Flaming PT boats between Ireland and Wales | Forums

[NaKacu]

The funniest boat incident I saw was when I was in the carribeans once and a PT boat spotted me. Going balls out, it managed to hit a wave or two and plunged right for the bottom. No air attacks, not even one shot fired.

Me thinks, there be a issue with the damage model of the PT boats in stock game.

[tuddley3]

@ GoldenEagle8

WO: "How do you like your Puppet Sir , Well Done or Medium Rare"?

[Kaleun1961]

Originally posted by Realjambo:
I read somewhere that they used petrol not diesel as fuel, and apparently petrol is more volatile than diesel? I don't know if this deliberatley modelled into the game for this reason or not tho'. Still, helps to see 'em coming at night

Diesel is less volatile than gasoline [petrol to you Brits] and will not flash as easily as gasoline. It will burn if it gets hot enough, which of course is why it is used for engine fuel. Early in my career as a trucker I once limped a truck home that had a leaking fuel line in the engine compartment. Raw diesel was spilling onto the hot engine manifold and becoming heated was smoking. I got it back to my depot, whereupon a mechanic chewed my butt off, as it could have caused a fire. Hey, I did say that I was a rookie at the time.

My son, who is a firefighter, says that in his training he was shown the differences in ignition between gasoline and diesel. Still, gasoline is volatile, but not as scary as we may think. I recently visited a site devoted to debunking movie physics. Real scientists and physicists take apart various movie scenes and analyze how plausible the stunt. One famous scene they debunk is Mel Gibson in "Payback" I think is the name of the movie. There's a scene where he tosses a lit cigarette into a stream of gasoline he trailed behind the bad guys' car. It catches fire and then blows up their car. Well, these guys try to reproduce that scene numerous times and fail, and they explain why. It has to do with the temperature of the cig butt and how it is drowned out by the liquid gasoline before it can heat up the surrounding gas to ignition temperature. Interesting stuff, but I still wouldn't mess with any fuel. I'm not a fan of *******.

[Ant__.]

Thanks for that Kaleun1961, interesting reading indeed - I feel educated!

So, when John McClane in Die Hard 2 (?) lights the spilt fuel with his Zippo that runs down the line of fuel on the runway to blow up the plane, that's bunkum too? HA! next time that's on TV I'm gonna stand up and denounce it!

At least I think it's Die Hard 2.

[Kaleun1961]

Maybe a Zippo would do the job; after all, it stays alight, unless like with the cig butt it gets drowned by the liquid fuel. Still, I can't imagine that the burning fuel trail could go fast enough to catch up to the plane like it did in that film. I'll have to ask my son how fast the fire will travel across a puddle of gas. Don't you just hate it when a movie fakes stuff? I nearly puked watching Mission Impossible when that helicopter gets tethered to the train and the pilot still keeps it flying in the tunnel. Uh... uhh.. huuuurrrrllll barf! I'll have to track down the URL to that movie physics site. I think they had something in there about Die Hard.

[Kaleun1961]

Ok, in hunting down movie physics here is what I have found so far:

Silverscreen Science

This is the one!

After trolling through some blogs and such, the second link is the site I mentioned earlier. Scroll down the left side of the page and you will find descriptors for all sorts of movie fakery. Some interesting reading there. Look under the section for cigarettes and you see them document their failure to ignite gasoline with a cigarette. They also have a movie review section where they examine the physics of some popular films.

Enjoy!

Edit: Faulty memory on my part; it seems there isn't a section there dealing with Die Hard. Nonetheless, some very interesting reading there and some intense mathematics for those inclined that way.

[Ant__.]

Cool, thanks for the links!

[AO1_AW_SW_USN]

@ Kaleun1961- Try that cigarette theory with JP5 (AKA Aviation Jet Fuel)!

It has a flash point of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37.7 degrees Celsius and it is very sensitive. On the flight deck of the CVN that I was stationed on, we had to keep a constant eye on any spilt JP5 while on station in the Persian Gulf during the summer months… especially around my “Toysâ€Â�.

[IsaanRanger]

I must be a bug to me now, I experienced 7 PT Boats coming after me, only 2 looked normal, the other 4 were flaming, and 1 had slight black smoke bellowing out of it, and the rest flamed as I was close to Gibraltar