• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    5·
    8 months ago

    Gotta love the movies where someone is falling only to be caught by a superhero who has accelerated to ludicrous speeds to catch the fallen and intercepts their trajectory at 90° just before hitting the ground. So the victims goes from 150mph down to some crazy speed at a 90° vector to their original path after being slammed into by superhero.

    They’re so dead.

    But the superhero Suspension of Disbelief Field extends to secondary characters in the story.

    • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      Transformer movies were awful with this. Human falling hundreds of feet to the pavement. But wait! They’ll hit a giant steel hand instead! Much better. Soft.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        8 months ago

        I guess technically this could work if the robot lowers the hand at the same speed they were falling and then decelerates gently, but I bet that’s not what happens in these movies.

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      8 months ago

      You’re not wrong but there is one thing: hitting the ground is an instantaneous impact with a hard surface. Being swooped in some direction is a relatively slower process - the swooper is softer than concrete, and the change in velocity is spread over a longer period of time (even if it’s still “instantaneous” to the casual observer, it can be an “instant” 100 times longer than ground impact).

      It’s like landing on a mattress vs a hard floor - from a high enough height both are deadly, but I’d still pick the mattress.

      • Khrux@ttrpg.networkEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you’re falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.

        12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you’d only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.

    • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
      0·
      8 months ago

      Isn’t this the story of the original Gwen Stacy? Spiderman tries to save her, but does exactly this and the force on her body kills her anyway.

      It’s been a long, long time since I have read the comics but iirc, it was a defining point in the spiderman canon.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        It wasn’t originally. It was essentially the scene from the first Spider Man movie where Goblin makes Spidey swoop in to save her, but she was already dead.

        They retconned it later to make it so Spidey killed her, which is a better story.

        • kronisk @lemmy.world
          1·
          8 months ago

          It’s the other way around, actually.

          In The Amazing Spider-Man #125 (Oct. 1973), Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas wrote in the letters column that “it saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey’s webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn’t have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she still would certainly have perished. There was no way out.” Source

          The comic (#121) is ambiguous though. There is really no way for the reader to know whether she was dead before her neck was snapped, Green Goblin certainly seems to think so (but he is hardly a reliable source). But snapping her neck certainly would have killed her anyway.

  • Hereforpron2@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Largely true, but it’s crazy what the difference of just a few feet of slowing down does (rather than zero feet of abrupt stopping) to acceleration forces. The crumple zone on a car only has to be 3 feet long to turn a 60mph crash from a fatality to a horrific injury.

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      Crumple Zone is the superhero we really need here. With thick arms and soft bones he can rush to the scene and turn sudden death into mere horrific imjuries.

  • sarchar@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    This begs the question for me - at terminal falling speed, what’s the fastest you can decelerate to 0 and not sustain injury? And given that, how much more distance would you need to move?

    Maybe a superhero can catch you, decelerate you to 0 over 3 inches and that’s good enough?

    • birbs@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 months ago

      Human terminal velocity is roughly 56 m/s. Let’s say our superhero wants to decelerate the person at 10G, which should be survivable for a short period. That would be 0.6 seconds of deceleration over 48 m. That’s a short time but quite a long distance, let’s slow down faster:

      20G -> 0.28 seconds, 24 m.

      30G -> 0.19 seconds, 16 m.

      50G -> 0.11 seconds, 9.6 m.

      100G -> 0.057 seconds, 4.79 m.

      200G -> 0.029 seconds, 2.45 m.

      5000G -> 0.0011 seconds, 3.6 inches.

      A 40 mph car crash in a modern car into a solid wall gives around 15G.

      F1 driver David Purley survived a 180G crash in 1977.

      In short, I don’t recommend catching someone with 3 inches to spare.

      • Toine@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        8 months ago

        Something is wrong with your distance formula by a factor of 4 (you should have D=1/2 * V_0^2 / a) . Not that it changes anything in your conclusions.