(dramatic music)
- Think of all the crazy, bone crunching crashes
of fist and feet that you can find in the history
of Mortal Kombat.
You can see just about anything happening
in this eternal tournament.
But, there's arguably one move that is the most iconic.
An uppercut that sends an opponent skyward.
This incredible powerful punch
is a mainstay of modern fighting games
and pop culture in general.
But, what would it really take,
aren't we gonna do like a big thing for this?
Or?
Alright.
Well, what would it really take.
Oh, release me.
No, no, geez.
No, help me.
That was good, okay.
Kill for me.
Defend my honor.
(uptempo music)
(choral music)
Wow, that was great.
You've earned one treat.
What would it really take to do a move like that.
This is the science of Mortal Kombat.
Welcome to my Mortal Kombat version of the Void.
Complete with a legion of minions
ready to do my sciency bidding.
An entire areas dedicated to the over-analysis
of kicking and punching.
In today's episode we are covering maybe
the most famous move in all of Mortal Kombat.
The classic uppercut.
You've seen the uppercut in Mortal Kombat games
for decades now.
And of course, it returns in the latest entry
into the series, Mortal Kombat 11
from Warner Brothers and NetherRealm Studios.
It is typified not just by a punch that is strong
but a punch that has so much force behind it
that lifts an opponent up into the air
and above the puncher's head.
Our mission today is to test whether or not
a humanoid fighter could really punch this hard.
But, if one of my minions can't handle it
then we'll have to figure out some kind of way
to replicate what we see in the game.
What?
You haven't done anything yet, you don't get a treat.
This isn't how this works.
Get out of here.
Leave.
Go away.
You would not believe the treat budget around here.
Look, I'm not gonna pull any punches here.
A Mortal Kombat style uppercut
does not have physics in its favor.
If you wanted to lift a fighter off of the ground
with an uppercut alone,
you're gonna have to supply a substantial force
to their face with your fist.
At minimum that force you apply to their face
is gonna have to equal their weight
which is the mass of the fighter
multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity
on whatever planet they're on.
If there is some force left over,
some resultant force after these two forces interact
then in accordance with smart boy Issac Newton's second law
they will accelerate in that direction
in accordance with their mass, flawlessly.
To estimate the uppercutting forces that we need
we can assume that the uppercutted fighter
travels in an arc, like a projectile would.
Then, I went back and I looked at
all of the Mortal Kombat footage over the years
and it looks to me like the average uppercut
launches another fighter at around an 80 degree angle
one and a half body lengths or so off of the ground.
And it takes about a second for the bodies to hit the floor.
Using all this information and plugging it into
some of the equations for projectile motion.
You find that to conform to this arc
a fighter needs to be hit with enough force
to give them an initial velocity of seven meters per second.
Or, 15 miles an hour.
Seven meters per second isn't a crazy with a K velocity
but it would still require quite a bit of force.
If a fighter is going to be lifting someone
off of the ground with an uppercut
they're doing work on that other fighter.
Defined as applying a force from their fist
across some distance, their face.
And work can also be defined as
the change in kinetic energy for an object.
So using that we can plug in our initial velocity
from our projectile motion equations
and start assuming a range of distances
that the fist crosses another fighters face
in order to get a range of force values.
And when we do that,
we have to do the final move first,
which is forward, forward, back, punch.
No, it's forward, back, back, punch.
There we go.
If we do that, we get a range of force values
that's somewhere between 5000 and 15,000 Newtons.
Thousands of pounds of force.
Now, not only is this range out of the range
out of the range of any validated punching numbers
I could find for a real human.
All of this is assuming that a human
is perfectly rigid, like a point mass.
But, a human is not a point mass they're a flexible body.
When you actually uppercut someone's face
their head is gonna move around
and their neck is gonna extend.
And their skin is gonna get all weird
like in those videos on the internet that you see.
So it would probably take even more force than we see.
So, a Mortal Kombat uppercut is implausible at best
but hey, we're still being theoretical here.
Let's test it ourselves.
For today's testing I've enlisted the help
of science YouTuber, super nerd and friend Allen Pan.
Hello Allen, this is upsetting.
- Hi Kyle
- [Kyle] So what do we got?
- This is a ballistics gel head.
And it's got a material inside
that his skull and his spine are made out of
that have a similar strength to actual human bone.
And he also has this sort of rubber flesh
that has similar impact characteristics
to actual human flesh.
- That will be perfect.
And this whole stand I'm assuming is gonna be persony.
- So this stand is to make sure that
he's at the correct height.
And most importantly,
we have weights on this stand
so that he weighs about as much as a person weighs.
- Sure, because the important thing here
is to see not just what happens to the head,
neck and face,
but if you can do the physical work
to lift their weight off of the ground.
- Exactly.
- Okay, well I'm gonna get my more punchy minions
to try punching this thing.
So here is our experimental set up
for the human powered test.
As Allen said, we have our analog head
and now it is on a stand
that is accurately weighted for a beef boy.
But if we really wanna test if a human can do this
lift out test subjects of the ground
we're thinking you can uppercut a real person of the ground.
But if we want a real person to do that
we need someone who's use to punching heads.
So Void, send me my most experienced minion
in punching heads please.
(dramatic music)
Oh,
- Oh hey.
- Hey, it's world famous mixed martial artist
and professional wrestler, CM Punk.
How long have you been here?
- Since MK one.
- Oh, oh no.
We have stuff to talk about later.
But for now.
You have a lot of experience punching people in the face.
- Sure.
- So what do you think your chances are
with a full weighted setup and a head like this?
- To get this think six feet in the air?
- Yeah, over your head.
- (chuckles) My chances aren't good.
I'm hoping I can at least chip a tooth.
- Well, the floor is yours.
- Alright.
- [Announcer] Round one.
(upbeat music)
- Whoa, I would not wanna get hit like that.
- He moved a little bit.
- But, did not move up in the air.
How did that feel.
- Felt good, felt solid.
Just actually being able to lift the mass off the ground
I thinks gonna be impossible.
- I think this might actually be impossible
for mere mortals such as we.
So, I'm gonna bring in what I call the Fist of Doom.
- Alright, I'm gonna leave for that.
- Okay, yeah let's go.
Hey, do you think I could do some MMA stuff?
- [CM] You know, if you try really hard, probably not.
- Oh, thanks.
I think we're gonna have to ramp it way up,
so what do you got.
- Just the thing, this.
- No.
- Okay, plan B.
- Sure.
- The Fist of Doom.
(bright angelic music)
- That's legitimately impressive.
- Thank you.
- What is that gonna do.
- This is a punching piston.
It's running at about 170 PSI
and it can punch with a force of nearly 3000 pounds.
- Nearly 3000 pounds.
That's perfect because it falls right within the range
that we previously calculated.
So, if the head doesn't come straight off of this thing
it might lift up some amount.
- Maybe.
- Yeah, okay, well you finish the Fist of Doom.
- Can do.
(dramatic music)
- Allen our minion punched valiantly
but it wasn't quite the classic Mortal Kombat uppercut.
So, how is the Fist of Doom gonna do better?
- Well, we're going to full pressurize our air tank.
And then, after getting a safe distance away
we're gonna activate that punching piston
with this switch and this battery.
- Yeah, better be safe when this thing goes off.
And we still have our weighted dummy accurately,
80 kilograms just so we can see
what the perfect application of force does to it.
But what do you think is gonna happen.
- Well, it's a ton of force that we have,
but just like a real body,
our dummy has a little bit of a flop to 'em.
So, I think there's a good chance that rather
than getting punched up,
he might just get punched back.
- Alright, well you get to a safe distance
while I do the same.
- [Announcer] Round two.
- Okay.
Punching machine is armed.
Fist of Doom firing in three,
two,
one.
(dramatic music)
I don't think we got airborne.
- Oh really, what gave that away?
Yeah, but it does look like our entire stand
shattered in the back.
- [Allen] Yeah, we pulled out
the wood screws down here, entirely.
- Yeah, that's not easy to do.
But we still did not get any lift off
like we see in Mortal Kombat.
- Yeah, you know, I'm noticing now
that we put all of the weight
that a human body would have, at the bottom here.
And that might have created sort of like
an artificial pivot point
that encouraged him to get knocked back like this,
rather than up.
- Yeah, my feet don't weigh 80 kilograms.
So, maybe redistributing the mass closer
to where the center of mass of a person would be, sorry CM.
The Fist of Doom, how could that change?
- You know underneath that boxing glove
is just a solid block of aluminum.
- Okay, so if it was more rigid
then more force would transfer more quickly to the face.
You're saying the gloves are coming off?
- I think the gloves are coming off.
- [Announcer] Round three.
Fist of Doom firing in
three,
two,
one.
(upbeat music)
- Okay.
Okay so, still not airborne.
We did everything that we possible could.
And I think looking at the high speed,
it's the flexing of the neck.
- [Allen] We did manage to punch this guy about as hard
as you could ever possible hope to punch a guy.
- The neck is flexing so much
that the force is going into translating motion
into the neck and not lifting straight up.
Humans are floppy things.
This is kind of what would happen.
I mean, looking at him more closely
I do see some damage underneath the neck.
I see kind of a big gash across
where the jugular would be.
- Yeah, his throat got split open in a couple places.
- Yeah.
- [Allen] It's still floppy.
- Why is his head so,
oh, Allen look at this.
Look at this.
That is a full spinal fracture
right across where, I believe,
this is where your spinal cord would be.
It snapped his neck, before it lifted him half an inch
off the ground.
This is a fatality my friend.
So, I think we've done pretty much all we can do
in this setup.
How can we make this uppercut work.
- We've made the fist harder
we've made the body stiffer.
We've given this every possible chance.
I think the only thing left to do
if we wanna replicate what we see in the game
and try to get a body to fly two meters in the air
or whatever, is just to make this guy super light.
It might look kind of weird.
- I'm fine with that.
- Okay, let's do it.
Fist of Doom firing in
three, two, one.
- [Announcer] Finish him.
(triumphant music)
(crew laughing)
(upbeat music)
- Yes, Allen get over here.
We did it.
- I think that was perfect replication.
- Yeah, if you look at the footage
it looks just like it does in Mortal Kombat.
But what did we have to do just to make that happen?
- Well first of all,
we had to create a gigantic punching machine
that could punch way harder than any mortal man could.
- And then we had to make a special inflatable dummy
that weighed 10 to 15 times less
than what we had been using.
- And then, just to make sure that all that energy
actually transferred into him,
we had to give him this outrageous chin extension.
- And, we had to add a guiding rod
like he was some kind of water bottle rocket
just so the force wouldn't push him away
when he was punched.
- Kyle,
- Yeah?
- I don't think you can punch into the air.
- Allen, I'm really glad we replicated this.
But I don't think you can punch a guy into the air.
This is awesome though.
We set out to test today
whether or not it truly was possible
to uppercut someone so hard that they lifted off the ground.
And I think we've shown that that's pretty much impossible.
Even if you had the theoretical amount of force
behind your fist to lift someone
humans are squishy, bendy things,
and most of that force is gonna go into
either moving the head out of the way.
Or, moving the neck so far back
that you cause a fatality
before the other fighter even hits the ground.
Kinda defeating the point.
So, this move has to stay in the Mortal Kombat universe.
Until next time, I'll see,
for me?
Thank you.
I'll see you in the Void.
- [Announcer] Coming up next on,
The Science of Mortal Kombat,
- [Kyle] It is the heat of Scorpion's chain
which allows him to pull it through a person.
So what we are going to do today
is try our best to replicate the conditions
of this heated fatality
to see what they do to our human flesh analog.
- [Man] Heated chain test in
three,
two,
one.
(triumphant music)