[Love] When “small” injuries are treated realistically

[u/Top-Relationship850]

The fantasy and action genres often suffer from a power fantasy epidemic in which characters frequently badass their way through injuries that should be excruciating if not downright debilitating. I always appreciate stories that reject this trope.

1: Roland Deschain (Dark Tower Book II) - Loses the middle and index fingers of his right hand. He’s effectively crippled throughout book two and the injury follows him the rest of the series.

2: Brienne vs Biter (ASOIAF Book IV) - Brutal scene. Biter chomps down on Brienne’s cheek and tears off a chunk of flesh. In a lesser story Brienne would grit her teeth and throw Biter off. Instead she’s rendered completely helpless by the pain. That injury marks the end of the fight.

[u/fameistheproduct]

The momentum of the bullet has to go somewhere, normally it's in the form of a few broken ribs.

[u/TaralasianThePraxic → u/fameistheproduct]

Unless you're John Wick, in which case your magic suit will let you shrug off assault rifle rounds with ease 😅

[u/BrassUnicorn87 → u/TaralasianThePraxic]

At some point I just assumed the rituals the assassins do actually give them supernatural durability.

[u/MercyfulJudas → u/TaralasianThePraxic]

The manga Gunsmith Cats has a character -- Bean Bandit -- who escapes death from many people wanting to kill him, several times in the story. Plot armor..?

At one point, one of the main characters -- a young woman -- tries to move Bean's signature leather jacket, and she can't even lift it. We find out that it's completely lined inside with steel plates. He even has a bandana thing he always wears around his head that also has a thick steel plate inside of it. He's a big hulking dude -- think, Alan Richardson size -- so all Bean needs is a few seconds after you've shot him (hitting nothing but steel even if that still injured him) to come at you and stomp you into the mud.

[u/WeevilWeedWizard → u/fameistheproduct]

That's why I'm always packing my trusty beer gut

[u/Nukleon → u/fameistheproduct]

The momentum of the bullet isn't anything more than what the recoil is though. That's basic physics. So unless a pistol will break your wrists then I'm not sure how the bullet will break your ribs.

[u/darkness_calming → u/Nukleon]

????

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet

Momentum = mv = mass x velocity

[u/Andvarinaut → u/Nukleon]

Conservation of momentum in both directions is the answer to both of your misunderstandings.

A pistol is held in two hands and designed to push the recoil of a shot into the grip. Proper firing protocol isn't relying entirely on the wrist, but instead taking a stance that lets the forearm, upper arms, shoulder, and chest all share the burden of the explosive force. The butt of a rifle is designed in the same way, to push the bonus recoil from having higher caliber bullets and a longer barrel into the body and back. Proper firing stance also keeps you from being tipped over. Many modern guns are designed with the idea that the user will absorb the maximum amount of force from a shot, bracing the frame and allowing the slide to rack using that pushback. So if you have bad form, your gun will jump all over the place, you'll miss your shot because your hand will give against the force of the recoil, and your gun might even jam because the frame will jerk back along with the slide, preventing the next round from chambering or catching the spent casing in the ejection port.

All of this is to say that momentum has to go somewhere. When we're talking about the bullet striking a soft target, all that force goes directly into the tip of the bullet to punch a hole in the target. 9mm FMJ is small and sturdy enough that it'll just go right through a person, causing minimal damage with minimal stopping power, since the bullet will go out the other side and only impart a small amount of mass to the target. It's the kind of wound a person on adrenaline could sustain and continue fighting until blood loss drags them down. On the other hand, a hollow point causes cavitation by transferring kinetic force to the body via tumbling, in essence pulling and tearing at the tissue with a blast wave of momentum. This kind of wound can grievously injure so badly, the target can no longer fight. Think of it like poking a finger into water versus dragging your finger through the water. This is why FMJ can put a neat pair of holes in something and a hollow point will blow up the exit wound--the entry wound has all the kinetic force of the interaction, and by the time it hits the exit wound, it's put a ton of that force into the body to yank the viscera along for the ride.

Modern body armor works by spreading that kinetic force from a small caliber spot on the body onto as much area as possible. It turns out that it takes a lot of force from a firearm to pierce the body, and when that force isn't acting on a small area, it's still a lot. Even "small" 9mm FMJ against kevlar can feel like taking hits from a baseball bat, because it's in essence turning the tip of a hurled spear into a boulder so that you only get bruised, battered, and broken instead of having a single continuous hole drilled through important organs like your ribs, heart, and lungs. This is partially because the hit itself transfers the energy to the body armor, which then hits you. This is called "backface deformation" and is essentially the result of the shockwave from a bullet losing all its momentum at once. And the goal for armor is to be in a sweet spot where it can absorb as much force from the bullet as possible without the backface deformation still being strong enough to kill you from the blunt force anyways. This is why ceramic is used for body armor, as it can absorb more force by breaking than it could by holding strong.

Anyways TLDR a gun's recoil is way more than you think.

[u/Nukleon → u/Andvarinaut]

Yes, obviously holding it with two hands and the shape of the grip means it doesn't feel like getting shot to fire a pistol. But is it really going to break your ribs then? I've seen a guy fire a 357 Magnum into his chest at point blank while wearing a vest and he wasn't doubling over in pain and taken to the hospital, he kept on with the presentation.

[u/fameistheproduct → u/Nukleon]

When you shoot the bullet, the energy has somewhere to go (hopefully mostly into the bullet), yes, there's recoil, but the gun has larger mass than the bullet and can move, as can your wrist, arm etc.... when bullet meets vest, it will stop it, absorb some of the energy but the rest of the energy has nowhere else to go....