As someone from the military. I assure you, this is not their worst idea.

I like to imagine that Adam Savage just materializes whenever something fun like this is happening in the desert

My favourite part is where Adam Savage appears out of nowhere, as if desert explosion tests just summon him 😂

Wish there was a point in the experiment that the goal switch from accuracy to "lets see how big crater get from dropping really high" and proceed to have everyone really far away until it lands.

Genuinely shocked at the scant amount of forethought that went into something with a budget this large.

The fact that they didn't seem to anticipate that a weight dangling from a helicopter on a tether would be swinging all over the place is ... odd to say the least.

I find it funny that Adam Savage is in this video, and it's not even mentioned. I'm just used to him being the one talking to a camera out in the desert, busting a myth.

I'm shocked at how little thought went into properly testing this idea, especially when compared to the amount of money and number of people involved.

Impressive how little research went into this.

This seemed like a "lot of money, not a lot of thought" video. No one thought about how the rods were going to hit their targets until the day of?? Fins are a bare minimum, you could have even done some gps-based bang bang course corrections with an arduino or something. Of course then you are basically designing a precision guided bomb like Mark Rober noted in his egg drop video.

I'm a little shocked that no smaller-scale testing was done prior to the full-scale "helicopters and sand castle professionals" part was brought out. A drone with a piece of rebar would have taught you a lot about the need for targeting apparatus, the lack of fins, etc.

Kinda surprised that nobody realized that this was never going to work. Id expect this from a Mr. Beast video but not Veritasium. Usually he simulates outcomes with equations before going into the field to test.

This is about as good a test for rods from god as me sitting on my roof dropping marbles onto army men in my front yard.

There are so many errors in the design and execution of this experiment, that one would almost think it was intentional.

There are two main problems I see with Derek's setup: 1) Dropping the payload from what is effectively a pendulum is going to make it nearly impossible to aim, and 2) as Adam pointed out, you need some fins on the rods if you want them to land perpendicular to the ground.

I find it hard to believe the engineering problems couldn't be worked out. At one time it was thought you couldn't hit a missile with another missile.

Honestly I'm surprised about how elementary this set up was

Pretty much all they proved is that they put minimal thought into this and that it's hard to drop things precisely from a helicopter.

I appreciate the honesty and I understand why you had to post it. But brother if you had spent an hour with a ballistic expert enquiring about a good way to showcase this it would have worked a million times better. And like everyone is suggesting, dropping the biggest weight from the heighest height you can just to see the crater size would be a much more enjoyable video than this. I won't think less of your content from one failure and i'm sure it's a very complicated process but this one felt really like a lack of forethought

Im an engineering student and my first thought was to add fins to these rods, with a bunch of other stuff that would easily make them way more accurate. This whole thing feels very under prepared.