Probably in the top half of ideas because at least with this, there isn't any chemicals or radioactive materials that can become uncontained when things inevitably go wrong.
Wish there was a point in the experiment that the goal switch from accuracy to "lets see how big crater get from dropping really high" and proceed to have everyone really far away until it lands.
I suppose they could have dropped from higher while staying safe, by not dropping it anywhere close to people, and just using the handcam footage from the helicopter
I imagine like they run into Adam randomly, like he's taking a stroll in the desert and find these Veritasium guys testing stuff, sharing his wisdom along the way.
Adam's just busy on something in his workshop, when suddenly something twinges in the back of his mind. With a jerk, his head shoots up and he faintly cocks it, as if to listen for something in the distance. His eyes narrow and his brow furrows, and with a slightly defeated -- for the distraction -- but otherwise classically enthusiastic "It's time. I am needed!" he fades from the workshop and surprises Derek with a clap on the back and a "Hey there! So I heard you were doing some science experiments out here..?"
I mean I'm fairly sure anyone attempting an experiment like this is required to get permission and supervision from and by Adam by law in the United States lol 🤣 I Hope You Are All Doing Well And Having A Great Day/Night!!
I don't really understand why they bothered doing such a poorly done test. They used no fins. No control device. etc. What they tested has basically nothing to do with using an actual developed weapon. It'd be like throwing a spear the first time in your life and then declaring that missiles don't work
@@SG-Gaming20 I kinda like the simplified explanation of why birds can fly, that air is also a fluid. But since people can't see it, they forget about that fact. That's what I think.
He gave logical reasons as to why the rod of gods wouldn't work at the end. He didn't just say it wouldn't work because of the conclusion of the video. Maybe you should pay attention more.
I'm a little shocked that no smaller-scale testing was done prior to the full-scale "helicopters and sand castle professionals" part was brought out. A drone with a piece of rebar would have taught you a lot about the need for targeting apparatus, the lack of fins, etc.
This new format, focusing on hype and false drama like on Discovery Channel is really hurting Derek's videos, IMO. If the next video follows suit, I'll be unsubbing, and that's sad because I've followed him since he had less than 10k subscribers. I think it's probably due to the sheer size of the production team. IMO he needs to return to his roots. But that's just me. Also get off my lawn. Rawr.
@Adrian Molière Because then it would miss the point of this video (no pun intended). The video was trying to prove or disprove that the Rods from god was a feasible idea. And they disproved that. I mean, what's the point of having a missile when you would miss the target by a kilometre away? Althougth I still think it was a bad idea he didn't do a small scale test first
Derek probably did a couple of expensive videos with helicopters at once. In previous videos, Adam Savage was there as a guest. Here, I guess, he didn't have that much to add to the experiment so he just watched.
Huh, forgot to add fins, refused to shorten the rope connecting the payload, refusing to have people walk away to a safe distance to test extreme height, refusing to try and use lasers to track positioning... Interesting...
Yeah, first thing would be to attach the payload securely to the stabilized platform - the chopper -- and the second thing would be to impart spin. Since they're attempting to "drop straight down", I'd take spin over control surface like fins - but you're right, a targeting laser could have been a big, and not very expensive help.
Nobody thought to add fins? They spend thousands of dollars but nobody brought a welder? Or some plywood and some super glue? I lost a lot of respect for Veritasium because of this vid.
Yup, I mean attach fins or like a square kite to the tow strap would of straightened it out like an arrow, but what do I know, I didn't finish high school, but I have made arrows and spears from scratch that flew very straight, also built a rc airplanes, and many dozens of model rockets when I was a kid.
There are two main problems I see with Derek's setup: 1) Dropping the payload from what is effectively a pendulum is going to make it nearly impossible to aim, and 2) as Adam pointed out, you need some fins on the rods if you want them to land perpendicular to the ground.
Can't it be dropped at the height of the swing when it has 0 velocity? Correct me if I'm wrong but don't pendulums work based off turning gravitational potential energy (GPE) to kinetic energy (KE) and at the top of the swing it has no KE and thus no velocity?
I think the (incredibly flawed) reasoning was that since the rods from god weren't meant to have them, these ones didn't need it either. Completely forgetting that launching something from space has way more variables that could allow for such a thing: -little to no air resistance from orbit (no duh) -no swinging motion from a satellite moving at orbital speeds -once in the atmosphere, the speed would be so high that the air resistance would be more than enough to cause the rod to fall vertically (at so relatively low speeds from the helicopter, the density of the metal is more than enough to overcome the wind resistance)
I find it funny that Adam Savage is in this video, and it's not even mentioned. I'm just used to him being the one talking to a camera out in the desert, busting a myth.
@@jordancarter8310 and yet he didnt reach out to him and missed out on the vital "you should put fins on it" that noone else involved seemed to think of
Honestly I wish they had just dropped one from the max height they wanted to do, just to demonstrate how big of a crater it would make. But also, even with the height they were dropping from, everyone needed to be a LOT FURTHER back. They took some really dumb risks.
@@hellomark1 The dumbest thing to me was that they saw how they weights were swinging around like crazy below the helicopter and NOBODY thought to shorten the tether, if that tether was 3ft long it would've been much more accurate. What they really should have done though is make a mount/drop system strapped tight to the bottom of the helicopter that would lock the weights in place before release. That, coupled with fins, would have made an enormous difference.
@@watermelonsavage2914 not as much of a difference as it would have made with the way the helicopter itself was fidgeting, but it'd still have been better.
@@watermelonsavage2914 Yeah that bothered me too. They could have made a solid mount, or stabilized the strap with a few more anchor points... or ANYTHING really. Like you said, I'm surprised at how little actual engineering went into this.
Agreed. Using a laser or camera for vertical alignment would have been much more reliable than GPS. As someone else said, a shorter tether would reduce swing inaccuracy. Fins would increase flight stability on the rods. It's poorly enough done that if i were a conspiracy theorist, I might think they were being intentionally misleading.
Easily the greatest distance between original concept and small-scale simulacrum ever demonstrated. I have tremendous admiration for Derrick’s ability to understand and explain some pretty intense scientific concepts, especially those involving complex mathematical constructs. But I have noticed over a series of videos that he sometimes struggles to appreciate the complexity and practical requirements involved in a hands-on physical undertaking to demonstrate a concept. From any scientific perspective, this was a disaster.
This seemed like a "lot of money, not a lot of thought" video. No one thought about how the rods were going to hit their targets until the day of?? Fins are a bare minimum, you could have even done some gps-based bang bang course corrections with an arduino or something. Of course then you are basically designing a precision guided bomb like Mark Rober noted in his egg drop video.
A precision guidance system with accelerometers dropping longer thinner rods with fin stabilization from heavy lift drones on much, much bigger sandcastle city from much higher. That would have been cool to see.
I appreciate the honesty and I understand why you had to post it. But brother if you had spent an hour with a ballistic expert enquiring about a good way to showcase this it would have worked a million times better. And like everyone is suggesting, dropping the biggest weight from the heighest height you can just to see the crater size would be a much more enjoyable video than this. I won't think less of your content from one failure and i'm sure it's a very complicated process but this one felt really like a lack of forethought
What irks me about the whole thing is it demonstrates an extremely shallow understanding of the topic at hand while oozing “self-satisfactory professionalism”, my next thought then is the question “On how many other topics that are less obvious did they do similar mistakes?”
KEW on that scale essentially fall under the nuclear disarmament treaties. They’re not mentioned explicitly, but any nation developing them would find itself negotiating soon.
The engineering problems have been worked out. We have tables based on windage for dropping troops out planes been doing it since nam. We know exactly how far a t10 or t11 chute will fly given altitude and windage. Its not that hard to calculate the same for a rod. just add stabilizing fins. and walla
Well the video explains pretty clearly that the issue isn't launching a projectile and hitting a target. The issue is maintaining accuracy as weight, distance, and velocity increase exponentially. Launching a howitzer round 2 miles past the horizon is nowhere comparable to dropping a 10-tonne rod from 22,000 miles altitude, accounting for the change from a vacuum to entering the atmosphere and still trying to maintain enough accuracy to cripple installations. Artillery actually requires less accuracy than kinetic weapons, and it's cheaper and more accurate.
The fact that they didn't seem to anticipate that a weight dangling from a helicopter on a tether would be swinging all over the place is ... odd to say the least.
Sometimes a genius is so into the genius stuff, that he forgets about the basic stuff. Whenever I try to do something smart, a rookie mistake just screws it up.
Your aiming problem was because your rods were pendulums, so they had significant lateral velocities that threw them off target. you should have had them in hardpoint mounts under the chopper so they'd be dropped with zero lateral velocity.
Needs fins as well to keep the center of drag begin the center of mass, so it stays straight rather than drifting off to the side. Realistically it needs GPS guiding with fins as well because there will always be wind hitting the rods broadside. imo this video was really poorly done, many of these issues could have been mitigated with just an hour or reviewing potential issues and small scale tests, and a week of implementing the fixes full scale.
@@InfernoViperz123 at the speeds they are testing at, the fins would need to be large, and the larger they are, the more wind will blow them off course as well. Now they are realizing why bomb zones in WW2 were often miles wide from a single wave of bombers. yes, GPS or laser buiding would be necessary. A real THOR warhead would have GPS and inertial guidance, as well as active radio guidance from a spotter either on the ground or in space, particularly for hitting moving targets like aircraft carriers.
The problem with a hard mount, is that the object would _still_ be affected by the turbulence caused by the heli rotor the moment it was released. That turbulence extends downwards for a fair distance beneath the chopper before it even starts to ease away. And then once it does you have the general motion of the atmosphere to deal with - which in a hot desert area is probably a fair amount at that height. Only fins can counter this issue - especially adjustable fins whos angle can be adjusted to counter any spin/lateral movement.
I am so confused by how thoughtless this "experiment" was but how well researched the rest of the content was, even with the lamp shading by adam savage and later admitting to "screwing up", it felt more like a drunken idea hastily executed without anyone stopping to think than a high budget science demonstration.
Yeah this looks like it cost a ton of money for basically nothing. Why not build a little 25% scale house or something and do all the drops on that. Wtf was the point of the pool?
@@Mutantcy1992The point of the pool was probably just what you saw: If there was a hit, it would make a splash. Remember, this is video, and you have to have an interesting image.
Im an engineering student and my first thought was to add fins to these rods, with a bunch of other stuff that would easily make them way more accurate. This whole thing feels very under prepared.
LOL yeah he says its a bad idea but i dont think he really understands what the concept is, Fins as well as a design to make it accelerate even faster on the way down seem pretty simple
I‘m a Industrial Design and Informatics Student and this was also my first thought + maybe a arduino with a gyroscope that controlls the rod to point straight down… what would that‘ve cost? 50-100$ and a few hours of testing? Definitely nothing compared to chartering a Helicopter for a day
I’m honestly a little bit dumbfounded that they went through the whole process without considering down wash, swaying, and the rod’s stability. They didn’t even have a backup plan? (Pivot to just creating the largest impact possible, since this is all about the explosive potential of a KE weapon, not accuracy)
They could have created a larger impact but they were so inaccurate they would not have been able to position a camera to film it without endangering the people operating the camera
Mate the fact they used SAND to showcase destruction of KE weapons might be the most moronic thing in this video. The substance that is LITERALLY known for its ability to do a good job stopping bullets because of it.
To be fair he does admit it's his biggest failure, but yes you'd need a very thin, very long rope to not have to deal with wind from the helicopter blades, in turn the helicopter is buffeted by winds, it can't be steady either meaning that the projectile is always moving in a vaguely circular motion modified by the difference between where the helicopter was at this point in the last rotation and the current location. Setting the rod spinning with impeller-like fins would steady the trajectory of the rod but wouldn't help with getting it pointed at the right target and not imparting some spurious steering input as it's dropped. Probably the logical thing to do would be to put a "tungsten warhead" on a conventional missile and fire it on a "kinetic trajectory" (ie: straight down) from a great height (orbit, hopefully). Normal missiles have already solved all the problems rods would face, and could impart more energy as well as actively steering towards the target.
I put this knife to my skin and now I'm bleeding. Purely amazing and mind blowing. So happy we have science channels like this to show us that plastic pools will in fact rip when dropping a 150 pound piece of metal from thousands of feet in the air.
I wouldn't attempt it without an arduino based targeting system tested in KSP. Since it's not meant for combat, image processing can be simplified a lot by placing a few bright lights around the target.
@@wyattroncin941 There is absolutely no point. You are needlessly increasing resistance and weight carried on the heli while the same could be achieved over radio. Wifi might lack the range. Idk, whatever drones are using would do.
@@aleksanderczajka6072 a rope rail system would certainly be heavy and expensive, but it would be simple to get opperational, and wouldn't be destroying $200+ in hardware per drop, and it's practically guaranteed to work.
All this crew and no one stopped to think about how hard it would be to hit the target? I think the story would have been just as interesting (or maybe even more interesting considering how underwhelming the impacts ended up being) without any targets, just going for the maximum drop height and letting it fall wherever. That would have at least demonstrated the power of kinetic energy, assuming you designed a projectile with high enough terminal velocity.
Yeah I get why this video was released considering the cost but... The high cost could've been reduced AND you could've better tested kinetic energy. Makes the video quite pointless. Also really not a fan of this editing/production.
Exactly. If the point was to demonstrate the release of the maximum possible kinetic energy, there was no need to do the whole targeting thing. Just take the rod really high and drop it. Film the results. One other issue is the effect the lift strap had on the aerodynamics of the object. Maybe rethink this a bit?
The other problem is knowing where it might hit. It's clear there's going to be some drift as the object falls so you need more safe zone space the higher you go. At 3 kilometers I would want a safe space of at least a kilometer. Finding that sort of space where the land is flat enough that you can see the object hit and catch it on film is going to be tough. Plus actually having a camera close enough to the spot it hits to catch the impact point close up is going to be nearly impossible with a helicopter. What you need is something that can go up and drop the object over the target with no wind blowing the object around like some sort of UFO. Maybe on of those drone platforms designed to carry people might work. Only with the fans extended out another ten to twenty feet so that their downward force is far enough from the object that it isn't impacted by that turbulence. Which requires someone like Bezos to fund the development.
4 point rigging, fins, better weight distribution, and crosswinds are things I would have assumed would have been thought of for something this expensive. If it was just a backyard experiment type thing I get not doing all the bells and whistles and just trying to make a big hole. But I feel almost bad no one thought of this before dumping what appears to be a large amount of money into something of this caliber. You live and you learn.
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At a minimum, they could have made the straps much shorter. Less swing that way.
@ I can't believe they didn't talk about the swinging and the potential for harminic motion due to the helicopter pilot's compensation. He kept saying the "wind was blowing it all over the place" - something tells me the wind didn't have nearly as big an impact on that 450lb cubic foot of metal as the helicopter did. I was bothered by some of the other commentary as well. The cube punching straight through the bottom of the intex pool was "unbelievable"? Really?? For me this video was just a miss all around, pun intended.
@ You read my mind!!!! Shorten the straps, have a 4 or 6 point harness to hold whatever they were going to drop which would exponentially minimize the swinging!!! They spent a ton of money prior to thinking everything through. Oh well........ next time (maybe.....)
I don't like when they are all for example doubtful if the helicopter is actually at the right altitude. At the beginning of the vid. I mean, a pilot probably would know...
A model isn’t meant to be the exact same. It should just fulfill a purpose. This wasn’t done as good, but he didn’t have alternatives. I think this video was good, because usually a lot of experiments fail but you still protocol it, to falsify it.
>Burn retrograde to deorbit >Drop rod >Re-orbit burn >Rod hits target >orbital_mechanics_sometimes_are_helicopters.png Edit: what I’m trying to say is that the “rocket” helicopter that drops off the rod is just a model showing what would happen
It's not the wind causing the swinging, it's that you created a long pendulum which exacerbated any vibrations and movement from the helicopter. You would want a 3 or 5 point strap system that the quick release drops from. Combine that with a set of fins and you'd be able to pretty consistently hit the target.
Yes!!! Thank you Raven! I almost stopped the video purely due to his statement of it being the wind. I typically enjoy his videos, this was terrible and for such an individual to have a fair level of intellect to miss so many key points was very frustrating to watch. Possibly his worst video yet.
or just use a plane and some rudimentary ww2 era bombing targeting system. if you lob it, not drop it, it's much more accurate, as long as it's fin stabilised.
Are they so firearm averse they couldnt have spent a few grand to get a 20mm single shot gun and 4 or five rounds and made it a real experiment? Jeez.. Adam Savage probably suggested this...
Derek needs to speak with Darrel Barnette who worked for several years on projects like this for DOD. The videos that are public from the railgun and gravity weapons for DOD were taken by or with Darrel.
@@JonMahn Using a gun doesn't demonstrate the basic principle of "just dropping a big weight from high up is powerful". It would kinda defeat the point of the video.
I think it's amazing how this guy and mythbusters both suffer from the same problem of giant ego blindness. "If we can't do it with some rediculous half assed plan, then its impossible". That was a great try if you're in middleschool.
Kinda surprised that nobody realized that this was never going to work. Id expect this from a Mr. Beast video but not Veritasium. Usually he simulates outcomes with equations before going into the field to test.
Yeah, actually it really surprised me too, derek usually plans things really well, since Adam was there maybe this was at the same time they tested the pennies and the dropping of really big thing was just and afterthought?
I expected he would mention the "Iraqi bunker busters" the US used against Iraqi bunkers in the Kuwait invasion. They did contain explosives, but still used the kinetic energy to penetrate really deep, at least 15 meters (45 feet). Probably not feasible to be recreated by a youtuber tho.
@@iFix. This is what happened. They just decided to milk this and release this video, which is going to make insane money; this video got 200,000 in 1 hour. So they got two videos out of this 'project' they did. Easily making over $500,000 from both videos when you consider the sponsorship as well
Adam: "Does it have fins?" Derek: "Why didn't we have this conversation weeks ago?" I just hear Jaime in my mind. "Should have done the engineering." Shortly followed by, "When in doubt, lube."
I was thinking the same thing as soon as I saw it??? everything that's a tube and is sent to fly has wings, except for bullets but they usually don't go that far
Exactly what I was thinking. Could’ve made the impact end a pointed end. Could’ve added wings. Added vents, more straps to stop the swinging. Just downright horrible execution
Considering that shortly before this video was published, Mark Rober put up a video where he was well on his way to designing a system to do exactly this kind of guidance dropping an egg FROM SPACE (way higher than shown here), and he was already dropping from 10k feet (3048 meters) with an accuracy in a reasonable ballpark of what was achieved here, in scale, I'd say that with the technical resources of the US military contracting industry, this definitely COULD be done. It would be fairly costly, but uh... if Mark Rober with a few engineer friends and something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino and a not absurd amount of code can get that far, that relatively fast, I'm sure it wouldn't take too long or too much money to develop a working system. Deploying the rapid response coverage is the issue, NOT making the projectile control be precise enough. Communicating a target would be trivial, and once loaded, no actual guidance from the ground would be needed - as demonstrated by how well Rober did so quickly. They only stopped from developing their system because of the snares of legality and ethics, when they realized they were developing a guided missile. Yes, this concept is functionally possible and on a smaller scale with less time response definitely feasible.
his experiment was flawed.. he needs to get a smaller object up closer to mach 1 to do any real kinetic damage... if you think about it the shock wave would be enormous..and the impact it rather small whoops right.. they cant show that on youtube..
So, the issue I have with this video is that while it is an amusing concept, it really poorly conveys the effects of the kinetic energies involved which are way outside the domain these kinds of mundane drops can achieve. As noted early in the video, true hyperkinetic impacts result in violently explosive energies and liquefaction of the impact area, so the physical dynamics are completely different than low energy kinetic impacts from things like bullets or simple dropped weights.
The fact he literally has video which explains why scaling things is so difficult in science and how it needs additional adjustments but then makes this trash ....tragic.
The original business model of TH-cam stank, but at least the ads were reasonable. New flood of invasive, repetitive, and offensive ads are EVIL. Google is now fully dedicated to doing any evil that seems profitable. And censoring complaints, too.
If you’re wondering why Adam is there, if you look at the details it’s the exact same site, helicopter, and crew from the penny drop video released 2 months ago. I suspect it was a pooled resource shooting multiple experiments at one time to minimize cost. Although it’s much cooler to think that Adam myth buster sense starts tingling and he just shows up whenever cool experiments are going down.
I have to imagine this experiment was rushed or something, because I would've expected Derek to take a lot of these issues into consideration. There are a lot of good suggestions in the comments that would've given them a better chance, but I think the bigger issue is that they felt the need to do this at all. Veritasium videos are usually much more information-based; telling stories of scientists or interviewing experts in an interesting field. There's no need to do Mr.Beast-esque stunts like this, especially when there's such a high chance of failure
@@QuasiDude He has a PhD in Physics Education Research. His thesis was "Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education", ie. creating educational TH-cam videos. Still a PhD, but not in Physics- in education. And you know what they say about those that can't do...
"We gonna drop rods from several kilometers up" Ok well that sounds hard but Veritasium probably knows what hes doing. **Pulls up mobile to get target GPS and gets into a helicopter with the payload just dangling freely a few meters under** Im surprised they didnt hit themself...
@Karl with a K just as competent as experts in any and every single field out there. no more, no less. regardless of how many we educate, truly intelligent people remain in short supply.
Agreed, I thought the purpose was to find out the destructive force of the rods and scale it up, not find the most inefficient way to destroy a sand castle.
Meh: rods from god were a piss poor idea from the get go: the fact that you can deliver a bunch of energy without it being nuclear was about the only thing they had going for them, the fastest weapon ever devised was constrained by the slowest kill chain conceivable!
@@wilfdarr Don't under estimate the Rod from God concept. The original idea was rods the size of telephone poles made of 100% tungsten 20 ft long by 1ft diameter. These would hit a city with the impact force of a ground penetrating nuclear weapon and destroy any underground facility hundreds of feet underground. When dropped from orbit it would reach up to 10x the speed of sound without violation of the 1967 outer space weapons treaty which prohibits nuclear, biological and chemical weapons attacks from space signed by 107 countries. These rods would destroy an entire city just like a nuke and any bunker, base or silo under it for hundreds of feet with none of the nuclear fallout. While the targeting system and cost for something like this was near impossible at the height of the cold war its much more feasible now. Especially with advanced AI and the cost of moving things into space diminished It is more possible than ever before ! Unfortunately some weights would have to be dropped from space to gather data for the AI and I would not want to be the country those tests are landing on lol.
Years of experience doing stuff like this, constant contact with world renown scientists, complex logistics involving several teams of people, Adam Savage who has done this for most of his life and somehow the test turned out like this.
Welcome to soulles entertainment. This video was made for sharing it in 30 second clips on facebook and generating ad money. Sadly almost all large content creators get ground down and bought by big business.
The fact that star link exists proves that we could put a lot of satellites in space that could all just launch a couple rods each, and make a spread good enough to level a city. Edit: starlink is also good enough to transmit data through that plasma, so aim wouldn’t be a problem (not that aim is a problem with a space shotgun)
Given the relative lack of anything beyond visual targeting, this video is functionally a demonstration of why, in WW2, they estimated there was only a 1% chance of a bomb falling within 100 feet of the intended target (thus necessitating hundreds of bombs/bombers in order to have a high likelihood of actually blowing up what you wanted blown up)
I can't believe anyone would think that they were going to get any accuracy at all with that setup. I'm bloody positive they all knew about pendulums *before* they went out there.
I’ve watched enough mythbusters to know that you always attach radio controlled aerodynamic surfaces to hunks of metal whenever your dropping them from a helicopter.
@@the_regulator1145 I'd've thought at least a rigid "launch tube" or guide rail fixed to the side of the helicopter. Something other than a bloody-great pendulum
@@quertbarbie62 I'm pretty sure that was this exact conversation, from the same shoot. They tried to make two videos at the same time, only got one good one, and then posted the bad one too, just for kicks.
“Is that 500 meters, it seems too high” “Wanna radio him, to ask if that’s 1500 feet?” Says all this when the helicopter is literally equipped with altitude meters
Honestly the only way to test this is in a silo using an overhead crane/winch and a quick release. The fact that the projectile was swinging side to side ruined the accuracy as much as anything else they failed to do in the projectiles construction. However that means they can't drop it from as high as they can from the helicopter.
Yes, the effort was wasted on a perfect sand city and not put in considering how to hit a target by dropping a not-aerodynamic rod swinging (!) under a helicopter.
"it ripped right through the pool. Unbelievable!" What's so unbelievable that a chunk of steel being drop from the sky goes right through a shallow plastic pool?
It was all planned just for the punchline at the end. "I would say it is my biggest failure of all time, which as it turns out, is also something you could say about the actual weapon Rods from God." The whole setup is so crappy it's obvious he never intended for it to succeed.
@UCiUl8dZIzCkGUyB6nrTpOTg Ye, or instead of having the weight tied outside the coptor, have the guy chuck it. So, you don't waste so much fuel to reload.
Entirely shocked that you didn't expect a cylinder to turn on it's side given the air resistance the end of the cylinder would be experiencing compared to the rest of the cylinder.
seriously, you can figure this out just by throwing a pencil up in the air.. it's very hard to get a pencil shaped object to land vertically in the dirt..
If they did a quick reading of wind speed and direction, or maybe did a better probably cylindrical harness this would’ve been a much better experiment. Maybe it was a rush video
I was really surprised it wasn't just a few of us noticing the complete lack of aerodynamic consideration going into such an expensive project. Anyone who has tried throwing a stick as a spear can tell you it will tumble around. Hundreds of other people are already saying it, but I'll say it too: fins. Some rear drag surfaces (some people have even suggested spin-stabilizing fins which was a positive surprise) really would have been so simple to do. Tons of people working on this project, but I guess anyone realizing it needed fins wasn't comfortable enough to speak up or there was some kind of deliberate reason for excluding them.
Almost as if they did it wrong intentionally... What say if we show people on an open internet like TH-cam how to make weapons of ass destruction? Okay, so, maybe instead we make a video detailing how not to do it and say that it can't be done as if it hasn't been done already and isn't being done right now?
I am shocked to think why he puts so little thought to it. There were lots of things they could have done. 1. Shorten the straps 2. Steps could have been of metal. 3. Calculated the wind and have done something to counter it ( like change the drop position of helli. 4. Have designed the fins on rod.
@@27sspider27 Any trailing straps makes it "fly", not a true drop. The best thing would be to deploy it without a strap or wings of any kind. Projectile must be bottom heavy, so it stays in a downward orientation.
Calculating the wind is a lot harder than what you'd expect. Mark rober took a shot at this with his egg drop from space, its incredibly difficult to actually have any form of guidance. And also if it had guidance, it would be legally classified as a missile which makes it illegal
Calculating the wind wouldn't have made a difference. You see it swinging, but as a result it is also rotating. When the dropped it is continued to rotate. It wasn't falling long enough for a fin to have a positive effect. What they needed was to contain it in a pipe that was fixed to the aircraft to prevent swinging. It would have been easy to rig if they'd just given it a few moments of thought.
Just releasing the weights when it reached to the apex of the swing would have made all the drops a lot more accurate. Just like when you jump off a swing on a swingset at the apex you go straight down rather then jumping off in the middle of the swing.
The point is that this isn’t a efficient way to distribute energy as the force is to focused to effect a large area . I’m sure it would do great work in the case of a giant kaiju or robot though
@@ashscott6068 by saying "this has nothing to do with rods of god, we just wanted to drop stuff from a helicoptor, they explain the rods work by hitting hard enough to create actual explosions, whis would be like testing grenades by throwing rocks at a wall, you are skipping the whole bit that makes it effective, the explosion
i think the solution here is to add properties to the weights that would stabilize their course, i.e. weighting one end to increase the likelihood of dropping perpendicularly to the ground, side fins to help straighten the path, etc.
Honestly if he had just anticipated the fact that it would be unlikely to hit a target from 500 meters (it only takes a small amount of research to know this btw) he could've dropped the object into the sand from a significantly higher height, and at the crater site he'd be like "According to our calculations, this delivered the equivalent of X amount of TNT into this crater. We're now going to test what X amount of TNT would look like if it hit our sand castle city." Then use X TNT explosive planted in the sand city to see what the damage would look like.
I think this video is a perfect demonstration of a few things: 1. How a lack of preparation, simulation, and small scale testing can completely ruin an idea, even if it's just for a video. 2. Dropping an unguided object from space on a specific target is INCREDIBLY difficult to do to the point of being almost impossible. 3. Magnification of error over time. If the object is swinging at just 1m/s before it is dropped, and it falls for 10 seconds, it will be almost 10 meters off target when it lands.
As sad as it might have been to start again from scratch, I don't think this video should have been released until it became something worth watching, so as not to dilute the generally high quality of Veritasium's videos. It ended up as non-event, non-video but it would have been better to try again, with fins and without the need for a target.
Agreed it wasn't 'blowing things up' spectacular, but it does remind me of a lot of failed trial-and-error science experiments in my past, and how one has to take stock, change something, and try again. Sometimes the 'obvious' changes (e.g. fins) only dawn on you part-way through the first trials.
@@paulsyms2142 But they aren't trailblazing here, a very similar experiment has been done by the Mythbusters, simply talking to Adam Savage could've fixed so many problems. It's bewildering, this isn't a Veritasium video.
I’d assume it probably has to do with money honestly.. Like, as said many times it is the most expensive video, and the crew seemed to be very big here and all gotta be paid. Helicopters are expensive as hell, and those sand castle builders didn’t sound cheap either. I believe they just believed too much in themselves and did the failure, and probably thought of trying again, but funds running low, so being to forced to release as it is to gain back and get back on track, or something like that.. Kinda sad, but I hope it’s a lesson learned so they stick to doing the quality work so they don’t have such failures anymore!
As someone who’s dropped a lot of cylinders from fairly high heights, yes, they DO tend to fall on their side, however, that strap would provide enough drag to right that. The problem was they dropped while it was still swinging, not that it wanted to fall wrong.
@@IIARROWS The quick release was attached to the chopper. Also when you take off you need a little slack between the helicopter lifting off and the load, so it is good to add a the strap or string or whatever to give the heli some room to take off.
It would have been better if they carried the weight in the cabin, and then when they got to the position they could lower it out and then drop it. That would eliminate most of the pendulum effect from the helicopter adjusting its position, plus the wind, though that would be minimal since the wind isn't going to easily blow a 100 kg weight around easily.
i am SHOCKED they didnt think of that. I mean this in the most respectful way possible. I think hes a smart dude. how was anyone surprised that "its really swinging"?? even the trick shot youtube channels (like HowRidiculous, DudePerfect, etc) hit small targets from very high up. Im really amazed that stuff wasnt thought about Really, the thing im amazed by is that they underestimated this. Dropping stuff from high up is something people have done for a long time lol. we know its hard. the fact they were like "we're above it" and didnt even mention that wind could push it to the side as like whugt. All this said, smart people make mistakes all the time. so im not hating. im just surprised
Sometimes incredibly smart people don’t always succeed at applying relevant knowledge. Saw it all the time in school. Classmates that could solve differential equations would struggle to apply concepts from physics 1.
All of the issues are so easily fixed... I don't understand how a physicist would not see them from a mile away and resolve them, instead of wasting a bunch of money and time in the desert. I hope you make another go at it with better preparations.
@@Mr.LaughingDuck No. A physicist can easily calculate those. It's literally the job of a physicist to be able to calculate them properly. I would know, I'm a physics engineer.
@@OsedayCan i think they were joking and mocking high school physics, which all start with "neglecting air resistence" "assuming this to be frictionless"
I think one of the other issues with this test was the materials for the target: the buildings were basically just mostly-solid lumps of damp sand, rather than a hollow honeycomb-like structure of rigid pieces of steel, concrete, and glass. While sand is fragile, it's also pretty soft and squishy, and as a result ended up absorbing a lot of the shock from the dropped weight, which is why every time the rods landed they just made an unremarkable "plop" rather than a sizable blast (didn't help that they weren't nearly going as fast as the proposed Rods From God). If they made the model skyscrapers constructed more like actual skyscrapers, separate floors and windows and whatnot, the results might have been more spectacular and destructive. I mean the materials don't have to be totally accurate- maybe just something made of thin bits of wood or plastic would be fine.
kinetic bombardment was not developed as an "answer" to soviet ICBMs. it was developed as a weapon that cannot be defeated and is capable of hitting any target anywhere in the world within an hour without the giant red flag of a missile launch that can be detected across the world.
@@lachlan1971 well, most likely. an ICBM launch can be detected anywhere in the world. a kinetic weapon cannot be detected until it's too late and it cannot be defeated.
@@aaronkcmo "a kinetic weapon cannot be detected until it's too late and it cannot be defeated." Can not be defeated... but I am sure the Chinese, Indians, Pakistani and Israelis are aware of this weapon. The moment the incoming rods are detected is the moment the nukes would start flying.
@@thechloromancer3310 uh, this weapon doesn't exist. it's been superseded by hypersonic rockets and jets. are you suggesting that any of these countries would respond to conventional weapons with an all-out nuclear assault? seems highly unlikely since India, Pakistan and Israel do not possess the ability to launch a first strike against the united states. china, having that ability, would seem unlikely to initiate a global nuclear war in retaliation considering their entire country would be obliterated. this weapons system wasn't ever designed to be a strategic deterrent like the nuclear arsenal, it has always been a covert, precise, prompt global strike system that was meant to take out precision high-value targets such as assassinations. btw, by in the time it takes for a hypersonic weapon is detected and for that weapon to reach its target, there would not be enough time to even distribute launch orders to a nuclear arsenal, let alone actually see missiles fly. if an adversary were to launch a nuclear weapon in retaliation to a hypersonic missile or kinetic bombardment it would be a serious escalation, not a response in kind.
@@aaronkcmoThe other commenter seems to be assuming these would be city-burners, like in some popular media, and used like nuclear weapons. You are correct to dispel that notion. However, you claim this weapon has been "superseded by hypersonic rockets and jets." It has not, they fill different profiles. This theoretical weapon is not practical for a variety of mechanical and political reasons, so hypersonics fill most of the role. But hypersonics have nowhere near the same survivability as a kinetic penetrator, just look at tank combat. APFS is far more reliable than ATGM at killing tanks.
As others have said, for a creator that puts so much effort into research, this seemed half baked. I like that he left in the part where the first question Adam asks is, "Does it have fins?" and he's like, oh we should have thought of that. Like, what?? Also you could have shortened the rope significantly so it wouldn't swing as much. That was never adjusted.
Why use a rope at all? Seems very dangerous and probably hard to control the shifting center of mass for the chopper pilot... let alone aiming. It should have been a firm attachment with a release. That said, I was more interested in seeing a crater than needing to see it hit some "target"...but we never even got to see that from their original intended height because they were so obsessed with hitting something they arbitrarily placed there. Pretty lame.
@@maskddingo1779 The rope is actually significantly safer and easier then a fixed mounting point. While I'm not a pilot I did spend a good many years as a technician for equipment that was installed into a helicopter and flew with it. One such piece of equipment was for a 800lb cast iron gimbal with sensors in it and that alone was right near the limit of what the AS350E we used was rated to handle in the cab due to centre of gravity concerns. When the payload is on a slingline it's better able to operate at it's max rated capacity because there is a bit of give in the slingline when the helicopter makes any sort of adjustments or movements and doesn't put nearly as much strain on the control hydraulics. It's also why it was likely so hard to aim because it's very difficult to completely stop the swing. Between the swing and upper air currents between extremely strong and not always the same direction as ground winds, the ground crew would need to be very far away to ensure there being 0 chance the payload accidentally doesn't land on them. Which also means they need a very large area to have cordoned off as if anyone did get hurt they would be opened up to some very serious litigation. Another reason fixed mounting was likely not an option is anything attached to the helicopter, especially of that weight, would need some kind of engineering approval and that process is expensive. And anything that might be off the shelf that has all the requisite approvals is also likely not to be very cheap because the company that made it had to go through that process. Slingline on the other hand only needs the approval for the sling mount system which the aviation company likely already has sling mounting equipment. Also keep in mind that helicopter rental can easily cost a few thousand dollars every hour, plus fuel which the AS350E took over 500L of Jet-A at $1.60/L for a 2.5h flight. I'm sure the cost of the sand castle was probably low on their list of expenses. Rotary aircraft arn't nearly as precise as they are made out to be in certain bits of media. The pilots I worked with all attested that the hardest thing to do well is hover perfectly in place. As often the controls are calibrated to be most at neutral when in forward flight and hovering often requires constant correction which introduces errors in positioning. Got to try it myself for a short while, was quite fun but indeed very tricky. At altitude mind you and with dual controls so the pilot always had the ability to take over :P
When they started talking about aiming the helicopter to the pool, ok the chopper might have an RTK capable GPS to actually aim precisely, but they're taking/marking the pool coordinates with just a cell phone? In the middle of nowhere the cell network might not be good enough to augment the phone's precision(process of which admittedly I'm not very versed in so idk...) the result might actually for the mark to be off from the pool? E: so ok I watched more and they're aiming with a phone also... well hopefully they'll hit the ground :D
@@TacticalCommand That's a lot of words. Some make sense. Others don't. While I haven't flown real helicopters, but I do fly pretty powerful models and have been doing so for quite a while... long before automatic flight stabilization was the norm. I am aware of the principles under which they opperate. Adding a fixed weight to the bottom (or something that can be pushed out the side) is not significantly different than adding another passenger. If it were better to have weight you are carying suspended by a rope, then they ought to make helicopters where every occupant hangs from a rope.
ThE Compressed sand castles don't behave like a real building structure. The loosely packed sand readily absorbed the displaced KE from impact dissipating it through the intergranular space. The Shockwave would probably do more damage to solid concrete,wood, and steel.
Yeah there were so many thing’s Veritasium could’ve done differently with this experiment. Like building actual scale model buildings/structures instead of sandcastles, using a helium filled balloon to lift the object instead of a helicopter that is going to move around slightly, especially at that altitude.
This was a fun watch! I kinda guessed at the results, because while I was in my skydiving years, some of the guys and gals got the fun idea of dropping pumpkins on an old barn from the skydiving plane...and hilarity ensued. The barn was at no time in any danger, although passersby most certainly were. And their vehicles. Also, we were 'faced.
Funny thing was, when I hovered over video to do the "preview autoplay" thing. I saw a guy with an Adam Savage goatee wearing his hat and laughing/smiling. I was sure it was someone that just happened to look like him. But no it was actually Adam Savage.
@@agentkirb Pretty sure this was shot at the same time as the earlier penny drop video with Savage in it -- same helicopter, I think the same clothes, and it makes sense to do it all as one set of rentals/excursion.
You just know that the ENTIRE time Adam was watching this, he was trying to suppress his desire to say: "Uhm... why no fins?" Because that would have been the *first* thing he thought while looking at it, having dropped a bunch of things from heights, before.
@@mikaellindqvist5599 thats not what happened. 8:12 veritasium was saying that he wished that they had had that conversation a week ago, which they wouldve IF adam had been involved in the prep. adam has dropped things from altitude several times. why would he forget things that even i would know having never done it?
@@mikaellindqvist5599 Derek DREAMS he had have spoken to Adam earlier, but he didn't... because Adam wasn't in on the planning at all. Hence Derek saying he wishes they had have spoken about this project sooner than on the day. Adam would have totally caught this early and saved them a lot of time/effort.
You could have just dropped the biggest rod you had from around the highest height possible without thinking about target, it would also be cool to watch how much impact it makes.
The sandcastle builders are incredibly chill. Knowing that your sandcastle would be hit by a telephone pole traveling faster than sound is not really amusing.
It was so odd that a science channel didn’t think of this, like it seems obvious to me to put fins or to drop the cylinder by some type of rigid attachment to the helicopter or something.
@@Mr_Vosakisen It's kind of weird how unprepared he was for this, like he's trying to be Mark Rober but doesn't realize how much thought and preparation goes into even his failures
Please redo this. It doesn’t need propulsion, it just needs guidance. With a guidance system distance becomes your friend instead of your enemy giving you more time to aim. I feel like you could easily build a cheap guidance system out of fpv drone/wing tech and some fins, and drop that thing from max altitude. Literally just fly it in like an fpv wing. If you use the dji fpv system, you have some nice footage too.
@@maxdoesgames6753 didnt think about that. Idk how hard it would be to get clearance for that, but I feel like they’re past that by dropping stuff from a helicopter in the first place.
They could just freaking stabilise it better on the helicopter. Make it a three to four point structure that won't allow the weight to wiggle as much. I can't understand how they missed that.
Im guessing they wanted the shape to be closely associated to the orig project. ofcourse, a blunt object gets rounded after atmosphere entry, and wind/air is not a factor after gaining it's velocity, so yeah, to emulate those conditions, they would have to emulate completely opposite conditions in this context, iycmd guess they should have gone to space.
The effort was wasted on a perfect sand city and not put in considering how to hit a target by dropping a not-aerodynamic rod swinging (!) under a helicopter.
Aftermath inside talk: "So, we did this dumb idea with 0 forethought and the result belongs to the trash" Him: *"Publish it anyways, we spent a lot on this, we have to make some money back even if this is a big waste of time for us and anyone watching it!*
I've always held the guy up as a very smart individual. After this I'm not so sure. He's always so polished on his channel But I guess with script and edits most anyone can be made to look knowledgeable. I'm not suggesting this is the case but clearly he's not the polished brainiak I believed him to be. Very little of this " experiment " went according to his reasoning. It's a shame really because it didn't give him any positives. It is even possible that he lost a few subscribers after this. Even Adam appeared to raise an eyebrow. I will keep watching Veritasium if the subject is of interest to me." But it's not Must See TV " anymore.
Research is something anyone can do, designing an experiment takes someone willing to put mental effort in. A particularly clear indication of poor mental effort and quality control here, even in the research, was how he somehow goofed the common name for the concept Its not "Rods from God" in most circles its "Rods from the Gods"
Very dissapointed. There were a number of variables that could have been addressed with more thorough testing. Additionally, conducting smaller tests without the costly resources of a helicopter or the construction of sand castles for the final test may have helped to identify any potential issues. It seemed as though these factors may have contributed to a rushed and potentially incomplete evaluation of the subject.
The simplest solution to their biggest problem in this test - weight swaying - could have been fixed by drastically shortening the cord that holds the weigh. Just make it like 30cm long, attach it to the helicopter in the same spot and voila - minimum swaying and probably more precision.
@@blingerstinger I was thinking you could have the rod contained within a tube attached on the side of the helicopter, which would have reduced swaying and the effect of the wind.
This video confuses me so much. Literally 2 months ago Veritasium posted a video about dropping pennies and pens onto targets. And in that video they discovered cylindrical objects will naturally turn sideways while falling, which maximizes air-drag. So it should have been obvious to add fins. This video must have been in production before that older one and took longer to edit or something, because this doesn't make any sense how poorly planned everything went. Plus how did no one think to directly attach the weight to the helicopter so it doesn't swing as much? Or just see how big of a crater you can make rather than hand-sculpting a city? What the heck even was this video????
@@AccAkut1987 Yeah exactly. So they dropped weights from 100m. Wow. Who could have thought how that will turn out. Still fun I guess. But nothing learned.
Aiming a drop from an aircraft involves calculating wind speeds at various altitudes to adjust for the push. I’m surprised that this didn’t come up at all in the planning (maybe it did behind the scenes but you seemed caught-off when it was blowing and swinging from a helicopter, and that seemed an obvious thing that would happen)
@@mattmarzula This video is a fail. This video would be far more entertaining if they actually did the experiment right. I was ignorant of this technology until watching this video. Derrick spent a lot of money for this fail of a video, money that should have been given to me as the winner of the veritasium contest, so giving advice is the least I can do. U need to offset the mass of the cylinder so more of the mass is in the front of the cylinder. This will stabilize the cylinder. U cannot put fins on the cylinder because the fins will catch wind and make it sway off course even more. U need to put a sensor that measures the sway of the cylinder, then when the velocity is 0 quickly automatically releases the cylinder. The cylinder should be as heavy as possible and round on both the front and back so the wind has no flat surface to effect it. The amount of off-course radius should be simulated so a safety region is determined, and no personell inside of this region are allowed to be inside that region. Finally, the test demonstration should be built of brick which is more sturdy than sand castles (unless they hardened the sand with some kind of mortar or something.)
@@LeadFarmer1597 Please, it is a well known fact that if you stand in the middle of the desert with a camera and a mildy-complicated physics problem to solve then you risk attracting a wild mythbuster or worse... the ferocious Heineman's Desert Walrus.
The failure of this project seems to be centered around the extreme lack of thought put into the planning phase and a follow-on fear of what MIGHT happen in the operational phase. The highest point drop was never even attempted. It appears that the producer had expectations of failure from the beginning and never intended to actually make a high altitude drop at all. Perhaps his true motivation was to make it look hopeless and silly. Finally: if you spent all this $$$ with the end result as unmitigated failure on every test (the pool hit was due to your lowering the drop altitude, not an improved drop plan) then you should put someone who actually knows how aerodynamics work in the real world in charge and run the test again. You should use a 3-point mount for the drop cylinder that stays closer to the body of the craft. This would reduce the gimbal effect of the airframe to the cylinder. You might also have as a secondary sight system a simple bomb sight. Oh, yeah. Put FINS on it. Even a tiny drag chute would have likely improved the cylinder's descent characteristics. Absolute wasted effort toward a potentially very interesting experiment. Finally: your 'clickbait' title "I tested the US Military's secret space weapon" is a flat out lie.
I'm glad the comment section is calling out this video. I thought there would have been more accuracy from this channel. Test planning aside, the entire "failure" of the concept of kinetic weaponry seems to be due to the channels constraints, like time limits to the target, or intercepting missiles. There was little to no credit given to the fact that these weapons would be non-nuclear, and could therefore be reasonably housed on an orbiting weapons platform without breaking any international treaties, would be launched with a computer program aiming, and using military grade guidance systems. The show literally just dropped a cube from a 150 feet after eyeballing it and declared that the concept of kinetic weaponry was a failure followed by trying to humiliate the individual who conceptualized it. I was very excited to watch this, and very disappointed in the result.
Exactly what I was thinking. This guy literally tries to do experiments with a pre determined results. He exactly knows what to do to get the results he wanted to show. No real science. A few years ago I worked out the numbers for the “rods from god” theory. The kinetic force of the tungsten rod hitting the target was unreal. The kJ was so high it would have obliterated everything more than an MOAB would have done. And the crater formed resembled a meteor strike. It was a real weapon. The issue in the program was getting those rods to space. It was extremely heavy and crazy expensive that the US military deemed conventional explosives were cheaper. An MOAB is cheaper to build and blow up than transporting the tungsten pole to outer space and hold it there in a satellite. Only the economics didn’t work out, but the science behind the system was crazy effective. Veritasium is kinda turning into a stupid schmuck. Or was he really one since beginning.
I can’t imagine how awkward this entire thing must have been. Watch people build sand castles, have Adam Savage literally appear for 10 seconds, and just attempt after attempt of poof, dust clouds 😂
@@Markmagoo Literally any scientist in a field related to the experiment. It would have taken ten seconds for some guy in a lab coat to sit in front of a computer and go "nah, wind exists".
Fun note: the only reason why the fins wasn't there was because those rods wouldn't have fins in the first place (instead, it got weight ball and thrusters). Other than that and some so-so engineering the test, good point. Cool in theory, but those rods from god are too ridiculous to be executed feasibly by sane things (let alone practically). So there you go.
Not just unprofessional, every single step was executed and/or planned sooooo badly if there was any planning involved at all beyond renting a heli. They rented a chopper but didn't even think about welding fins on their "darts"? They used extremely long rope in windy conditions and nobody said "maybe we should shorten the rope a bit or use another system"? They used GPS to hit targets less than 5 square meters big (civilian GPS is not that accurate) and were surprised when it wasn't accurate enough? Nobody thought of using a friggin laser pointer or something to aid the aiming? Those are just the things that immediately came to mind, seriously did nobody involved in this video think for just one damn second? I like veritasium but this is insultingly bad.
I refuse to believe no one thought about stabilization of a falling projectile before dropping one. It's like they were paid to convince us that it's not possible.
What is more, when the idea was conceived, they would have known every single fact covered in this video. Therefore, resurrecting the project years later must mean they had other ideas. For example, I would be interested in many rods and seeing what it does in an area. I also would not have ANYONE NEAR the drop site and then go for much higher distances. I think they went low for fear of not getting their objects back ever, or there were other limitations. But then what are you actually testing?
I think this was an impromptu add-on to the penny drop video. You can see they are in the same location with the same helicopter. He probably just wanted to get in two videos for the price of one helo rental.
It's kinda surprising they didn't think to put fins on the cylinders. I would expect to put not only fins but remote or automatically controlled fins to actually be able to aim. Like did They seriously just go to the desert with a chopper thinking they can hit something so small by releasing a dangling weight from that high?
Automatically controlled fins to guide a projectile to a target is essentially a guided missile and is illegal to make around the world. I'm in a student rocketry team and any form of active directional control is super problematic. But yes they absolutely needed some static fins to make it stable. It's aerodynamics 101 to know about static stability margins etc.
It wouldn't really need to be necessarily "guided" to the target. If they just used passive or actively controlled fins purely for stabilization on it's way down, it would have taken out a lot of the inaccuracy without being in the illegal area of guided missiles, which is a bit of a grey area anyway.
fins paired with a better release method like a mount to eliminate the rod swinging from a rope would likely have been beneficial. maybe move the chopper to account for wind (similar to what snipers do)
It would have been interesting had you still just dropped the rod from 3km into the sand to see what kind of impact it made, even if you missed the target.
The original business model of TH-cam stank, but at least the ads were reasonable. New flood of invasive, repetitive, and offensive ads are EVIL. Google is now fully dedicated to doing any evil that seems profitable. And censoring complaints, too.
@@SethEssington which just begs another question, why do they have to demonetize channels? They've only ever cited advertisers as the reason. You pay $10 to watch content that only TH-cam gets paid for.
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
As someone from the military. I assure you, this is not their worst idea.
Probably in the top half of ideas because at least with this, there isn't any chemicals or radioactive materials that can become uncontained when things inevitably go wrong.
Wasnt their idea to begin with
worst one was allowing females to have combat roles in the military.
Their worst idea was reducing the Jalapeno cheese spread to 1 ounce from 1.5
Worst in terms of costing
Wish there was a point in the experiment that the goal switch from accuracy to "lets see how big crater get from dropping really high" and proceed to have everyone really far away until it lands.
They got scared. lol
@@BestCosmologist You can tell that by the final shot (the 500 m one) they were terrified lol. I would too, honestly.
Fan of mythbusters, I take? ;)
I suppose they could have dropped from higher while staying safe, by not dropping it anywhere close to people, and just using the handcam footage from the helicopter
Thought the same, fly the helicopter really far and drop it, would love to see it
I like to imagine that Adam Savage just materializes whenever something fun like this is happening in the desert
lmao yeah
I imagine like they run into Adam randomly, like he's taking a stroll in the desert and find these Veritasium guys testing stuff, sharing his wisdom along the way.
Adam's just busy on something in his workshop, when suddenly something twinges in the back of his mind. With a jerk, his head shoots up and he faintly cocks it, as if to listen for something in the distance. His eyes narrow and his brow furrows, and with a slightly defeated -- for the distraction -- but otherwise classically enthusiastic "It's time. I am needed!" he fades from the workshop and surprises Derek with a clap on the back and a "Hey there! So I heard you were doing some science experiments out here..?"
Funny. Had me laughing. Haha. And i actually needed to laugh with the night I'm having so thanks.
I mean I'm fairly sure anyone attempting an experiment like this is required to get permission and supervision from and by Adam by law in the United States lol 🤣 I Hope You Are All Doing Well And Having A Great Day/Night!!
I don't really understand why they bothered doing such a poorly done test. They used no fins. No control device. etc. What they tested has basically nothing to do with using an actual developed weapon. It'd be like throwing a spear the first time in your life and then declaring that missiles don't work
I can guarantee they basically insulted anyone with a basic knowledge of aerodynamics lol
@@SG-Gaming20 I kinda like the simplified explanation of why birds can fly, that air is also a fluid. But since people can't see it, they forget about that fact. That's what I think.
@@erikamikulcova3796 now u remind me air is actually fluid, thx
Exactly. I commented they should get the guy that makes glitter bombs to help them add a guidance system via some fins.
He gave logical reasons as to why the rod of gods wouldn't work at the end. He didn't just say it wouldn't work because of the conclusion of the video. Maybe you should pay attention more.
I'm a little shocked that no smaller-scale testing was done prior to the full-scale "helicopters and sand castle professionals" part was brought out. A drone with a piece of rebar would have taught you a lot about the need for targeting apparatus, the lack of fins, etc.
I dont know this still probably got all of our views which is the real success
arrows work too.
This new format, focusing on hype and false drama like on Discovery Channel is really hurting Derek's videos, IMO. If the next video follows suit, I'll be unsubbing, and that's sad because I've followed him since he had less than 10k subscribers. I think it's probably due to the sheer size of the production team. IMO he needs to return to his roots. But that's just me. Also get off my lawn. Rawr.
Yup, no small scale test first.
@Adrian Molière Because then it would miss the point of this video (no pun intended). The video was trying to prove or disprove that the Rods from god was a feasible idea. And they disproved that. I mean, what's the point of having a missile when you would miss the target by a kilometre away?
Althougth I still think it was a bad idea he didn't do a small scale test first
My favourite part is where Adam Savage appears out of nowhere, as if desert explosion tests just summon him 😂
“As if”? :)
@@ericpmoss As if
@@ericpmoss As if
Derek probably did a couple of expensive videos with helicopters at once. In previous videos, Adam Savage was there as a guest. Here, I guess, he didn't have that much to add to the experiment so he just watched.
You mean they don't?
Genuinely shocked at the scant amount of forethought that went into something with a budget this large.
Yeah... Like I would have thought Derek would have welded some fins on or somthing to get it to fly true.
Physics vs engineering
If they would've dropped it out of a tube that would have in part cancel out the swaying. A lot more accurate.
@@piele1982 or just not let it swing from a copter. Anyone who's played a video game knows what would have happened.
They are playing about for Likes.
Sort of "Myth busters very lite for TH-cam"..
Huh, forgot to add fins, refused to shorten the rope connecting the payload, refusing to have people walk away to a safe distance to test extreme height, refusing to try and use lasers to track positioning... Interesting...
Yeah, first thing would be to attach the payload securely to the stabilized platform - the chopper -- and the second thing would be to impart spin. Since they're attempting to "drop straight down", I'd take spin over control surface like fins - but you're right, a targeting laser could have been a big, and not very expensive help.
Yeah it was very weird, i'm not even 10% as smart as veritasium but i thought about this stuff, pretty dissappinted
Nobody thought to add fins? They spend thousands of dollars but nobody brought a welder? Or some plywood and some super glue?
I lost a lot of respect for Veritasium because of this vid.
Yup, I mean attach fins or like a square kite to the tow strap would of straightened it out like an arrow, but what do I know, I didn't finish high school, but I have made arrows and spears from scratch that flew very straight, also built a rc airplanes, and many dozens of model rockets when I was a kid.
@@horrorislanderat a certain length to width ratio, the required spin will be too much; so fins are more practical for pole-like rods.
There are two main problems I see with Derek's setup: 1) Dropping the payload from what is effectively a pendulum is going to make it nearly impossible to aim, and 2) as Adam pointed out, you need some fins on the rods if you want them to land perpendicular to the ground.
Can't it be dropped at the height of the swing when it has 0 velocity? Correct me if I'm wrong but don't pendulums work based off turning gravitational potential energy (GPE) to kinetic energy (KE) and at the top of the swing it has no KE and thus no velocity?
I'm trying to find a part of this was WASN'T a problem.
Didn't Mark Rober just do a video of trying to make an egg survive a fall from space. Think they could've collaborated
@@kilansgames556 Mark Rober and Adam Savage casually testing failed doomsday devices for TH-cam.
I think the (incredibly flawed) reasoning was that since the rods from god weren't meant to have them, these ones didn't need it either. Completely forgetting that launching something from space has way more variables that could allow for such a thing:
-little to no air resistance from orbit (no duh)
-no swinging motion from a satellite moving at orbital speeds
-once in the atmosphere, the speed would be so high that the air resistance would be more than enough to cause the rod to fall vertically (at so relatively low speeds from the helicopter, the density of the metal is more than enough to overcome the wind resistance)
I find it funny that Adam Savage is in this video, and it's not even mentioned. I'm just used to him being the one talking to a camera out in the desert, busting a myth.
Smart to reach out to him! He’s probably the global expert on these things!
@MrBeest is ruining the planet[recent vid explains] 100%
@@jordancarter8310 and yet he didnt reach out to him and missed out on the vital "you should put fins on it" that noone else involved seemed to think of
The man needs no introduction, hes that iconic lol.
"We should have had this conversation yesterday..."
I'm shocked at how little thought went into properly testing this idea, especially when compared to the amount of money and number of people involved.
Honestly I wish they had just dropped one from the max height they wanted to do, just to demonstrate how big of a crater it would make. But also, even with the height they were dropping from, everyone needed to be a LOT FURTHER back. They took some really dumb risks.
@@hellomark1 The dumbest thing to me was that they saw how they weights were swinging around like crazy below the helicopter and NOBODY thought to shorten the tether, if that tether was 3ft long it would've been much more accurate. What they really should have done though is make a mount/drop system strapped tight to the bottom of the helicopter that would lock the weights in place before release. That, coupled with fins, would have made an enormous difference.
@@watermelonsavage2914 not as much of a difference as it would have made with the way the helicopter itself was fidgeting, but it'd still have been better.
@@watermelonsavage2914 Yeah that bothered me too. They could have made a solid mount, or stabilized the strap with a few more anchor points... or ANYTHING really. Like you said, I'm surprised at how little actual engineering went into this.
Agreed. Using a laser or camera for vertical alignment would have been much more reliable than GPS. As someone else said, a shorter tether would reduce swing inaccuracy. Fins would increase flight stability on the rods. It's poorly enough done that if i were a conspiracy theorist, I might think they were being intentionally misleading.
Easily the greatest distance between original concept and small-scale simulacrum ever demonstrated. I have tremendous admiration for Derrick’s ability to understand and explain some pretty intense scientific concepts, especially those involving complex mathematical constructs. But I have noticed over a series of videos that he sometimes struggles to appreciate the complexity and practical requirements involved in a hands-on physical undertaking to demonstrate a concept. From any scientific perspective, this was a disaster.
This seemed like a "lot of money, not a lot of thought" video. No one thought about how the rods were going to hit their targets until the day of?? Fins are a bare minimum, you could have even done some gps-based bang bang course corrections with an arduino or something. Of course then you are basically designing a precision guided bomb like Mark Rober noted in his egg drop video.
This felt like a producer made video, with mr. Veritasium just hosting. Sub par quality for this channel
Very underwhelming.
A precision guidance system with accelerometers dropping longer thinner rods with fin stabilization from heavy lift drones on much, much bigger sandcastle city from much higher. That would have been cool to see.
Yeah, the producer not doing a good enough job
Big blimp tethered to the target, have the tether act as a zip line to target. Wait for a less windy day.
I appreciate the honesty and I understand why you had to post it.
But brother if you had spent an hour with a ballistic expert enquiring about a good way to showcase this it would have worked a million times better.
And like everyone is suggesting, dropping the biggest weight from the heighest height you can just to see the crater size would be a much more enjoyable video than this.
I won't think less of your content from one failure and i'm sure it's a very complicated process but this one felt really like a lack of forethought
What irks me about the whole thing is it demonstrates an extremely shallow understanding of the topic at hand while oozing “self-satisfactory professionalism”, my next thought then is the question “On how many other topics that are less obvious did they do similar mistakes?”
It's to try to get more youth interested in the USA military. I hope it's not working!
Ir tie a crash Cam tied to a long rope to the weight with a small stabilizer parachute so you can record it no matter where it goes
@@MichaelButlerC so it's just propaganda then? If so then wow boy is the FCC going to have a field day
@@MichaelButlerCyou say that till you need them
I find it hard to believe the engineering problems couldn't be worked out. At one time it was thought you couldn't hit a missile with another missile.
At one point we also thought that re-usable rockets are far-fetched.
KEW on that scale essentially fall under the nuclear disarmament treaties. They’re not mentioned explicitly, but any nation developing them would find itself negotiating soon.
The engineering problems have been worked out. We have tables based on windage for dropping troops out planes been doing it since nam.
We know exactly how far a t10 or t11 chute will fly given altitude and windage. Its not that hard to calculate the same for a rod. just add stabilizing fins. and walla
@@chiefgully9353 pretty much but there have been artillery charts for much longer than nam.
Well the video explains pretty clearly that the issue isn't launching a projectile and hitting a target. The issue is maintaining accuracy as weight, distance, and velocity increase exponentially. Launching a howitzer round 2 miles past the horizon is nowhere comparable to dropping a 10-tonne rod from 22,000 miles altitude, accounting for the change from a vacuum to entering the atmosphere and still trying to maintain enough accuracy to cripple installations. Artillery actually requires less accuracy than kinetic weapons, and it's cheaper and more accurate.
This could have been a 5 minute explanation. Nothing actually representative happened.
The fact that they didn't seem to anticipate that a weight dangling from a helicopter on a tether would be swinging all over the place is ... odd to say the least.
Things like these in a video like this seems like it’s scripted
Sometimes a genius is so into the genius stuff, that he forgets about the basic stuff. Whenever I try to do something smart, a rookie mistake just screws it up.
@@AgeDrain What exactly should be scripted about this?
Also the weight was not pointed on one end. How much more could have cost them to weld some steel fins to it?
ikr, like they can make the rope shorter or something to increase precision.
Your aiming problem was because your rods were pendulums, so they had significant lateral velocities that threw them off target. you should have had them in hardpoint mounts under the chopper so they'd be dropped with zero lateral velocity.
Don't forget about the drag that was caused by the massive strap that was trailing behind it.
@@Bimmer_MD negligible at that velocity and mass, esp given that straps 'drag" didn't prevent the posts from falling sideways.
Needs fins as well to keep the center of drag begin the center of mass, so it stays straight rather than drifting off to the side. Realistically it needs GPS guiding with fins as well because there will always be wind hitting the rods broadside. imo this video was really poorly done, many of these issues could have been mitigated with just an hour or reviewing potential issues and small scale tests, and a week of implementing the fixes full scale.
@@InfernoViperz123 at the speeds they are testing at, the fins would need to be large, and the larger they are, the more wind will blow them off course as well. Now they are realizing why bomb zones in WW2 were often miles wide from a single wave of bombers. yes, GPS or laser buiding would be necessary. A real THOR warhead would have GPS and inertial guidance, as well as active radio guidance from a spotter either on the ground or in space, particularly for hitting moving targets like aircraft carriers.
The problem with a hard mount, is that the object would _still_ be affected by the turbulence caused by the heli rotor the moment it was released. That turbulence extends downwards for a fair distance beneath the chopper before it even starts to ease away. And then once it does you have the general motion of the atmosphere to deal with - which in a hot desert area is probably a fair amount at that height. Only fins can counter this issue - especially adjustable fins whos angle can be adjusted to counter any spin/lateral movement.
I am so confused by how thoughtless this "experiment" was but how well researched the rest of the content was, even with the lamp shading by adam savage and later admitting to "screwing up", it felt more like a drunken idea hastily executed without anyone stopping to think than a high budget science demonstration.
I'm flabbergasted by how dumb this entire test was.
@@fluffylittlebear Same. I mean this is the worst Veritasium video by far. A city built of sand? What?
Honestly thought this was some sort of spoof after the first few minutes
Yeah this looks like it cost a ton of money for basically nothing. Why not build a little 25% scale house or something and do all the drops on that. Wtf was the point of the pool?
@@Mutantcy1992The point of the pool was probably just what you saw: If there was a hit, it would make a splash. Remember, this is video, and you have to have an interesting image.
you hired a team of championship winning professional sand castle builders and you couldnt find a single physicist to figure out the aiming?
A retired engineer would have sufficed.
The sad artists where expensive
Im an engineering student and my first thought was to add fins to these rods, with a bunch of other stuff that would easily make them way more accurate. This whole thing feels very under prepared.
LOL yeah he says its a bad idea but i dont think he really understands what the concept is, Fins as well as a design to make it accelerate even faster on the way down seem pretty simple
USA BS, or Hollywood?
I‘m a Industrial Design and Informatics Student and this was also my first thought + maybe a arduino with a gyroscope that controlls the rod to point straight down… what would that‘ve cost? 50-100$ and a few hours of testing? Definitely nothing compared to chartering a Helicopter for a day
@@Simoxs7 and a small rocket engine to increase acceleration. There's no way the real thing wouldn't have had some sort of initial acceleration.
No comparison since one is the speed of a meteor the other is just a plop
I’m honestly a little bit dumbfounded that they went through the whole process without considering down wash, swaying, and the rod’s stability. They didn’t even have a backup plan? (Pivot to just creating the largest impact possible, since this is all about the explosive potential of a KE weapon, not accuracy)
They could have created a larger impact but they were so inaccurate they would not have been able to position a camera to film it without endangering the people operating the camera
Mate the fact they used SAND to showcase destruction of KE weapons might be the most moronic thing in this video. The substance that is LITERALLY known for its ability to do a good job stopping bullets because of it.
Yeah, it seems like an 8th grader did the math and planned this out. It’s hilarious that physicists didn’t think about physics 😂
To be fair he does admit it's his biggest failure, but yes you'd need a very thin, very long rope to not have to deal with wind from the helicopter blades, in turn the helicopter is buffeted by winds, it can't be steady either meaning that the projectile is always moving in a vaguely circular motion modified by the difference between where the helicopter was at this point in the last rotation and the current location.
Setting the rod spinning with impeller-like fins would steady the trajectory of the rod but wouldn't help with getting it pointed at the right target and not imparting some spurious steering input as it's dropped.
Probably the logical thing to do would be to put a "tungsten warhead" on a conventional missile and fire it on a "kinetic trajectory" (ie: straight down) from a great height (orbit, hopefully). Normal missiles have already solved all the problems rods would face, and could impart more energy as well as actively steering towards the target.
This whole documentary is an embarrassment.
15:11 "It ripped right through the pool. Unbelievable." That's actually the most believable thing ever.
I put this knife to my skin and now I'm bleeding. Purely amazing and mind blowing. So happy we have science channels like this to show us that plastic pools will in fact rip when dropping a 150 pound piece of metal from thousands of feet in the air.
@@musstakrakish Who'd a thunk it?
Indeed, talk about a face palming "Well DUH" type of moment...
They have to over-act everything.
My nieces and nephews nephews have broken like 6 of these kiddie pools just being dumb kids
*uses longest swinging rope possible. "why do we keep missing?"*
Honestly I'm surprised about how elementary this set up was
I wouldn't attempt it without an arduino based targeting system tested in KSP. Since it's not meant for combat, image processing can be simplified a lot by placing a few bright lights around the target.
What do you do?
I'd drop it on a wire guide. A few hundred meters of 3mm steel wire and a set of roller guides could get it reliably on target
@@wyattroncin941 There is absolutely no point. You are needlessly increasing resistance and weight carried on the heli while the same could be achieved over radio. Wifi might lack the range. Idk, whatever drones are using would do.
@@aleksanderczajka6072 a rope rail system would certainly be heavy and expensive, but it would be simple to get opperational, and wouldn't be destroying $200+ in hardware per drop, and it's practically guaranteed to work.
All this crew and no one stopped to think about how hard it would be to hit the target? I think the story would have been just as interesting (or maybe even more interesting considering how underwhelming the impacts ended up being) without any targets, just going for the maximum drop height and letting it fall wherever. That would have at least demonstrated the power of kinetic energy, assuming you designed a projectile with high enough terminal velocity.
Yeah I get why this video was released considering the cost but...
The high cost could've been reduced AND you could've better tested kinetic energy. Makes the video quite pointless. Also really not a fan of this editing/production.
My thoughts exactly, though it would be hard to catch on camera!
Exactly. If the point was to demonstrate the release of the maximum possible kinetic energy, there was no need to do the whole targeting thing. Just take the rod really high and drop it. Film the results. One other issue is the effect the lift strap had on the aerodynamics of the object. Maybe rethink this a bit?
Yeah, I think the best drop was when the rod just completely buried itself, I think that showed a lot of power on it's own
The other problem is knowing where it might hit. It's clear there's going to be some drift as the object falls so you need more safe zone space the higher you go. At 3 kilometers I would want a safe space of at least a kilometer. Finding that sort of space where the land is flat enough that you can see the object hit and catch it on film is going to be tough. Plus actually having a camera close enough to the spot it hits to catch the impact point close up is going to be nearly impossible with a helicopter.
What you need is something that can go up and drop the object over the target with no wind blowing the object around like some sort of UFO. Maybe on of those drone platforms designed to carry people might work. Only with the fans extended out another ten to twenty feet so that their downward force is far enough from the object that it isn't impacted by that turbulence. Which requires someone like Bezos to fund the development.
4 point rigging, fins, better weight distribution, and crosswinds are things I would have assumed would have been thought of for something this expensive. If it was just a backyard experiment type thing I get not doing all the bells and whistles and just trying to make a big hole. But I feel almost bad no one thought of this before dumping what appears to be a large amount of money into something of this caliber. You live and you learn.
At a minimum, they could have made the straps much shorter. Less swing that way.
@ I can't believe they didn't talk about the swinging and the potential for harminic motion due to the helicopter pilot's compensation. He kept saying the "wind was blowing it all over the place" - something tells me the wind didn't have nearly as big an impact on that 450lb cubic foot of metal as the helicopter did.
I was bothered by some of the other commentary as well. The cube punching straight through the bottom of the intex pool was "unbelievable"? Really??
For me this video was just a miss all around, pun intended.
I feel like this was one of Derek's absolute worst vids for all these reasons. It was just dumb, unscientific, hype.
@ You read my mind!!!! Shorten the straps, have a 4 or 6 point harness to hold whatever they were going to drop which would exponentially minimize the swinging!!! They spent a ton of money prior to thinking everything through. Oh well........ next time (maybe.....)
I don't like when they are all for example doubtful if the helicopter is actually at the right altitude. At the beginning of the vid. I mean, a pilot probably would know...
>Put satellite with rods into orbit.
>is over target
>let's go of rod
>rod stays in orbit
>orbital_mechanics_aren't_helicopters.png
Yeah this guy is just a dumb ass
A model isn’t meant to be the exact same. It should just fulfill a purpose.
This wasn’t done as good, but he didn’t have alternatives.
I think this video was good, because usually a lot of experiments fail but you still protocol it, to falsify it.
>Burn retrograde to deorbit
>Drop rod
>Re-orbit burn
>Rod hits target
>orbital_mechanics_sometimes_are_helicopters.png
Edit: what I’m trying to say is that the “rocket” helicopter that drops off the rod is just a model showing what would happen
If i understand it correctly they were rocket propelled, not just dropped
@@darthvader6533 aka missiles. lol.
I can feel Adam Savage's pain when he asks if it has fins and this guy says no. How could you not think to put fins on it??
This would not have made Mythbusters...
@@kkrauter1 Ghostbusters? I'm dying now! 🤣 Whoopsie!
@@grinandferret Yikes!!! My bad...MYTHBusters!!!
@@kkrauter1well, it probably wouldn't have made Ghostbusters, either.
Too true...I got my "busters" mixed up!
It's not the wind causing the swinging, it's that you created a long pendulum which exacerbated any vibrations and movement from the helicopter. You would want a 3 or 5 point strap system that the quick release drops from. Combine that with a set of fins and you'd be able to pretty consistently hit the target.
Yeah if it were the wind it wouldn't swing with an even periodicity, it would be biased to one side.
The wind could start off the pendulum action and keep it going longer. Theoretically it could also stop the action.
Yes!!! Thank you Raven! I almost stopped the video purely due to his statement of it being the wind. I typically enjoy his videos, this was terrible and for such an individual to have a fair level of intellect to miss so many key points was very frustrating to watch. Possibly his worst video yet.
Curious…have you studied physics and what degree did you obtain?
or just use a plane and some rudimentary ww2 era bombing targeting system. if you lob it, not drop it, it's much more accurate, as long as it's fin stabilised.
8:15 I like to imagine that Adam Savage just materializes whenever something fun like this is happening in the desert
Well, that's my headcanon now too
Are they so firearm averse they couldnt have spent a few grand to get a 20mm single shot gun and 4 or five rounds and made it a real experiment? Jeez.. Adam Savage probably suggested this...
Derek needs to speak with Darrel Barnette who worked for several years on projects like this for DOD.
The videos that are public from the railgun and gravity weapons for DOD were taken by or with Darrel.
@@JonMahn You can buy a 20mm for a lot less than a grand, also, pretty sure Derek lives in Cali so...... no. Lol.
@@JonMahn Using a gun doesn't demonstrate the basic principle of "just dropping a big weight from high up is powerful". It would kinda defeat the point of the video.
I think it's amazing how this guy and mythbusters both suffer from the same problem of giant ego blindness. "If we can't do it with some rediculous half assed plan, then its impossible". That was a great try if you're in middleschool.
Kinda surprised that nobody realized that this was never going to work. Id expect this from a Mr. Beast video but not Veritasium. Usually he simulates outcomes with equations before going into the field to test.
Big little boys playing sand castles?... Why not!
Yeah, actually it really surprised me too, derek usually plans things really well, since Adam was there maybe this was at the same time they tested the pennies and the dropping of really big thing was just and afterthought?
I expected he would mention the "Iraqi bunker busters" the US used against Iraqi bunkers in the Kuwait invasion. They did contain explosives, but still used the kinetic energy to penetrate really deep, at least 15 meters (45 feet). Probably not feasible to be recreated by a youtuber tho.
@@iFix. This is what happened. They just decided to milk this and release this video, which is going to make insane money; this video got 200,000 in 1 hour. So they got two videos out of this 'project' they did. Easily making over $500,000 from both videos when you consider the sponsorship as well
So many of you really don't understand the point of this video, and it's sad because his audience is usually fairly educated.
Adam: "Does it have fins?"
Derek: "Why didn't we have this conversation weeks ago?"
I just hear Jaime in my mind. "Should have done the engineering." Shortly followed by, "When in doubt, lube."
*tub of lard
Yes, there's always time for lube.
Quack, damn you.
I was thinking the same thing as soon as I saw it??? everything that's a tube and is sent to fly has wings, except for bullets but they usually don't go that far
@@colenewton5183 Bullets are spin stabilized.
There are so many errors in the design and execution of this experiment, that one would almost think it was intentional.
for fuckin real
Exactly what I was thinking. Could’ve made the impact end a pointed end. Could’ve added wings. Added vents, more straps to stop the swinging. Just downright horrible execution
Author oversteps literary license with misleading statements many times.
Considering that shortly before this video was published, Mark Rober put up a video where he was well on his way to designing a system to do exactly this kind of guidance dropping an egg FROM SPACE (way higher than shown here), and he was already dropping from 10k feet (3048 meters) with an accuracy in a reasonable ballpark of what was achieved here, in scale, I'd say that with the technical resources of the US military contracting industry, this definitely COULD be done. It would be fairly costly, but uh... if Mark Rober with a few engineer friends and something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino and a not absurd amount of code can get that far, that relatively fast, I'm sure it wouldn't take too long or too much money to develop a working system. Deploying the rapid response coverage is the issue, NOT making the projectile control be precise enough. Communicating a target would be trivial, and once loaded, no actual guidance from the ground would be needed - as demonstrated by how well Rober did so quickly. They only stopped from developing their system because of the snares of legality and ethics, when they realized they were developing a guided missile.
Yes, this concept is functionally possible and on a smaller scale with less time response definitely feasible.
his experiment was flawed.. he needs to get a smaller object up closer to mach 1 to do any real kinetic damage... if you think about it the shock wave would be enormous..and the impact it rather small whoops right.. they cant show that on youtube..
2:35 got all the bloons td players hyped
So, the issue I have with this video is that while it is an amusing concept, it really poorly conveys the effects of the kinetic energies involved which are way outside the domain these kinds of mundane drops can achieve.
As noted early in the video, true hyperkinetic impacts result in violently explosive energies and liquefaction of the impact area, so the physical dynamics are completely different than low energy kinetic impacts from things like bullets or simple dropped weights.
The fact he literally has video which explains why scaling things is so difficult in science and how it needs additional adjustments but then makes this trash ....tragic.
Agreed this is baffling
That's the part I don't get - something coming in from orbit is way different than dropping a weight from a few hundred meters.
@@natalyawoop4263 terminal velocity is a thing but that doesn't scale well with this size weight
its because he isnt as smart as he would have you belive he is.
Let's be honest here I think we all want you to do another redo video of the experiment targeting the problems you faced here.
The original business model of TH-cam stank, but at least the ads were reasonable.
New flood of invasive, repetitive, and offensive ads are EVIL.
Google is now fully dedicated to doing any evil that seems profitable.
And censoring complaints, too.
@@ShannonJacobs0 loser
@@ShannonJacobs0 what
Personally, I'd like to see Laser guided rods
@@ShannonJacobs0 I agree with you, but that literally has nothing to do with the OP
If you’re wondering why Adam is there, if you look at the details it’s the exact same site, helicopter, and crew from the penny drop video released 2 months ago. I suspect it was a pooled resource shooting multiple experiments at one time to minimize cost.
Although it’s much cooler to think that Adam myth buster sense starts tingling and he just shows up whenever cool experiments are going down.
Sniff sniff... I smell science!!!
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
Say, "Is it gonna blow up?" and Adam shows up behind you. He's the Savage Candyman.
@@FlyinSparky Watch out it doesn't always work as planned, last time I did some crazy science experiments only Bill Nye showed up.
You’re trying to tell me that orbital kinetic weapons are a worse idea than the CIA plot to turn a cat into a living surveillance device
I have to imagine this experiment was rushed or something, because I would've expected Derek to take a lot of these issues into consideration. There are a lot of good suggestions in the comments that would've given them a better chance, but I think the bigger issue is that they felt the need to do this at all.
Veritasium videos are usually much more information-based; telling stories of scientists or interviewing experts in an interesting field. There's no need to do Mr.Beast-esque stunts like this, especially when there's such a high chance of failure
It's like he outsourced all of it to his interns and just showed up for filming.
Maybe he really isn't very smart, I mean he does make YT videos for a living?
100% gov contracted work. Where else do you see projects of this verbosity without any substance
@@QuasiDude He has a PhD in Physics Education Research. His thesis was "Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education", ie. creating educational TH-cam videos. Still a PhD, but not in Physics- in education. And you know what they say about those that can't do...
@@QuasiDude More of a Ph.D in education about physics through media as it is defined.
15:08 "It ripped right through the pool. Unbelievable!"
A 200kg cube of metal against a flimsy plastic membrane.
Who would have thought?
Hydrogen bomb vs Coughing baby
@@ashutoshkumar3864 Hydrophobic acid vs cancer patient
Christ…this sums the video up wholly.
im convinced veritasium is specially educated
It could have been a magic pool? Mb with magic water?
"We gonna drop rods from several kilometers up"
Ok well that sounds hard but Veritasium probably knows what hes doing.
**Pulls up mobile to get target GPS and gets into a helicopter with the payload just dangling freely a few meters under**
Im surprised they didnt hit themself...
Yea or rig up steerable fins with a live FPV camera so you can guide it.
I don't know how this guy has so many subs if this is how he operates...
Error margins on GPS being bigger than the target.
@@hunterahudsoninstall the GPS right into the body, and just launch it like an actual rocket. That’s how you’ll test it.
@Karl with a K just as competent as experts in any and every single field out there. no more, no less. regardless of how many we educate, truly intelligent people remain in short supply.
Falling piece of metal exists.
Veritasium: "all begins in 1426"
Pretty much all they proved is that they put minimal thought into this and that it's hard to drop things precisely from a helicopter.
Gee who would have thought? Apparently them.
I know! I'm surprised how much money was spent with so little care as to why.
Agreed, I thought the purpose was to find out the destructive force of the rods and scale it up, not find the most inefficient way to destroy a sand castle.
My opinion they should try to make it work and less on accuracy bc the accuracy can always come after you figure out how to drop the rod straight
At least do a test drop before making a video😅
This is about as good a test for rods from god as me sitting on my roof dropping marbles onto army men in my front yard.
so accurate
Meh: rods from god were a piss poor idea from the get go: the fact that you can deliver a bunch of energy without it being nuclear was about the only thing they had going for them, the fastest weapon ever devised was constrained by the slowest kill chain conceivable!
Pencils would be better since it’s more rod-like
I would watch that.
@@wilfdarr Don't under estimate the Rod from God concept. The original idea was rods the size of telephone poles made of 100% tungsten 20 ft long by 1ft diameter. These would hit a city with the impact force of a ground penetrating nuclear weapon and destroy any underground facility hundreds of feet underground. When dropped from orbit it would reach up to 10x the speed of sound without violation of the 1967 outer space weapons treaty which prohibits nuclear, biological and chemical weapons attacks from space signed by 107 countries. These rods would destroy an entire city just like a nuke and any bunker, base or silo under it for hundreds of feet with none of the nuclear fallout. While the targeting system and cost for something like this was near impossible at the height of the cold war its much more feasible now. Especially with advanced AI and the cost of moving things into space diminished It is more possible than ever before ! Unfortunately some weights would have to be dropped from space to gather data for the AI and I would not want to be the country those tests are landing on lol.
Years of experience doing stuff like this, constant contact with world renown scientists, complex logistics involving several teams of people, Adam Savage who has done this for most of his life and somehow the test turned out like this.
Welcome to soulles entertainment. This video was made for sharing it in 30 second clips on facebook and generating ad money.
Sadly almost all large content creators get ground down and bought by big business.
Adam savage was just visiting,he wasn't really involved
He was actually a desert mirage.
@@fiiredark He always was...
Yeah this is disgraceful. How do you make a science show, and have this loose a grasp on how to apply it practically
The fact that star link exists proves that we could put a lot of satellites in space that could all just launch a couple rods each, and make a spread good enough to level a city.
Edit: starlink is also good enough to transmit data through that plasma, so aim wouldn’t be a problem (not that aim is a problem with a space shotgun)
Given the relative lack of anything beyond visual targeting, this video is functionally a demonstration of why, in WW2, they estimated there was only a 1% chance of a bomb falling within 100 feet of the intended target (thus necessitating hundreds of bombs/bombers in order to have a high likelihood of actually blowing up what you wanted blown up)
Actually, this was their measured result, not just estimated. This was very disappointing, as they'd had high hopes for their bomb sight technology.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤙🏽🍻🇦🇺
This. I absolutely expected the video to have something to say about WW2 bombing raids.
Also relying on a phone GPS system for targeting, which has an accuracy of about 10 meters
Exactly. No wonder we needed so many bombs and bombers to level Germany....
I can't believe anyone would think that they were going to get any accuracy at all with that setup. I'm bloody positive they all knew about pendulums *before* they went out there.
I’ve watched enough mythbusters to know that you always attach radio controlled aerodynamic surfaces to hunks of metal whenever your dropping them from a helicopter.
@@the_regulator1145 I'd've thought at least a rigid "launch tube" or guide rail fixed to the side of the helicopter. Something other than a bloody-great pendulum
Shorten the strap up you don't need 50 feet of strap. Gees
@@williamkowalchik572 That'd just make it oscillate faster 😁
@@wolf1066 even just having a shorter pundulum arm.. Take out the 15ft of strap and put it right against the copter. Problem solved.
*gets helicopter and world-class sandcastle builders before testing how cylinders fall*
Derek noooo
Adam Savage mentioned that to derek when they were doing the bullet/ penny drop episode.
@@quertbarbie62 I'm pretty sure that was this exact conversation, from the same shoot. They tried to make two videos at the same time, only got one good one, and then posted the bad one too, just for kicks.
@@MobiusPeverell surely you aren't calling the penny one good.
@@Cssfiend False.
NOW they posted both so your presumltion has now been invalidated.
not surprising since this show has turned into click bait and tv type videos.
“Is that 500 meters, it seems too high”
“Wanna radio him, to ask if that’s 1500 feet?”
Says all this when the helicopter is literally equipped with altitude meters
I don't know if you can afford it, But this video needs a revisit. Ideally with more effort put into the rods than the sand buildings.
If you ‘dropped’ a rod from geo synchronous, it would just orbit in geo synchronous orbit….You would have to launch it from orbit.
It would be relatively easy to make them gps guided. Some basic flight controller or even an FPV pilot.
if you need you appetite whet now, check out Mark Rober's egg drop from space
Honestly the only way to test this is in a silo using an overhead crane/winch and a quick release. The fact that the projectile was swinging side to side ruined the accuracy as much as anything else they failed to do in the projectiles construction.
However that means they can't drop it from as high as they can from the helicopter.
Yes, the effort was wasted on a perfect sand city and not put in considering how to hit a target by dropping a not-aerodynamic rod swinging (!) under a helicopter.
"it ripped right through the pool. Unbelievable!" What's so unbelievable that a chunk of steel being drop from the sky goes right through a shallow plastic pool?
🤣🤣🤣😂
I think their concern was about the accuracy
Yeah, that comment got me too. Clutching at straws for this car crash of a video.
my thought exactly lol
why are these people acting smart when they cant even understand what people are tryna say
Impressive how little research went into this.
It was all planned just for the punchline at the end.
"I would say it is my biggest failure of all time, which as it turns out, is also something you could say about the actual weapon Rods from God."
The whole setup is so crappy it's obvious he never intended for it to succeed.
Did you see all the producers that were involved? lol, so embarrassing.
@UCiUl8dZIzCkGUyB6nrTpOTg Ye, or instead of having the weight tied outside the coptor, have the guy chuck it. So, you don't waste so much fuel to reload.
@@L1ft0ff They're all 20 somethings from prestigious universities. You can't expect them to do anything except hate everyone beneath them.
@@BestCosmologist calm down, edgelord
Dropping a pebble in the water creates the same effect. An asteroid travelling so fast at hyper speed punches through the Moon with a circular result.
Entirely shocked that you didn't expect a cylinder to turn on it's side given the air resistance the end of the cylinder would be experiencing compared to the rest of the cylinder.
seriously, you can figure this out just by throwing a pencil up in the air.. it's very hard to get a pencil shaped object to land vertically in the dirt..
@@Jerald_Fitzjerald but if you throw one really fast upwards with a half spin you can stick them in the ceiling 10/10 times - further research needed.
@@Jerald_Fitzjerald That’s why they should have added fins
Even watching old Airforce or Nasa files on dummy drops, they show the payload with fins.
*rod swinging wildly back and forth on the helicopter*
everyone: "wow I can't believe that missed the target."
OMG it can land sideways if you have no fins? How could we possibly know that before renting a helicopter?
The drop at 17:35 was ridiculous. If it was rigidly mounted to the base of the chopper and had fins it would've hit the middle of the city.
Shorten the strap and involve a professional surveyor.
If they did a quick reading of wind speed and direction, or maybe did a better probably cylindrical harness this would’ve been a much better experiment. Maybe it was a rush video
😂😂😂😂😅😅😅😅
I was really surprised it wasn't just a few of us noticing the complete lack of aerodynamic consideration going into such an expensive project. Anyone who has tried throwing a stick as a spear can tell you it will tumble around. Hundreds of other people are already saying it, but I'll say it too: fins. Some rear drag surfaces (some people have even suggested spin-stabilizing fins which was a positive surprise) really would have been so simple to do. Tons of people working on this project, but I guess anyone realizing it needed fins wasn't comfortable enough to speak up or there was some kind of deliberate reason for excluding them.
Almost as if they did it wrong intentionally...
What say if we show people on an open internet like TH-cam how to make weapons of ass destruction? Okay, so, maybe instead we make a video detailing how not to do it and say that it can't be done as if it hasn't been done already and isn't being done right now?
How will the average person launch massive rods of tungsten into space and then back at earth?
@@kaneanwalsh6943 Weapons of ass destruction lol. I know what you meant but that's just too funny.
I haven't watched the vid yet, but I'm assuming this test never reaches a hypersonic regime. Are fins even effective at those speeds?
the tip should have been the heaviest part - clearly they didn't think ANYTHING through one single second
You call it rods from god, I call it Odin. Call of Duty Ghost was the best.
Finally, I have been using ctrl f to find someone who also made the connection. I also loved Ghosts! (I did not have xbox live for multiplayer)
I am shocked to think why he puts so little thought to it.
There were lots of things they could have done.
1. Shorten the straps
2. Steps could have been of metal.
3. Calculated the wind and have done something to counter it ( like change the drop position of helli.
4. Have designed the fins on rod.
Wind is partially the helicopter
@@27sspider27 Should have used a blimp.
@@27sspider27 Any trailing straps makes it "fly", not a true drop. The best thing would be to deploy it without a strap or wings of any kind. Projectile must be bottom heavy, so it stays in a downward orientation.
Calculating the wind is a lot harder than what you'd expect. Mark rober took a shot at this with his egg drop from space, its incredibly difficult to actually have any form of guidance. And also if it had guidance, it would be legally classified as a missile which makes it illegal
Calculating the wind wouldn't have made a difference. You see it swinging, but as a result it is also rotating. When the dropped it is continued to rotate. It wasn't falling long enough for a fin to have a positive effect. What they needed was to contain it in a pipe that was fixed to the aircraft to prevent swinging. It would have been easy to rig if they'd just given it a few moments of thought.
I think just one hour of consulting with a professional would make the results wayyyy different!
I mean shoot Adam Savage magically appeared and within a few minutes of the helicopter lifting up thought to ask if it had fins on it lmao.
@@hereandnow3156 Right? He had THE professional right there the whole time!
i mean he had adam savage there.. he could have spent 10 minutes with him and solved a lot of pain..
@@bconnler yeah, and Adam almost looked in pain when he asked if it had fins on it.
Just releasing the weights when it reached to the apex of the swing would have made all the drops a lot more accurate. Just like when you jump off a swing on a swingset at the apex you go straight down rather then jumping off in the middle of the swing.
this is "testing" rods of gods, like shooting a spitball at a wall is testing a bazooka
TRUE
not a wall but a pile of sand could give a good idea about a bazooka impact on broken particles probably
The difference being that a bazooka exists. How seriously do you want a TH-camr to take a subject this silly?
The point is that this isn’t a efficient way to distribute energy as the force is to focused to effect a large area . I’m sure it would do great work in the case of a giant kaiju or robot though
@@ashscott6068 by saying "this has nothing to do with rods of god, we just wanted to drop stuff from a helicoptor, they explain the rods work by hitting hard enough to create actual explosions, whis would be like testing grenades by throwing rocks at a wall, you are skipping the whole bit that makes it effective, the explosion
i think the solution here is to add properties to the weights that would stabilize their course, i.e. weighting one end to increase the likelihood of dropping perpendicularly to the ground, side fins to help straighten the path, etc.
Honestly if he had just anticipated the fact that it would be unlikely to hit a target from 500 meters (it only takes a small amount of research to know this btw) he could've dropped the object into the sand from a significantly higher height, and at the crater site he'd be like "According to our calculations, this delivered the equivalent of X amount of TNT into this crater. We're now going to test what X amount of TNT would look like if it hit our sand castle city." Then use X TNT explosive planted in the sand city to see what the damage would look like.
Yeah but then you don't get to put a whole crew of people in harms way like they did here.
I like it.
Pretty good idea
u dont need to go higher. Air also has resistance and is stopping acceleration at a point. the whole experiment is dumb
lol that youtube comments are smarter written in 3 minutes are smarter than the 100k production value video
I think this video is a perfect demonstration of a few things:
1. How a lack of preparation, simulation, and small scale testing can completely ruin an idea, even if it's just for a video.
2. Dropping an unguided object from space on a specific target is INCREDIBLY difficult to do to the point of being almost impossible.
3. Magnification of error over time. If the object is swinging at just 1m/s before it is dropped, and it falls for 10 seconds, it will be almost 10 meters off target when it lands.
I was checking whether anyone else noticed item 3. Well done.
Yeah kind of insane how no one thought of any of these things....
As sad as it might have been to start again from scratch, I don't think this video should have been released until it became something worth watching, so as not to dilute the generally high quality of Veritasium's videos. It ended up as non-event, non-video but it would have been better to try again, with fins and without the need for a target.
Agreed it wasn't 'blowing things up' spectacular, but it does remind me of a lot of failed trial-and-error science experiments in my past, and how one has to take stock, change something, and try again. Sometimes the 'obvious' changes (e.g. fins) only dawn on you part-way through the first trials.
Brutally put and brutally true
@@paulsyms2142 But they aren't trailblazing here, a very similar experiment has been done by the Mythbusters, simply talking to Adam Savage could've fixed so many problems. It's bewildering, this isn't a Veritasium video.
I’d assume it probably has to do with money honestly..
Like, as said many times it is the most expensive video, and the crew seemed to be very big here and all gotta be paid. Helicopters are expensive as hell, and those sand castle builders didn’t sound cheap either. I believe they just believed too much in themselves and did the failure, and probably thought of trying again, but funds running low, so being to forced to release as it is to gain back and get back on track, or something like that.. Kinda sad, but I hope it’s a lesson learned so they stick to doing the quality work so they don’t have such failures anymore!
It honestly feels like him just trying to recoup some of the lost money. Such a bad video.
*wasnt tungsten*
*didnt even attempt to weld fins to at least try to add some stability*
*built a sand castle*
bruh i feel robbed
As someone who’s dropped a lot of cylinders from fairly high heights, yes, they DO tend to fall on their side, however, that strap would provide enough drag to right that. The problem was they dropped while it was still swinging, not that it wanted to fall wrong.
Also: why did they dropped the strap too? They could have released just the rod.
There are a multitude of ways to stabilize that swinging and nobody thought of any in advance of making this. It's kind of hilarious.
@@IIARROWS The quick release was attached to the chopper. Also when you take off you need a little slack between the helicopter lifting off and the load, so it is good to add a the strap or string or whatever to give the heli some room to take off.
@@sluggo562 You can tell these engineers aren't very good weapons designers haha
It would have been better if they carried the weight in the cabin, and then when they got to the position they could lower it out and then drop it. That would eliminate most of the pendulum effect from the helicopter adjusting its position, plus the wind, though that would be minimal since the wind isn't going to easily blow a 100 kg weight around easily.
I'm surprised he's gotten this far without learning he'd need fins on the rod. Should've talked to savage apparently
i am SHOCKED they didnt think of that. I mean this in the most respectful way possible. I think hes a smart dude. how was anyone surprised that "its really swinging"?? even the trick shot youtube channels (like HowRidiculous, DudePerfect, etc) hit small targets from very high up. Im really amazed that stuff wasnt thought about
Really, the thing im amazed by is that they underestimated this. Dropping stuff from high up is something people have done for a long time lol. we know its hard. the fact they were like "we're above it" and didnt even mention that wind could push it to the side as like whugt. All this said, smart people make mistakes all the time. so im not hating. im just surprised
@@pvic6959 Yup, pretty poorly researched.
Sometimes incredibly smart people don’t always succeed at applying relevant knowledge. Saw it all the time in school. Classmates that could solve differential equations would struggle to apply concepts from physics 1.
They could just use a rope or something with one end on the ground and the other on the helicopter, and use that to guide the rod to the target.
@@shenjingbing2293 500m of rope seems like a lot of rope though
All of the issues are so easily fixed... I don't understand how a physicist would not see them from a mile away and resolve them, instead of wasting a bunch of money and time in the desert.
I hope you make another go at it with better preparations.
Well, when most of a physicist's calculations are done in a vacuum and a frictionless space, real life things like air and momentum get in the way lol
@@Mr.LaughingDuck No. A physicist can easily calculate those. It's literally the job of a physicist to be able to calculate them properly. I would know, I'm a physics engineer.
@@OsedayCan i think they were joking and mocking high school physics, which all start with "neglecting air resistence" "assuming this to be frictionless"
I think one of the other issues with this test was the materials for the target: the buildings were basically just mostly-solid lumps of damp sand, rather than a hollow honeycomb-like structure of rigid pieces of steel, concrete, and glass. While sand is fragile, it's also pretty soft and squishy, and as a result ended up absorbing a lot of the shock from the dropped weight, which is why every time the rods landed they just made an unremarkable "plop" rather than a sizable blast (didn't help that they weren't nearly going as fast as the proposed Rods From God). If they made the model skyscrapers constructed more like actual skyscrapers, separate floors and windows and whatnot, the results might have been more spectacular and destructive. I mean the materials don't have to be totally accurate- maybe just something made of thin bits of wood or plastic would be fine.
kinetic bombardment was not developed as an "answer" to soviet ICBMs. it was developed as a weapon that cannot be defeated and is capable of hitting any target anywhere in the world within an hour without the giant red flag of a missile launch that can be detected across the world.
Giant red flag with a hammer and sickle on it?
@@lachlan1971 well, most likely. an ICBM launch can be detected anywhere in the world. a kinetic weapon cannot be detected until it's too late and it cannot be defeated.
@@aaronkcmo "a kinetic weapon cannot be detected until it's too late and it cannot be defeated."
Can not be defeated... but I am sure the Chinese, Indians, Pakistani and Israelis are aware of this weapon. The moment the incoming rods are detected is the moment the nukes would start flying.
@@thechloromancer3310 uh, this weapon doesn't exist. it's been superseded by hypersonic rockets and jets. are you suggesting that any of these countries would respond to conventional weapons with an all-out nuclear assault? seems highly unlikely since India, Pakistan and Israel do not possess the ability to launch a first strike against the united states. china, having that ability, would seem unlikely to initiate a global nuclear war in retaliation considering their entire country would be obliterated. this weapons system wasn't ever designed to be a strategic deterrent like the nuclear arsenal, it has always been a covert, precise, prompt global strike system that was meant to take out precision high-value targets such as assassinations. btw, by in the time it takes for a hypersonic weapon is detected and for that weapon to reach its target, there would not be enough time to even distribute launch orders to a nuclear arsenal, let alone actually see missiles fly. if an adversary were to launch a nuclear weapon in retaliation to a hypersonic missile or kinetic bombardment it would be a serious escalation, not a response in kind.
@@aaronkcmoThe other commenter seems to be assuming these would be city-burners, like in some popular media, and used like nuclear weapons. You are correct to dispel that notion. However, you claim this weapon has been "superseded by hypersonic rockets and jets." It has not, they fill different profiles. This theoretical weapon is not practical for a variety of mechanical and political reasons, so hypersonics fill most of the role. But hypersonics have nowhere near the same survivability as a kinetic penetrator, just look at tank combat. APFS is far more reliable than ATGM at killing tanks.
As others have said, for a creator that puts so much effort into research, this seemed half baked. I like that he left in the part where the first question Adam asks is, "Does it have fins?" and he's like, oh we should have thought of that. Like, what?? Also you could have shortened the rope significantly so it wouldn't swing as much. That was never adjusted.
I think the rope length is probably determined by helicopter safety reasons.
Why use a rope at all? Seems very dangerous and probably hard to control the shifting center of mass for the chopper pilot... let alone aiming. It should have been a firm attachment with a release. That said, I was more interested in seeing a crater than needing to see it hit some "target"...but we never even got to see that from their original intended height because they were so obsessed with hitting something they arbitrarily placed there. Pretty lame.
@@maskddingo1779 The rope is actually significantly safer and easier then a fixed mounting point. While I'm not a pilot I did spend a good many years as a technician for equipment that was installed into a helicopter and flew with it. One such piece of equipment was for a 800lb cast iron gimbal with sensors in it and that alone was right near the limit of what the AS350E we used was rated to handle in the cab due to centre of gravity concerns. When the payload is on a slingline it's better able to operate at it's max rated capacity because there is a bit of give in the slingline when the helicopter makes any sort of adjustments or movements and doesn't put nearly as much strain on the control hydraulics. It's also why it was likely so hard to aim because it's very difficult to completely stop the swing. Between the swing and upper air currents between extremely strong and not always the same direction as ground winds, the ground crew would need to be very far away to ensure there being 0 chance the payload accidentally doesn't land on them. Which also means they need a very large area to have cordoned off as if anyone did get hurt they would be opened up to some very serious litigation.
Another reason fixed mounting was likely not an option is anything attached to the helicopter, especially of that weight, would need some kind of engineering approval and that process is expensive. And anything that might be off the shelf that has all the requisite approvals is also likely not to be very cheap because the company that made it had to go through that process. Slingline on the other hand only needs the approval for the sling mount system which the aviation company likely already has sling mounting equipment. Also keep in mind that helicopter rental can easily cost a few thousand dollars every hour, plus fuel which the AS350E took over 500L of Jet-A at $1.60/L for a 2.5h flight. I'm sure the cost of the sand castle was probably low on their list of expenses.
Rotary aircraft arn't nearly as precise as they are made out to be in certain bits of media. The pilots I worked with all attested that the hardest thing to do well is hover perfectly in place. As often the controls are calibrated to be most at neutral when in forward flight and hovering often requires constant correction which introduces errors in positioning. Got to try it myself for a short while, was quite fun but indeed very tricky. At altitude mind you and with dual controls so the pilot always had the ability to take over :P
When they started talking about aiming the helicopter to the pool, ok the chopper might have an RTK capable GPS to actually aim precisely, but they're taking/marking the pool coordinates with just a cell phone?
In the middle of nowhere the cell network might not be good enough to augment the phone's precision(process of which admittedly I'm not very versed in so idk...) the result might actually for the mark to be off from the pool?
E: so ok I watched more and they're aiming with a phone also... well hopefully they'll hit the ground :D
@@TacticalCommand That's a lot of words. Some make sense. Others don't. While I haven't flown real helicopters, but I do fly pretty powerful models and have been doing so for quite a while... long before automatic flight stabilization was the norm. I am aware of the principles under which they opperate. Adding a fixed weight to the bottom (or something that can be pushed out the side) is not significantly different than adding another passenger. If it were better to have weight you are carying suspended by a rope, then they ought to make helicopters where every occupant hangs from a rope.
ThE Compressed sand castles don't behave like a real building structure.
The loosely packed sand readily absorbed the displaced KE from impact dissipating it through the intergranular space. The Shockwave would probably do more damage to solid concrete,wood, and steel.
Yeah there were so many thing’s Veritasium could’ve done differently with this experiment. Like building actual scale model buildings/structures instead of sandcastles, using a helium filled balloon to lift the object instead of a helicopter that is going to move around slightly, especially at that altitude.
I'm even surprised they didn't even think about this.
bad bad unplanned video this one
@@RagdyAndy It's hit piece Anti RoG designed to fail. I'm sure there'd dome money backing Anti with weak Propo.
@@Deutritium93 Huh? A balloon would drift miles and miles off the target. There's literally no way to steer them. Absolutely hopeless.
This was a fun watch! I kinda guessed at the results, because while I was in my skydiving years, some of the guys and gals got the fun idea of dropping pumpkins on an old barn from the skydiving plane...and hilarity ensued. The barn was at no time in any danger, although passersby most certainly were. And their vehicles. Also, we were 'faced.
Adam Savage doing tests in the middle of the desert… seems nostalgic. 😂
Funny thing was, when I hovered over video to do the "preview autoplay" thing. I saw a guy with an Adam Savage goatee wearing his hat and laughing/smiling. I was sure it was someone that just happened to look like him. But no it was actually Adam Savage.
@@agentkirb Pretty sure this was shot at the same time as the earlier penny drop video with Savage in it -- same helicopter, I think the same clothes, and it makes sense to do it all as one set of rentals/excursion.
Honestly that was the highlight of this vid.
He needs money for young girls
@@rickgreer7203 Sounds up to the point.
You just know that the ENTIRE time Adam was watching this, he was trying to suppress his desire to say:
"Uhm... why no fins?"
Because that would have been the *first* thing he thought while looking at it, having dropped a bunch of things from heights, before.
He was in on the planning as he said to adam why didnt you say that a week ago. Either Adam is getting old or this bs is scripted.
@@mikaellindqvist5599 thats not what happened. 8:12
veritasium was saying that he wished that they had had that conversation a week ago, which they wouldve IF adam had been involved in the prep.
adam has dropped things from altitude several times. why would he forget things that even i would know having never done it?
@@mikaellindqvist5599 Derek DREAMS he had have spoken to Adam earlier, but he didn't... because Adam wasn't in on the planning at all. Hence Derek saying he wishes they had have spoken about this project sooner than on the day. Adam would have totally caught this early and saved them a lot of time/effort.
@@sunnymon1436 Holy crap thatbmakes this awful channel even more useless. A freaking daydreamer....
Guess he didn't at any point think of an arrow? 🏹 😅 like ya need some fletching bruv
You could have just dropped the biggest rod you had from around the highest height possible without thinking about target, it would also be cool to watch how much impact it makes.
What if it hit them? No one would know how far to film from.
But how would you get footage and make sure nobody gets hurt?
@@KrulKrulSprietSpriet remote cameras.
@@KrulKrulSprietSpriet I would be interested in just seeing the damage it caused on the ground
But wouldn’t it just get buried under the sand like the others and possibly drag the canvas straps down too making it hard to find?
The sandcastle builders are incredibly chill. Knowing that your sandcastle would be hit by a telephone pole traveling faster than sound is not really amusing.
When Adam "Does it have fins?" His laugh was like "this guy has never dropped anything from this high huh?"
It was so odd that a science channel didn’t think of this, like it seems obvious to me to put fins or to drop the cylinder by some type of rigid attachment to the helicopter or something.
I thought that immediately.
@@Mr_Vosakisen It's kind of weird how unprepared he was for this, like he's trying to be Mark Rober but doesn't realize how much thought and preparation goes into even his failures
@@teflontelefon There are "fins" on the animated one, they go inward instead of outward
@@teflontelefon Can't trust the marketing photos without seeing the actual engineering lol.
Please redo this. It doesn’t need propulsion, it just needs guidance. With a guidance system distance becomes your friend instead of your enemy giving you more time to aim. I feel like you could easily build a cheap guidance system out of fpv drone/wing tech and some fins, and drop that thing from max altitude. Literally just fly it in like an fpv wing. If you use the dji fpv system, you have some nice footage too.
i think adding a guidance system makes it illegal basically a missile
@@maxdoesgames6753 didnt think about that. Idk how hard it would be to get clearance for that, but I feel like they’re past that by dropping stuff from a helicopter in the first place.
@@glitchy8429 Apparently the FAA frown upon that sort of thing, Mark Rober ran in to the same issue with his egg drop from orbit plan A.
@@maxdoesgames6753 if it succeeds they can already sell it to the military
They could just freaking stabilise it better on the helicopter. Make it a three to four point structure that won't allow the weight to wiggle as much. I can't understand how they missed that.
How did someone not think "this thing needs fins" in the first 60 seconds of this idea getting discussed? 🤣
It's almost like literally every dumb bomb is shaped the same for a reason or something lmao
@@Acidburn1155 Every bomb has fins
Im guessing they wanted the shape to be closely associated to the orig project.
ofcourse, a blunt object gets rounded after atmosphere entry, and wind/air is not a factor after gaining it's velocity, so yeah, to emulate those conditions, they would have to emulate completely opposite conditions in this context, iycmd
guess they should have gone to space.
The effort was wasted on a perfect sand city and not put in considering how to hit a target by dropping a not-aerodynamic rod swinging (!) under a helicopter.
Seems only Adam Savage did lol
Aftermath inside talk: "So, we did this dumb idea with 0 forethought and the result belongs to the trash"
Him: *"Publish it anyways, we spent a lot on this, we have to make some money back even if this is a big waste of time for us and anyone watching it!*
For as researched and thorough as the videos on this channel normally are, I’m shocked at how off the cuff this experiment felt.
I've always held the guy up as a very smart individual. After this I'm not so sure. He's always so polished on his channel But I guess with script and edits most anyone can be made to look knowledgeable. I'm not suggesting this is the case but clearly he's not the polished brainiak I believed him to be. Very little of this " experiment " went according to his reasoning. It's a shame really because it didn't give him any positives. It is even possible that he lost a few subscribers after this. Even Adam appeared to raise an eyebrow. I will keep watching Veritasium if the subject is of interest to me." But it's not Must See TV " anymore.
dude messed up once due to a braindead mistake even though he's made hundreds of vids calm tf down
How they gonna put more effort into the sand city than thinking the actual process through on god🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@smiaza1357yeah thats funny as hell the stupid ass sand city wasnt even necessary 💀💀
Research is something anyone can do, designing an experiment takes someone willing to put mental effort in.
A particularly clear indication of poor mental effort and quality control here, even in the research, was how he somehow goofed the common name for the concept
Its not "Rods from God" in most circles its "Rods from the Gods"
Very dissapointed. There were a number of variables that could have been addressed with more thorough testing. Additionally, conducting smaller tests without the costly resources of a helicopter or the construction of sand castles for the final test may have helped to identify any potential issues. It seemed as though these factors may have contributed to a rushed and potentially incomplete evaluation of the subject.
The simplest solution to their biggest problem in this test - weight swaying - could have been fixed by drastically shortening the cord that holds the weigh. Just make it like 30cm long, attach it to the helicopter in the same spot and voila - minimum swaying and probably more precision.
@@blingerstinger Damn that's simple but effective.
@blingerstinger
Yes it's extremely lazy 😭 lol
@@blingerstinger You probably wouldnt be able to take off, its a safety measure that the cord is that long.
@@blingerstinger I was thinking you could have the rod contained within a tube attached on the side of the helicopter, which would have reduced swaying and the effect of the wind.
This video confuses me so much. Literally 2 months ago Veritasium posted a video about dropping pennies and pens onto targets. And in that video they discovered cylindrical objects will naturally turn sideways while falling, which maximizes air-drag. So it should have been obvious to add fins.
This video must have been in production before that older one and took longer to edit or something, because this doesn't make any sense how poorly planned everything went.
Plus how did no one think to directly attach the weight to the helicopter so it doesn't swing as much? Or just see how big of a crater you can make rather than hand-sculpting a city? What the heck even was this video????
I think the two videos were filmed at the same time. Therefore, the "lesson learned" from the first project did not improve the second project.
I'm very confused too. I mean it's stupid fun, but thats not what this channel is about, totally off brand
They probably filmed both on the same day.
"What the heck even was this video"
click bait.
@@AccAkut1987 Yeah exactly. So they dropped weights from 100m. Wow. Who could have thought how that will turn out. Still fun I guess. But nothing learned.
M.O.A.B. is actually an airship and stands for mother of all Bloons. Everybody know that
Aiming a drop from an aircraft involves calculating wind speeds at various altitudes to adjust for the push. I’m surprised that this didn’t come up at all in the planning (maybe it did behind the scenes but you seemed caught-off when it was blowing and swinging from a helicopter, and that seemed an obvious thing that would happen)
The whole video is designed to entertain the ignorant.
yeah, anyone who watched the video of the grandma spinning under a helicopter knows more or less how carrying a weigh under a helicopter works.
Bold of you to assume that there was any planning.
@@mattmarzula This video is a fail. This video would be far more entertaining if they actually did the experiment right. I was ignorant of this technology until watching this video. Derrick spent a lot of money for this fail of a video, money that should have been given to me as the winner of the veritasium contest, so giving advice is the least I can do. U need to offset the mass of the cylinder so more of the mass is in the front of the cylinder. This will stabilize the cylinder. U cannot put fins on the cylinder because the fins will catch wind and make it sway off course even more. U need to put a sensor that measures the sway of the cylinder, then when the velocity is 0 quickly automatically releases the cylinder. The cylinder should be as heavy as possible and round on both the front and back so the wind has no flat surface to effect it. The amount of off-course radius should be simulated so a safety region is determined, and no personell inside of this region are allowed to be inside that region. Finally, the test demonstration should be built of brick which is more sturdy than sand castles (unless they hardened the sand with some kind of mortar or something.)
@@earthenscience I only know about the MOAB because of BLOONS TDS lol.
I'm convinced Adam Savage just spawns in the desert, like he shows up out of nowhere and so casually too.
I suspect they did this and their penny drop video in the same session
@@KINGJERMARCUS ratio
@@LeadFarmer1597 Please, it is a well known fact that if you stand in the middle of the desert with a camera and a mildy-complicated physics problem to solve then you risk attracting a wild mythbuster or worse... the ferocious Heineman's Desert Walrus.
He's the spirit of the desert
The failure of this project seems to be centered around the extreme lack of thought put into the planning phase and a follow-on fear of what MIGHT happen in the operational phase. The highest point drop was never even attempted. It appears that the producer had expectations of failure from the beginning and never intended to actually make a high altitude drop at all. Perhaps his true motivation was to make it look hopeless and silly. Finally: if you spent all this $$$ with the end result as unmitigated failure on every test (the pool hit was due to your lowering the drop altitude, not an improved drop plan) then you should put someone who actually knows how aerodynamics work in the real world in charge and run the test again. You should use a 3-point mount for the drop cylinder that stays closer to the body of the craft. This would reduce the gimbal effect of the airframe to the cylinder. You might also have as a secondary sight system a simple bomb sight. Oh, yeah. Put FINS on it. Even a tiny drag chute would have likely improved the cylinder's descent characteristics. Absolute wasted effort toward a potentially very interesting experiment. Finally: your 'clickbait' title "I tested the US Military's secret space weapon" is a flat out lie.
I'm glad the comment section is calling out this video. I thought there would have been more accuracy from this channel. Test planning aside, the entire "failure" of the concept of kinetic weaponry seems to be due to the channels constraints, like time limits to the target, or intercepting missiles.
There was little to no credit given to the fact that these weapons would be non-nuclear, and could therefore be reasonably housed on an orbiting weapons platform without breaking any international treaties, would be launched with a computer program aiming, and using military grade guidance systems.
The show literally just dropped a cube from a 150 feet after eyeballing it and declared that the concept of kinetic weaponry was a failure followed by trying to humiliate the individual who conceptualized it.
I was very excited to watch this, and very disappointed in the result.
Spot on. Starting to get fed up with Vertasium.
Exactly what I was thinking. This guy literally tries to do experiments with a pre determined results. He exactly knows what to do to get the results he wanted to show. No real science.
A few years ago I worked out the numbers for the “rods from god” theory. The kinetic force of the tungsten rod hitting the target was unreal. The kJ was so high it would have obliterated everything more than an MOAB would have done. And the crater formed resembled a meteor strike. It was a real weapon.
The issue in the program was getting those rods to space. It was extremely heavy and crazy expensive that the US military deemed conventional explosives were cheaper. An MOAB is cheaper to build and blow up than transporting the tungsten pole to outer space and hold it there in a satellite. Only the economics didn’t work out, but the science behind the system was crazy effective.
Veritasium is kinda turning into a stupid schmuck. Or was he really one since beginning.
I mean because of the air resistance there is maximum speed that object can accelerate no matter the height
@@greatgodhe did talk about that in the video thoug. But i agree. Disappointing video.
“On a sandcastle city” seems to be more realistic than originally intended.
I can’t imagine how awkward this entire thing must have been. Watch people build sand castles, have Adam Savage literally appear for 10 seconds, and just attempt after attempt of poof, dust clouds 😂
They spent the time and money for sandcastles just to be like "We're dropping it on a walmart pool instead."
Who could know it would be hard to aim when dangling a weight from a flying object in windy conditions /s
@@Markmagoo I think lot of engineers, theoretical scientists tend to underestimate practical issues. But may be I am wrong.
@@Markmagoo Literally any scientist in a field related to the experiment. It would have taken ten seconds for some guy in a lab coat to sit in front of a computer and go "nah, wind exists".
Fun note: the only reason why the fins wasn't there was because those rods wouldn't have fins in the first place (instead, it got weight ball and thrusters). Other than that and some so-so engineering the test, good point. Cool in theory, but those rods from god are too ridiculous to be executed feasibly by sane things (let alone practically). So there you go.
I love how Adam Savage was just *there*
like there was no explanation as to why, he just sensed an explosion and was like "im in"
This might be one of the most unproffseional carried out experiments ive ever seen
Not just unprofessional, every single step was executed and/or planned sooooo badly if there was any planning involved at all beyond renting a heli. They rented a chopper but didn't even think about welding fins on their "darts"? They used extremely long rope in windy conditions and nobody said "maybe we should shorten the rope a bit or use another system"? They used GPS to hit targets less than 5 square meters big (civilian GPS is not that accurate) and were surprised when it wasn't accurate enough? Nobody thought of using a friggin laser pointer or something to aid the aiming?
Those are just the things that immediately came to mind, seriously did nobody involved in this video think for just one damn second?
I like veritasium but this is insultingly bad.
I refuse to believe no one thought about stabilization of a falling projectile before dropping one. It's like they were paid to convince us that it's not possible.
@@ToBeIsWasWerebut but Adam savage!
What is more, when the idea was conceived, they would have known every single fact covered in this video. Therefore, resurrecting the project years later must mean they had other ideas. For example, I would be interested in many rods and seeing what it does in an area. I also would not have ANYONE NEAR the drop site and then go for much higher distances. I think they went low for fear of not getting their objects back ever, or there were other limitations. But then what are you actually testing?
I think this was an impromptu add-on to the penny drop video. You can see they are in the same location with the same helicopter. He probably just wanted to get in two videos for the price of one helo rental.
Adam savage coming in and asking "Did you put fins on that thing?" was extremely telling of the quality of the experiment.
This video is about 20mins longer than it should have been.
They have to make some money back on all the money they wasted here.
Honestly a horrendous video
It seems EVERY video I watch on YT has this problem!
Thank you, so I´ll skip it 1,5 minutes in.
it's long enough to get naked and partially drunk.
It's kinda surprising they didn't think to put fins on the cylinders. I would expect to put not only fins but remote or automatically controlled fins to actually be able to aim. Like did They seriously just go to the desert with a chopper thinking they can hit something so small by releasing a dangling weight from that high?
Automatically controlled fins to guide a projectile to a target is essentially a guided missile and is illegal to make around the world. I'm in a student rocketry team and any form of active directional control is super problematic. But yes they absolutely needed some static fins to make it stable. It's aerodynamics 101 to know about static stability margins etc.
@@alpsoysal3586 yeah mark rober had that exact thing 2 weeks ago
It wouldn't really need to be necessarily "guided" to the target. If they just used passive or actively controlled fins purely for stabilization on it's way down, it would have taken out a lot of the inaccuracy without being in the illegal area of guided missiles, which is a bit of a grey area anyway.
fins paired with a better release method like a mount to eliminate the rod swinging from a rope would likely have been beneficial. maybe move the chopper to account for wind (similar to what snipers do)
@@alpsoysal3586 I don't think you can call it a missile as it isn't even propelled
It would have been interesting had you still just dropped the rod from 3km into the sand to see what kind of impact it made, even if you missed the target.
The original business model of TH-cam stank, but at least the ads were reasonable.
New flood of invasive, repetitive, and offensive ads are EVIL.
Google is now fully dedicated to doing any evil that seems profitable.
And censoring complaints, too.
@@ShannonJacobs0 I’ve been paying for an ad free experience since the TH-cam Red days.
@@SethEssington which just begs another question, why do they have to demonetize channels? They've only ever cited advertisers as the reason. You pay $10 to watch content that only TH-cam gets paid for.
@@ShannonJacobs0 just use adblock, what's the problem?
same impact. learn physics
Earth's rotational speed is still a thing to calculate for...