MaximRecoil wrote:RamblerReb wrote:The pistols Sabre, Winston, and Boris use to cooly dispatch their strangely enthusiastic assailants at the airstrip are suppressed Walther PPs (not PPKs).
I disagree, at least with regard to the one Hillerman was using:
The barrel looks too short to be a PP. The other ones may or may not have been PPs; I couldn't get a close enough look at them to say for sure.
Notice how Tom Selleck doesn't flinch or blink while firing, showing him to be an experienced shooter, while John Hillerman does. Since the suppressors aren't real, on the actual location they would have been firing full-power blanks (necessary for the actions to function), and the reports would have been quite loud.
Selleck often, if not always, blinks when firing the usual Colt Government Model prop. Just watch the end of
Memories Are Forever for a good closeup of it, for example. Mosley wasn't blinking in this scene either, which suggests that the silencers were in fact real. A real silencer is a good thing when firing blanks in an auto, because they increase back-pressure, which helps cycling. The modifications made to pistols to allow them to cycle blanks usually involve restricting the barrel to increase back-pressure, and in the case of recoil-operated pistols, they usually remove the locking lugs. The Walther PP/PPK is straight-blowback, so it doesn't have locking lugs in the first place. A real silencer could serve the function of increasing back-pressure to allow the blanks to cycle properly, especially if it was designed with that goal in mind.
The square root of 18 is 4.242640687119285. It might have taken Sabre a second or two to call in those heat-seekers.
It would have taken him literally forever, because, like π, the square root of 18 is an irrational number, i.e., it never repeats nor ends. For example, here it is to 999 decimal places, and that's not even a spit in the ocean of infinity:
4.242640687119285146405066172629094235709015626130
84421953003921397219743538632111655116260298292471
82050415386927368910747745081675522116379323644912
99807494239667997782516778267399851503458346181714
41032867991481791082360379058604418555225592266759
58286569876914529261429643525192878108839857542239
69061760189638995426488921861845775057185164237250
86327988518950672566101259557103406312381022549654
14811606999120970144450916320833709493627434692054
78810755864741735389334790006139039046855706961711
70586552779458374849314626550026128570581804404741
62314307564622466971209032961160679456341047576404
86227542476797167800625675339956437519668183311277
97754009341647394044712478903017845761120095594410
26584691834871923135217910643941219565768351966120
73527368310068082338272088184148721432690251205510
96051053521773980941871822889908241414269644711869
91540980407423261887807374577156543013379526451773
36074832402518559443431741081011323192754860794413
05133350517497451806682592761497464563846885554654
That, of course, was the joke.