There's that scene in Iron Man, in the desert, in which Tony Stark's first attempt at a suit runs out of power and crashes into the sand after a fall from a decent altitude. The first time I saw that, I thought, "They just killed the hero in the first 10 minutes of the movie!" My mind raced, trying to figure out how they were going to make this work. That was way too many g's. He was surely very dead. Was he not actually in the suit? Was the story going to focus on a protege of some sort? Was there a clone or twin or something?
When he walked away from the wreck, I was disappointed. But I knew then with certainty what sort of physics engine we were using.
I've long hypothesized that a normal human from the "superhero universes" dropped in our world would still seem bizarrely sturdy, if not actually superstrong.
Another similar one that really bothers me is Oliver Sansweet's fall in The Incredibles. He attempts suicide by leaping off of a building, gets about twelve stories down, then is "caught" by Mr. Incredible leaping at him and re-entering the building he jumped from. Mr. Incredible exerts enough force to instantly stop his downward descent and enough force to also give him at least a good 20mph horizonally, probably more, and from this Oliver gets... a neck brace. That catch should have killed him, too. Yes, the maximum acceleration might have been smaller than an impact with concrete since Mr. Incredible could give him a very small buffer with his arms... though I see no evidence he does. Mr. Incredible impacts Oliver and within two frames tops Oliver has matched Mr. Incredible's velocity. Mr. Incredible also appears to have incredible mass, as he does at several other points in the movie, as Oliver's impact appears to leave his trajectory entirely unaffected. He seems to mass at least 3 or 4 tons, probably more.
Oliver is an incredibly sturdy guy by our real-world standards.
They're probably just simulating everything in HERO system, where an "average person" will survive a collision with a car (the car probably won't) and can easily survive two gunshots to the head.
Well, it's not really something you can turn off. When I saw Tony Stark crash in the sand, the effect on me was very much the same as if I'd seen his head disintegrated by a shotgun blast. I was viscerally sure he was dead.
I mean, I know it's a superhero movie, and I still wince at the force of the impact. It's like watching someone get hit by a speeding bus -- only the average superhero would destroy the bus and slow down over its length. The sand actually stops him.
As long as people in a movie are consistently more able to withstand blunt force, I don't have any problem with it. I'm only bothered if it's some kind of halfassed plot convenience that's forgotten immediately.
Comic book physics are a little bit different, and I'm fine with that.
The first section is a really roundabout and overly technical way of thinking about the force exerted on each person, and as a result, even gets it completely wrong:
> The sixth person in the human chain (the top person in a chain of six) would have to hold up a force of 660 pounds. This assumes an average human-chain person weight of 130 pounds
No. A chain of 5 would be a force of 650 pounds for the person on top (only the hand they're grasping with matters, the force of the chain against a link's ankle is pretty irrelevant, the human body has pretty good tensile strength and can probably lift quite a bit before getting dislocated joints, etc); a chain of 6 would be a force of 780 pounds.
This isn't rocket science, and really is so intuitive that this explanation is just beating around the bush. Here's how you really calculate it:
> The force exerted on the top person is the total weight of the chain.
The end. A chain of two 130-pound people exerts the exact same force as a "chain" of one 260-pound person.
For the same reason it ends at 700: because there are no data points outside the range [100, 700] so he can crop the chart without losing any useful data.
Not the same thing at all. You're losing the relative scale, and the benefit in this case is minor. If you're trying to emphasize near-term changes in a range with a very high base (e.g. stock fluctuations) this might be justified if you make the broken scale clear, but it's probably better in such a case to make the graph into log change from baseline (which is how, for example, yahoo charts stock prices).
In this case, for a very minor space saving and extra work the -- borderline useless -- graph is made misleading.
Interesting analysis, but this is just the initial shot. There is lots of CG work ahead, and I would be surprised if this kind of thing is not included in the effects necessary to make it more realistic.
Cartoonists would exaggerate a person's response when they're, for example, hit by a mallet, or kicked hard. This is especially true in anime. In the real world, a person isn't bent in half from a kick, they're lightly dented; but, to emphasize the power of the kick, they'll bend the person in half. Why can't this same thing occur in movies with real actors? Perhaps they thought this bend would better convey the motion of flying, rather than a bunch of people just hanging in the air. If they were just hanging in the air, the average view would think something along the lines of "wow, that's a bad green-screen effect" or "huh... they're not moving, they're just going straight up..." vs "they're being carried to safety by Ironman! and they're having to cross distance to do it!"
On the flipside, characters without any superhuman durability/healing will take no meaningful damage from things that would cripple a real human or at least take a few weeks to recover from.
Humans aren't very good at falling, getting thrown into walls, being knocked out with a blow to the head and so on.
well, it's a superhero show, so just say human chaining ability is part of his superpower. his suit makes little metal tendrils that reinforce the structure or something
When he walked away from the wreck, I was disappointed. But I knew then with certainty what sort of physics engine we were using.