Video games these days have decided to throw realism out of the window with regards to weapons and ammo, and instead go to comically extreme lengths. Perhaps most famous of this is GTA:V where you can have several dozen weapons on you at the same time.So today lets look at exactly how many guns you have, and what would would happen if a real person tried to carry them all.
Starting off lets lets have a look at the melee weapons you can carry, and how much they each weigh.
| Melee Weapons | |
|---|---|
| Baseball bat | 1 kilo |
| Little knife | 300 grams |
| Nightstick | 1.95 |
| crowbar | 8 kilos (Gordon freeman is a beast!) |
| golf club | 330 grams |
| broken bottle | 130 grams |
| Antique cavalry dagger | 500 grams |
| Knuckle duster | 170 grams |
| flash light | 1.043 |
| switch blade | 200 grams |
| pool cue | 566 grams |
Looking at all that, that’s 14 kilos just in the melee slot, but this is relatively benign compared to the weights we are going to rack up in the firearms.
Next up are the hand guns
| Handguns | |
|---|---|
| Pistol (Taurus PT92) | 960 grams |
| Combat pistol (Heckler & Koch P2000 | 620 grams |
| AP pistol (OTS-35 Pernach) | 1.15 kilos |
| Stun gun (Taser M26) | 544 grams |
| .50 Pistol (Desert Eagle) | 1.76 kilos |
| SNS pistol (AMT backup) | 510 grams |
| Heavy pistol (M1911) | 1.1 kilo |
| Vintage pistol (Colt M1902) | 1 kilo |
| Marksman pistol (Thomspson-center) | 1.7 kilos |
| Heavy revolver (Taurus Raging bull) | 2.2 kilos |
Most of the pistols above use the 9*19 Parabellum cartridge, which weighs 0.75 grams. All bullet based weapons have a maximum of 9999 bullets, so that means your character is carrying around 7.5 kilos of pistol ammunition. All the pistols stuck together are 11.54 kilos, or a little less than all the melee weapons.
| SMG | |
|---|---|
| Micro SMG (UZI) | 3.5 kilos |
| SMG (Heckler & Koch MP5) | 3 kilos |
| Assault SMG (FN P90) | 2.6 kilos |
| Combat PDW (Sig Sauer MPX) | 2.7 kilos |
| Machine pistol (Tec-9)1.4 kilos | 1.4 kilos |
| Mini SMG (Skorpion V5.61) | 1.3 kilos |
Most of the SMG’s appear to also use the 9*19mm Parabellum cartridge, so thats another 7.5 kilos of bullets on the pile. All the SMG’s put together weigh 14.5 kilos, or several backpacks of books.
| Shotguns | |
|---|---|
| Pump Shotgun (Mossberg 590 | 2.5 kilos |
| Sawn off shotgun (Mossberg 500) | 2.7 kilos |
| Assualt shotgun (UTAS UTS-15) | 3.1 kilos |
| Bullpup Shotgun (KEL-TEC KSG | 3.1 kilos |
| Musket (Brown bess) | 4.8 kilos |
| Heavy Shotgun (Saiga 12k) | 3.5 kilos |
| Double barreled Shotgun (Sawn-off shotgun) | 2.7 kilos |
| Sweeper Shotgun (Armsel Striker | 4.2 kilos |
All of the shotguns comes out as 26.6. Most of the shotguns above use .410 bore, which appears to be a relatively small shotgun cartridge. 9,999 cartridges of .410 bore weigh in at 56.69 kilos, or a young child.
| Assault rifles | |
|---|---|
| Assault rifle (Norino type 56-2) | 3.9 kilos |
| Carbine rifles (Heckler & Koch HK416) | 2.95 kilos |
| Advanced rifle (Tavor TAV-21) | 3.27 kilos |
| Special Carbine (Hecklre & Koch G36C | 2.82 kilos |
| Bullpup rifle (QBZ-95-1) | 2.9 kilos |
| Combat rifle (AKMSU) | 2.85 kilos |
All of the assault rifles weigh 18.69 kilos. These rifles use the 7.62*39mm casing, and 9,999 of these bullets weigh in at 163 kilos.
| Light Machine Gun | |
|---|---|
| LMG (PKM) | 9 Kilos |
| Combat MG (FN M249) | 7.5 Kilos |
| Gusenberg Sweeper (M1928A1) | 4.9 kilos |
total weight of all the LMG’s :21.4 kilos. LMG’s use the slightly bigger 7.62*54mm bullets, and 9,999 of these bullets weight 218 kilos.
| Sniper Rifles | |
|---|---|
| Sniper rifle (Arctic Warfare super magnum) | 6.5 kilos |
| Heavy Sniper (Barrett M82) | 14 kilos |
| Marksman rifle (M39 EMR) | 7.5 kilos |
All the sniper rifles weigh a hefty 28 kilos. These sniper rifles use the even bigger 7.62*51mm bullets, and now we get to 254 kilos when have 9,999 of these bullets.
| Heavy Weapons | |
|---|---|
| RPG (RPG-7 | 7 kilos |
| 20 Rockets (PG-7VL) | 52 kilos |
| Grenade launcher (Milkor MGL) | 5.3 kilos |
| 20 Grenades 40*46) | 5.34 kilos |
| Minigun (M134 Minigun) | 39 kilos |
| 9,999 7.62*51mm bullets | 254 kilos |
| Homing launcher (SA-7 Grail) | 6 kilos |
| 20 rockets (Strela 2M) | 196 kilos |
the heavy weapons come out to 57.3 kilos of guns, with 507 kilos of ammunition.
Sticking all these weapons together we have 192 kilos of guns, and 1210 kilos of ammunition. So overall, we have 1402 kilos of equipment weighing down on our intrepid villain, so lets examine what that’s going to do to them. The world record for a dead-lift to the thigh is 457 kilos, while the record for a dead-lift to over the head is only 263 kilos, or 1 fifth the weight of all the weapons and gear piled on top of our protagonist.
First things first, many bones are going to be broken. The spine is going to be squished into a pile of shards, and unless they have 
perfect posture, their legs are going to get snapped into many pieces as they fall to the ground. But before our intrepid hero turns into a pile of broken bones and crushed organs beneath a veritable mountain of ammunition, let us look at what happens around them. For that we must find out the pressure exerted by the soles of the fabulous shoes our character is wearing. P=F/A, where F is the force and A is the area of the feet. And as we know, F=mg, so P=mg/A. Assuming that an average adult male is 70 kilos, and also assuming that adult feet have around 100cm^2, or 0.01 m^2, we know that P=1472*9.8/0.01 we get 961,706 Pascals, or 961kPa. This is 1/27477th the pressure in a car tire. It may not be able to break through steel,( 841Mpa), but it would seriously dent any surface you were standing on.
Lets take it up a notch. Using the skyfall cheat, you fall from a high height hitting the ground with a great force. I measured the length of a skyfall sky dive as around 18 seconds, and using the formula v=u+at, we find out that v=0+9.8*18, therefore you hit the ground at a speed of 176 meters a second, or 633 kilometers per hour (assuming no air resistance cause that is just annoying). To work out how far up you fall from, w have to use another kinematic formula, x=0.5*a*t^2. X=0.5*1472*18^2. X=1587m, so you fall from 1.5 kilometers.
To find out how much energy you hit the ground with, we need to solve for Kinetic energy. Ke=0.5*m*v^2. Ke=0.5*1472*18^2. Working that out, our intrepid hero hits the ground with 22,798,336 joules, or 22MJ. Looking up the energy storage of TNT, we find out that 222MJ is about 5 kilos of TNT. To find out what that does to wherever our hero hits, we need to use a tool such as NukeMAP, a tool which I regularly use. 5 kilos of TNT is 0.000005 kilotons of TNT, the input requirement for NukeMAP. The readout shows that anything within 8 meters of the impact is going to experience a pressure wave of 5PSI, destroying anything within.
So there we go. A fully loaded GTA:V character would instantly die if standing still, or create a 190m^2 zone of destruction if chucked out of a helicopter.
If you have another scientific gaming mystery you want us to examine, drop a comment below with your idea!
Please remember that this is all in jest, The primary purpose of this article was for humor, not any scientific accuracy. Some areas of physics may have been ignored, or left out to enhance the interest and humor of the article.
version
Bit far back, but I think it was version 1.39, thanks for reading!