Dear Blizzard,
How ya doin’?
I’m doin’ alright.
I’ve been playing a lot of Legacy of the Void with what little free time I have.
That’s not what I’m writing to you about today.
I just...I just thought you’d wanna know.
I thought you’d care.
Anyway.
I’m not here to talk about Starcraft, as much as I might want to know how it is exactly
that the protoss happen to have thousands of prefabricated buildings floating out in
the ether waiting to be warped planetside just in time to be turned into useless scrap
by zerg, that, unfortunately, isn’t the kind of nitpicking I’m in the mood for today.
In fact, the level of nitpicking I’m prepared for this week is truly astonishing, even by
my own standards.
You see last week, the week I spend researching my letters, my ex-landlord started letting
the next tenant move shit into my apartment before I was vacated because...I don’t know,
reasons?
Anyway, while I was dealing with the legal ramifications of my landlord’s foolish disregard
for contractual agreements, my time to research topics was cut short.
So I said to myself, “I know what I’ll do!
I’ll pick a topic that’s a little bit easier than some of the others I do, so I’m
not pressed down to the wire making my video!
A lot of people have been asking me about Roadhog’s hookshot thing, I’ll just talk about
that!
Plus, that’ll give me an opportunity to point out that I completely suck at my
job and messed up Roadhog’s weight during the Mei episode.”
I was dedicated to doing this somewhat-easy topic, but I thought today’s video would
be far too short if I just focused on this one, teensy little detail.
So I decided that I’d do a bonus topic--kind of like two different SCIENCE episodes in
one.
Easy.
So I picked my bonus topic and started researching it.
And researching it.
AND RESEARCHING IT.
And as I read more and more, and ran more and more numbers, and parsed more and more
formulas, I got pulled deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of Newtonian Physics and Structural
Engineering until my entire worldview about how the universe fits together was shattered
and reassembled.
Gone was my interest in Roadhog, and in its place was a fixation on a topic so pedantic,
so nitpicky, so ludicrously absurd to apply real science to that I was simultaneously
embarrassed for myself and fucking PUMPED to share it with you guys.
One of the things I love the most about Overwatch is Blizzard’s attention to detail with their
level design.
I don’t just mean, like, in the way that Blizzard is ALWAYS great in EVERY game them
make when it comes to perfecting balance--that’s kind of their schtick.
No, I’m talking about the amount of interesting stuff that populates every single map in the
game.
Little tastes of the world of Overwatch that make it feel more real, more lived-in, and
makes each map feel like its very own character.
Of course, to us players, a unique and interesting world is little more than an opportunity to
blow off a little steam before matches begin, trashing the spawning zone and other set pieces
along the way.
Hell, sometimes it’s a good idea to clear out the set dressings for tactical reasons.
In either case, we love, love LOVE to tear the game you spent so much time painstakingly
crafting piece-by-beautiful piece.
And it’s because of this that I noticed something peculiar.
Something off.
Something that, once I looked a little bit closer, I realized was GOD DAMNED TERRIFYING.
Okay.
I’m ready to talk about it.
Promise you won’t make fun of me?
Oh, fuck you guys, I know you will.
Whatever.
You may make fun of me now, but once you see the truth, once you see the numbers dance
before your very eyes, you too will come to know the fear I have for the members of Overwatch.
Are you ready?
Everyone in Overwatch, from Mei to Lucio, have the most overpowered punches in the entire
history of mankind.
What.
This is something I noticed a couple weeks ago when I was getting ready for a match and
I saw someone punch a wrought iron fence into smithereens.
Iron!
The stuff they make steel out of!
I couldn’t help, I COULDN’T HELP BUT ASK MYSELF: how the FUCK would someone punch apart
metal with their bare hands?
Is this even fucking possible?
I needed to know: exactly how fucking terrifying is the quick melee attack in Overwatch?
Surprisingly, this is actually something we can figure out.
Come with me on this journey to nitpick the smallest feature in history, and together
we will discover a massive world of wonder and magic.
You might think it’s impossible to determine exactly how powerful the melee attack in Overwatch
is, and under most circumstances you’d be correct.
Not all wrought iron fences are the same, after all.
There remarkably little regulation and consistency across the world in how they’re made.
They serve a mostly-decorative role, although they can help keep dogs from running out of
yards and prevent people from tumbling over precarious ledges.
Thankfully, we can circumvent all of this by looking at something else entirely.
In Route 66, the map that takes place along the famous American highway that helped expedite
western migration in the early half of the 20th century, we find something much, much
more consistent, highly regulated, and well-documented, and, incidentally, the most durable material
that I could find that you can punch through in the entire game: street signs.
In fact, it’s because of these street signs that I even thought to look more closely at
the punches at all.
Why?
Because these signposts have been made the same way for years.
Two inches by two inches of Grade 50 ASTM designation A570 12-gauge galvanized steel,
and with one punch it snaps like a toothpick.
Sure, you might say, “But Austin, clearly this is just a piece of background material
that’s coded to break whenever it experiences any damage at all.
I could look at it wrong and it’d break.”
Sure.
You COULD say that.
OR you could learn to recognize when the wool that’s being regularly pulled over your
eyes slips just a little bit to reveal a secret, extensive conspiracy that extends deep into
the bowls of Blizzard North the united states government, and, ultimately, the cabal of
corporate overlords who rule us all through subliminal messages transmitted through the
flouride in our water!
But first, in order to understand this secret government subplot, we need to figure out
exactly how strong a punch would need to be in order to crack through a steel signpost.
In the United States, the world of signage is dominated by two major types of signposts:
u-channels and square tubes.
U-channels have the advantage of being easier to drive into the ground, and they cost less
since they’re made of less materials.
Square tubes are a lot more expensive, on the other hand, but you can mount signs on
all four sides, and they’re much, much sturdier.
When you affix a sign to a U-Channel post, a simple breeze can make it flap around like,
I don’t know.
A metal bird or some shit.
These signposts are actually designed to be installed in such a way as to minimize damage
to both cars and human bodies.
They’re inserted into anchor points and are secured with bolts that, when enough force
is administered, causes the base of the sign to tear away and fall flat in the direction
the force is applied.
Not only does this reduce potentially hazardous damage to an out-of-control vehicle by minimizing
pointy metal that could rip fuel lines, it also minimizes overall damage to the signpost
itself, allowing for an average 60% salvage rate of materials.
Awesome!
This tearaway feature is created by maximizing bending force applied to the metal on a point,
using special bolts to help focus incoming energy.
You can actually see this in effect both in Route 66 AND in Numbani, where signs break
off at the base as well as the middle section.
So, in order to break these signs in half, our punch has to do the same thing as the
bolt and anchor at the bottom of the sign and apply bending force until the signpost
can no longer take it and simply snaps, correct?
EEEEEH, dead.
WRONG.
Bending stress is created when there’s uniform stress across one direction of a beam with
a neutral axis as a point of support, like when the a front end of a car collides with
the broadside of a fencepost, with the neutral axis of the ground and anchor.
Specially-designed nuts are used to focus this stress on a single point, which increases
the likelihood of the metal tearing.
Unfortunately, a fist is never going to be able to apply stress this way, and since the
very nature of bending stress means that the highest point of force is at the neutral axis,
aka the ground, the best case scenario would be the sign tearing and falling flat on the
ground.
No, in order to punch our beam in half, we’re going to have to use a completely different
kind of force: SHEARING stress.
Shear stress is a little bit like bending stress, but is measured parallel to a cross-section
of the material in question.
Make sense?
No?
Okay.
So, let’s just take it for a given that your fist, when you punch something, like,
oh, I dunno, a 2x2 galvanized steel tube, you’re imparting a shearing force into it.
The way you look at this force is you take a cross-section of the area your fist is impacting,
in this case, a square.
You then calculate the force going parallel with the area, and boom goes the dynamite.
Now, these stresses and forces don’t exist in isolation to one another.
You’re never going to have a situation where there’s JUST bending force or JUST shear
force.
In fact, part of the design of the nut on the base of these signs is to help convert
bending stress into localized shear stress, using the vehicle as a kind of lever to maximize
the force delivered.
Still and all, direct shear force is going to be what we need to know in order to figure
out how strong of a punch Lucio or Mei or whom-the-fuck-ever needs to deliver in order
to judo-chop this tube in half, we have to know a few things: the dimensions of the post,
the shear force required to cause a structural failure, and the phone number for the nearest
hospital.
Galvanized telespar sign posts are typically 2 inches by 2 inches in dimension, because
this is AMERICA and we use the Imperial system.
DEAL WITH IT.
Anyway.
Those of you who are annoyed by inches, don’t worry, we’ll dispense with them soon.
Anyway, 2x2.
At these dimensions, we’re looking at wall thickness of gauge 12.
Pretty thin, in the scheme of things, but we ARE talking about steel.
Anyway, knowing this, we can pretty accurate figure out our area of shear force using a
cross-section at impact, which, converting everything to Science’s darling metric units,
is .053 square meters, or 5 square centimeters.
That’s almost nothing.
And if you subtract out the holes punched in the side, which could very likely be where
the break occurs, it’s an even smaller .041 square meters.
Sweet.
So in order to snap this bar, we have to shear our way through 4 centimeters of material.
That’s hardly anything at all.
So...what do we need next?
Well, we need to know how much force is needed to overcome the shear tolerance of this sign
post, and to know that we’re going to need the shear modulus.
Telespar signposts are forged from ASTM A570 steel at grade 50, and are 98% iron, with
the rest of the 2% taken up with carbon, copper, manganese, and phosphorous blends that are
all designed to give this metal an incredibly high tolerance for punishment.
The Shear modulus, or the maximum resistance to shear stress, for ASTM A570 grade 50 is
80 GIGApascalls, or 80 BILLION pascals.
Pascals are a unit that measures newtons per square meter, so since we already have our
area, all we have to do is multiply the shear modulus by our are and we get a necessary
force of 3.29 gigapascals, ALL DELIVERED from your fist.
How much force is that?
Well, for comparison:
Melee attacks in Overwatch cover a distance of 2 meters distance at a speed of 30 meters-per-second.
Keep in mind that this is already a massively-powerful punch, with the fastest punch ever recorded
in history being a paltry 19-and-a-half meters-per second.
30 meters per second is the speed of a god damn cheetah.
Anyway, in order to deliver 3.29 gigapascals of power moving at this speed, your arm would
have to weigh over 180 fucking tonnes.
That’s like getting punched in the face with a blue whale!
So, obviously, we need to go faster and harder.
An average person, weighing 80 kilograms, would be able to deliver this much force if
they punched this bar at 2360 meters-per-second.
No big deal.
That’s just the escape velocity of the fucking moon, or fucking 7 times the speed of sound.
Well.
Shit.
Pretty sure your skin would be sandblasted right off.
In fact, in order to effectively snap this galvanized bar in the middle using shear force,
you’d have to ram it with a fully-loaded semi with a pointed tip at the end speeding
as fast as the fastest Formula 1 Racing Car.
On top of this, even if you could conceivably move your hand this quickly, human bones themselves
have a much lower resistance to force, so the instant you made contact with the metal,
sure, maybe you’d manage to splinter it, but normal human arm bones, with an incredibly
liberal compressive resistance of 131 megapascals, would essentially splinter into powder as
your entire arm would, at best, present 8.9 megapascals of resistance to strain versus
the 3200 megapascals coursing through it.
Your arm would be DONE FOREVER.
And before you go showing me videos of martial artists chopping metal bars and breaking metal
plates over their head, practitioners of competitive breaking intentionally use brittle alloys
and materials for their sport.
SO DON’T YOU EVEN.
Which leads me to my final and ultimate conclusion.
With Lucio’s sound gun being more powerful than a nuclear bomb, Mei’s gun being filled
with some magically and impossibly cold superfluid, and I’m sure when I do a video on Roadhog
next week we’ll discover he’s strong enough to lift a fucking mountain or something, and
every character’s ability to punch through metal as though it were made of pine, I’ve
realized something: the members of Overwatch aren’t human.
I mean, other than the obvious members.
No.
They are, instead, Gods, walking among us, asserting their will onto us mere mortals,
who are beholden to their whims like my dog is beholden to mine.
That’s why the people rebelled and overthrew Overwatch years ago.
It’s not because of political drama, it’s because the people realized that they didn’t
want to be held to the whims of capricious, meddling, and mischievous Gods from mount
olympus!
And THAT is the secret backstory of Overwatch.
Or I’m just overthinking a game mechanic oversight.
Whatever.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Today’s episode was brought to you by Audible, my personal favorite service of all time!
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ALSO!
I’m finally done moving, although I am getting sick.
In any case, I’m finally going to start streaming three days a week!
Woo!
Here’s the schedule!
Monday’s competative ranked Overwatch, so if you hop over soon today you can catch me
qualifying.
Tuesday is...I don’t fucking know yet.
Something.
And Wednesday
is Fallout: New Vegas!