Dear Everybody,
Hi!
It’s me.
Austin.
How’s it going?
I’ve been making SCIENCE!
Videos for nearly an entire year now, and we’ve covered a broad spectrum of topics
together, from chemistry to virology, and we’ve learned a lot together.
That being said, occasionally I’ve gotten things wrong.
Not too many things, ultimately, but it turns out that I am still fallible.
Thankfully, a lot of you have been on me like white on rice and have been very quick to
point out my fuckups.
Very quick.
Like, too quick.
Assholes.
Anyway, I have baby coming any day now, and I’m wrapped up trying to get things ready
for their delivery, AND I’ve been wanting to address some of these mistakes and correct
them, so that’s what I’m doing.
I’m gonna address every major fuck-up I’ve ever made.
Well.
Not every single one.
Today, we’re going to be looking at every lie I’ve ever told you in my Fallout videos,
since I’ve done a veritable assload of those.
Are you ready?
I’m ready.
Let’s get this bitch started.
Let’s start with the beginning--the first video I ever did ranting about video game
Science that made NO GOD DAMN SENSE: the Laser Rifles in Fallout 4.
Specifically, I griped about there being recoil, as photons and light don’t have mass, therefore
they don’t have kinetic energy.
Now, this actually isn’t strictly true.
Light, and photons, don’t have mass.
I guarantee you there will be people in the comments of this very video trying to argue
that they do, but they don’t.
But while they don’t have mass, they do, in fact, have momentum, which is exactly how
solar sails work.
We actually have a pretty beautiful formula to depict how much kinetic energy a photon
has, believe it or not.
It’s this.
This formula, E, meaning energy, equals the Square Root of mass squared times c to the
fourth plus p squared, which is momentum, times c squared, c being the universal constant
for the speed of light in a vacuum.
Does this formula look kinda familiar?
It should, because it’s the FULL VERSION of the formula people like to trot out whenever
they try to argue that light has mass: E=MC^2.
E=MC^2 is a reduction of this full version of the formula for objects with mass that
aren’t moving; they have a momentum of zero, which cuts out this second part, and the square
root reduces it to, tada, E=MC^2, which is, incidentally, the exact opposite situation
light finds itself in.
Light has NO MASS, and therefore, this first half of the equation cancels out, giving you
the simplified version E=pc--the energy of light equals its momentum times the speed
of light.
Now, all of this is super cool, and I definitely welcome the nitpicking, but ultimately is
irrelevant.
While there is technically some kickback created by light, and therefore lasers, it is effectively
equal to the kinetic energy the light imparts when it imbues the target of your attack with
energy.
Since the smallest objects in the entire game don’t budge an inch when you shoot them,
it can logically be deduced that you should NOT be feeling any kickback from laser weapons
at all.
FURTHERMORE, some folk have suggested that the kickback is created by gas in the barrel
being heated up, and therefore is expanding and exiting the front end, pushing back on
the gun like a normal bullet does.
There’s a huge problem with this however, and it gets at the heart of why we don’t
use laser weapons all that much in real life: lasers are very, very, VERY affected by the
atmosphere.
While photons are always moving at c, save for some very specific laboratory situations
where they move more slowly, they are very easily deflected by gasses.
And rain.
And fog.
In fact, moisture evaporating from the targets of lasers can actually be enough to insulate
the target from incoming heat.
So if gas were heating up in the barrel of the gun, it’s very likely these lasers would
be deflecting in all directions and very likely blowing the gun up in your very hands.
This is a small one, but in the Glowing Sea episode I conflate “nuclear fusion” and
“nuclear fission” reactors like they would both have the same effects when it comes to
Nuclear Fallout.
Nope, not at all.
Now, nuclear fusion, the combining of elements to form heavier ones, does create radiation,
but it’s very shortlived, and tends to stop existing as soon as the fusion reactions stop.
So they wouldn’t be responsible for the Glowing Sea; that being said, nuclear FISSION
reactors were still pretty widespread in the Fallout Universe, especially since one of
the major creators of Nuclear Fusion was actually just lying to everyone and using fission instead.
So as long as there was enough nuclear materials in the blast zone, which seems likely, this
is pretty legit.
Still and all, acting like fusion and fission were the same was a major, MAJOR goof on my part.
In my video about how many bombs were dropped during the Great War, I called the 200-750
kiloton nukes that were dropped “tactical nukes,” which is not really true.
Tactical weapons are much, much, much smaller, in the tens of tons range, like the Davy Crockett,
not in the hundreds of Kilotons.
Still, they were pretty small given current standards of MEGATONS as opposed to kilotons.
Which brings me to power armor, and something I wanted to talk about.
Firstly, g-forces, impact, impulse, and inertial dampening.
This isn’t strictly something I got wrong, but I couldn’t live with myself if people
walked away from my videos not understanding g-forces and how they can hurt your body.
G-Forces are a way of articulating the forces felt from a change in speed, also known as
acceleration.
Here’s a really, really simple example: you’re riding in a bicycle at 9.8 meters-per-second,
or 21.9 miles per hour, and suddenly a car comes out of nowhere, and you gotta stop.
If you stop in one second, your acceleration, your change of speed over time, is 9.8 meters-per-second-per-second.
Your body, though, wants to keep moving forward at the original speed, according to Isaac
Newton’s first law of motion.
That means your body resists stopping, which you experience as a pulling forward of 9.8
meters-per-second-per-second.
Incidentally, 9.8 m/s^2 is the same rate of acceleration you feel from the earth’s gravity,
which is why we measure this acceleration force in g’s--it makes it really easy to
communicate the power of the forces you’re experiencing are.
Now, g-forces and gravity are one of the reasons falling is incredibly dangerous, and let’s
go over why.
First, we gotta talk about Impact vs Impulse, which is something I touched on a bit in my
Mirror’s Edge video, but nobody ever watched that one, so I might as well go over it again.
Impact, for the sake of simplicity, is the force experienced from a sudden acceleration,
or deceleration in this case, and it’s a variable of impulse.
Impulse is the total amount of force you will experience for the entirety of a deceleration.
A really simplified way of looking at it that will piss off more than a few physics majors
is that Impulse is the force of the impact times the time of the deceleration.
In a fall, the amount of impulse you’ll experience by the time your speed reaches
zero miles-per-hour on the ground will always be the same no matter what, BUT you can reduce
the amount of impact you experience by increasing the time it takes you to slow down.
Impulse is measured from the moment your feet hit the ground to the instant your center
of gravity stops moving downward.
Parkour practitioners utilize this knowledge to fall from heights that can be potentially
fatal with minimal-to-no damage by using the parkour roll, which vastly increases the amount
of time they spend decelerating by allowing their center of gravity to move further down
than if they were just landing normally on their feet.
For instance, if I fall from a mere 2 meters high, I hit the ground in less than a second
later at a speed of over 6 meters per second, or over 20 miles-per-hour.
If you land flat and stop in just 1/10th of a second, your bod and legs experience 6 gs
of force--meaning my body would, for that 1/10th of a second, be crushing my joints
with the force of over 300 kilograms or 800 pounds.
If I slow my descent by rolling, though, even if it’s just to a half a second versus one
tenth, the g-forces I experience drop dramatically, to just over 1 G.
This is a huge reduction in force experienced, with little perceivable time added.
And the overall impulse I experience remains constant throughout.
Why do we need to know this?
Because, knowing this, we can prove, unequivocally, that someone wearing power armor, no matter
what is inside it, is fucking dead.
Power armor in Fallout 4 is capable of withstanding drop speeds of over 110 meters-per-second.
Now, I don’t have my original notes anywhere that I can find, so I don’t know why I said
that the total impact would be 366Gs.
By my new calculations, it’s more around 112 gs, so I may have messed up originally.
So what if there were “inertial dampeners” in the suit that slowed you down?
Taken as a given that you’re traveling at 110 meters-per-second when you hit the ground,
and the exterior of the suit slows down in 1/10th of a second, and there is, at best,
12.7 centimeters of cushioning inside the suit--how much does this save us?
Actually, amazingly, 12.7 centimeters of cushioning, plus the hydraulics of the power armor could
greatly reduce the force you experience down from 112Gs to 34Gs.
Humans have survived more than this, so we’re good, right?
WRONG.
A human weighing a mere 60 kilograms hitting the ground at this speed is going to experience
over 18,000 newtons of force, FOUR TIMES the force it takes to reliable fracture bones,
all of it going straight into their skeleton.
Best case scenario, you shatter your kneecaps; worst case, all of your internal organs rupture.
The only way you can survive falls at this speed is by greatly increasing the amount
of time you decelerate, such as with a jetpack or parachute.
Otherwise you’d be completely and totally fucked.
You’d have to increase your slowdown time to at least 1-and-a-half total seconds before
risk of major injury reduces significantly.
So.
Yeah.
Which brings me, at last, to my final major error in my Fallout videos.
And I’ll be honest with you. It's a big one!
This was a major fuck-up on my part.
So this happened during my mini-nuke episode of Fallout 4.
All of my conceptual stuff in the video is 100% on-point, until I bring up Albert Einstein.
I AM SUCH A FOOL.
You see, E=MC^2 only works as a way to calculate energy if you use delta M, which means change
in mass.
You see, E=MC^2, when calculating the energy of massive objects at rest, accounts for the
total energy the object has if you were to transform all of it into energy at 100% efficiency.
Nuclear bombs don’t 100% transform into energy--what happens is that atoms split into
lighter elements, and release the difference as energy.
Now, in my math for the episode, I did eyeball it by using an efficiency multiplier of 25%,
but my whole methodology was wrong.
So let’s look at this a different way, using things that actually existed: the Little Boy.
The Little Boy was a Uranium bomb of the gun-type, meaning the explosion was triggered by shooting
two pieces of subcritical Uranium together to form a criticality event.
It had a total of 64 kilograms of uranium inside of it, and of that 64 kilograms, only
.91 kilograms actually underwent fission, and of THIS percentage, only .6 grams were
transformed into energy.
That means only 0.001% of the materials used in making the bomb actually turned into the
explosion we saw in Hiroshima, which killed over 150,000 people.
.001% is a much, much more pathetic percentage compared to 25%.
We need a Delta-M of 17.8 nanograms for our fatman.
So...doing all the math backwards, this gets us a final mass of 165 milligrams of Californium
if we can somehow push the critical mass down with reflectors and implosions.
That’s like three of my zoloft pills turned into a weapon.
Awesome.
Of course, the cost of Californium is so high that that means one mininuke would cost over
$4 million dollars.
DAMN IT.
That’s a hell of a lot more expensive than 500 caps.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
BRAH, THE SHODDYCAST POWER LEVEL IS OVER 9000!!!!!!!
Is that...is that still a meme?
God, I’m so ooooold.
I guess I should probably not talk about how much I heard you love mudkips, either.
Damn it.
I’m just trying to be relevant.
Anyway.
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Like Dragon Ball Super, the latest chapter in the perpetual motion machine that is the
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The cool thing about Crunchyroll is that they work closely with the people who actually
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Do iiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttt.
Thanks for watching me go over every mistake I made in my Fallout SCIENCE!
Episodes.
Be sure to subscribe if you’re not yet, ‘cause in the next couple of weeks I’m
going to have another video about all the OTHER mistakes I’ve made.
Oh, also, I know it’s not Halloween anymore, but I love my Halloween costume so much that
I’m still wearing it today.
If you wanna see it, head on over to twitch.tv/shoddycast at 10 AM, central standard time, where I’ll
be livestreaming some Darkest Dungeon and naming the characters heading toward the meatgrinder
after people in the chat.