Dear Blizzard,
Hi!
Are you mad that I’m doing two Overwatch videos in a row?
Well I don’t give a shit.
I do what I want!
Plus, I let you off easily last week by focusing on something pedantic that, honestly, doesn’t
even fucking matter.
Which, given by the steeper-than-usual like-to-dislike ratio, annoyed more than its fair share of
people.
Ah well.
I don’t care.
I don’t care at all.
Nope.
I’m...no, YOU’RE CRYING.
Anyway.
I’m writing to you today Blizzard because, well.
It’s finally time.
It’s finally time to talk about my least favorite character: Roadhog.
Now, I know, I know, you’re thinking to yourself: Roadhog?
What the hell?
And, granted, Roadhog is no Mei.
And there’s definitely a unique kind of terror that you only feel as a support character
when you round a corner and come face-to-face with that little she-devil, you catch her
eye, and she sprays you down while your body slowly freezes to a stop while you struggle
with futility to escape and she looks you right in the eyes with that adorable little
face with an evil little fucking smile as she plasters the walls with your brains by
shoving an icicle through your temple.
In fact, there are a few such situations of hopelessness you learn to instinctively fear
as an Overwatch player.
Whenever McCree tells you what time of the day it is, whenever D.va laughs and says “nerf
this” and you have NOwhere to run, whenever you get pinned by fucking Reinhardt, or you
hear Genji shout some bullshit in Japanese, you know you’re going to have a bad fucking
time.
But for me personally?
There’s nothing, nothing, NOTHING that compares to when you see a Roadhog half a mile away
and he starts lumbering toward you.
“Oh fuck, he’s after me!
NO.
GET AWAY” and then his fucking, what is that, a fucking rusty meat hook?
Whatever the fuck it is, he hurls it approximately 5000 feet, through walls, and by god that
damned hook will always fucking grab you and rip you away from what you’re doing until
you’re face-to-face with this giant meatmonster of a man.
And if he’s being played by any player worth their salt, there’s a 95% chance he’s
going to instantly kill you with a devastating headshot and meathook to the face.
Sigh.
I’m sorry.
It just--it stresses me the fuck out more than anything.
And I swear his goddamn hook recharges instantly.
There’s nothing that freaks me out more than a Roadhog who has a raging hateboner
for me as the healer and makes it their personal mission to take me down.
And while I do think that it’s bullshit that the damned thing seems like it can travel
through walls, whatever.
I’ll live with it.
I’m not going to whine about him being broken.
Well.
Not in my videos.
What happens between me and monitor is nobody’s business but ours.
ANYWAY.
Folk have been asking me to take a close look at Roadhog for a while now, and since I meant
to last week but got distracted by bullshit that didn’t mean anything, I figure I owe
you a real topic on something awesome.
SO: Roadhog’s signature technique is the ability to throw a giant hook across a great
distance, grab a motherfucker, and whip them to himself fast-as-fuck like a fat Scorpion
from Mortal Kombat.
Also why the fuck is Kombat spelled with a K?
What the actual fuck.
Seriously?
Is this some 1990s bullshit idea of how to be edgy, like, when everbody was spelling
extreme like “X-TREME YEAH.”
Where was I?
Oh, right Roadhog’s hook-thingie.
Yeah.
There’s no character he can’t yank away.
Bastions, D.vas, fucking everything.
I mean, how strong do you have to be in order to one-arm a fucking Mech across a vast distance?
Let’s figure this the fuck out!
Unfortunately, we can’t.
Sorry.
But we have no idea what Bastion or D.va are made out of.
Mech suits don’t really exist to compare to, nor do, what is Bastion?
A drone tank thing?
Anyway.
Since there’s no mass or weight recorded anywhere for these characters, the best we
could do is a big fat bubkis.
We can’t even necessarily presume that they’re made out of steel.
For all we know it’s an ultralight, super-durable ceramic or plastic polymer future nonsense.
Nah, we’re boned.
Well.
Sort of.
There’s actually something else we can look at instead of D.va or Bastion.
Something we have numbers for, and something that is truly, TRULY massive: Roadhog.
Sure, from a canonical perspective, there’s no possible way Roadhog would be able to hook
another Roadhog, minus some sort of backdoor cloning facility nonsense nobody told me about.
But mechanically, this is something Roadhog is totally capable of.
Now, about a month ago, I foolishly said that Roadhog probably weighed about 300-and-some
pounds, which, at the time seemed to be a totally reasonable assumption.
Of course, I didn’t realize that Blizzard actually tells us exactly how much Roadhog
weighs in one of their cinematics.
550 pounds, or roughly 250 kilograms.
Hot damn, that’s a heavy man.
So first things first: can a 250 kilogram person actually budge another 250 kilogram
person?
Because if not, it doesn’t matter what the heck D.va or Bastion or whatever are made
out of, because Roadhog will immediately be complete bullshit.
And since we have a lot of SCIENCE to do today, I’m going to spare dangling you on the reveal
of this one: Roadhog would totally, TOTALLY be capable of dragging another person of equal
mass to himself, no problem.
What we’re essentially looking at is tug-of-war, except in this case, the target isn’t really
resisting, since they’re caught off guard, presumably because they’re stunned by a
goddam IRON HOOK embedding itself in their flesh.
The physics of tug-of-war are fucking complicated.
Randall Munroe can back me up on this one.
There are a lot of forces acting on one another at different moments, from angular momentum,
friction, and fucking just...everything.
Tug-of-war is rarely won by raw power or weight anyway.
Believe it or not, tug-of-war, not unlike real war, is won by coordination and psychology.
Professional tug-of-war teams aren’t just comprised of folk pulling on the rope.
They also have members called “drivers” whose sole job it is to stand on the sides
and shout commands to their team, using motions to coordinate their pulling, gives commands
to hang, which means to dig your heels in and pull back as far as you can go, increasing
your angle of resistance up until you’re almost flat against the ground.
This makes a team almost impossible to budge, and is designed to tire out the entire team.
If and when the opposition is worn out, a good driver gets his team to go gung ho and
tear the other team up off the ground.
At the end of the day, tug-of-war is a game of skill, as much as it may seem otherwise.
Since Roadhog is unlikely to meet any resistance from a fellow Roadhog, he can totally move
him.
But this is only half, maybe even a third of the equation.
Lets get deeper into this topic.
Deeper.
Just, all the way in there.
Lets look at this hook chain of Roadhog’s first.
This bad boy has a range of 20 fucking meters, and when first thrown, it covers that distance
in under half a second at a blistering speed of 63 meters-per-second.
Phew.
That’s as fast as the world’s fastest rollercoaster, the Formula Rossa.
After covering this distance, it hooks the target,
and yodhog ra-
Yodhog?
After covering this distance, it hooks the target,
and Roadhog yanks it back to himself.
It returns somewhat slower, unsurprisingly, reaching only 40-meters-per-second in just
half a second.
Still, that’s pretty damned fast.
That’s more or less how fast you’d be going if you jumped out of an airplane without
a parachute.
Anyway.
Before y’all try to point out that Roadhog appears to have some sort of winch on his
back like that’s doing all the work for him, let me just stop you right there.
Imma let you finnish, but regardless of whether or not Roadhog’s muscles or the winch is
doing the pulling, he’s still going to need to be strong enough to counteract the force
of the winch, or else what would happen instead of his enemy getting pulled toward him, Roadhog
and his enemy would both get dragged across the ground and crash into one another in the
middle.
So just stop it with that nonsense.
Pulling 250 kilograms of manmeat across 20 meters is no easy feat, let alone doing so
at near terminal atmospheric velocity.
Before we can even look at whether or not a person would be strong enough to do this,
we have to figure out: could a chain even withstand these kinds of forces?
I mean, really, could they?
Chains are surprisingly easy to break, believe it or not.
That’s why you tend to see more cables used in places where rugged durability is an absolute
necessity.
The amount of steel of the same quality formed into a continuous rope is way, way less likely
to break than a chain.
Why is this?
Well, the simple, tl;dr answer is because, with a chain, all of the force is focused
on a much smaller area, where the links connect to one another, whereas with a cable tension
is much more evenly spread out, and isn’t focused on specific, small points.
But, alas, Roadhog has a chain.
Shit.
But ah, not all chains are created equal.
Chains are manufactured with different grades, with different tensile strengths.
Higher grades are of course more expensive, but if you’re a badass who definitely wants
to do their hard work with a chain instead of cable for sheer intimidation factor, price
is no fucking object.
Tensile strength is the amount of resistance a material has to tension, which is pulling
forces.
This is opposed to impact strength, which is its resistance to getting hit with this,
shear strength, and compressive strength, and probably a thousand different others.
Fucking engineers man.
They think of everything.
Anyway, we just need the one, tensile strength.
Tension is spread out evenly throughout a material.
Well, in a perfect world it is, anyway.
For our purposes, it doesn’t matter that much.
We need to figure out exactly how much force is getting exerted on this chain.
And in order to do that, we need to do some basic-ass physics.
A 250 kilogram roadhog moves from Point A to Point B, accelerating from 0 meters-per-second
to 40 in half a second.
How fast is Roadhog’s average acceleration, and how many Newtons of force does a chain
pulling him from Point A to Point B experience?
Be sure to show your work.
What?
You don’t wanna do it?
But I...I made the sheet.
FINE.
I’ll do EVERYTHING, like always.
This is actually really, really simple.
Force in Newtons is simply mass time acceleration.
Acceleration is velocity divided by time.
Doing this gives us an acceleration of 80 meters-per-second-squared, which gives us
a nice, clean force of 20,000 Newtons, or 20 kilonewtons.
So we just need to find a chain that can withstand 20 kilonewtons of force and then we--AHAH!
Not so fast, youngster!
This isn’t your High School physics class!
This is, like, your community college physics class!
You know what else has mass?
Our chain.
We absolutely can’t forget to factor in the weight of any chain we pick, since that’s
going to add to the force.
Now, this can be a bit tricky, as different grades of chain at different sizes all have
different weights.
And while their masses aren’t negligible, luckily for us they don’t add THAT Much
force.
About a thousand Newtons for a Grade 80 chain that’s 9/32 of an inch thick, which, conveniently,
has a tensile breaking resistance of over 61 kilonewtons, over three times the tensile
force our chain is going to be experiencing.
Awesome!
So far, so good.
Chain that won’t crack, check.
And tossing a chain this heavy would take a massive 4000 newtons.
This is a lot, but it’s the kind of forces bodybuilders experience during a competition,
so it’s within the realm of feasibility.
Of course this leads us to our next big, big problem.
Force.
These forces are astronomical.
Well.
Maybe not astronomical.
Terrestrial, for sure, but extreme.
The instant Roadhog yanks that chain back, over 21 thousand newtons are going to surge
through that chain, dragging the person on the other end over to him.
While the chain does seem as though it will probably hold together without a problem,
can a human being even exert this kind of force on something?
Enter Louis Cyr, the strongest fucking man in recorded history.
This dude was a motherfucking badass.
You know, when I looked up “strongest person in history,” I expected it to be someone
from the modern era.
I figured that, clearly, with all the modern technological and medical advances, we’d
have perfected and streamlined strongness.
The things is, it turns out, being strong is an old-as-fuck practice among humanity.
You just gotta lift heavy shit.
And then lift heavier shit.
And just keep doing that until you die.
Nowadays strongness isn’t really a valuable survival attribute, at least not in Western
Industrialized Nations.
Hell, even the military, who are professional killers, aren’t a strength-based organization.
Sure, it’s important to be strong, but a firearm is what does the killing, not, you
know, ripping someone into two pieces.
And few in history were ever as good at being strong as Louis Cyr.
Born in the fucking 19th century, in CANADA no less, this dude is a certified badass.
A lot of his feats were totally overblown, but solid, reliable records can verify that
he definitely lifted over 500 pounds using just his finger and carried 18 dudes on a
platform weighing almost 2000 fucking kilograms.
This man was fucking incredible.
And kinda cute, too.
So if anybody in history could yank a Roadhog across 20 yards in half a second, it’s Cyr,
right?
Well...unfortunately not.
At least not at these speeds.
You see, accelerating at 80 meters-per-second squared, this chain-and-person would be experiencing
over 8 Gs and feel as though it weighed over 2200 kilograms, or over 4800 pounds, well
over Cyr’s recorded limit of strength.
So close.
SO.
CLOSE.
And it doesn’t end there.
There’s the ballistic energy of the chain to consider.
When thrown, it blitzes through the air at 60-meters-per second and strikes whoever the
target is.
Weighing over 21 kilograms, this is like getting hit by a small car.
This chain would rip through flesh and bone with easy, and it’s entirely likely that
it would leave whoever it hit paralyzed forever, if not dead outright.
Of course, we have already established in our punching episode that Overwatch members
have superhuman bones.
And since they seem to be able to withstand Lucio’s nuclear-weapon-strength sound gun,
I’m guessing it’s not all that weird at all that they’re merely annoyed by this
dangerous-as-fuck attack.
And, honestly, with the forces and weights as they are, I have to say...well, Roadhog’s
hook is surprisingly feasible.
I mean, it’s clearly complete bullshit, but for video game stuff, it’s barely complete
bullshit.
Roadhog would have to just be slightly superhuman in order to throw it.
I mean, he could probably be on the B Roster of the Avengers and be able to pull off these
chain tricks.
In fact, maybe you, if you practice long and hard enough, could do it.
Maybe you can beat the massively impressive records of Louis Cyr, claim the title of strongest
person in history, and become a member of Overwatch.
Just, you know.
Try not to actually throw meathooks at people, because you will definitely end up in jail.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
I got stuff again!
Things!
Tchotchkes!
All these things and more, from Lootcrate!
Not lootbox.
That’s the other thing.
From Overwatch.
This is pretty similar though!
Every month Lootcrate sends awesome things to your door to show off to your friends.
Each month they pick a theme, and send you different stuff according to that theme.
Last month was Anti-Heroes, and next month the theme is SPEED.
For as little as $20 a month you can get in on this action.
And if you’re not into Tchotchkes, but your wardrobe needs some sprucing, never fear!
You can subscribe to their Level Up your Wardrobe service and, you know.
Level up your wardrobe.
All their stuff follows the same theme as the lootcrate!
If you wanna sign up, just head to lootcrate.com/shoddycast to save 10% on your subscription!
Badass, right?
Just be sure to do it by September 19th, the deadline for next month’s theme.
That’s just a week from now!
So, you know.
Go to there.
Or click the link in the description.
Also, I look awesome in that skirt.
Also, do you watch me stream?
‘Cause you totally should.
It’s awesome.
I’m sexy and awesome.
Normally I have a set schedule and blah blah blah, but THIS week I’m doing something
a little different.
In honor of today’s Overwatch video, I’m going to be devoting my entire week of streaming
to Blizzard titles!
Head on over to twitch.tv/shoddycast and check me out at 11 AM central standard time!
Today is Overwatch, of course, but tomorrow will be Diablo 3 OR MAYBE CLASSIC DIABLO I
HAVEN’T DECIDED YET.
Anyway.
Here’s the schedule.
Check it out, and check meeeeee out.