Hey Rave, I'm the dude that got blown up in the video. I appreciate your breakdown and willingness to talk through it from your own perspective. Great video.
So basically, the launcher’s imported, but it’s illegal to import a working one (at least from Russia, who makes the RPG), so the people they bought it from broke it in a specific way so they could import it, and then the weld was to make it a “new” actual rocket launcher, which would (by legal technicality) be considered US-made and legal. But because that weld is a weak point in the structure now, when they used an oversized/overfueled rocket variant, it failed at the weld point.
They spoke about it on the Unsubscribe podcast, the conclusion everyone wound up at was that the booster of the rocket itself was the failure point. It most likely separated in such a way as to make launch impossible, and the weak point of the weld is the only reason the explosion was then survivable. Crazy stuff.
you should see part of Unsubscribe podcast when they talk about it as they went there is more details and as it's more unhinged they didn't tried to make it PG Adam is not griming if you were wondering nerves on his right side of face are in shock or dead but only time will tell. he may regain control of them from 6 months to many years from now or never. also few pieces of shrapnel hit his plate on chest (so blessed that he was wearing plate carrier with one inside) and it stopped them from going inside his chest. plate toke beating. somehow safety glasses stayed in one piece even tho they were hit as well. also fun fact Adam was in same hospital as Scott from Kentucky ballistics and had same doc.
@@thefightinggameplayer Could have sworn it was Scott's dad evacing him to a place where an air ambulance could pick him up, but it's been a while since I looked into it.
Scott was stabilised at the hospital they headed to first and then was flown by helicopter to the other hospital for surgery etc so that may be where confusion coming from
@@thefightinggameplayer They bolted the range with his dad driving and Scott called 911 which sent an ambulance to meet them "halfway" as Scott described. The ambulance then took him to a hospital where they did initial scans and patchwork, after which they told him he would need to be transported to the Vanderbilt Hospital via LifeFlight (aka helicopter) for proper treatment.
Hey Rave, I'm not sure you correctly registered a couple things. I wanna try to clear a couple things up. The Grenade part of the RPG is a dummy essentially. It won't go boom it's just visual. The launcher going grenade as they stated was if the weld had not failed and vented for the rocket part to relieve pressure. They think the rocket part split into a couple parts with both firing at different sides of the internal part next to where the weld was. Had the weld not failed and allowed that pressure to vent the pressure would have built up and then exploded into shrapnel like a grenade. Secondly these launchers are like ex military stuff. They have been decommissioned some components added to it to make it unable to function as intended. To recommission these the people these guys got it from had to cut open or drill into the launcher to remove said components. They then welded over the parts they worked on to patch it back up to let it work again. No matter how good the weld is, it is now a weak point. This ended up being somewhat serendipitous as it allowed the explosion to vent rather than build up and become even more dangerous.
When he says "grenaded" he means the whole tube he was holding would have blown up due to the building pressure and he would have been killed and more or less his whole head and most of his upper body would have been shredded by all the fragments. Luckily the weld patch failed and allowed the building gas and pressure to escape, and in doing so saved his life but it still messed him up. And his helmet and plate carrier took most of the blow.
The guys trying to do a SAMPLE history is quite nice. You can tell they are shaken up (understandable) and they knew the information would be important, but they were not quite focusing in like a professional medic. As a paramedic of 27 years it is very interesting to see the incident occur, we almost always get there after the initial accident. Seeing the forces involved gives a lot of interesting perspective. Note: a SAMPLE history is an acronym. S)igns and symptoms A)llergies M)edications P)ast pertinent history L)ast oral intake E)vents leading to incident
In these situation it is usually set up before hand who is the designated person to call 911 and who the back ups will be if the designated person is also hurt. This goes down in the debrief before any sort of shooting happens. It's called an SOP
The rocket motor failed not the warhead. Now this wasn't a DIY rocket, this was a real rocket and he just got really unluckily to get a defective one. If it wasn't a reactivated launcher instead of blowing out the weld the launcher would have likely properly detonated and he would have not survived that.
It was a dummy rocket with no explosive inside of it. The test they were doing was for learning what the backblast would do to a human. That's why they only have the failure in 3k fps because the 100k fps camera was pointed at the ballistic dummy head directly behind the launcher
if the booster failed like they said, and there's nowhere for the explosion to go, it will fail at the weakest point first, that being the weld, and if it was not welded there, it might have turned into a big shrapnel bomb, with a chance of also hitting others around him... they were very lucky!
The RPG-7 they were shooting was basically decommissioned and made unfireable, when they had it remilled they had the firing pin reinstalled, and to fix that you also have to do some welding. that is what they are talking about, you dont have to weld it after every shot
I know this video is a month old but I wanted to address a broader point. When energy, any energy whether kinetic, thermal, electrical, whatever, is out of control it is dangerous. We harness these forces to do work for us. We bind them in copper wires and ovens and fly wheels. This man was very fortunate that the thermal and kinetic energy did not come to rest in his body. A significant portion was vented away. He was picked up and tossed instead of being ripped or broken. The heat was only able to bite his arms. If the energy had not been channeled away, or even worse been directed into his body, he probably would have died. If you want a practical example of channeling energy look at Parkour. The art is all about generating, conserving, bleeding off, and channeling the energy from your body and gravity to move safely. Or at least safe-ish.
Ive seen this a few times now but it just hit me, imagine the 911 operator and the first responders. I'm just assuming RPG accidents aren't covered and responding to a scene with a (as far as a first responder is concerned at that point) functional rocket launcher or two probably isn't in many police/ems handbooks on this continent. "We were test firing an RPG and it exploded." Has to be an absolutely nuts thing to hear in the call center.
It's an accident that will probably always be in the back of both their minds, but at least he is recovering well. If you enjoy the slow mo footage their is a really cool video from The Slo Mo Guys in collaboration with Kentucky Ballistics shooting some of his bigger guns in extreme slow motion that is really cool.
"this is no joking matter, and i know i made a joke about it" Bro these guys were on the unsub podcast just a few weeks later and making jokes about it. Yes it was a crazy incident and very traumatic, but he made it out the other end.
When they say "grenades", they mean the actual launcher blowing up, not the shaped charge (which they weren't using anyways, they used a practice round), which would keep moving forward regardless. Probably at even higher speed because none of the propellant is going out the back and is thus pushing more like a gun breech than a recoilless, increasing the efficiency of the propulsion at the cost of the user.
Classic problem with solid rocket motors is usually a bubble in the propellant or failure to properly pack the propellant turns the motor into a bomb. Unfortunately it looks like it was close to the start burn area when the malfunction here happened. Most of these happen downrange so it's likely a statistical anomaly. Our friend is lucky he was wearing the armor he had on it most likely saved his life here judging by how violently the plates and helmet were moving.
Their analysis is far more detailed on the specifics than mine here. It's interesting that they are using a segmented booster charge here instead of controlled burn all one piece(which is far more prone to failure) but the same problems I listed with bubbles or improper packing or movement post packing can still happen.
To be very clear re welding and sleeving a demilled launcher or firearm usually isn't an issue unless there is another entirely different catastrophic event happening such as this one and even then this should have been well within tolerance if the booster hadn't been that scuffed. Consider that this also isn't a factory booster as that would be near impossible to import. They probably had to make one from what they know of the original design and rocketry basics which probably doesn't quite match the resources the soviet design beuros had available to design and make these.
There is also the fact that this literally happens to even the factory made rpgs sometimes I again thing this is a statistcal anomaly and purely an accident.
11:48 Brain is weird. Imagine a total drunk saying something then short term memory (last only seconds) does not relay to long term memory. Happened to me, was taking a test then next I know my mom saying "I love you" being taken away in a helecoper
The part where you talk about watching videos similar to an injury someone had is fairly common, i think. When you see worse injuries, it makes you think that yours are not as bad and can ease your nerves temporarily.
24:43 Completely grenades is... as bad as you think it is. Explosions kill more by shrapnel and momentum than the pure pressure wave. If the charges separate and there is no easy route for them to vent then the pressure builds up until the metal starts to fracture. Of course it depends on if enough pressure can build up, to begin with. Gun mechanics are always a bit like playing hot potato. Make the parts reinforced enough to withstand the pressure and you're fine. Make the parts just weak enough to fail and you got a grenade. Have a very weak point of failure and you may not even get hurt.We have no way to confirm if the factory condition RPG would've withstood the pressure but if it didn't, not just Adam but likely everyone present would've gotten hurt. Of course with the distances involved it'd be more of a random chance for most but as for Adam... yeah, it'd have been closed casket, most likely. Tl;dr Without any further analysis it's likely that the "weak" weld saved his life.
No, they don't need to do "maintenance " on it and then weld it back into place. They were talking about reactivating the rocket launcher, aka taking something that's been decommissioned so it can't fire, and making it able to fire again. This is only done once, not each time they fire it. It'd be far easier to just make your own tube to fire a rocket than repeatedly welding and unwelding each time you fire, let alone it being far safer. Reactivate =/= reload
If you'd like a new Kentucky Ballistics video to react to; he recently uploaded a video of a double barrelled 1911 (technically, it's two 1911 handguns in a single frame; side by side with a joined trigger and two magazines joined on one base plate).
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