Spent Shells Shower



One way to emphasize More Dakka, or at least how powerful a weapon, is showing all the bullet casings being ejected out of that gun. Expect this to be noisy.

Anime and Manga

 * Rebuild of Evangelion: Unit 01 fires an Eva-sized gatling gun at Shamshel, raining immense spent cartridges on the street below -- one of which flattens a car.
 * In Victory Gundam there's a scene in which a civilian, caught in a battle between two mechs, is killed when a mecha-sized empty casing (coming with several others from a mecha-sized machine gun) falls on her head.
 * The intro to Gungrave features this in a couple of places.
 * Shows up in Hellsing at times.
 * Shows up in the first episode of Elfen Lied.
 * In the first episode of Gunslinger Girl, the audience is treated/subjected to a small shower of golden 5.7x28mm shells seemingly originating from the female protagonist's groin.
 * Which would be because the P90 ejects its shell casings straight down. Making this screen an example of Shown Their Work.
 * The Area 88 OVA opens with a shot of 20mm shells falling from Shin's F-8E Crusader as he tears up a column of enemy tanks.
 * Deliberately averted in the original Appleseed manga. Shiro's notes indicate that he thought it would look cool if the E-SWAT members weapons sent spent casings flying everywhere, but he felt that would conflict with the professional nature of their missions, and thus their weapons would have attached pouches to catch spent casings and keep their operation neat.
 * In Space Runaway Ideon, someone on the street gets clobbered by a giant shell casing from a Humongous Mecha-wielded gun.
 * The Black★Rock Shooter TV anime absolutely relishes on this.

Comic Books

 * Gorsky and Butch recreate the Matrix helicopter scene. Then it shows a street sweeper on the street below, cussing at the sight of the raining shells.

Film

 * Hot Shots! Part Deux had that scene where the hero became nearly buried in his spent shells. Played for Laughs, of course.
 * The Matrix: when Neo saves Morpheus or any other time they use guns.
 * Gets taken to extreme in the CGI battle for Zion in The Matrix Revolutions.
 * Black Hawk Down: when a helo's minigun is being fired above a soldier on the ground. One (hot) shell actually falls down the soldier's shirt, burning him a bit. Which makes it a Deconstruction.
 * Also Truth in Television. A fresh hot shell casing down your collar burns pretty much like you'd expect a hot piece of metal falling down your shirt would.
 * Wanted: during Bullet Time at the end.
 * The Gods Must Be Crazy: when a group of African guerrillas are shooting at a helicopter, one is annoyed by the man next to him, whose submachine gun is throwing its shells into the first's head.
 * Watchmen: Nite Owl's ship has a minigun, and a compartment in the floor for catching spent shells.

Live-Action TV
"Adam: I'm no, like, crime scene investigator, but I strongly suspect that someone's been firing a gun in the vicinity of this car."
 * MythBusters: After blowing a fish barrel to hell with a minigun, there's a huge pile of spent shells.


 * And that one time they were trying to shoot an escape hole through a piece of flooring.
 * Sons of Guns does this from time to time.
 * This makes an appearance in the Stargate SG-1 movie Ark of Truth. During the course of the movie Replicators get unleashed on the Odyssey. A group of airmen guard the entrance to the Asgard so Carter and Marks can find the command to shut the Replicators down. By the time they do, the hall way is covered in spent shells and Replicator blocks.

Music

 * Disturbed's video for "Indestructible" features footage of this, presumably from a Gatling gun.

Video Games

 * The minigun on the Warthog in Halo.
 * The Heavy's minigun(s) in Team Fortress 2 notably ejects shells out of a solid plane of the model.
 * Ghost Hunter the Glock can be fired fast enough to cause an obvious fountain of shiny brass shells. Shows off the graphics, but the Glock is the emergency weapon, so it's not a display of More Dakka.
 * The Vulcan cannon in the obscure freeware game SUAVE.
 * Used as an attack by the fifth boss in the Shoot'Em Up game 19XX. After firing out its rapid machine cannon weapon, it ejects out the shells forward, at your character! You will die if you get hit by them, but thankfully, they are destructible. (Starts at 4:13 here)
 * StarCraft II: When General Warfield is desperately holding a position against the Zerg and this trope is used to show exactly how many different kinds of fucked he and his men are, since with all the dakka they are generating it isn't doing a damn thing against the Zerg.
 * Max Payne: The Ingrams empty their 50 round magazines in about 1.5 seconds, at most, pouring brass onto the ground. And you can fire two at a time.
 * Cortex Command has some weapons that eject lots of casings, some weapons that eject very large casings, and some weapons that eject lots of very large casings. If a character stays in the same position and shoots for long enough, it's entirely possible to make quite large piles of empty shell casings - that you can then walk on.
 * Streets of Rage final boss is Mr. X, apparently the only guy in the city to have a firearm, and an impressive tommy-gun at that. Killing him sends his corpse to the ground in a hail of casings.
 * In Mass Effect 2, the limiting factor on the guns' ammunition isn't the ammunition itself but the heat sinks that allow them to keep firing without melting. Whenever Shepard reloads he ejects a spent heat sink that looks remarkably like a red-hot shell casing.
 * Deconstructed in Zaeed's loyalty mission where a spent heat sink ignites a fuel trail and causes an explosion.
 * Also played straight in the case of the machine guns on some vehicle/vehicle sized enemies - the Viper gunship, YMIR mech and geth Prime all have spent casings. These are apparently lots of heatsinks being rapidly ejected, as heavy weapons load multiple sinks with each reloard.
 * Battle Garegga has a playable ship whose special weapon is More Dakka, accompanied by spent shell casings that also cause massive damage to enemies.

Web Comics

 * One Turn Signals on a Land Raider strip has a Land Raider crew tricked into firing their Assault Cannons with the top hatch open. A second later, the crew has been buried by a pile of shell casings that fills the tank.

Web Original

 * Red vs. Blue had this as a result of being a Halo based Machinima (the creators claim that they didn't notice the casing until they actually began filming).
 * The "Red" Trailer for RWBY ends with a shower of spent shells dropping out of the air around Ruby.

Western Animation

 * Beast Wars: Rhinox makes a pretty epic pile of spent shells at his feet while trying to cover Rattrap and Dinobot (who are, of course, fighting) to get in the base.
 * Samurai Jack: in "Robo-Samurai vs Mondo Bot", Mondo Bot fires its Machine Guns at Robo-Samurai.
 * Sym-Bionic Titan: when the H.M.E.R. uses its arm gatling guns.

Real Life
"Sitting in a Humvee while the machine gun on top is tearing a seam into hell is an experience - hot brass and links raining down into the passenger compartment like a Skittles commercial for infantrymen."
 * From the book Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq:

"''I'm no, like, crime scene investigator, but I strongly suspect that someone's been firing a gun in the vicinity of this car."
 * The AC-130u Spooky II has a 25X137mm Equalizer Gatling gun. Think about it, a .30 caliber (7.62X51mm) minigun creates a shower of spent casings. Lampshaded by Adam Savage-


 * A 25mm shell is many times the size of a .30 cal shell, and it's being fired from a Gatling gun. There have been many stories of crew members having to shovel away spent shells.
 * Averted with most modern jet aircraft, however, as spent brass could be sucked into the engine and trash it.
 * This is known as a "double-ended feed system" - that is, the weapon system returns spent casings/jammed rounds back into the magazine.
 * Another reason for retaining the spent casings is that it assists in maintaining the center of gravity of the aircraft.