When you spend years in the military playing with some cool noisemakers, you tend to want to see more and more, bigger and louder…under good circumstances, of course. My first time at the M-16 range in basic training was nice, but we were wanted to see a live, real-deal AT-4 anti-tank weapon send an old cargo van off in a Viking funeral kind of way. For years, my duties involved a lot of time with the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, the big-bore badass that your grandpappy knew about decades ago. I also spoke ATAS rockets, Hydra rockets, Hellfire missiles, grenade launchers, and more. But the most jaw-dropping sight I got to see was a firing range for M1 Abrams tanks. The percussion was the wildest thing I’d experience in a peaceful situation ever, the noise of the round screaming over the terrain was all new and equal parts intriguing and horrifying, and seeing this massive slug (for lack of a better word) move out at speeds I can barely fathom to this day…yeah, it’s hard to not be impressed.

In real life, it’s a bomb blast with one massive fragment. Explosion, flames, cloud, dust, and a loud thump after a short time. But thanks to slow motion cameras, you can get a look at what the round does from the moment the fire starts blowing out of the barrel until the round impacts…or, in the case of the really big surprise that the Slow Mo Guys have lined up as an Act II, you can see what the round does until it escapes even the camera’s ability to keep up!