This site is funny and educational; it critiques movies, and common movie devices, from a physics point of view. The following clip is taken from their review of Matrix Revolutions.
In a number of cases, sentinels by the hundreds stream directly toward the blazing guns of the robots and are blasted from the air by the heroically screaming robot operators. This would be about as effective as trying to stay dry by shooting a squirt gun against a fire hose. Yes, it would be possible to knock out the on-board computers and mechanical systems in the sentinels but bullets would do little to counteract their forward momentum.
If two objects collide head on in an inelastic collision (meaning they fuse together) and both have the same magnitude of momentum, the forward velocity of the fused objects will be zero. In the case of sentinels, they would drop from the air. If we assume that a sentinel has a mass of 500 kg ( 1100 lbs) and a velocity of 30 m/s (67.4 mph) its momentum would be 3020 Ns. Assume each sentinel is hit by 10, 20 mm cannon bullets with ballistic properties identical to those used in U.S. fighter aircraft and that the bullets fuse with the sentinels. Each bullet would have a momentum of 104 Ns for a total of 1040 ns. The sentinels would lose only a third of their forward velocity and crash into the robots at about of 20 m/s. This would be more than enough velocity to seriously injure or kill unprotected robot operators.
Even if the machinegun bullets contained high explosive that blew the sentinels apart, the pieces would still continue in a forward path. Blowing the sentinels apart would be like converting them from rifle bullets to shotgun blasts. The fragments of the sentinels would still pummel and seriously injure or kill the robot operators.
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