thought ab
out misfire procedures because we used them immediately. Clear. It's all clear. Three, two, one, go. Heard a big old piece of bullet come back here that time. Did you feel it? Three, two, one. Fire. [gun fire] Maybe we got too confident at this point. We got frustrated. We started missing things several times and we didn't know why. We thought it might be vibration of the gun. So we turned the high speed camera over and tried to analyze it. We started looking at every variable we could find. Som
etimes it would miss and sometimes it would hit. It was a combination of timing and aiming. [sound of bullets hitting in slow motion like a gong] [gun fire] [gun fire] So our shots are inconsistent and we've got to address what's going on. And you're probably wondering why we haven't destroyed the other gun yet. The guns are offset by about one degree. That's certainly played in our favor on all these misfires. We haven't damaged the other gun yet. The next thing to think about is how much powde
r is in the cartridge. This is the 45 long Colt cartridge that we talked about earlier, right? We have powder in this thing, but we don't want too much because we don't want it to be too fast. So David and I purchased some of these shorter brass cartridges so that we could fill them all the way up with powder. To understand why we did this, let's 3D print a section of our barrel. And I've got some split cartridges here, and let's fill them up with gunpowder. Okay, look at this. So we've got the
long cartridge on the left, and we've got the short cartridge on the right. This is roughly the same amount of powder. And you'll notice that the cartridge on the right, the shorter one, is full. We did this because we want a consistent velocity. And the assumption is when you go to load that longer bullet inside the gun, you can see how that powder slumps down in the cartridge. It's not filling up the entire volume. And the thought is we would get an inconsistent burn. There's one thing about t
his, though. If you look really, really close, you'll notice that way up here, up front, that bullet is engaging the riflings. The riflings are the thing in the barrel that spin, or these grooves that spin the bullet as it goes down the barrel. And that bullet right there is already engaging the riflings. So we've got two things going on. We have a gap in our powder, but we are engaging the riflings. The short cartridge. This is something that we think might be giving us a problem. If you look r
eally close here, yes, the powder is more consistent. There's no slump of the powder, but there's a gap between the front of the bullet and the back of the riflings. So the thought is that bullet is having to jump the gap whenever you fire the bullet. And sometimes we can even see it on the high speed, we can see a fireball come out before the bullet, which tells us fire is getting through that little gap right there. And we think that's giving us inconsistent velocity. All this is so hard. You
can see why there's so many variables here. But even in the edit, when we started looking at all the shots in really close detail, we noticed that on the north gun, which was our Datum, {Bang!} there's a nut on the elevation control of that gun that would {Slowmo Bang} move during the firings. So we were trying to aim to something that was moving. We have so many variables here, but it's okay, because eventually we figured out that the long cartridges work better and we got into a rhythm and we
started actually getting some hits. [gun fire] [Happy finger picking guitar] [bullets exploding] [gun fire] [Bullets exploding] [gun fire] [bullets exploding] One of the most beautiful things to me about these intercepts is when the bullets come in and collide. Depending on where the noses are, the tangent points define a plane of fragmentation. And so, like, if this one is high and this one's low, then the angle of the fragments will be like that. If this one's left versus right, it's going to
just change and make a three dimensional plane defined by where the tangent points touch each other. It's beautiful. [gun fire] [Rad cello music playing makes you feel things] So everything's working. And now we get to play. We're we're seeing the high speed camera view right there like 90 degrees to the flight axes of the bullets. Right? What happens if we rotate it around isometric like this? What happens to the back of the bullet? We're going to get to see that if we put the high speed came
ra in just a little bit more danger than from the side. Let's go see what it looks like. [Super Cool slowmo sounds] [Music is a fun combination of Spanish Guitar and 80's Cop show] [Deep throbbing crushing sounds, you can feel it] [gun fire] That last shot you saw was a hollow point bullet, which is why it exploded in such a crazy way. We've mostly been firing normal lead bullets and Full Metal Jacket, which is just a copper sheath on the outside of a lead bullet. In this next shot, we were firi
ng full Metal jacket bullets against each other, and something incredible happened. Three, two, one, fire. [gun shot] [David] - I think I saw them hit. [Destin] - You saw them hit? [David... his voice unchanging] - I did. [Destin] - {Eager Laughing} Awesome! You could see it? How does that work? [Destin] - {LOUD GASP} [David, who doesn't get excited easily] - Oh wow. [Destin] - It stopped!! It just stopped. You see it? Maybe that's why I saw something. It hung in the air. It hung in the air. Oh,
man. That was a perfect momentum transfer. That is as close as we've gotten to make 'em fuse. [Destin laughing in disbelief] -It's like you froze it there! We can find the tip of that thing. It would have been to the left. Is this it? That might be one of the back ends. Yeah, this is it, Dave. Is it okay? It looks just like the other one. Yeah, these are them Dave. Look. You can see there's a little circle where the nose of the bullet was where they met. You see that? So there's a little piece
of copper that was in between those. Like a little circle of copper. Actually, two circles of copper. I wonder if the other camera will show us which way it went. Yeah, we never did look at that did we? Yeah, I'm still waiting on the big file to save. That is that guy. You see it? That is that guy. How about that? Odds of finding oh, man. Which means where are you? [gun shot] [whirling sound] It's straight in plane with the camera. So I'm going to get right here at the intercept point. I'm going
to look right back at the camera and it's like on this line right here, just a little bit to the left. You got it! Yes! Well, that's tiny. [Destin, clearly very excited] Oh, yeah! That's awesome! Is it got copper on both sides? Yes! So is that the tip? That's it! So that should go in between our other two pieces. Let's see if we can put these together. That looks like it to me. Can you slide the other one on top of it? Like that right there? [David] -I would guess.. [Destin] - That is like the
coolest thing ever, man. That's not quite a fusion, but almost. Gah! That's awesome! The fact there's copper on both sides of that meant that that was from the collision I guess. There's copper on both sides. Yeah. That means that's one copper note. But what's happening with the lead? I don't know, man. I just know it makes me really excited. It is so cool that you said you saw that one. Yeah. I saw that collision. That means that long video, that long lens should be able to see it, too. If we r
eplay that long lens, we could see it. I'm jealous. You saw it with your naked eye. I can just only describe it to you. Please, David, describe it. You would have had to have been there [laughter] so, all this work and we still haven't fused two bullets together. Our assumption is it's because we're firing the bullets too fast. And our lead is not the same type of lead used in the Civil War. So what we decided to do is the only thing we had within our control, which is load super slow bullets. W
e hand loaded more bullets with the least amount of powder we thought possible and still make it down the barrel. And this is what happened. One fire. [gun shot] Boy, those things just barely flew. Here it is. We may have a Squib on the other side, meaning it didn't exit the barrel. Okay, misfire procedures. It's right at the end. That's the bullet. Can you knock it out? [Destin laughing] Oh, man. So clearly that wasn't enough gun powder. So we loaded just a little bit more and gave it a couple
of more shots. Fire. [gun fire] Okay. It didn't explode as much. You see that? So close! It's our lead, David. They want to stick together so bad, but they refuse to. All right, so it looks like we cannot make these things fuse together with the lead that we made these bullets out of and purchased the bullets from. So I think we need to figure out a way to shoot them slower to mimic terminal velocity more. And we also need to change the metal composition. But for now, I have something else to sh
ow you. That's pretty fun. I may have accidentally shot the coolest ad I've ever made on Smarter Every Day, and I am excited to share that with you. It's for Ridge wallet. This episode of Smarter Everyday is sponsored by Ridge Wallet. So Ridge reached out and they're like, hey, we want to sponsor Smarter Every Day. And I said, no, I'm cool with my leather wallet. I don't need to change. They're like, that's cool, no big deal. We're just going to mail you one anyway. One day I'm walking around th
e house and I look at that thing. I'm like.... that thing.... I should try that. I should just KNOW that I don't like it. And so I put my cards in it and I put it in my front pocket and I love it. I genuinely love it. This is the old man part that I'm afraid to say, but my lower back pain went away. And I'm ashamed to tell you that, but that actually happened. So anyway, I called Ridge back. I was like, hey, will you please reconsider I'm sorry we broke up. Will you please reconsider sponsoring
Smarter Every Day? And they were like, "Sure!" And then I made this video. And then something amazing happened. I ended up shooting a really, really cool promotion for Ridge. They have a lot of different materials. They have Damascus steel, which looks like that. They have titanium, which looks like that. And they have aluminum, which looks like that. There's a story there. This was my actual wallet. And this is what I want to tell you. I asked Ridge if I could give you this. It's an air tag mon
ey clip. And it is the most amazing thing. I can find my wallet in my house using an air tag. And I asked them if I could give you a free air tag moneyclip if people go to 👉 Ridge.com/Smarter and they get a Ridge wallet. I said, can we throw in a money clip for FREE? And they said, "We don't do that". I said, "You MUST do this because it's that amazing." And they said "Yes". So if you want to try this, I promise you're going to love this wallet. Go to Ridge dot com slash Smarter, and you get to
tag on an air tag money clip to your order. They have a 99 day.... You try it, and you can give it back. Money back guarantee. That tells you how good it is. And by the way, backed by a lifetime warranty, these make fantastic gifts for your dad. They've got a father's day sale going on right now where there's ways you can get up to 40% off. That's a big sale. Go to Ridge.com/Smarter. It's a genuinely good wallet. I only talk about things on smarter every day that I genuinely love. And, you know
, if I'm telling the truth, and I am, and I want you to have an air tag money clip, go to Ridge.com/Smarter Let's shoot these things and let me show you how they work. We thought it would be fun to shoot these wallets from both sides because they're two plates of metal. The first one we decided to shoot was the Damascus steel version because it sounds like the toughest, and we wanted to see what happens. It's gone. I heard something. Big land in the woods. Turns out the bullets didn't fire at t
he same time, which I think made it even MORE awesome [Destin giddy with laugher] Aw Man! That is so cool! Did that go through? It did not penetrate Next up was the titanium wallet and this time, the bullets fired at the same time. For the last shot. We wanted to fire against lightweight aluminum, so we used my actual wallet because I've had my eye on a new blue one, and this was a good excuse to make the changeover. What happened here was surprising. Firing against my wallet in three, two, one,
fire. Oh, it went through! This was aluminum. This was an aluminum wallet. Was that one or two? Can't tell for sure, but the wallet's still in place. SHUT. UP. [David, sounding cool like a cowboy] What d'ya got? Is the bullet... What just happened? Looks like that bullet fell straight down. It did. It's got to be right there on the ground. How crazy is this? It's right at the bottom under the tripod. Didn't even have to move. Please focus. Here you go. Is that one or two bullets? Ahhh [Destin l
aughing, again] I think that is a possibility. That might be more than one bullet. That might be both of them. There's a tiny bit in the back that's heavier than this feels heavier than I wonder now. This is stupid. I wonder if the aluminum slowed them down just enough so they would fuse. We still get the fragmentation on the edges. You see that? And then look at that. It's absorbing it, and it's not letting it leave like it's holding it. And maybe even that air tag thing contained it. It almost
stayed. Yeah, there's just a little piece of bullet leaving. Okay. We have my wallet, an unfired bullet, and the bullet we pulled out of that. Bullet first. Digital scale, 14 grams. Okay. What about the thing we pulled out? 22 grams. We had a partial fusion inside the wallet, and I have decided it doesn't count. I love doing this so much. Thank you to everyone who supports on patreon. You help me do this. It takes years to do a project like this. And I'm grateful to everyone who supports at p
atreon.com/smartereveryday. This is not over. We have ideas. We are going to uh, well, I'm not going to tell you what we're going to do. We just have ideas and we're going to try to figure this out. So if you would consider supporting at Patreon, I do a few things. Everybody gets a baseball when they sign up there. And also every year we have what we call a sticker team for people that "stick" with me. The first year was the supersonic baseball team. The second year we had the James Webb Space T
elescope. That was a holographic sticker. That was amazing. I'm thinking this year we should have some kind of bullet versus bullet team or something like that. So if you want to consider sticking with me, you can do that at patreon.com/smartereveryday. Also, there's an email list if you want to check that out. I promise I won't spam you. I'll just tell you when I upload new videos, and I'll leave a link down below for that. Anyway, I'm grateful to everyone who watches this stuff. I would do thi
s like again, even if internet video wasn't a thing. This is what I love doing and I'm grateful that you're here. I'm grateful that you're consuming this content, that me and my buddies spend so much time building. We're grateful. Anyway, I'm Destin. Thank you so much. You're gettin Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.

Comments

@smartereveryday

Well.... the specifics of how to accomplish this have been in my head since 2017. I'm very excited to finally share it with you. I'm grateful to everyone who supports Smarter Every Day on Patreon. You make long-term planning things like this and the baseball cannon possible! Here's the link if you'd like to join our sticker team: https://www.patreon.com/smartereveryday Also, as promised, here's the link too the email list! https://www.smartereveryday.com/email-list I don't spam you. I just send out an email every time I upload. Thanks for your consideration!

@StuffMadeHere

When the two bullets perfectly hit each other it looks like your shot a single bullet into the worlds strongest mirror. Insane.

@KentuckyBallistics

This was awesome! I’ve always wanted to see this!

@Stephanie0123

As an engineering student, your videos are right up my alley. But as a playful person, the enthusiasm you exude throughout the scientific process is everything! Thank you for sharing as always, Destin.

@joshuabradford8206

The fact that the sponsorship was the end of the story of this video is so great. That is such an amazing way to incorporate a sponsorship. Since I have YouTube premium it tried to automatically skip it and I feel like there should be some way for YouTube to make a distinction between actual content and just mindless sponsorships. If you have YouTube premium rewind it to the point till before the sponsorship started and to make sure to watch it. It is so cool and you don't want to miss it.

@colinfurze

amazing video, i love destin's excitment and daves dry combacks lol

@5MadMovieMakers

Really appreciate how you name the people involved and describe how they contributed to making this crazy thing happen!

@hoganmcclure223

I wonder if you could make two bullets hit inside a block of ballistic gel so it catches all the fragments and everything and you could see this little pause of time and see how it all expands outward, I think that'd be pretty cool if possible but maybe it wouldn't be able to catch it I'm not sure

@bradparker9664

I am a traffic accident reconstructionist, so I tend to think it terms of momentum, velocity, Vectors, etc. I never dreamed you'd get a complete mutual momentum transfer, particularly with the FMJ. Absolutely incredible work, gentlemen.

@zollotech

Interesting to see this. Thanks for taking the time to figure this out and share it.

@russofamerica

24:40 - I love that you puzzled the delaminated metal scraps back together!

@skinnypup1

Amazing content on all of your videos, and you are really breaking out the big guns with Mr. Fielding. The thing that makes you two great is your ability to not only teach people how to do things, you teach us how to think. Thank You!

@taofledermaus

This makes me a little doubtful about the validity of the 2 Minié balls stuck together. Also the fact they have no white lead oxide at all on them after so many years. I have 30 year old bare lead ammo that is fluffy with lead oxide.

@OfentseMwaseFilms

This was amazing. Thank you for all the hard work💯🔥

@rocky3075

Awesome video. I do appreciate the hard work and determination to get the perfect shot.

@rundoctor

Awesome video! You've probably considered this already but there are lots of old lead bullets around. Maybe something about the old lead would allow these bullets to fuse? I also thought that you might want to put down a tarp to make finding the fragments easier. Keep up the great work!!

@BlackGryph0n

It’s amazing to think that those soldiers were probably shooting at each other at the EXACT same time, and likely saved each other’s lives! I’ve always wanted to re-create this phenomenon, thanks for doing it!!

@lcasbdr254

16:24 first colision between them (not perfectly hit) 18:51 perfect shot 26:36 another great shot

@kennethrisner8648

I have wondered about something like this for years, but never said anything or suggested it for fear of sounding nuts. I mean, the amount of figuring and calculating must be enormous. Great job gentlemen

@ericvasquez8876

This video has to be hands down one of the most well explain shown video, i have ever seen in a while...❤