This may sound dumb to some folks, but lets say I fire a gun. 1000N of force goes into the bullet, and another 1000N of force goes into my body. Even if i strap the gun to the ground, it will just apply 1000N of force to move the earth by a tiny amount. Because of this, does it mean that it isn’t possible to have 2000N of force going to the bullet with the same parameters as before?
In: Physics
It’s not that half is wasted, it’s just a directionality thing.
For the gun example first of all the explosion of the powder in the bullet wants to expand outward in every direction but the design of the gun only allows the bullet to move in one direction, down the barrel.
If the same amount of powder was lit on an open surface with the bullet sitting on top it wouldn’t go nearly as far at all and in a fairly unpredictable direction.
You can’t have a single directional force though, you have to push off something. If the gun was redesigned that the bullet sat in the middle of a hollow tube with no chamber behind it the explosion wouldn’t propel the bullet very far (but farther than the open pile example) without the chamber to push against.
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