Dear Valve,
please release Half-Life 3.
Sincerely,
Aus-
[laughing]
Just kidding.
I'm here today to tackle the big one. The one topic I've been consistently asked about, like...
...literally, since I started this show.
The Long Fall Boots from Portal.
How do they work?
They FREAKING...
DON'T!
*science montage*
But fine, OK, fine; let's do this. Bust out your pixel rulers, your pixel cups of tea,
salute the Queen for spiff, and let's get down to brass tacks.
The Long Fall Boots were a plot contrivance
invented by the creators of Portal to justify not giving a crap about the laws of physics,
vis-a-vis knee caps and shattered ankles. They allow you to, effectively, fall from any height without consequence.
They auto orient you to gravity and...
[chuckling]
...somehow,
absorb all the impact from a fall, allowing the designers to make puzzles without
worrying about the safety of your character, when it comes to turning yourself into a ballistic weapon.
Of course, you can shoot yourself into a wall at fractions of the speed of sound face-first,
and you still somehow don't die,
even though your feet had nothing to do with it.
While they definitely made the game more fun, they seem impossible.
Like, really?
Just this tiny spring right here to keep you from breaking your knees?
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure about that?
It kind of seems like a bad idea to me...
And, in fact, as Reddit user u/verdatum on the Theorist subreddit put it,
these things (if they worked by compressing and then decompressing),
they are kind of more like springs than shock absorbers.
And they should, in theory, instead of dampening your landing,
send you bouncing along the ground, as though you just jumped on a trampoline.
What they need to do, instead, is slow your descent,
and redistribute your landing forces to a wider and stronger area.
BUT, we'll get to that in a minute. Because first of all, we gotta do the fun part:
Pixel measurements.
You see, before we tear apart - uh,
no, I mean, uh, before we get into how Long Fall Boots work,
We have to get a clearer picture of what's going on, and what the scope of their effective parameters is.
Specifically, we have to know the fastest way at which they operate,
and how quickly they are slowing Chell down.
What we need to do is figure out, within a reasonable range of certainty, if possible,
how tall Chell is.
The - the model, since that's what we're gonna be using for all of our math.
Now, the fan wiki for Half-Life claims that she's been calculated to be about 5 feet, 4 inches tall,
which, you know,
I'd love to rely on, but somebody didn't show their work! So, we'll have to do it ourselves.
How?
Bed sizes.
You see, you start Portal 2 in a weird fake hotel room,
a hotel room that's filled with, basically, the only conventional stuff you'll see in the game,
aside from a few offices that are difficult to locate.
And, within that hotel room is a bed;
a bed that has a mattress.
A...
queen-size mattress, if I'm not mistaken.
Which would mean that it measures 60 inches wide, by 80 inches tall.
Using this, we can approximate Chell's height, using
the POWER OF MATHEMATICS!
If our 80-inch or 2.032 meter long bed is 383 pixels wide,
and our Chell model is 302 pixels tall,
this gives Chell a height of 1.6 meters,
or almost exactly 5 foot 3 inches.
So, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
Hey; good job, whoever did the math on the fan wiki!
You got close enough; 5' 4 is definitely within the margin of error; it's nearly negligible.
And, for all I know, they were more accurate than I was!
Using this Chell as a ruler,
we can measure the size of these panels in this room and find out that they are
2.7347 meters tall, which we can use to figure out our top speed!
All we have to do is the super-duper-fun-and-not-at-all-defying-the-laws-of-physics thing
of putting one portal over the other and using them to reach our tippy-top speed,
see how far we travel in the space of one frame, and...
bam! We'll figure out our top speed. And...
not the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.
23.748 meters per second, or just over 52 miles per hour,
or 85 kilometers per hour for those of you who are literally anywhere but America.
Unfortunately, it's here where things begin to go off the rails.
Being very,
VERY generous with the stopping animation,
I determined that at 60 frames per second,
a mere 10 frames passed when Chell's feet hit the floor,
to when her landing animation stops completely.
141.89 meters per second squared of acceleration;
14 Gs, if she weighs the average weight for a woman of her height, 55 kilograms.
That is 7,803 Newtons of force going straight into her legs.
I don't care how much of that dinky spring thing supposedly absorbs a force,
this is VERY BAD for your legs.
But, you know, it's a video game.
Let's just put aside Chell's definitely broken kneecaps.
Is it even possible to fall from this speed and live with the help of a device like this?
*deep breath*
...maybe.
In order to figure that out,
we're gonna have to look at professional fallers,
a.k.a., people who practice parkour.
People who parkour regularly are really good at falling from heights,
and the way they do it is by decreasing the force on their bodies,
by increasing the amount of time it takes them to slow down.
They have a bunch of rules and techniques for this
and rule number one is one that Chell has down pat: Don't lock your knees.
Rule number two is always land on the balls of your feet, and never land on your heel.
Landing on the balls of your feet allows you to control the amount of flex you have in your legs and ankle,
and, more importantly,
landing on your heels will shatter your ankle.
A jump as small as one from a chair can send you to the hospital, if you land right on your heel.
That's another thing that Chell has going for her:
the Long Fall Boots keep her ankle permanently elevated.
So far, so good.
But now comes the important stuff.
Deceleration times, something you can understand more easily if we talk about impulse.
This is the impulse formula.
Don't be scared, though,
because we're gonna simplify this for illustrative purposes,
because impulse, in short, is an impact force experienced over time,
and the impulse you'll experience from a jump or a fall
will basically always be the same once you're in the air and falling.
There's very little you can do without a jet pack or a parachute that will decrease the force
you will feel in total upon landing, because an object in freefall is a closed system.
However, while this side of the formula, impulse, is basically locked in,
we can play with these variables on the other side.
For example, if we increase the amount of time it takes to slow down,
we can decrease the peak force experienced,
because it will be spread out over more time, proportionally.
And this is how parkour practitioners save their precious kneecaps.
The most common techniques for high falling in parkour are the roll and the four-point slap out,
where the practitioner bends their knees as they fall,
touches the ground with their hands,
and this allows their entire body to drop almost all the way to the ground.
The roll is basically the same thing,
but it increases the amount of time and distance the torso, or the center of gravity, takes to reach the ground
Landings are measured from when the feet hit the ground,
to when the torso stops moving down.
And proper technique can take maximum force experienced from as high as 7 Gs,
where your ankles would experience what it's like to be over 1,000 pounds,
to as low as 2 Gs from the same fall (just by landing properly!)
But, it's here that we run into trouble.
Very experienced parkour practitioners can sometimes jump from as high as 2 stories, even,
MAYBE 3 stories up in the air and land mostly unharmed.
But, the speeds at which the Long Fall Boots work are way beyond this.
They are equivalent to you jumping out the window of an eight-story building.
And the best parkour techniques take deceleration time from about
half a second, to maybe like 1.2 seconds from small heights.
This makes a big difference, and even in the case of Chell,
this would decrease the force experience dramatically, to only
1,083 newtons, which is pretty impressive,
especially if you found a way to transfer that force into your femur, the strongest bone in your body,
which would pretty easily be able to handle these forces.
Unfortunately, if it's going into your femur, that means it's traveling up to where your femur connects:
Your hip bone.
And it only takes about 400 newtons to dislocate your hips.
So, while she may survive a fall at these speeds,
there's no good technique that is going to let her literally walk away from this.
In order to make sure that she doesn't just break her legs in a dramatic fashion,
She'd have to increase her deceleration time through 3.3 seconds,
which seems like a short amount of time, but, well, this?
Right now, I'm gonna play 3.3 unedited seconds of silence for you.
That felt like forever, didn't it?
And the reality is that there simply isn't enough space.
No matter what equipment you're wearing, and what your technique is,
to slow yourself down that slowly...
No...
way!
What are her...
*random garbles*
…are her boots filled with black holes that bend space-time in such a way, that,
when she lands, somehow, magically,
there's actually more space crammed into that spot that allows her to fall?
*more weird garbled noises spewing out of Austin's mouth*
Somehow more and th-th-th-then even-
Let's say, let's just say that that actually made any sense.
What are even the implications of having black holes in your shoes?
Radiation.. general bad things from gravity gradients.
The only way that could possibly work is if they actually had rockets to keep her from going too fast,
or the little weird metal things actually extended several,
and I mean like 15 extra feet in front of her,
so they can begin to decelerate her well before her feet hit the ground,
and that's all ignoring that, hey!
In the game, she slows down in .167 seconds.
That's like crashing a car into a brick wall at 50 miles an hour,
but without an airbag.
There's no way these boots would ever possibly work.
Period.
The end.
Never gonna happen.
Chell
Chell is
Chell is DEAD.
Are you happy?
You monsters who begged me for literal years to make this episode?
Are you?
Are you not entertained?!
Do not jump from eight story buildings and expect tiny-as-heck weird fetish boots to save your life.
They can't. Period.
That's why we invented the freakin' parachute and safety nets,
because they actually work without shattering your freaking hip bones.
And, we invented the parachute in 1783, so there you go!
*sigh of relief*
All right, I'm gonna...
I'm gonna go take a nap. Can someone get in here and...
clean up the pile of bones and meat from Chell's body now?
It's like... starting to get flies.
Sincerely, Austin.