While she has the benefit of being braced for the shot, it’s still unlikely the T1000 would be knocked through the air an entire metre, unless it weighed much much less than a human. For each shot Sarah Connor should feel the same momentum effects as the T1000 that is struck. We don’t need to perform any calculations to show this is implausible. Sarah Connor manages to knock the T1000 back a sizeable amount with single shotgun blasts in the final showdown at the steel mill. Sarah Connor would suffer from the same momentum transfer issues as the T1000. In terms of relative effect, that’s more than an order of magnitude more than the lone handgun, so the T800 being knocked around a bit by the combined fire is reasonable. We’ll do the calculation as if he gets hit by ten bullets at a time: Let’s repeat the calculation, for a team of ten shooters each emptying a 30-round AR-15 magazine firing 5.56x45 4gram bullets at a muzzle velocity of 975 m/s. Later in the film, an entire police and SWAT team unloads on Arnold and he appears to get shaken around a bit more. So each bullet would only impart a miniscule amount of velocity change to the T800 - so it being able to shrug them off effortlessly is entirely reasonable. But it can ride a motorcycle fine - so we can guesstimate a weight of 200kg: We can then work out what velocity each bullet would normally impart, which we’ll refer to as “Delta V”, or “DV” for short.įirst we need a weight for the T800, which is never stated. With a muzzle velocity of about 380m/s and a bullet weight of 7.45 grams, each bullet has a maximum momentum P of:Īssuming that all the momentum is transferred to the T800, it will change the momentum of the T800 by a certain amount: we can call this “Delta P” or “DP” for short.

The T800 first gets shot at the shopping mall by the T1000, who unloads a magazine of 9x19mm handgun ammunition into Arnie’s back.

This is very different to humans, to whom bullets often do most of their damage via energy transfer rather than momentum transfer. Like any military tank, Terminators would potentially be vulnerable to sheer momentum transfer knocking them off their feet, even if bullets weren’t able to damage their endoskeleton directly. Shotguns, handguns, miniguns, grenade launchers… what will take down a Terminator? StudioCanalĭirector James Cameron referred to Arnold’s T800 Terminator model as a sort of Panzer Tank, in contrast to the liquid metal T1000 being more like a sleek Porsche.

Terminator quote learning machine