Can A Ping Pong Ball Kill You? | MythBusters | Season 9 Episode 20 | Full Episode

i dont get why they dint reinforce the cannon like they where going to with the balls.

when i first seen what they were going to do with the ping pong ball i had my doubts because of the mass . then when jamie said ( force equals mass times acceleration ) i changed my mind . the ice cannon was fun the thought of doing that had me scratching my head but i loved the way Torrie an carrie an the late great sir grant figured it out . an it did look like a great way to make snow cones

I'm very nostalgic about this show. What a whimsical inspiring show to watch as a child

A shot cup or a seal behind the ping pong ball would give you the acceleration you are looking for along the entire length of the barrel.

You could die from it if you were shot on the throat/neck, head, torso near heart. It is definitely lethal depending on your aim.

Best episode ever. Pushing The limits and far beyond 🚀🚀

I'm not convinced that either of these are truly busted! They did this way too often! Just because they were unable to prove the myth was possible, doesn't mean it's "busted'! A lot of their results were INCONCLUSIVE at best.

I think it's probably the shape of the round cannon ball that makes it so strong. A round ice-bullet might work, like the old-school musket rounds. Also, in Siberia they may have been able to create the cannon in place, making it MUCH bigger and thicker because they didnt have to move it to where it would have been fired.

No wonder the ice cannon breaks when you start with ice block full of bubbles and cracks. Next time buy a clear ice block. I am sure it would survive 2x the explosives

i hate those teasers that pretty much sum up entire episode at start, worst thing ever! i always skip it. just start from 1 and move towards 100, don't start with 100 and then go back to start, it's boring. it ruins it

why did they call ping pong ball busted? even .50cal is not lethal if you get shot in limbs or it not directly in any organs, try shooting that ping pong ball at someone's throat or head, i call that a lethal hit.
also a hit like that right at your heart might cause your heart to stop.

i'd call it plausible, it highly depends where you get shot at. they should have used ballistics dummy with proper organ placement and see how much damage that did.

in one episode they tested what happens if you get hit with a bottle in the head, like in movies. they made proper dummy with brain and everything to test if it would give you concussion. they should have done same in ping pong ball test.

Would've been amazing to see a hollow titanium ball be put through that haha

They fired one ball to test lethality formally...

We always used to watch these with my dad when I was young! Its so nostalgic to watch these

'Can a ping pong ball kill you?' Yes obviously it can if you swallow it and it blocks your airway starving your brain of oxygen for long enough.

The ice bullet must have failed because it's just too small. Relatively it has much more surface area exposed to hot gas. The ice cannonball probably also lost some mass upon being fired, but it's not exposed to the hot gas for very long, and melting a solid ball of ice take a pretty significant amount of energy. I'm not surprised it didn't vaporize, but I was surprised the pure ice cannonball survived being fired without breaking up.

How much is caused by the airpressure alone i wondered

Goes right through a wooden paddle ?? Pretty sure it would do the same to your skull.

I absolutely love this series but sometimes they just don’t give themselves the best chance. Perhaps if they approached it as a challenge “given the materials in a castle in Russia, design and build a cannon who’s body is mostly ice”

I once witnessed a girl fire a ping long ball quite a way. Lets just say it wasn't from her ice cannon !

Its a shame that i doubt any producer in this day and age would even consider thr costumes and such. Its funny as 😂 So sensitive these days...

Nitpick on the historical science: that soldier might have been a Cossack, but definitely not a comrade.

The vacuum tube is btw a wonderful demonstration of what would happen if your Hyperloop vacuum tube would have a leak!

The testing of the cannon won't give the right result. The ice crack the second you take it out in the warmth. You can't do that experiment properly when you are in warm climate and get a proper result in warm weather. Look at the ice, it's cracked as soon as it leave your freezer. It is a huge difference workin an ice cannon in -30° and +20°c

it would have been cool also to shoot it straight up ?

The hole in the paddle at the end was like a real-life cartoon.

Beautiful 😂❤😂❤
Two comments- they should've added mixed the water with saw dust or paper to reinforce the ice cannon, and should've used a heavier pig carcass (or a heavy ballistic gell humanoid) for the ping pong myth. Some of the ping pong's energy was lost with the flying pork butt...

anything moving fast enough could totally kill someone. There have been plastic straws speared through trees after tornadoes. What the question should actually be is: Can you propel a ping pong ball fast enough to kill someone? Answer is probably no. Can a tornado do it? Maby?

Now what would happen if you replace the pingpong ball with a golf ball.....

pycrete balls but no cannon......the pingpong cannon was missing a vacuumchamber at the front, were it wouldnt interact with the ball after it passes much like a gas block on a rifle
a shole ass team couldnt think of this.

just add a piece or cloth to the harrel.

Can A Ping Pong Ball Kill You?

Only if its fired out of katie price's hairy letterbox.

not lethal. but still nobody was anywhere near the muzzle. how can they claim it is not lethal, and at the same time have a huge safety area.

The long barrel thing looked like rifle from Trigun

next on mythbusters : can jet fuel melt Steel beams

They never tested the structural properties of an ice-hay (or whatever) mixture because the ice ball worked so well. OK, but would such a mixture have resisted the blast if used in the walls of the cannon? Such a missed opportunity here.

No, Adam, a pork shoulder is called a butt because they were packed into barrels called butts. Nothing to do with the rump.

Wondering what happend if they've putted the Ping-Pong ball into the LHC ???

This is one of the best episodes of Master Chef UK ever! Thanks for the upload!

Read subtitles between 9.50 and 10.10

Pykrite canon....

I have to say I think this was called wrong on both counts. First, in theory since they were making the ice cannons in brutally cold Russian winters, they could effectively have their mould as big as they wanted on top of a cart, ready to go, or already facing out away from city walls. If you have 50 of the things it really doesn't matter if you can aim them or not - a wall of cannons going off in unison is a scary thing. Because they can have the mould outside, they don't HAVE to worry about moving it around and are as such not constrained by the weight of the thing. They make the assumption that they'd make them somewhere else and wheel them there, but often cannons in the past were NOT always mobile. Siberian winters can hit -70 or more degrees - cold enough 300 years ago - it was even colder before we pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere - to freeze a pot of boiling water before it hits the ground if you throw it into the air. That's MORE than cold enough to freeze a LOT of cannons - all THEY'd need is to make the moulds out of SNOW - yes, packed snow can work - have it already horizontal, stop up the ends until they're solid, pour the water in from a hole and they've got themselves potentially a VERY big cannon that, yes, is fixed in POSTION but if you have a WALL of them pre-set to be aimed to different distances, it CAN work at bare minimum as a scary deterrent to an attack. It doesn't HAVE to be super effective at killing - just providing some scary wall of flying projectiles - and it's going to be doing enough - meanwhile, soldiers with rifles can take more mobile shots as the enemy tries to stay out of the way of the cannon shots. If you have a wall of ice cannons with, say, 16" thick or 20" thick walls, then yeah, actually, while you cannot AIM them, if you make tiered WALLS of MANY of them set in place, you could in theory get the ice cannonballs moving with bigger powder loads - thanks to the thicker walls and weight of the snow pack around them bracing tthem (something tthey did not account for here either) - to maybe at a guess 500 mph, which with a decent sized chunk of ice IS lethal. Also, even with the 200 mph one here, THAT is lethal if it hits in the head or possibly chest or neck - people have been killed by fast pitched baseballs to the head, so it's certainly lethal if a ball of hard ice hits your head at 3 times that speed. Anyway, they could build a WALL of snow-pack reinforced giant ice cannons as big as they want IF they are willing to sacrifice the ability to move the canon. the other thing is, they could also lengthen the barrels for greater exit velocity even IF limited to the powder charges used here - you could have in theory frozen a longer cannon barrel separately, moulded it to fit snugly onto the cannon base, and had yourself an extension - using, again, snow pack as bracing.


As for the ping pong ball one, if it penetrated 1.5" into a pig like that, I'd say that's a bad call to say it's not lethal. It's POTENTIALLY lethal, is what it is. That hits you in the skull, that IS going to very likely crack your skull, which is not terribly thick in humans, and very well may cause a brain bleed that kills you. THe SHOCK could kill you, too - people forget, but shock kills. One man had his testicles squeezed by his angry wife so hard that he died - not from physical damage, but from shock. If it hit your NECK, particularly the spine or the jugular, and takes out a 1.5" deep hole, I'd BET on lethality. if it hits your eye or testicles, the pain could kill. if it hits your chest it could stop your heart. Now, if it hit you in the @ss or leg or arm, yeah, you'll be in pain but would survive. But there's for sure lethal potential having 1.5" of flesh blasted out.

They didn't use cotton? 🤔

I imagine if one got stuck in your throat, there would be a fair to middling chance of your demise...

Pretty sure you would just cut the ice out of the river

Bullet not fly whit casing

1086mph and laughter was so wholesome and accurate.

On the topic of Cossacks… This episode is a great example of how propaganda messes with actual history and how countries like Russia are erasing history of another nations… which as a matter of fact they are literally trying to do right now by occupying and destroying Ukraine…

Sadly USA’s ignorant academics didn’t really care at the time and ate all the fake history Soviets fed to them and projected it to their students (even going on to this day) creating this imaginary „Russian World“ which is in fact just a prison of nations, which were physically wiped out of any resistance to become a grey mass of fake, violent and criminal „Great Russia“

Go ahead and read about who the Cossacks really were, where they was based, what they were fighting for and most importantly who they were fighting against, as well as who tried to erase them from existence and sadly for the most part succeeded. Fortunately the national memory of countries like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states remembered and preserved the real history, but we are sadly left with few generations of people, who still are calling all the east of Europe „Russians“ not even knowing where that name came from. Practically playing along to Russian propaganda machine…

Please learn the actual history and not the stuff Russian or Soviet propaganda is trying to stuff you with.