Dear Bethesda,
Hi!
It’s me!
Austin!
And, sadly, this is probably the last letter I’ll be writing to you.
That is, until you release your next game.
I’ve run the gamut of topics, from the absurdity of laser weapons, to how to build your own
mininuke.
But you know, The Elder Scrolls has a bit of a dark spot in my topic list; mostly because I didn’t
think there was any SCIENCE! to be found.
And yet, just last week, while I was streaming Skyrim for funsies, someone asked me, “Hey,
Austin, what’s the SCIENCE of the giant’s ability to launch you into space?”
You know what I’m talking about, Bethesda.
It’s that charming little...glitch?
I think?
You know, it’s hard to tell with your games what’s a glitch and what’s a feature,
since the two seem to eternally be inextricably intertwined.
Regardless, almost every Skryim player on the planet is familiar with the sting to their
ego that’s felt when they first see a Giant outside of Whiterun and they say to themselves,
“I can take this.
I’m a master gamer just as much as I’m a masturbator.”
And they take those first fateful steps into antagonizing something capable of knocking
dragons out of the sky with their slender-yet-toned, hairy, delicious bodies.
And then, before you know it, you’re dancing in the sky, hundreds of feet above the air,
with a full view of Skyrim, asking yourself “How the fuck did I get here?”
But no. I can’t.
As much as I want to, Bethesda, I can’t nitpick this.
It’s not fun.
It’s not SCIENCE!
There’s absolutely no way, no POSSIBLE way I could do an entire video on this subject,
over analyzing what is effectively less than a second’s worth of game mechanics, researching
high-level force-transfer physics, gravity, and...oh my god.
OH MY GOD.
ARE WE DOING THIS?
I THINK WE’RE DOING THIS.
BETHESDA.
LET’S GO OUT WITH A MOTHER FUCKING BANG.
Somewhere in Skyrim, a giant slams his club down onto the ground, and suddenly, a poor,
defenseless bandit or Dovahkiin is careening through the sky, questioning their life choices.
You know, if this were something more straight-forward, like the giant swinging their club UPWARD,
for instance, this would be an open-and-shut case.
Just plug in the amount energy needed to fling a body up into the sky, hit enter, and kaboom!
221,130 joules!
But this isn’t a simple math equation, oh no.
This giant is slamming their club into the GROUND, and the end result is one person very
high up in the air.
How the FUCK does this even happen?
Well, before we can answer that, we’re going to have to gather the basics: how high are
you getting launched by this giant monstrosity?
And how quickly?
The answer to this question is trickier than you may realize, but I think we can do it.
Are you ready?
I’m ready.
Let’s do this.
As with everything in Skyrim, the key to all of our questions lies in one thing: horses.
You see, the horses in skyrim are modeled very closely after Clydesdales, and as such
are the closest thing to an empirical ruler we get in the entire world of Tamriel.
But horses alone won’t be enough.
We’re also going to have to murder a lot, a LOT of Bandits.
Eventually, we get lucky, and using the POWER OF TECHNOLOGY we can estimate the speed at
which these giants fling their poor victims into the heavens, as well as how high they ascend.
Using the trees as a reference plus a few other fun tricks up my sleeve, we can determine
that a mortal human is flung upward at a peak speed of 76 meters-per-second, to a terrifyingly
precarious height of 215 meters in just over 5 and a half seconds.
And that, my dear lovelies, presuming the average person weighs 75 kilograms, gets us
a nice and cozy figure of 221,130 joules.
The total kinetic energy of a car driving down the highway.
Neat!
Now, this alone is quite a significant amount of energy to be delivering with a direct strike
to a club, but this is NOT how these people are getting launched into the sky.
The Giants are hitting the ground with their clubs, which changes absolutely everything
about how we need to figure this out, and turns it from a simple in-and-out math formula
to one of the most headache-inducing mess I’ve ever had to unravel, but fear not,
I was up to the task.
So let’s talk about waves.
Waves are all over the place.
Soundwaves.
Ocean waves.
Light, or electromagnetic waves; at the end of the day, they’re all the same, although
their mediums are different: waves are “force carriers,” not “things.”
Waves move energy from point a to point b and beyond.
Like with sound; sound is just pressure waves caused by vibrations moving from the location
they’re created to your ears, which absorbs the vibrations, and sends information to your
brain as “sound.”
And waves are the only way a Giant could launch you into the sky by hitting the ground.
A giant has to hit the ground at point A with enough energy that, by the time it reaches
you at Point B, you’re flung into the air at 76 meters-per-second, over 170 miles per
hour.
How this is done is...complicated.
I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details.
Here’s what you need to know: waves have a few basic components:
Wavelength: the physical distance it takes for a wave to complete a full cycle
The Velocity, its speed forward, The Amplitude: the total displacement up and
down, And the frequency: how many times per second
a wave cycle is completed, measured in Hertz.
In order to knock you into the sky, several things have to occur: the wave displacement
has to be hitting you with enough force to actually impart enough kinetic energy into
your body to send you upward; secondly, it has to hit you fast enough to match the speed
you’re heading upward.
This wave is created by hitting the ground.
You can do this right now, actually; just tap your finger against something, and you’re
creating a wave.
Two waves, actually.
First, a physical wave that you can feel if you, say, tap a desk and have your other finger
resting a short distance away; but also the microscopic vibrations in the desk are hitting
the air and creating pressure differentials, making sound waves.
You’ll notice, though, that no matter how hard you hit a table, you barely, BARELY feel
the vibrations in your other finger.
Physical waves dissipate incredibly quickly.
Considering the range of the club attack is approximately one meter, it means we’re
working with a wavelength of approximately two meters in length, enough distance for
force to be imparted into the ground, and for it to travel forward and deliver enough
energy in its peak amplitude upward to turn any poor sap foolish enough to be standing
too close into a Newtonian projectile.
This energy is imparted in just over 1/100th of a second, giving our mega-wave a frequency
of 30 Hertz; relatively low as far as waves are concerned, but don’t fret, the pants-shittingly
terrifying numbers are on their way.
Next we have to talk about soil.
You see, one of the biggest determinants of how efficiently energy is transported is the
medium through which it is flowing.
In this case, soil, and soil.
Is.
A. BITCH.
Thankfully, there’s an entire field of SCIENCE! devoted to studying exactly the sort of thing
we’re talking about: seismology.
In the mid 1970s, seismology, the study of earthquakes, was still a relatively new field,
all things considered, which was first taken seriously after an Earthquake ripped through
Alaska and caused serious, catastrophic damage in 1964.
Ten years after this, some scientists wanted to figure out how terrestrial impacts like
meteors would affect and create seismic waves.
So they dropped a bunch of shit onto the ground and recorded what happened.
Unknown is the amount of cocaine or disco music that fueled this massive investigation,
but regardless I’M ON BOARD.
What they learned is that...well, predicting and modeling seismic waves from impacts is
fucking HARD, because the ground is notoriously unpredictable.
Soil is almost never an even density, and even if it is, you can’t control for everything.
There are just far too many variables going into seismic waves.
Seismic waves aren’t even just ONE thing.
There’s p waves, s waves, surface waves, rayleigh waves; too many to count.
But taking what they learned in their experiments, we can get a reasonable facsimile that’ll
do just fine, pig.
Average soil density is 1400 kilograms/cubic meter.
Knowing this, and knowing that our wave has an amplitude of 4 meters, we can ascertain
that a wave moving upward at an amplitude of 4 meters in just under 1/100th of a second
is going to reach a speed of 240 meters-per-second; well within the speed requirements for our
launch into space.
But will it have enough energy?
Oh, you bet your sweet patootie it will.
A wave moving through average soil with a wavelength of 2 meters, a frequency of 30
hertz, a wave VELOCITY of 60 meters-per-second will generate 2.2 gigawatts of power and deliver
more than enough energy into our space cadet, giving enough room for error regarding imperfect
transfers of energy.
BUT this isn’t enough.
For in order to create a wave, energy has to be imparted into the medium carrying the
wave, and it’s here, my dear children, that things finally start to get scary.
A wave carrying 2.2 gigawatts of power will almost entirely dissipate after traveling
15 meters, and would be over in a quarter second, but in this time, truly terrible shit
will have happened.
For one, there’s a giant crater where the club hit the ground.
Ah, the club hitting the ground with enough energy to send a wave of power rippling through
the earth.
This club has to penetrate the earth by four meters in less time than it takes you to blink
and accelerate it to three quarters of the speed of sound.
Taking into account energy inefficiencies, a generous 20%, and we’ve got this giant’s
club hitting the ground with 3 GIGAJOULES of energy.
That’s the kinetic energy carried by a Boeing 767 at top speed SLAMMING into the ground
and imparting all of its energy in an instant.
All from this comparatively tiny club.
In order to pull that off the damned thing’d have to weigh 5200 kilograms and have a density
three times that of osmium, the densest goddamn thing on our planet that isn’t on the inside
of a fucking star.
Holy shit those giants must be ripped.
But wait, there’s more!
Tell them what’s behind Door #2!
Remember earlier when I said impacts don’t create just one kind of wave, they also produce
another?
Sound waves.
You see, at sea level, this ground, oscilating at 30 hertz and slamming into the surrounding
atmosphere, displacing atoms by 4 meters in mere moments, creates a pressure differential
three times what is normal.
A 300% increase in air pressure in 1/100th of a second.
628067 of pressure wave would shove its way outward in all directions from the point of
impact of the club.
What, that doesn’t mean anything to you?
What if I said that was 177 decibels, louder than the loudest sound ever recorded--well,
sort of.
You see, the “ever recorded” is kind of important, because that was the sound registered
over 100 miles away from the source.
The source?
A violent volcanic explosion at Krakatoa, which produced a shockwave so intense that
it burst people’s eardrums a hundred miles away.
IF, by some miracle a giant missed or you survived, your eardrums would be slammed with
a pressure wave they were never meant to survive.
Every eardrum within 25 meters would shredded like pork in a sandwich.
If a giant launched me into the sky at my home in Champaign, Illinois, the Yebbas would
be able to hear it in Florida, Walter White could hear it in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Hank Green in Missoula Montana, and every ship lost in the bermuda triangle would be
like “What the fuck was that sound?”
THAT was the sound of a Giant ruining my day, and THAT was the sound of me showing you just
how utterly fucking terrifying Skyrim giants are, and how CLEARLY, demonstrably, terrifyingly
overpowered they are.
How on earth they haven’t taken over Tamriel by now is beyond me.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
It’s wintertime, I’m a YouTuber, and I have a newborn, which means I haven’t left
my apartment in days.
I’ve actually lost track of how many days it’s been.
I need a haircut.
I need a shower.
Don’t ask me why my hermitude is keeping me from showering, that’s MY BUSINESS.
Anyway, I’ve been stuck watching TV on the couch while feeding in the middle of the night,
which means I’m burning through episodes of things so quickly I can’t keep up.
Thankfully, there’s Crunchyroll, and thankfully there’s Yuri On Ice.
Granted, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t, you know.
A yuri.
But this is good too.
The cool thing about Crunchyroll is that they work closely with the people who actually
make the shows you love, and give them a fair cut for letting them host the videos.
You can head on over to crunchyroll.com/shoddy to start a 30 day free trial right now.
If you use the link and become a member, you get these shows in full 1080p HD without ads.
That’s crunchyroll.com/shoddycast, which tells ‘em you came from us.
Thank you everyone for watching my episode about GIANTS!
I’m so happy I was able to do this, I’ve been wanting to do a SCIENCE!
On Skyrim for AGES, but I haven’t been able to think of a topic.
Sadly, though I wish I could credit the Twitch user who asked me the question, I can’t
remember who it was.
Also, I have some news: this is my last SCIENCE video on Shoddycast.
Don’t cry!
There’s still SCIENCE!
It’s moved over to...wait, should I keep you in suspense?
Nah, I’ll just tell you: I’m joining the Game Theorists!
This is pretty bitter-sweet for me, but never fear: I’ll still be making videos on this
channel from time to time.
Like a Skyrim War video that was like my Fallout one.
That...will come some day.
I’m sure.
Some day....