Do The Last of Us Part 2 Bottle Silencers Actually Work? | The Science of...The Last of Us

dear naughty dog hi it's me Austin I really liked the last of us - which is apparently a controversial thing to say which oh well I liked it it's not really relevant to this video at all but I had to get it off my chest and it might be an important preface before a video where it might seem like I'm being a little nitpicky I genuinely like this game and nothing I'm about to say after this point moving forward is gonna change that with that said I have to get something off my chest um soda bottle silencers make no freakin sense feel good feel Limbert feel loose ready to do this and the Furious type dude I found you someone is down in the comments section already angry about my use of the term silencer to describe these things you put on the tips of firearms in order to make them quieter instead of the word suppressor now look hey look at me look at me stop it the Wikipedia article on this device it is titled silencer the National Firearms Act of 1934 sights silencers along with kinda alaria sleep mufflers and the original patent filed by a Hyrum Percy Maxim the son of the guy who invented the Maxim machine gun also says silencer on it stop it stop it with this fake debate that nobody cares about silencer muffler suppressor all these terms will be used interchangeably here and elsewhere in the video and you just gotta like get over it bro just it's okay to let it go just let go it doesn't matter anyway alright soda bottle silencers these are a thing you can craft in The Last of Us - and attach to the end of your 9-millimeter pistol in order to render it completely and totally silent allowing you to shoot enemies with bullets without producing a sound at all the required materials are plastic bottles and cloth and you know what I'm actually gonna give Naughty Dog some leeway on this it would be a bit mean of me to single them of all people out for having a totally and completely unrealistically quiet silencer in their game when they didn't exactly create the trope of silencers making bullets make either no noise or that little whistling noise from Goldeneye it would just be like colossal II mean to be like well homemade silencers could never completely silence a firearm therefore gotcha the last of us to get done goofed sincerely Austin because the thing is silencers the way they're portrayed in video games and movies and TV shows to numerous to even begin to start naming here are themselves complete and total nonsense and it kind of seems like we like it that way which is more fun a gun that makes zero noise allowing a super-secret spy to do super-secret stuff or a gun that's still very loud and still obviously a gun that brings everyone nearby running to your location to beat you up or breast you or whatever obviously the first one is more fun although way less realistic you see making a gunshot absolutely silent is frankly impossible unless you're somehow firing it in a vacuum that's because the noise comes from not one not two but actually three separate events and in order to get into why silencing bullets is so difficult and ultimately pick apart these weird plastic contraptions we really got to talk about the noise and how exactly guns work first [Music] the basic way that a firearm works is not exactly changed all that much since their invention sometime in the 12th century where it was basically just a metal tube filled with gunpowder with a projectile or shrapnel packed on top of it you light the gunpowder on fire it catches really quickly heating up rapidly expanding gases very fast these rapidly expanding gases are contained by the tube which allows pressure to build up very quickly this pressure has only one way to escape and that is out the front end of the tube so that's where it goes propelling whatever is in front of it along the way fans my show who actually watched my doom video about exploding barrels will recognize this description for what it actually is an explosion firearms use explosions in order to propel projectiles and this is one of the biggest sources of noise from a gun if you've ever held a bullet yourself you might be surprised at how light they are and wonder how something so small can possibly be harmful even a 22 which for some reason by some people gets treated as though they're not dangerous are easily fatal in spite of being tiny and guns achieve this by taking advantage of physics if I shoot a 2 point 5 gram 22 out of a gun at 370 meters per second it'll slap into you with a hundred and seventy 1.125 joules of kinetic energy all concentrated on this very tiny object making it more than capable of piercing through your flesh and organs causing massive damage on the way through that is the very basic principle behind all firearms move a very small thing very very fast and here's our second major problem and source of noise the bullet traveling through the air itself your average 22 leaves the muzzle of a firearm at 370 meters per second which is 27 meters per second faster than the speed of sound for pretty much every altitude you'll be firing a gun at and this is a very big problem for silencing bullets because traveling faster than the speed of sound creates a ton of noise in the form of a pressure wave this is because when an object travels faster than the speed of sound it compresses the air molecules in front of it creating a pressure to between the gases in the atmosphere at rest and the gases in front of the object of traveling as these gases move out of the way they expand again sending powerful ripples through the gas itself which creates a loud crack sound as the force moves through the air and dissipates as heat energy this is what's known as a sonic boom and any object moving faster than the speed of sound will create one this can be mitigated with subsonic ammunition but this is actually pretty rare and even non supersonic bullets still make sound as they cut through the air with the trade-off being that the bolts become a lot less effective silencers of all varieties can do nothing about this noise with even low powered bullets making loud with cracking sounds as they travel forward the last source of noise from a firearm is pretty miniscule but it's still worth mentioning regardless and it's the action from the firearm itself the clack of the hammer hitting the bullet and the slide being thrown back and then forward again back into place by the explosion from the bullet very very quickly that is surprisingly noisy even if you ignore everything else it's not super loud but it's definitely enough to grab someone's attention if they're nearby especially if they're on edge which brings us to how silencers actually work and you can actually get a lot of insight into how they work yes cut them open and look at a cross-section of them inside the tube of a silencer are all these baffles placed at precise angles these serve three primary functions one to disrupt expanding gases while still allowing the bullet to travel unimpeded number two redirecting sound waves away from the opening of the firearm and three helping to shrink the expanding gases the disruption part is easy just gets in the way the gases as they leave the muzzle and redirect some upward into their cavities the second function they serve is really similar to the first but instead of redirecting expanding gases it's actually redirecting sound waves sound waves exiting the muzzle will bounce against the baffling and be redirected into the cavity where they will continue to bounce around losing energy each time its reflected as heat into the silencer each time it's reflected until ultimately it completely runs out of energy this is actually really similar to house proof paneling and recording studios work the third function they serve is actually really really clever they essentially act as little heat sinks that pull heat away from the gases cooling them down which in turn makes them condense reducing their explosive energy quite significantly some silencers even employ oil or water or some other form of gel to help pull heat away even more effectively that said these baffles pull heat energy away by themselves heating up which is one of the reasons why they can become less effective under sustained fire and that's essentially it they reduce the noise from a firearm by basically slapping the gas away from the place it wants to go out of the gun in this instance and telling it who literally take a chill pill this alone can almost entirely negate the noise created from the expanding gases which is quite a lot in many cases it can actually make lower powered firearms quiet enough as to not require hearing protection while firing them at a range that said it does absolutely nothing to the sound from the action of the gun itself nor does it do anything to impede the sonic boom created by the bullet traveling through the air once it's out of the gun bullets fired from a gun can reach over a hundred and eighty decibels of noise from one meter away from the source and silencers can reduce this to under 160 decibels sound measured in decibels is actually pretty tricky as it is a measurement of power that depends upon distance quite a bit in something that's a hundred and sixty decibels at one meter away they'd only be like 80 decibels of football field away and a twenty decibel decrease of noise is not insignificant every three decimals decreased is half as loud or twice as quiet if you will as the value three decibels above it meaning a gun fired at a hundred and eighty decibels is over sixty four times louder than a gun fired at 160 decibels but 160 decibels is still very very loud 160 decibels is a sound level of a live rock concert it is not subtle is louder than the sound of a jet aircraft taking off from over a quarter of a football field away it is loud and it is unmissable so yeah silencers and video games and TV and movies are to put it mildly purely a work of fiction so I will not be judging these plastic silencers in the last of by that standard but rather if they can come anywhere close the effectiveness of industrial made silencers I'm going to consider it a win on their part so can a plastic water bottle be just as effective as a real silencer well it's complicated there are as far as I'm aware no official Studies on the effectiveness of improvised silencers and I really I hate to weigh in on subjects I have almost no scientific research in them but this is a decent exception because among hunters and firearm enthusiasts this is one of those things it's kind of like like folk knowledge passed from one person to another by word of mouth via oral tradition like basket weaving or folk tales and while getting empirical evidence of their effectiveness is difficult there's a lot of individual experimentation and demonstrations that are out there and because of that I can make some pretty educated assumptions survival guides written by a mix of ex military members totally normal outdoor survivalists and Doomsday Preppers all basically agree that improvised silencers require two things plastic soda bottles in some form of baffling whether it's newspapers or old rags or t-shirts something that will defuse the shockwaves from the exploding gases by absorbing the energy from the sound waves and dissipating them as heat this is actually really similar to how industrial silencers work except that industrial silencers rely more on damping which is deflecting sound waves causing them to bounce around endlessly until they run out of energy while the improvised ones utilize absorption which is pretty similar but it relies more on soft fibers that actually Bend and move on a molecular level more kind of like slowing a runaway shopping cart by getting in front of it and slowing it down this removes energy from sound waves in a completely different way this use of rags and bottles in-game confirms that this is the method used by the game and that's how they're supposed to work but do they actually work well that's tricky it's really hard to say to be entirely honest because technically the best way to figure it out would be for me to test it myself but aside from not even having a FOID card silencers are 100% SuperDuper illegal in my state which is Illinois and even in Texas Texas where my editor and her good loving husband Daniel dadgum has the way up to nine dad get Munson bale whoa dang old $200 Uncle Sam a register god dang plastic silencer I tell you what not worth it so instead I watch pretty much every video under the Sun testing plastic bottle silencers and I have arrived at a conclusion with a few caveats plastic bottle silencers if properly made on low powered firearms work just as well as manufactured silencers at silencing guns especially if you're like this crazy guy who actually constructed plastic baffling to mimic how industrial silencers are actually constructed they can reduce the explosion noise from expanding gases if properly sealed with tape against the barrel and have adequate baffling to about the same level as industry silencers however the rounds have to be low powered and I mean that most of them really struggle even with 9-millimeter rounds second of all they only get one one and I mean this one shot off period not a couple not three not five one because expanding gasses and the bullet itself will absolutely and utterly obliterate the bottle period what's more the bottle has to be quite big and the silencers we see in the last of us part two are miniscule for a 9-millimeter you need at least the leader probably a liter and a half of a bottle sticking out on the other end but this tiny tiny little Nalgene bottle looking thing looks like it's like half liter tops but that being said the handcrafted silencer when compared to other video games is surprisingly plausible I mean if we give them wiggle room for being way harder than they'd actually be and ignore the fact that no silencers worked the way they're portrayed in fiction I have to say this is actually one of the more legitimate weird things I've looked at in a while it's certainly a hell of a lot better than whatever the heck The Walking Dead did but it's a flashlight taping a flashlight to the end of your firearm will accomplish nothing Rick what are you doing get your life together sincerely awesome I'll give a quick shout out to my high-level patrons for making this show possible jarred featured Javon Stanley Emma Sims Frances Cagney on at a damn TP Dan Rob Nicolas Bullinger Marissa Resnick siggy and Mazur be sure to subscribe to the game theorists if you have not already and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,416,577

Rating: 4.7881951 out of 5

Keywords: the last of us, the last of us 2, tlou, tlou2, the last of us 2 trailer, the last of us part 2, the last of us part II, the last of us part 2 walkthrough, the last of us part 2 ending, the last of us ending, the last of us 2 leaks, the last of us 2 leaked gameplay, the last of us 2 gameplay, the last of us 2 gameplay leak, ellie, joel, the last of us ellie, the last of us leaks, the last of us 2 ending, the game theorists, game theory, matpat, the last of us gameplay

Id: 32vfPNcNDVQ

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Wveth]

Of course they don't. I mean real silencers don't work at all like they're presented in games and movies and stuff. They lower the volume of the sound, sure, but only to the point of "very loud" rather than "will damage your hearing." They were never meant to be for stealth or anything; most of the sound escapes from the ejection port, and it's gonna crack hard when the bullet breaks the sound barrier. No stopping that.

They are much more effective for subsonic rounds though.

[u/herbwannabe]

They worked great in the game except once or twice when it popped off when i fired, which was not funny at the time, but afterwards was pretty hilarious.