Dear Bethesda,
I’m afraid of heights. You know, I don’t even know why I bother saying that. I feel
like that’s a perfectly natural human instinct to be afraid of heights. Heights are dangerous.
Hell, you can die just by falling wrong in your own goddamn house, let alone from a potential
free fall from several stories up. You, and other game developers, seem to have gotten
the memo, making fall damage an ever-present factor in almost every game you make that
isn’t a retro-style platformer, further serving to enhance my anxiety about falling.
Jesus Christ, I come to your games to get away from the realities of every day hazards,
and yet find one of the most genuine and most likely to kill me hazards in almost every
single fucking game.
That is, until you guys unleashed your new-and-improved power armor concepts in Fallout 4, complete
with cool things like Deathclaw Repellant, jetpacks, and INFINITE PROTECTION FROM FALLING.
FUCK YES, JUST WHAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED. NO LONGER MUST I CARE ABOUT MY PESKY ENEMY:
GRAVITY.
Wait a minute. Ooooooooh wait a minute.
Dammit, Bethesda. Your power armor makes no. God. Damned. Sense.
I know, I know, I promised I wouldn’t give away the conclusions before, but seriously.
Seriously guys. I mean. Falling from a bajillion feet up in the air, and just landing on the
ground like Tony Stark and being like “no problem brah.” BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT I SAY.
The first thing I thought of was car accidents, which means we have to talk about g forces.
You know that phrase “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at
the end?” That’s damned true, and it’s the same thing for car accidents. It’s not
traveling super fucking fast that kills you, it’s the sudden stop when you, you know.
Hit something. Like a wall or another car. Anyway, let me explain.
Instant stops basically don’t exist. We perceive them that way, but we suck, so. When
you hit something in a car, a series of events happen. Force is transferred both into the
vehicle and into the object it hits, slowing down the movement of the vehicle, and speeding
up the object it hits, like those little marble things on strings they have in novelty stores.
Of course, if the thing you hit is a thick wall, the wall isn’t going to move very
much, which is really, really bad for you because all that force is going all the way backward back into you.
You know, it’s probably a bit inaccurate to say “it’s the sudden stop” that kills
you as much as “the sudden deceleration.”
G forces are what you feel any time you change speed or direction. You’re in a car and
you turn, and you feel your body pull a bit in the other direction? That’s g forces.
Gs, the unit, are equal to 1 earth gravity. So if you’re on a roller coaster and it
zips around a corner, and you feel 1 g, that’s the equivalent of being pulled to the side
by the same force you feel that keeps your feet on the ground. So if you weigh 150 pounds,
and you’re pulled 1 g to the left, you’ll feel 150 pounds of “weight” to your left,
and if you’re pulled by 2gs, that’s 300 pounds, and so on and so forth.
Our body has a limited capacity to deal with really, really high g forces. And what’s
a high g force? I’m glad you asked. Fighter pilots are capable of surviving some of the
most extreme g forces for extended periods of time than any human on earth, and they
can pull as much as 9 gs at once. Take that same 150 pound person, and now they’re feeling
over 1300 pounds of weight, and John Stapp was an officer in the United States Air Force
who built a fucking rocket sled to test the effects of g-forces on the body, and he survived
g-forces exceeding 43 Gs, making our 150 pound person from earlier feel over THREE TONS of
weight all at once.
People in car accidents experience, by contrast, about 100 g-forces.
When these forces are applied to our bodies, they strain our joints, put tension in our
bones, and put pressure on our respiratory system--in fact, that last one is particularly
important, because high g-forces can actually completely disrupt our blood flow to our organs.
This is the biggest thing that fighter pilots have to fight when under extreme g-forces,
because if they fail to keep blood flowing to their brains, they could pass out and send
their plane careening off into the ground.
But what does this have to do with Power Armor?
Well, it’s important, because when you hit the ground in your power armor, all that force
is being applied directly to your body. I mean, yes, there’s some cushioning from
the armor, and people survive high-speed impacts in vehicles all the time, but dropping from
the sky in power armor is nothing at all like a car crash.
For one thing, you stop really, really, really quickly in power armor. Way faster than you
do in a car accident. In a car accident you decelerate over about the span of a second.
The front end of your car crunches forward, absorbing some of the force and giving you
more time to slow down. The seatbelt grabs you, the airbag deploys, all of which are
designed to give you precious time to drop from what are normally fatal speeds. By contrast,
power armor? You drop from whatever your speed is to zero in 6 frames, 1 tenth of a second.
But that’s not all of it. Speed is incredibly important. And to know how fast you’re going,
we’re going to have to do some math. What we need is the terminal velocity, or the fastest
possible speed you’ll be falling through the air. You see, as something falls toward
the ground, gravity isn’t the only force acting on it. The atmosphere, the air, is
also pushing up. At a certain speed, the force of gravity and the force of the atmosphere
will cancel out, and you’ll stop accelerating. This is called “terminal velocity.” The
terminal velocity of the average human is 195 miles per hour. But how are we going to
find the terminal velocity of our power armor clad superhero? Easy. Send ‘em high up,
and drop ‘em, and measure their speed. Calculating the average human to be about 6 feet tall
in power armor, taking video moving at 60 frames per second, our armor moves at roughly
1 Power Armor Height per frame. Six feet per frame, sixty frames per second gives us a
velocity of 245 miles per fucking hour. Holy shit.
That’s way, way, WAY faster than most people will ever move in a car. Anyway, knowing that,
and knowing how quickly you decelerate to zero, the rest is really easy. Just do some
quick division and multiplication and the force you experience is...holy shit. 366 gs.
That’s higher than the really-poorly sourced highest g-forces experienced by a human ever.
“But Austin,” you say, “All that force is conferred upon the power armor, not you!
It’s all good baby!” BULLSHIT! Your body is still traveling that speed, it’s still
stopping that quickly. There’s no way that you’re not feeling that. And that’s more
than enough power to pull all of your blood into your head, bursting blood vessels, giving
you an immediate stroke, and that’s not to mention the shock damage to the rest of
your body and internal organs as they suddenly experience the equivalence of 366 times the
earth’s gravity all pulling up in an instant, snapping your shins, bursting your bladder,
rupturing your heart and overall giving you a really, really bad headache.
Furthermore, a fully loaded suit of power armor with a person in it has gotta way over
250 pounds, and hitting the ground at those speeds would impart over 450 kilonewtons,
or 101,325 pounds of force directly into the suit, over two times the tensile-strength
limit of most steel alloys. That suit would crumple like a wet paper bag into fucking
nothing!
(breathes out)
But you know what, Bethesda, that’s alright. I’ll take it. Because, honestly, I’m so
over falling damage. I’m done being scared of heights. I’m over it. I’m going to
go celebrate now by jumping off my roof. Ain’t no gravity gonna hold me back.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
If you like to know things about how the human brain and society works like I do, you should
totally pick up this book I just finished, called The Lucifer Effect. It’s written
by Philip Zimbardo, who’s most famous for something called the Stanford prison experiment,
which experimented with power dynamics and corruption by taking ordinary people and giving
them power over one another. It’s pretty awesome and a little bit unsettling. You can
pick this book and others up at Audible.com, where you can actually get a free 30 day trial
and a free audiobook to go with it if you mention our name. If you don’t wanna listen to this one, no biggie,
they have over 250,000 titles to choose from. Just head to audible.com/shoddy, and nab your
free trial and book. And try not to get hooked.