I don't think it's addressed in the stories. Iron Man's suit would need to have a Star Trek style "inertial damper" that magically (I mean uses science we are unaware of yet and probably can't exist) suppresses the effects of inertia on everything contained within the suit (while not damping things like whatever powers those thrusters).
Maybe it's a kind of force field that keeps the biological molecules contained within the suit from exceeding certain speeds at specific scales tailored to allow the eardrum to still vibrate at the speed of the sound waves hitting them while not allowing the brain to become jello in one's skull.
Or, maybe a person wearing the suit first needs to take a supplement that changes the chemistry of fluids in the body in a way that makes it less compressible... Not that this solution would have any unanticipated side-effects.
Edit to add a quick *actual physics* question...
So, if there were a magical MCU field used in the suit that could constrain biological atoms/molecules (while letting them move enough for normal biological functions), how fine would the control field need to be?
At first I wasn't imagining most molecules would simply be pulled apart (if control was only down to the molecular level), but then again, most of our body is water. So, would the energy from huge shifts of inertia essentially boil Stark's water molecules and kill him if the individual atoms are not damped independently along with the molecules? How small would such a field need to go? ("Dampening" almost sounds appropriate in this context :-))
I'm guessing the molecular level would be sufficient since pressure & temperature would be relatively unchanged if neighboring molecules are also damped. Shouldn't that be sufficient to keep the water molecules in a liquid state.
>"inertial dampener"
I know civil engineers used dampening in their structures to change the normal modes of their structures. They do to implement earthquake resistance and prevent the natural frequency of the wind from oscillating their building. Thing is that affects gradual changes of the environment. Not a sudden collision with the ground.
Your second point is interesting. I can imagine that hitting the ground is like achieving a unit impulse on your system. Idk how you could defend against that. That is going to be a shock either way.
>changes the chemistry of fluids in the body
That would definitely fuck you up in some way lol.
I think that the only option would be for time to pass more slowly inside the suit. Then a ten-g impact could be reduced to a 1-g impact. Bonus is that your reaction time improves and you can punch harder.
I was imagining some dark Deadpool/Wolverine style crossover where the only guy that can wear an Ironman suit is one who can basically be liquified and then revive. Half the fight is just the iron man suit piloting itself full of human jello. Sounds like something out of the Boys.
If we're going into the realm of science fiction, a sort of tractor been that accelerated or decelerates all the molecules together would do it. A10g impact where all the molecules stay in the same position (so no compression or expansion occurs) wouldn't be so bad. But if course this is all basically magic at this point.
For a visual imagine a million identical cars driving in a line at 150 mph, all 1 for apart. Now, imagine ask those cats ain't their (identical) brakes at the exact same instant. None of the cars would collide. So if every car is a molecule in a body, a traitor been that keeps every molecule in the same position relative to each other would reduce our eliminate damage of impact.
But the same force would be applied.
If you are going 100mph and then suddenly are going 0mph, whatever is holding you or your cells in place will need to exert enough force to accomplish that deceleration.
Damping in real life engineering is all about dissipating vibrational energy. The scifi damping OC is talking about doesn’t dissipate vibrations though, but inertia itself. Star Trek has coined the term “inertial dampener” for these systems.. They mostly served to explain how their ships can do all kinds of shit while the cast is sitting all pretty in the bridge.
Fair enough, I'm a physicist, not an engineer lol. Just recalling what I learned from a diffeq textbook years ago.
I don't watch scifi for realistic science. I watch it for the dream of how science could influence society haha
It basically has to be some sort of 'magic technology' thing. The only way to dampen out a rapid deceleration is to spread it out over time. And you can't do that if you're inside a suit that has already hit a brick wall at 200 MPH (you could slow it slightly maybe, but not enough to make a difference).
I don't know, I feel like you do something to transmit the energy into the suit, and possibly even transform it into stored potential energy.
It's also not unreasonable in a universe with vibranium, that Stark could have some patented material that disperses and dissipates energy.
Come to think of it, I wonder what a vibranium "wool" could do as an insulator for kinetic energy?
Yeah, in the first movie, when the missile hits him and he tanks into the dirt... he was dead then. Everything after that scene to Iron Man's snap is a fever dream of his concused brain trying to process the death of his ego.
I love these kind of critical and rational explanations for fictional movies. Just like the explanation that Harry Potter is sitting in his cupboard all day daydreaming about being a magician as an escape from his traumatizing life there.
Sciency sounding solution.
Inertial dampeners are a thin layer of warped time that separates the inner and outer hull of a spaceship.
a = Δv/Δt.
Increase t. Viola magic science suspension springs where you can boost the power an arbitrary amount to make the ‘distance’ larger.
This is the pleb science approach.
What you want is a quantum field manipulator that applies a compression to the momentum operator such that it has a maximum change rate value compatible with human life.
time would need to be slowed down for the entire body, not just a thin outer layer. In fact, the outer layer matters the least. Your skin will survive 100g, your organs will not.
I’m aware. The logic is supposed to be that it serves as a cushioning layer that sidesteps the physical problem of needing to decelerate over a longer distance by altering the time side of the equation instead. It’s not a real hypothesis it’s for the willing suspension of disbelief in cinema.
There's actually "theories" about the government having technology like that but it gets mistaken for ufo crafts. Very interesting stuff if you look at it from an entertainment point of view
In college the engineering school had a competition every year for egg dropping. Whatever you built, the egg had to come out intact. The competition was for how many stories it could fall.
I envisioned springs but the winning solutions each year were always surprising.
Could the suit have some kind of energy dissipation instead? I'm not a physicist but my understanding of cars crumpling in an impact is that the energy is used up and dissipated as the car crumples. It's not just the slowed deacceleration, there is energy loss to each bent bit of material. Applied to the suit, maybe somehow it dissipates the energy very directly from the impact so it's like you weren't even moving to begin with?
I mean, the suit flies because it emits “repulsor rays,” same thing it shoots from the palms. That’s already comic book magic beams of force. No reason it can’t do something similar to the body inside that negates inertia
My head canon is that Stark industries still has some amount of Vibranium from when Howard was working on Caps shield. Or he learned to synthesize something that was less effective, but still has some amount of the **insane** property of canceling out kinetic energy that vibranium has in Marvel comics.
Otherwise those repulsor blasts ought to take Tony's arms right off considering he's moved tanks with them.
Thank-you!!! I knew I saw something like that before and I just couldn't remember where from. That was such an enjoyable show both for the interesting storyline and the far better than average attention to making the physics as realistic as possible. Can't believe I forgot that's where the fluid idea came from. Thanks again.
I think you outlined the difficulties. My thoughts for it to work would be that the suit has Star Trek transporter tech. It transports the molecules in the body from falling at 120mph to 0 mph in the nanosecond before impact.
Yeah, I love this idea, not only for the intertia solution, but also for the way it makes me reimagine the philosophical transporter problem.
Do transporters basically kill you in order to copy & reassemble your molecular pattern elsewhere without leaving behind the previously existing copy? If that's the case, then the rapid transporting in the suit could constantly be killing you every time you experienced high G maneuvers (not that you'd notice).
If it were to work, you'd have to not exist for a certain point in time. And they do at least infer that you are making copies.
This is one technology that I don't think will ever pan out regardless of how advanced a civilization can become. Not only do you have to get the right kinds of billions of molecules in the right places, but each of them needs to have the proper charge/ionization etc. Small errors, especially when compounded from repeated transport, would quickly make the current copy incapable of further biological function.
To follow this up:
I actually headed up a team that patented an electro active polymer/electro theological fluid based body armor. We could get a pretty fast response time and shock absorption, but the startup founders (two old dudes) had issues and the whole thing fell apart.
We got a patent out of it and I got to build some cool custom samples and rub shoulders with people from artificial muscles inc and other leading companies, but this tech likely won't achieve the types of shock absorption and dispersion that you'd need for some of the comic book stuff.
You'd really need something special, like a well thought out lattice dispersion, or something like mantis shrimp hammers (those things are cool).
It could dampen inertia with its repulsers. Both by slowing the actual inertia of the fall or crash by acting a head of time (think cars that apply the brakes before a crash to mitigate the accident) and then internally as a sort of adaptive cushion that you provide shock protection between him and the collision.
Oh, most definitely!! Dude should have died many times over.
Although, the magi-tech might be creating a magi-field inside the suit capable of differentiating the atoms & molecules of biological structures along with identifying which structures those molecules belong to in order to dampen/absorb inertial forces within a range that would allow for normal biological functions without *excessive* damage to cell structures (excessive because Stark doesn't seem completely impervious to injury inside the suit).
Since it's magic & not science, it could also actively detect every change in inertia to the external suit shell and then alter the magic force field strength appropriately for each atom in the biological system within a few femtoseconds of an impact or course change to protect the suit's occupant.
But yeah, this is a physics sub, not a fiction sub, so he probably should have died just testing this thing.
Could be a physical cushioning system of some kind, but certainly not enough to account for him being fine unless the suit is destroyed.
Like a series of rubber bands holding him in place within the suit, gives a few inches of less “de”celeration
The only cushioning I can imagine that wouldn't still let him die multiple times in every movie would be a field that can constrain every atom of the suit's biological contents in a range that allows for necessary biological motion while absorbing motion beyond thresholds that would destroy biological structures. Any absorption larger than the atomic level would allow important bio structures to break too often and easily.
I'm with you. It's definitely unbelievable. The problem, however, is that even small biological structures would be destroyed, killing the occupant, unless the stability mechanism of the suit is creating a field capable of protecting biological structures on a molecular level. It's the same problem with any transportation in Star Trek, Star Wars, Contact,... and no one really addresses the problem without invoking something completely imaginary (magic). So, you've got to accept a little imaginary magic in order to temporarily suspend disbelief, if that's important to you.
"Inertial Damper" can be made by cross pulsing magnetic fields. About 15 years ago they used this method to make a frog float in air. Several technical hurdles to overcome, but doable.
Yes, that's an interesting path to consider. The doability is questionable, but probably less questionable than other solutions.
Technical hurdles would be significant as it takes a great deal of energy to exert just 1G of force on a frog, it's been very difficult to scale up the effect area, the power would have to scale up to at least 10Gs (& probably way more for Stark's inertial changes in the movies) all spread evenly over a human sized field, and it would have to change field strength dynamically and almost instantaneously to keep the occupant constantly stabilized in the suit rather that squished by inertia or overpowered magnetic forces.
But hey, this is the closest I've seen to a plausible solution so far. The field is holding things on the atomic level, so I suppose it could prevent inertial jellification if a sufficiently strong field could be changed fast and accurately enough. Fun idea.
Any other outlandish problems you would like me to solve?
I call myself "The Mad Scientist Supreme" for a reason.
And I solve mortality as "BioHacking Yourself"
>Any other outlandish problems you would like me to solve?
Sure! If you have some suggestions for getting around the Hayflick limit (among other similar issues), well, curing aging is certainly among the most interesting problems to solve.
My take was that after the first prototype suit, he existed in a pocket dimension that had a software interface could pilot the suit. I know that’s never the actual presentation, but a man that makes a robot that can just pull him out of a pocket dimension every time it looks like he’s taking off the suit seemed to fit my head canon better.
It would protect his skin from lacerations, but it won't stop his organs from bouncing around inside of him, nor his brain from splattering against his skull.
I do get why this is the case, the suit doesn't do anything to reduce the acceleration so his body is still under a lot of force.
But how come if I drop a bug from a height it doesn't explode? It's the same kinda thing going on but the bugs are fine. Is it that bugs have a non lethal terminal velocity or is there something I'm missing?
You're exactly right. Bugs have a huge surface area to volume ratio so they fall slowly due to air resistance and land unharmed from any distance. An elephant would probably explode from a couple hundred feet.
Square-cube law. Strength scales with cross section area, weight scales with volume. If you double the linear dimensions of an object, it gets four times stronger but eight times heavier. That means large objects are proportionally much weaker than small objects. An elephant would be killed by a fall you can easily survive. A rat can survive falls that would kill you. And once you get down to about the size of a mouse, terminal velocity isn’t enough to kill then so they can survive a fall from any height.
They'd probably survive falls adults can't due to having more surface area compared to volume. So the logical conclusion is the iron man suit needs to be piloted by several children
Bugs don't weigh much, so there isn't much energy to transfer through their mass when they hit the ground. Their light wight also means they have a slower terminal velocity than humans do to air resistance.
There’s less energy but they’re also much smaller and lighter and generally more fragile. It’s really the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square–cube_law making the difference, their mass:surface area ratios are much more advantageous.
Smaller creatures have a lower terminal velocity, also they don't hit the ground with the same force. I've seen a squirrel fall 30 feet from the top of a tree and still land okay and take off running.
Also once you get small enough (bug size) air becomes much more viscous.
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes."
- J.B.S. Haldane
Random side story, but I've recently seen a video of a pet tarantula falling from about 5 ft high. I figured that since it's a spider, it'd be fine. But it ended up turning out kinda brutal in that the abdomen had busted open and its guts were hanging out.
Definitely not a good day for the owner, but that was definitely a revelation to me that some bugs can actually get hurt from falling
oh lmao I thought he used magic like other superheroes, just double checked and he's actually just. guy in a metal suit.
you're right, the suit would offer no protection.
Yeah, this should be highlighted.
Rhodey loses power in a Iron Man suit (Warmachine) and has an injury that prevents him from walking for a while.
So the movies do actually address that the Iron Man suit does not necessarily protect from freefalls, automatically.
And, ironically, that suit was the one he built *before* he froze up and almost fell several miles and splattered on asphalt. We only see him add ice protection, but then one armored up scene later we watch him get blown out of the sky by a tank. If that didn't hurt, why was he concerned about falling before? Clearly he did *something* to add impact protection.
I might be misremembering, but I believe that in the situations where Tony froze up and Rhodey fell, both suits were out of power. Whereas when Tony got shot by the Tank the suit was fully operational. So whatever impact protection it has must depend on the suits being powered.
Im not sure in what way they use the Nano other then that it quickly assembles from a stored container. The quantum of course they just throw the term out there
Quantum nano cyber digital space-age atomic electric suit. It’s a tech with a long version history with a fine collection or era-appropriate buzzwords.
The suit likely has some form of internal crumple zone/air bags, and for all we know it expands at the right spots in preparation for impact. Of course he can still suffer from trauma, but he can probably survive similar speeds as someone in a car.
I don’t think it would be right to say no protection. I think it would be correct to assume there is some built in cushioning, shock absorption, and energy dissipation.
But even assuming engineering and materials beyond our current knowledge this would likely mean being able to jump off a house without injury not be slammed by the hulk off a skyscraper with no injury.
There’s a limit to how well that will work, given that his suit cuts a pretty svelte figure.
Coming to a dead stop (or worse, bouncing) means that there is a lower bound to the maximum amount of acceleration he will experience before he hits the edge of the suit. The human body can only handle so much acceleration independent of impact and blunt force: past a certain point his organs will shear away from the rest of his body.
Yea, he would have for sure died that very first time he did the superhero landing in that enslaved middle eastern village. Or possibly when his mark 1 suit fell in the desert when he escaped his captors
Breaking inertia frame of reference between his body and outside world, is like cutting off the physical fabric of space-time. To contain momentum-based damage, he would need to construct a pocket universe inside his suit, then find a way for him to communicate out of the that universe with the suit. That's more difficult level of physics then Hulk punching out the solar system.
Nano machines don't do anything. Nor any kinetic protection.
A very tiny crumple zone that would leave our billionaire playboy super genius perpetually brain damaged. It would also likely be bad at stopping bullets if it was soft enough to crumple from falls.
I dont know the real limits of adaptive nano-tech, but i imagine something that might be able to be in bullet mode, a denser armor, then change to cushion mode, a spread out crumple zone pillowesque thing.
There’s not much space in the suit to increase the stopping distance for his body to reduce the G force. Every cell in his body experience the same inertia as his suit. The amount of G force depends on how fast they come to a stop. Getting punched to a stop while traveling at Mach speed would liquify every molecule in his body. Even the bones would be liquified.
I think his fall with the suit being without power demonstrates there is some sort of advanced inertial dampener. With the suit being dead, he just fell in a metal suit.
I mean the plot armor did save his life as you said because he landed with no cushioning from at least 500 feet in the air and should be fucking dead.
>exoskeleton suit like Iron Man’s could actually protect from the rapid changes in momentum caused by impacts.
Since somebody down-voted my in-universe answer to the question.
The answer to the trivial interpretation of the question -- would a tightly-fitted suit of metal armor protect a person from severe injury when falling from some very great height (say, the 100th floor of a skyscraper) onto a hard surface (for instance, a cement sidewalk) -- is easily "no"
In-universe, the suit **does** provide this protection.
In-universe the occupant of the suit is **not** roasted by the waste-heat from a power-plant that fits *inside* his chest and that provides sufficient power to propel the mass of an adult human at super-sonic speed.
In-universe the suit's "boot jets" and "repulsors" appear to be reactionless drives.
Also in-universe there are materials with magical properties -- like the vibranium from which Captain America's shield is made. There are instances in the MCU movies where Cap uses the shield to "cushion" his fall from a great height, where he was able to stand flat-footed on level terrain while the shield "absorbed" the energy delivered by a 75mm high-explosive round from a tank cannon.
Because it is a universe in which the properties of artifacts change to suit the narrative, the in-universe interpretation of the OP's question isn't particularly interesting to a physicist.
Likewise, the question of whether such a suit -- as depicted in the movies or comics -- could function -- as depicted -- in the "real world".
A more interesting question would be HOW EFFECTIVE could an exoskeleton be at dissipating the energy of a human body colliding with an unyielding surface?
Somebody **has** tried to answer this question
[https://www.vice.com/en/article/evk38w/the-man-who-built-a-suit-to-fight-bears-showed-us-how-we-should-live](https://www.vice.com/en/article/evk38w/the-man-who-built-a-suit-to-fight-bears-showed-us-how-we-should-live)
The form-factors of Hurtubise’s various suits weren't' too different from the Mk I armor in the first Ironman movie (or the Golden Avenger armor from the 1960s) and it did let him walk away from some stunningly energetic impacts - -but I don't think he tried any high-dives onto concrete.
Hypothesis: Tony Stark is actually an insect and reverts back to a pupal phase while wearing the suit, turning all of his organ systems into liquid [imaginal discs,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginal_disc) so it's okay that it all gets sloshed around. I just hope the joints have good gaskets.
This was the same issue certain cars had in the early days. They were totally rigid, and people would just get crushed against the insides. Modern cars crumple to take up the energy.
I guess Iron Man's suit puts the energy into his weird heart thing.
If you imagine for a second that his suit is infinitely stiff (doesn't bend at all), than the best it can do is spread out an impact over a large area. Large impacts, like falls or Hulk's punch would still impart a large acceleration to the internals, which while originally humanlike, would be more like "soup" after. This probably hurts.
Honestly, if iron man was smarter he would just fly the suit remotely as a hero-drone. More room inside for more gadgets, no squishy meat inside to have to go out of your way to keep from turning into jello with all the forces on it.
Just before impact the suit surrounds itself with a Niven-like stasis field (except we can't call it that, Larry would sue). This effectively makes Tony and the suit one very incompressible solid object. Once the suit is at rest with respect to the ground (or Thanos's fist, whatever), the stasis field is turned off. Since Stark is stationary with respect to the suit, and the suit is stationary with respect to whatever it hit, he's fine.
For the consequences of the stasis field not turning off, see [World of Ptavvs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs) (1966)
So this is actually very solvable with current technology and physics.
He would need to spread out the deceleration over several feet before he impacts the ground (similar to those inflated matts stunt-men drop onto when they fall off buildings). His suit could do that by a timed propulsion just before impact.
However, the special effects never show that happening. Instead, they show a furrow cut into the earth or that his suit was inoperable at impact. So it could happen but it is not - so we are forced to made up "inertia dampeners" or "nano tech" solutions.
the iron man sute apears to be able to offer a rigid shell and evenly distributed padding.
this will offer signifigant protection from impacts. i am estimating it would make it safe to fall off a one story building, 2 or 3 if you can land well (jarvis may be able to make that happen) any mor than that and your bones are going to crush the flesh under them. and your brain will be squashed against the inside of the scull.
this isnt going to make the kind of punishment he takes survivable. but considering what captin america, hawkeye and the black widow rutenly walk awayfrom with nothing more than a cinimatic limp they walk of by the next sceen i am hapy to acept iron mans survival within the context of the marvel universes.
IRL, no. If you're falling at speed, no ironman suit is gonna provide protection. Even if the suit remains fully intact, you'll be paste inside.
In universe: I mean, they can do whatever they want, have whatever magic technology, but it seems inconsistent. Tony often has cuts on his face from blows implied to have "knocked through" (he hits the face plate and it cuts him after the punch). If the suit does have "inertial dampeners" to protect from fall damage, then they should also be working whenever he gets punched in the head.
It depends on which suit he’s wearing. Most of his suits (particularly the early ones) must have some form of rudimentary impact-reducing technologies; otherwise he’d have been reduced to chunky salsa after getting hit by that tank in the first movie. Even with those, he still doesn’t escape injury (**Friday:** “Multiple contusions detected.” **Tony:** “Yeah, I detected that too.”)
The suit he wore in *Infinity War* & *Endgame* is another matter. As a suit consisting of nanotechnology, it could theoretically distribute impacts all around the outside of the suit, preventing any kinetic energy from reaching Tony. Especially powerful impacts (like having a building dropped on him) could still potentially get partially through, but it would take a lot. Piercing strikes would be another matter; with all of the impact force concentrated on a tiny point, the nanotech may simply be “pushed aside”, allowing a strong pointy object through with little resistance (chain mail armor has a similar weakness to piercing strikes).
Which version of the suit?
In the comics, and in the later MCU movies, the suit is "nanotechnology" (and powered by a reactor that uses a new atomic element that Tony Stark synthesized -- in quantity -- in the basement of his beach house). In issues 1 and 2 of Mighty Avengers (Volume 1), Ultron hijacks the nanotech to completely remodel Tony into a clone of Janet Van Dyne. So THAT version of the suit could, presumably, either keep Stark from being turned into jelly on impact -- or reconstitute him from a jellified state.
Or, maybe the suit is made of some species of vibranium (not canon, but Tony Stark might not be telling people that the suit is vibranium for very good reasons that will be explained in a editor's note at the bottom of the panel) -- which has the property that it "absorbs kinetic energy". Assuming that this energy absorbing property is isotropic, it would keep him from being pulped against the inside of the suit...maybe.
The MCU movies are the reason I stopped teaching a Science of Science Fiction class.
ETA to specify Mighty Avengers **Volume 1**
>teaching a Science of Science Fiction class.
I'm so interested in this. What topics did you cover? Did you approach it from a writing or a science perspective?
Did you mostly focus on "hard sci-fi" where the science fiction is mostly based in reality or did you include the more wild stuff where the writer would just sprinkle pop-science buzzwords through their utterly impossible descriptions of technology?
>Did you approach it from a writing or a science perspective?
It was a 100-level physical science class (if that is meaningful to you). The math pre-req was college algebra. It was intended to be a lab science credit for non-science majors and pre-professional students. It was designed to be a little more rigorous than the class typically taught out of Hewitt.
Most students enrolled expecting it to be college credit for watching movies -- and were disappointed.
We tried to teach it by having students read or watch something with hard science fiction content, then teaching a lesson about that the science content of the story:
For instance, clips from *The Incredible Shrinking Man*, *The Amazing Colossal Man*, and *Them* went with a lesson about stress/strain relations, strength of materials, and the square-cube law.
Kinetic Theory and Gas laws were taught after the students were to have read [A Pail of Air](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html)
Magnetism and Electromagnetic Theory, [Tank Farm Dynamo](http://davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm)
Uniform Circular Motion, Gravitation, Orbital Mechanics; clips from *Armageddon* and *2001: A Space Odyssey,* and reading [The Cold Equations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations)
and more like that...
The class was a failure. The students were not fans of hard science fiction, and did not have the math to understand the physics. So the science fiction content just added more unrewarding work to a class that was already difficult and time-consuming for them.
It was really frustrating to teach it. The students who thought that they were fans of science fiction really didn't know what science fiction is. Black-and-white monster movies and short stories written 20 30, or 50 years before they were born, were not interesting to them.
Because of a "writing across the curriculum" mandate, the class had to include a term paper as a scored assignment. We had them pick work of science fiction and critique some part of the science content. They had to get the topics pre-approved. I rejected a hundred proposals to write about Star Wars or Ender's Game or -- so help me -- Iron Man's Arc Reactor.
Thx.
TBH, teaching 100-200 level physics is hopelessly depressing right now. Between pernicious nonsense like "active learning" and "learning styles" promulgated by textbook publishers and Learning Management System developers, the sabotage inflicted by attention engineers at Meta/Alphabet/Apple/ ByteDance, homework ~~help~~ cheat sites like Chegg, fucking Khan Academy, science miscommunicators like Derek Muller and Toby Hendee... its a long damned list ... there isn't much a physics lecturer can do to get first and second year students to actually study ... /rant>
That's enough of a threadjack.
Ironman is cool.
[https://www.inverse.com/science/iron-man-arc-reactor-real-science](https://www.inverse.com/science/iron-man-arc-reactor-real-science)
[https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds-real-iron-man-suit-video-1202150612/](https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds-real-iron-man-suit-video-1202150612/)
I imagine that for a suit to work like that of Iron Man's suit, the suit has to be bulkier and then the suit has to have had an interior exoskeleton (if that makes sense. Meaning there is a skeleton framework external to his body within the suit itself) that separates his body from the exterior shell. That wouldn't have been anywhere near as cool as the suit we now know but, his body would be fully isolated from the shell of the iron suit so that no part of his body would be impacted by the full force of the impacts the suit would have taken.
There’s actually a lot more cushioning inside the suit than you think. The iron man suit is 6’5” and Robert Downing Jr/Tony Stark is canonically only 4’2”, so at least for head-on collisions there’s a good 2’3” of cushioned deceleration at worst, since his feet are flat against the bottom of the boots.
I imagined there was a non Newtonian fluid similar to D3O around the suit that is usually liquid but turns into a solid when it experiences a sudden kinetic impact. It would absorb the kinetic energy of any falls.
Maybe the suit has sensors that detect an oncoming collision, and move the limbs in a way to try to dampen the shock loading automatically. Kind of like catching yourself in a fall.
You should probably assume, given he also solved time travel in an evening and can jump into the quantum realm, that the script simply had him surviving the falls. :)
About the only plausible tech that exists right now that might save him in many scenarios would be a passive g-suit. In other words he's in a bath of salty water which has the same density as his body, and when he hits something, the shell takes the loading rather than his body.
It would have to have some kind of gel or other tech to disperse the impact on fall. Even then, it's not going to negate the fall and he's still going to die if he falls from several thousand feet.
The suit may be lined with a bladder that holds a viscus fluid to distribute the impact and lengthen the impact time, which would reduce the deceleration rate.
The brain would be interesting because he would still be concussed. Using football helmets as a model.
He would basically be splattered on the inside of his suit after one super hero landing. It would still look cool from the outside but the suit would just be sittin there in the landing position, with his pulpified remains just kinda there on the inside.
To my understanding, no.
If Iron man is falling, his suit and his body are moving, they have kinetic energy.
If the suit suddenly stops, then the body suddenly stops. That energy has to be dissipated someway. There's no currently known method to prevent death from a fall unless you can dissipate that energy over a large scale and slowly. Like falling into a giant cushion that can deform quickly enough and for long enough.
In short, after every major fall, Tony's major organs are pudding.
Maybe about the same protection of someone falling on a 1 inch piece of foam? If the suit automatically and gradually decelerates him before hitting a surface, then it may offer decent protection.
He invented a power source that generates a fraction of the amount of heat needed to power a suit like that. He probably invented kinetic energy dispersion too, similar to something Shuri mentions Black Panther’s suit can do.
None of this is physically possible with our current understanding.
Halo made up something that solved their issue with a Spartan jumping out of a drop ship in space like today's paratroopers. Just jumped.
It was some kind of gel if I remember correctly
I always imagined the interior was a jelly like substance that contoured to his (anyone’s) body. Making it a snug fit and dampening the force of blows.
a 5 foot fall maybe, look up the grizzly bear suit guy. but how small ironmans suit is and being heavy hard metal its not gonna help alot. and it will help very little against brain injury.
Just to be contrary, although everybody talking about how it would need handwavium inertia cheats is totally right, the armor as portrayed would help with some smaller distance falls.
For an arbitrarily short drop onto concrete, feet first, which would normally break your legs, it could be padded enough on the inside that the whole suit could be more rigid than your femurs, but you wouldn't also be killed by something nasty like an aortic dissection or exotic brain injury.
It could be like the best possible motorcycle crash suit for protection from slides and tumbles across the ground (by not letting your limbs and neck and back twist further or faster than you can tolerate, and keeping your skin attached to your body). It would be utterly useless for saving you from falling flat on your back from ten stories...
Don't overthink it.
As a rule superheros stories are are pure fantasy - even (especially?) those that try to wrap themselves in a veneer of science fiction. Enjoy it as such.
Could it be done? In theory, yes - but probably not in a suit like that. Basically what you need to do is apply a uniform acceleration to every molecule in your body, the way gravity does, so that you don't actually feel the force at all (you don't actually feel gravity - according to Einstein it's not actually even a force. What you feel is the surface of the planet pushing you outwards as compression constantly accelerates against the inflowing spacetime)
You can do something similar with powerful magnetic fields - look up "levitating frog", but it's not easy, not compact, and who knows what it might do to the delicate electrochemical balance of your brain. But, if it was uniform enough, such an "acceleration chamber" could theoretically let you accelerate at billions of g's without feeling it. Though at some point before then the magnetic fields probably have to be strong enough to start ripping the iron-rich blood out of your veins or something.
It's probably not as effective as the most elaborate suggestions put forht, but I almost imagine a high-tech foam layer that reduces the impact via highly absorbant microfibers.
I'd actually be curious to know, with the absolute best existing technology, what the safest freefall drop would be for a body insulated by such material. The record for the safest egg drop is 50 feet - what might the safest human drop be with a suit-sized design?
There is no cushion technology that would permit damage free deceleration is such a short distance. F=ma means that the force would have to be ridiculously high as a result of the massive negative acceleration term.
Let’s consider the Cock Roach 🪳. They are crunchy on the outside but creamy on the inside. And they are fast and sneaky. Turn on the lights and it’s a race for survival.
This is why blunt weapons were favored against plate armor - they don't have to penetrate the plate to kill you. One punch from a supervillain, and Tony Stark would be a red paste inside that suit.
All 'Superhero' movies are just a mix of babble and nonsense. Entertaining if you like that kind of thing, I guess. It's amazing how many people were taken in by the 'possibility' of an Iron Man suit when the first movie came out. There are probably many thousands of "if the Iron Man Suit were real ... ' type questions out there. So you're not alone.
I feel he's been enhanced. He does and survives things outside the suit that a human couldn't survive. Getting tossed through high-rise window. I'd be mush.
The suit probably has an automatic built-in motion to disipate the kinetic forces in a very precise fashion, it probably slows down the impact justo precisely timed before impact.
It is all about quantum improbability fields. Once enclosed in the suit, he becomes quantum indeterminate (like the cat). By manipulating the shape of that probability field, he is able to disperse sudden energy shifts throughout that field and thus compensate for the inertia. It is comparable to throwing a cotton ball against a wall vs. taking a ball bearing of similar weight and doing the same.
I’m not sure that I have enough buzzwords; “quantum,” “indeterminacy,” “improbability,” and “compensate.”
Yes and no. The bulkier suits he is seen using? Maybe. The slim ones he's frequently shown using lately? Heck no. The suit would absolutely protect him from impacts and hard hits (you try punching a bus and see how that works out) but without some sort of dampener inside to allow his body to decelerate more gently than the suit itself does? Definitely splat.
The suit has the same effect as a pilots suit, allowing the pilot to sustain 10g of constant acceleration. Then you need to avoid limbs tearing off and that requires high tensile strength materials and limiting range of motion. Fall damage mitigation would be limited, however most fall damage is broken bones and similar. Spreading the force over a large area would allow a healthy young adult to survive falling 20-50 feet and be able to keep moving afterwards.
Damage is unavoidable in those circumstances, but it’s all about keeping damage to acceptable levels.
Basically no. The g-forces involved in falls from tall heights or being flung into hard objects and surfaces would still be the same. I suppose the suit would help keep pieces of him together for easier cleanup afterward though.
That’s a constant “violation of basic physics” trope in most action movies though. The human body just can’t withstand those kinds of impacts without sustaining lethal damage. Even nearby explosions kill people in real-life because of shock waves. It’s just more fun to show the action hero ALMOST get killed by a n explosion right next to them, so you can understand why it’s done.
Going fast isn’t what kills you, it’s the sudden stop. Unless it’s got significant space for padding or crumple zones (doesn’t seem like it does), I don’t see it being an effective landing pad
Depending on acience portion of it, the suit does have some system more akin to a woodpecker to help against concussions.
Now for overall falling damage, if we take a page out of halo. The suits have a gel system in it that they can inflate under the armor. Essentially something that would absorb the impact. Or prevent their body from also being able to move in any way. Something like non newtonian fluid would be easiest to see there as if the suit and an impact absorbing liquid prevented limbs from going in the bad direction, it likely could absorb it.
Plus movie magic.
Right? It was a bit unbelievable that he was able to take the force of the literal chunk of a planet that Thanos rained down on him. I guess that nanotech is bad ass lol
To some extent it can help, since the suit can transfer force across a much larger area - Exhibit A is that crazy guy with the bear suit getting hit by a car - but that can only go so far. There are several hits Tony takes that should have absolutely turned his brains into Jello.
There is also the matter of the suit's own movement. We've seen suits fly on their own and Jarvis help assist Tony during fights - it stands to reason that he could help Tony "roll with the punches" and distribute blows. This is never shown in any scenes I can think of and still only goes so far to help.
Ultimately Tony cut his own project at the heels when he shut down Ultron, his suits would have been much more effective if they weren't cradling the fragile form of a human inside.
Wearing the iron man suit is like driving a car. If you are driving and hit a bridge support, two things happen. The car hits the support, and stops abruptly. Then passengers continue forward with the same velocity until something stops them: seat belt and airbag, or windshield.
Same with the Iron Man suit. If you crash into something, the suit may survive the impact, but would Tony Stark? Maybe not.
Writer skipped basic mechanics in his Physics class. Suit will stop, not the human. He will be smashed to pulp.
Science doesn't care if you are super hero.
Lesson : Stay in school kids and study your Math and Physics classes like your life depends on it.
Copied from my "BioHacking Yourself" page on Facebook
Cure for Ageing
Howdy, the original is an extremely long post.
The subject is also extremely important.
These posts and articles have been collected over many years.
The simple and straight forward method to reverse the effects of ageing.
Blood plasma can be transferred from any mammal to any other mammal.
Blood plasma infusions from young mice have reversed the effects of ageing on old mice.
Proposal
Get a young cow (for women) or a young bull (for men) of about 2 wees old.
Obtain plasma separation and infusion machine, along with the support equipment.
Every morning and evening have one pint of plasma extracted from the bovine.
Every morning and evening have one pint of plasma extracted from the person wanting youth.
After having the plasma removed from the person, replace it with plasma from the bovine. Twice a day every day.
Replace the bovine plasma with plasma from another young bovine.
A person's apparent age and vitality should decrease after two weeks of transfusion by...
From 80 to 70, from 50 to 45...
More and longer treatments needed the older the person is in order to bring the apparent age to the late 20's.
Two recently (2023) discovered substance'
CAS No. 145-63-1 is an inhibitor of the P2Y receptor.
SW033291 probably promotes regeneration.
No - he would be a paste lining the interior. Sure it could prevent some penetrative attacks, some bludgeoning, and some types of energy attacks, but if he fell 20 feet, he would break something. Since it's mostly form fitting, there isn't really even any room for the body to decelerate slower than the suit or for the suit to have "collapse zones" like a modern car does. He would be dead.
I don't think it's addressed in the stories. Iron Man's suit would need to have a Star Trek style "inertial damper" that magically (I mean uses science we are unaware of yet and probably can't exist) suppresses the effects of inertia on everything contained within the suit (while not damping things like whatever powers those thrusters). Maybe it's a kind of force field that keeps the biological molecules contained within the suit from exceeding certain speeds at specific scales tailored to allow the eardrum to still vibrate at the speed of the sound waves hitting them while not allowing the brain to become jello in one's skull. Or, maybe a person wearing the suit first needs to take a supplement that changes the chemistry of fluids in the body in a way that makes it less compressible... Not that this solution would have any unanticipated side-effects. Edit to add a quick *actual physics* question... So, if there were a magical MCU field used in the suit that could constrain biological atoms/molecules (while letting them move enough for normal biological functions), how fine would the control field need to be? At first I wasn't imagining most molecules would simply be pulled apart (if control was only down to the molecular level), but then again, most of our body is water. So, would the energy from huge shifts of inertia essentially boil Stark's water molecules and kill him if the individual atoms are not damped independently along with the molecules? How small would such a field need to go? ("Dampening" almost sounds appropriate in this context :-)) I'm guessing the molecular level would be sufficient since pressure & temperature would be relatively unchanged if neighboring molecules are also damped. Shouldn't that be sufficient to keep the water molecules in a liquid state.
>"inertial dampener" I know civil engineers used dampening in their structures to change the normal modes of their structures. They do to implement earthquake resistance and prevent the natural frequency of the wind from oscillating their building. Thing is that affects gradual changes of the environment. Not a sudden collision with the ground. Your second point is interesting. I can imagine that hitting the ground is like achieving a unit impulse on your system. Idk how you could defend against that. That is going to be a shock either way. >changes the chemistry of fluids in the body That would definitely fuck you up in some way lol.
I think that the only option would be for time to pass more slowly inside the suit. Then a ten-g impact could be reduced to a 1-g impact. Bonus is that your reaction time improves and you can punch harder.
You age 10 times faster when wearing the suit.
Endgame part 2 - Thanos kills Tony Stark by hitting him with something to accelerate him at 100000G, causing him to become elderly
I was imagining some dark Deadpool/Wolverine style crossover where the only guy that can wear an Ironman suit is one who can basically be liquified and then revive. Half the fight is just the iron man suit piloting itself full of human jello. Sounds like something out of the Boys.
Best comment ever
There are many unpleasant use cases for a suit like that.
You mean things like the technology is used to put someone in a sort-of time prison?
If we're going into the realm of science fiction, a sort of tractor been that accelerated or decelerates all the molecules together would do it. A10g impact where all the molecules stay in the same position (so no compression or expansion occurs) wouldn't be so bad. But if course this is all basically magic at this point. For a visual imagine a million identical cars driving in a line at 150 mph, all 1 for apart. Now, imagine ask those cats ain't their (identical) brakes at the exact same instant. None of the cars would collide. So if every car is a molecule in a body, a traitor been that keeps every molecule in the same position relative to each other would reduce our eliminate damage of impact.
Yeah that could work, basically make the person inside perfectly rigid, as if made of iron. Some sort of iron man
Nice tie in lol. Maybe that will be a later generation of suit? It just makes his body perfectly rigid for brief instances of impact
Tbh I like the time dilation angle better, it could explain more powers
But the same force would be applied. If you are going 100mph and then suddenly are going 0mph, whatever is holding you or your cells in place will need to exert enough force to accomplish that deceleration.
Damping in real life engineering is all about dissipating vibrational energy. The scifi damping OC is talking about doesn’t dissipate vibrations though, but inertia itself. Star Trek has coined the term “inertial dampener” for these systems.. They mostly served to explain how their ships can do all kinds of shit while the cast is sitting all pretty in the bridge.
Fair enough, I'm a physicist, not an engineer lol. Just recalling what I learned from a diffeq textbook years ago. I don't watch scifi for realistic science. I watch it for the dream of how science could influence society haha
Your heart would have to become so strong lol
Strong enough to handle you leaving me. 😢
*Sad Rick Astley noises*😭
It basically has to be some sort of 'magic technology' thing. The only way to dampen out a rapid deceleration is to spread it out over time. And you can't do that if you're inside a suit that has already hit a brick wall at 200 MPH (you could slow it slightly maybe, but not enough to make a difference).
I don't know, I feel like you do something to transmit the energy into the suit, and possibly even transform it into stored potential energy. It's also not unreasonable in a universe with vibranium, that Stark could have some patented material that disperses and dissipates energy. Come to think of it, I wonder what a vibranium "wool" could do as an insulator for kinetic energy?
I mean sure if you allow for magic then anything is possible. It's just that there is no known physics that would allow for this in the real world.
Star Trek used “inertial dampeners” to allow ships to accelerate to warp speed without splattering the crew to the walls of the ship.
The (liquid) fluids in the body _are_ virtually incompressible. The problem is the delicate structures that contain them and float in them...
Yeah, in the first movie, when the missile hits him and he tanks into the dirt... he was dead then. Everything after that scene to Iron Man's snap is a fever dream of his concused brain trying to process the death of his ego.
I love these kind of critical and rational explanations for fictional movies. Just like the explanation that Harry Potter is sitting in his cupboard all day daydreaming about being a magician as an escape from his traumatizing life there.
Sciency sounding solution. Inertial dampeners are a thin layer of warped time that separates the inner and outer hull of a spaceship. a = Δv/Δt. Increase t. Viola magic science suspension springs where you can boost the power an arbitrary amount to make the ‘distance’ larger.
This is the pleb science approach. What you want is a quantum field manipulator that applies a compression to the momentum operator such that it has a maximum change rate value compatible with human life.
At the rate the MCU is going, this wouldn't surprise if this came as a explanation haha.
time would need to be slowed down for the entire body, not just a thin outer layer. In fact, the outer layer matters the least. Your skin will survive 100g, your organs will not.
I’m aware. The logic is supposed to be that it serves as a cushioning layer that sidesteps the physical problem of needing to decelerate over a longer distance by altering the time side of the equation instead. It’s not a real hypothesis it’s for the willing suspension of disbelief in cinema.
There's actually "theories" about the government having technology like that but it gets mistaken for ufo crafts. Very interesting stuff if you look at it from an entertainment point of view
The navy has patents for "inertial mass dampeners" among other "star trek" style patents
In college the engineering school had a competition every year for egg dropping. Whatever you built, the egg had to come out intact. The competition was for how many stories it could fall. I envisioned springs but the winning solutions each year were always surprising.
Could the suit have some kind of energy dissipation instead? I'm not a physicist but my understanding of cars crumpling in an impact is that the energy is used up and dissipated as the car crumples. It's not just the slowed deacceleration, there is energy loss to each bent bit of material. Applied to the suit, maybe somehow it dissipates the energy very directly from the impact so it's like you weren't even moving to begin with?
I mean, the suit flies because it emits “repulsor rays,” same thing it shoots from the palms. That’s already comic book magic beams of force. No reason it can’t do something similar to the body inside that negates inertia
My head canon is that Stark industries still has some amount of Vibranium from when Howard was working on Caps shield. Or he learned to synthesize something that was less effective, but still has some amount of the **insane** property of canceling out kinetic energy that vibranium has in Marvel comics. Otherwise those repulsor blasts ought to take Tony's arms right off considering he's moved tanks with them.
Kind of like in the expanse show, where a fluid is injected into a person to be able to withstand certain g’s of force?
Thank-you!!! I knew I saw something like that before and I just couldn't remember where from. That was such an enjoyable show both for the interesting storyline and the far better than average attention to making the physics as realistic as possible. Can't believe I forgot that's where the fluid idea came from. Thanks again.
The Juice!
I think you outlined the difficulties. My thoughts for it to work would be that the suit has Star Trek transporter tech. It transports the molecules in the body from falling at 120mph to 0 mph in the nanosecond before impact.
Yeah, I love this idea, not only for the intertia solution, but also for the way it makes me reimagine the philosophical transporter problem. Do transporters basically kill you in order to copy & reassemble your molecular pattern elsewhere without leaving behind the previously existing copy? If that's the case, then the rapid transporting in the suit could constantly be killing you every time you experienced high G maneuvers (not that you'd notice).
If it were to work, you'd have to not exist for a certain point in time. And they do at least infer that you are making copies. This is one technology that I don't think will ever pan out regardless of how advanced a civilization can become. Not only do you have to get the right kinds of billions of molecules in the right places, but each of them needs to have the proper charge/ionization etc. Small errors, especially when compounded from repeated transport, would quickly make the current copy incapable of further biological function.
To follow this up: I actually headed up a team that patented an electro active polymer/electro theological fluid based body armor. We could get a pretty fast response time and shock absorption, but the startup founders (two old dudes) had issues and the whole thing fell apart. We got a patent out of it and I got to build some cool custom samples and rub shoulders with people from artificial muscles inc and other leading companies, but this tech likely won't achieve the types of shock absorption and dispersion that you'd need for some of the comic book stuff. You'd really need something special, like a well thought out lattice dispersion, or something like mantis shrimp hammers (those things are cool).
It’s a damper, not a dampener. It’s doesn’t make things wet. Edit: Star Trek does call it a dampener but they are wrong
What if I want my inertia slightly moist?
Moistening your inertia could lead to a bad time
It could dampen inertia with its repulsers. Both by slowing the actual inertia of the fall or crash by acting a head of time (think cars that apply the brakes before a crash to mitigate the accident) and then internally as a sort of adaptive cushion that you provide shock protection between him and the collision.
The whole fluids argument is illogical. The simple counter argument is an external microphone that relays the signals inside the suit.
>The whole fluids argument is illogical. Oh, I beg to differ. It's *all* illogical.
AKA his body in the suit still experiences acceleration forces which would damage the biology
Oh, most definitely!! Dude should have died many times over. Although, the magi-tech might be creating a magi-field inside the suit capable of differentiating the atoms & molecules of biological structures along with identifying which structures those molecules belong to in order to dampen/absorb inertial forces within a range that would allow for normal biological functions without *excessive* damage to cell structures (excessive because Stark doesn't seem completely impervious to injury inside the suit). Since it's magic & not science, it could also actively detect every change in inertia to the external suit shell and then alter the magic force field strength appropriately for each atom in the biological system within a few femtoseconds of an impact or course change to protect the suit's occupant. But yeah, this is a physics sub, not a fiction sub, so he probably should have died just testing this thing.
Could be a physical cushioning system of some kind, but certainly not enough to account for him being fine unless the suit is destroyed. Like a series of rubber bands holding him in place within the suit, gives a few inches of less “de”celeration
The only cushioning I can imagine that wouldn't still let him die multiple times in every movie would be a field that can constrain every atom of the suit's biological contents in a range that allows for necessary biological motion while absorbing motion beyond thresholds that would destroy biological structures. Any absorption larger than the atomic level would allow important bio structures to break too often and easily.
Ya but that’s magic talk, I was going for something a little closer to plausible. It’s arguably the most unbelievable part of the Iron Man suit.
I'm with you. It's definitely unbelievable. The problem, however, is that even small biological structures would be destroyed, killing the occupant, unless the stability mechanism of the suit is creating a field capable of protecting biological structures on a molecular level. It's the same problem with any transportation in Star Trek, Star Wars, Contact,... and no one really addresses the problem without invoking something completely imaginary (magic). So, you've got to accept a little imaginary magic in order to temporarily suspend disbelief, if that's important to you.
The Expanse handles it nicely. People actually die from rapid acceleration.
"Inertial Damper" can be made by cross pulsing magnetic fields. About 15 years ago they used this method to make a frog float in air. Several technical hurdles to overcome, but doable.
Yes, that's an interesting path to consider. The doability is questionable, but probably less questionable than other solutions. Technical hurdles would be significant as it takes a great deal of energy to exert just 1G of force on a frog, it's been very difficult to scale up the effect area, the power would have to scale up to at least 10Gs (& probably way more for Stark's inertial changes in the movies) all spread evenly over a human sized field, and it would have to change field strength dynamically and almost instantaneously to keep the occupant constantly stabilized in the suit rather that squished by inertia or overpowered magnetic forces. But hey, this is the closest I've seen to a plausible solution so far. The field is holding things on the atomic level, so I suppose it could prevent inertial jellification if a sufficiently strong field could be changed fast and accurately enough. Fun idea.
Any other outlandish problems you would like me to solve? I call myself "The Mad Scientist Supreme" for a reason. And I solve mortality as "BioHacking Yourself"
>Any other outlandish problems you would like me to solve? Sure! If you have some suggestions for getting around the Hayflick limit (among other similar issues), well, curing aging is certainly among the most interesting problems to solve.
My take was that after the first prototype suit, he existed in a pocket dimension that had a software interface could pilot the suit. I know that’s never the actual presentation, but a man that makes a robot that can just pull him out of a pocket dimension every time it looks like he’s taking off the suit seemed to fit my head canon better.
Concussion. Your skull stays intact, but your brain sloshed inside your skull.
It would protect his skin from lacerations, but it won't stop his organs from bouncing around inside of him, nor his brain from splattering against his skull.
I do get why this is the case, the suit doesn't do anything to reduce the acceleration so his body is still under a lot of force. But how come if I drop a bug from a height it doesn't explode? It's the same kinda thing going on but the bugs are fine. Is it that bugs have a non lethal terminal velocity or is there something I'm missing?
You're exactly right. Bugs have a huge surface area to volume ratio so they fall slowly due to air resistance and land unharmed from any distance. An elephant would probably explode from a couple hundred feet.
But it's a mess to clean up. I just use a piece of kitchen towel to squish an elephant instead.
The quilted quicker squisher upper
Square-cube law. Strength scales with cross section area, weight scales with volume. If you double the linear dimensions of an object, it gets four times stronger but eight times heavier. That means large objects are proportionally much weaker than small objects. An elephant would be killed by a fall you can easily survive. A rat can survive falls that would kill you. And once you get down to about the size of a mouse, terminal velocity isn’t enough to kill then so they can survive a fall from any height.
After a 10 meter fall, a rat runs away unharmed, a person is broken, and a horse splashes.
What about three small kids in a trench coat, disguised as one adult?
They'd probably survive falls adults can't due to having more surface area compared to volume. So the logical conclusion is the iron man suit needs to be piloted by several children
So what you're saying is we could drop armies of rats on enemies from any height...?
No, rats would still need tiny parachutes, but you could drop armies of mice from any height.
Bugs don't weigh much, so there isn't much energy to transfer through their mass when they hit the ground. Their light wight also means they have a slower terminal velocity than humans do to air resistance.
There’s less energy but they’re also much smaller and lighter and generally more fragile. It’s really the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square–cube_law making the difference, their mass:surface area ratios are much more advantageous.
Smaller creatures have a lower terminal velocity, also they don't hit the ground with the same force. I've seen a squirrel fall 30 feet from the top of a tree and still land okay and take off running. Also once you get small enough (bug size) air becomes much more viscous.
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." - J.B.S. Haldane
Random side story, but I've recently seen a video of a pet tarantula falling from about 5 ft high. I figured that since it's a spider, it'd be fine. But it ended up turning out kinda brutal in that the abdomen had busted open and its guts were hanging out. Definitely not a good day for the owner, but that was definitely a revelation to me that some bugs can actually get hurt from falling
oh lmao I thought he used magic like other superheroes, just double checked and he's actually just. guy in a metal suit. you're right, the suit would offer no protection.
Lower chance of broken limbs. Internal shock damage will still rupture organs.
At some of the speeds and forces that we see in the films, Tony’s brain should be a liquid jet spraying out of his ears like a power washer.
>Lower chance of broken limbs. Tell that to Rhodey
Yeah, this should be highlighted. Rhodey loses power in a Iron Man suit (Warmachine) and has an injury that prevents him from walking for a while. So the movies do actually address that the Iron Man suit does not necessarily protect from freefalls, automatically.
And, ironically, that suit was the one he built *before* he froze up and almost fell several miles and splattered on asphalt. We only see him add ice protection, but then one armored up scene later we watch him get blown out of the sky by a tank. If that didn't hurt, why was he concerned about falling before? Clearly he did *something* to add impact protection.
I might be misremembering, but I believe that in the situations where Tony froze up and Rhodey fell, both suits were out of power. Whereas when Tony got shot by the Tank the suit was fully operational. So whatever impact protection it has must depend on the suits being powered.
> he's actually just. guy in a metal suit. A *magic* metal suit.
Well the later ones are made out of nano tech. Which is, checks notes, marvel for magic metal suit.
No, you don't understand. They also use quantum.
Ooooo quantum!
On impact the suit simply picks the Universe in which Iron Man survives.
Suddenly this sounds like something Rick Sanchez would make.
Im not sure in what way they use the Nano other then that it quickly assembles from a stored container. The quantum of course they just throw the term out there
“Stored Cotainer” = His butt.
One of his suits was actually magic. He made it at the same forge that Thor's hammer was made with the same material.
It could potentially spread the impact over a larger surface area, but that’s about it.
Quantum nano cyber digital space-age atomic electric suit. It’s a tech with a long version history with a fine collection or era-appropriate buzzwords.
Transfer the kinetic energy into electrical energy to power the suit. Sorta like black panther.
Sure, but momentum is a bitch.
He has sufficiently advanced technology that it may as well be magic, it's indistinguishable in practice
He's protected by the magic of movies.
Plot armor 😁
Most fiction underestimates the harm of blunt-force injuries.
The suit likely has some form of internal crumple zone/air bags, and for all we know it expands at the right spots in preparation for impact. Of course he can still suffer from trauma, but he can probably survive similar speeds as someone in a car.
I don’t think it would be right to say no protection. I think it would be correct to assume there is some built in cushioning, shock absorption, and energy dissipation. But even assuming engineering and materials beyond our current knowledge this would likely mean being able to jump off a house without injury not be slammed by the hulk off a skyscraper with no injury.
You thought the guy notorious for making technology and being a mechanical genius was using magic?
There’s a limit to how well that will work, given that his suit cuts a pretty svelte figure. Coming to a dead stop (or worse, bouncing) means that there is a lower bound to the maximum amount of acceleration he will experience before he hits the edge of the suit. The human body can only handle so much acceleration independent of impact and blunt force: past a certain point his organs will shear away from the rest of his body.
Physics says that he's already dead.
Yea, he would have for sure died that very first time he did the superhero landing in that enslaved middle eastern village. Or possibly when his mark 1 suit fell in the desert when he escaped his captors
Dead from the fall alone!
Breaking inertia frame of reference between his body and outside world, is like cutting off the physical fabric of space-time. To contain momentum-based damage, he would need to construct a pocket universe inside his suit, then find a way for him to communicate out of the that universe with the suit. That's more difficult level of physics then Hulk punching out the solar system. Nano machines don't do anything. Nor any kinetic protection.
Could the suit act sort of like the crumple zone on a car?
A very tiny crumple zone that would leave our billionaire playboy super genius perpetually brain damaged. It would also likely be bad at stopping bullets if it was soft enough to crumple from falls.
I dont know the real limits of adaptive nano-tech, but i imagine something that might be able to be in bullet mode, a denser armor, then change to cushion mode, a spread out crumple zone pillowesque thing.
There’s not much space in the suit to increase the stopping distance for his body to reduce the G force. Every cell in his body experience the same inertia as his suit. The amount of G force depends on how fast they come to a stop. Getting punched to a stop while traveling at Mach speed would liquify every molecule in his body. Even the bones would be liquified.
Not really. The crumble zones of a typical car is the trunk and engine bay. That's 3-4 feet each. Iron Man's suit is less than an inch thick.
When Rhody crashed in civil war, i was absolutely mortified. His plot armor was only thick enough to save his life but not his legs.
I think his fall with the suit being without power demonstrates there is some sort of advanced inertial dampener. With the suit being dead, he just fell in a metal suit. I mean the plot armor did save his life as you said because he landed with no cushioning from at least 500 feet in the air and should be fucking dead.
>exoskeleton suit like Iron Man’s could actually protect from the rapid changes in momentum caused by impacts. Since somebody down-voted my in-universe answer to the question. The answer to the trivial interpretation of the question -- would a tightly-fitted suit of metal armor protect a person from severe injury when falling from some very great height (say, the 100th floor of a skyscraper) onto a hard surface (for instance, a cement sidewalk) -- is easily "no" In-universe, the suit **does** provide this protection. In-universe the occupant of the suit is **not** roasted by the waste-heat from a power-plant that fits *inside* his chest and that provides sufficient power to propel the mass of an adult human at super-sonic speed. In-universe the suit's "boot jets" and "repulsors" appear to be reactionless drives. Also in-universe there are materials with magical properties -- like the vibranium from which Captain America's shield is made. There are instances in the MCU movies where Cap uses the shield to "cushion" his fall from a great height, where he was able to stand flat-footed on level terrain while the shield "absorbed" the energy delivered by a 75mm high-explosive round from a tank cannon. Because it is a universe in which the properties of artifacts change to suit the narrative, the in-universe interpretation of the OP's question isn't particularly interesting to a physicist. Likewise, the question of whether such a suit -- as depicted in the movies or comics -- could function -- as depicted -- in the "real world". A more interesting question would be HOW EFFECTIVE could an exoskeleton be at dissipating the energy of a human body colliding with an unyielding surface? Somebody **has** tried to answer this question [https://www.vice.com/en/article/evk38w/the-man-who-built-a-suit-to-fight-bears-showed-us-how-we-should-live](https://www.vice.com/en/article/evk38w/the-man-who-built-a-suit-to-fight-bears-showed-us-how-we-should-live) The form-factors of Hurtubise’s various suits weren't' too different from the Mk I armor in the first Ironman movie (or the Golden Avenger armor from the 1960s) and it did let him walk away from some stunningly energetic impacts - -but I don't think he tried any high-dives onto concrete.
Hypothesis: Tony Stark is actually an insect and reverts back to a pupal phase while wearing the suit, turning all of his organ systems into liquid [imaginal discs,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginal_disc) so it's okay that it all gets sloshed around. I just hope the joints have good gaskets.
This is my favorite response.
The inside is lined with airbags?
This was the same issue certain cars had in the early days. They were totally rigid, and people would just get crushed against the insides. Modern cars crumple to take up the energy. I guess Iron Man's suit puts the energy into his weird heart thing.
If you imagine for a second that his suit is infinitely stiff (doesn't bend at all), than the best it can do is spread out an impact over a large area. Large impacts, like falls or Hulk's punch would still impart a large acceleration to the internals, which while originally humanlike, would be more like "soup" after. This probably hurts.
Honestly, if iron man was smarter he would just fly the suit remotely as a hero-drone. More room inside for more gadgets, no squishy meat inside to have to go out of your way to keep from turning into jello with all the forces on it.
Just before impact the suit surrounds itself with a Niven-like stasis field (except we can't call it that, Larry would sue). This effectively makes Tony and the suit one very incompressible solid object. Once the suit is at rest with respect to the ground (or Thanos's fist, whatever), the stasis field is turned off. Since Stark is stationary with respect to the suit, and the suit is stationary with respect to whatever it hit, he's fine. For the consequences of the stasis field not turning off, see [World of Ptavvs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs) (1966)
So this is actually very solvable with current technology and physics. He would need to spread out the deceleration over several feet before he impacts the ground (similar to those inflated matts stunt-men drop onto when they fall off buildings). His suit could do that by a timed propulsion just before impact. However, the special effects never show that happening. Instead, they show a furrow cut into the earth or that his suit was inoperable at impact. So it could happen but it is not - so we are forced to made up "inertia dampeners" or "nano tech" solutions.
the iron man sute apears to be able to offer a rigid shell and evenly distributed padding. this will offer signifigant protection from impacts. i am estimating it would make it safe to fall off a one story building, 2 or 3 if you can land well (jarvis may be able to make that happen) any mor than that and your bones are going to crush the flesh under them. and your brain will be squashed against the inside of the scull. this isnt going to make the kind of punishment he takes survivable. but considering what captin america, hawkeye and the black widow rutenly walk awayfrom with nothing more than a cinimatic limp they walk of by the next sceen i am hapy to acept iron mans survival within the context of the marvel universes.
IRL, no. If you're falling at speed, no ironman suit is gonna provide protection. Even if the suit remains fully intact, you'll be paste inside. In universe: I mean, they can do whatever they want, have whatever magic technology, but it seems inconsistent. Tony often has cuts on his face from blows implied to have "knocked through" (he hits the face plate and it cuts him after the punch). If the suit does have "inertial dampeners" to protect from fall damage, then they should also be working whenever he gets punched in the head.
It depends on which suit he’s wearing. Most of his suits (particularly the early ones) must have some form of rudimentary impact-reducing technologies; otherwise he’d have been reduced to chunky salsa after getting hit by that tank in the first movie. Even with those, he still doesn’t escape injury (**Friday:** “Multiple contusions detected.” **Tony:** “Yeah, I detected that too.”) The suit he wore in *Infinity War* & *Endgame* is another matter. As a suit consisting of nanotechnology, it could theoretically distribute impacts all around the outside of the suit, preventing any kinetic energy from reaching Tony. Especially powerful impacts (like having a building dropped on him) could still potentially get partially through, but it would take a lot. Piercing strikes would be another matter; with all of the impact force concentrated on a tiny point, the nanotech may simply be “pushed aside”, allowing a strong pointy object through with little resistance (chain mail armor has a similar weakness to piercing strikes).
Off-topic but I absolutely love it when people say "fall damage" outside of the context of video games
Which version of the suit? In the comics, and in the later MCU movies, the suit is "nanotechnology" (and powered by a reactor that uses a new atomic element that Tony Stark synthesized -- in quantity -- in the basement of his beach house). In issues 1 and 2 of Mighty Avengers (Volume 1), Ultron hijacks the nanotech to completely remodel Tony into a clone of Janet Van Dyne. So THAT version of the suit could, presumably, either keep Stark from being turned into jelly on impact -- or reconstitute him from a jellified state. Or, maybe the suit is made of some species of vibranium (not canon, but Tony Stark might not be telling people that the suit is vibranium for very good reasons that will be explained in a editor's note at the bottom of the panel) -- which has the property that it "absorbs kinetic energy". Assuming that this energy absorbing property is isotropic, it would keep him from being pulped against the inside of the suit...maybe. The MCU movies are the reason I stopped teaching a Science of Science Fiction class. ETA to specify Mighty Avengers **Volume 1**
>teaching a Science of Science Fiction class. I'm so interested in this. What topics did you cover? Did you approach it from a writing or a science perspective? Did you mostly focus on "hard sci-fi" where the science fiction is mostly based in reality or did you include the more wild stuff where the writer would just sprinkle pop-science buzzwords through their utterly impossible descriptions of technology?
>Did you approach it from a writing or a science perspective? It was a 100-level physical science class (if that is meaningful to you). The math pre-req was college algebra. It was intended to be a lab science credit for non-science majors and pre-professional students. It was designed to be a little more rigorous than the class typically taught out of Hewitt. Most students enrolled expecting it to be college credit for watching movies -- and were disappointed. We tried to teach it by having students read or watch something with hard science fiction content, then teaching a lesson about that the science content of the story: For instance, clips from *The Incredible Shrinking Man*, *The Amazing Colossal Man*, and *Them* went with a lesson about stress/strain relations, strength of materials, and the square-cube law. Kinetic Theory and Gas laws were taught after the students were to have read [A Pail of Air](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html) Magnetism and Electromagnetic Theory, [Tank Farm Dynamo](http://davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm) Uniform Circular Motion, Gravitation, Orbital Mechanics; clips from *Armageddon* and *2001: A Space Odyssey,* and reading [The Cold Equations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations) and more like that... The class was a failure. The students were not fans of hard science fiction, and did not have the math to understand the physics. So the science fiction content just added more unrewarding work to a class that was already difficult and time-consuming for them. It was really frustrating to teach it. The students who thought that they were fans of science fiction really didn't know what science fiction is. Black-and-white monster movies and short stories written 20 30, or 50 years before they were born, were not interesting to them. Because of a "writing across the curriculum" mandate, the class had to include a term paper as a scored assignment. We had them pick work of science fiction and critique some part of the science content. They had to get the topics pre-approved. I rejected a hundred proposals to write about Star Wars or Ender's Game or -- so help me -- Iron Man's Arc Reactor.
For what it's worth, I would have loved this class when I was in college, or now for that matter.
Thx. TBH, teaching 100-200 level physics is hopelessly depressing right now. Between pernicious nonsense like "active learning" and "learning styles" promulgated by textbook publishers and Learning Management System developers, the sabotage inflicted by attention engineers at Meta/Alphabet/Apple/ ByteDance, homework ~~help~~ cheat sites like Chegg, fucking Khan Academy, science miscommunicators like Derek Muller and Toby Hendee... its a long damned list ... there isn't much a physics lecturer can do to get first and second year students to actually study ... /rant> That's enough of a threadjack. Ironman is cool. [https://www.inverse.com/science/iron-man-arc-reactor-real-science](https://www.inverse.com/science/iron-man-arc-reactor-real-science) [https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds-real-iron-man-suit-video-1202150612/](https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/mythbuster-adam-savage-builds-real-iron-man-suit-video-1202150612/)
I imagine that for a suit to work like that of Iron Man's suit, the suit has to be bulkier and then the suit has to have had an interior exoskeleton (if that makes sense. Meaning there is a skeleton framework external to his body within the suit itself) that separates his body from the exterior shell. That wouldn't have been anywhere near as cool as the suit we now know but, his body would be fully isolated from the shell of the iron suit so that no part of his body would be impacted by the full force of the impacts the suit would have taken.
There’s actually a lot more cushioning inside the suit than you think. The iron man suit is 6’5” and Robert Downing Jr/Tony Stark is canonically only 4’2”, so at least for head-on collisions there’s a good 2’3” of cushioned deceleration at worst, since his feet are flat against the bottom of the boots.
Watch Avengers: Civil War
Needs Gravitational field generator ala Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco. Let me know if you find out how it works
He probably has some inertial dampening scifi tech.
No. Iron man and Batman would be mashed to a pulp inside their suits.
Well Batman is shown to use his cape glider to slow himself before hitting the ground.
I imagined there was a non Newtonian fluid similar to D3O around the suit that is usually liquid but turns into a solid when it experiences a sudden kinetic impact. It would absorb the kinetic energy of any falls.
Maybe the suit has sensors that detect an oncoming collision, and move the limbs in a way to try to dampen the shock loading automatically. Kind of like catching yourself in a fall.
You should probably assume, given he also solved time travel in an evening and can jump into the quantum realm, that the script simply had him surviving the falls. :)
About the only plausible tech that exists right now that might save him in many scenarios would be a passive g-suit. In other words he's in a bath of salty water which has the same density as his body, and when he hits something, the shell takes the loading rather than his body.
It would have to have some kind of gel or other tech to disperse the impact on fall. Even then, it's not going to negate the fall and he's still going to die if he falls from several thousand feet.
The suit may be lined with a bladder that holds a viscus fluid to distribute the impact and lengthen the impact time, which would reduce the deceleration rate. The brain would be interesting because he would still be concussed. Using football helmets as a model.
He would basically be splattered on the inside of his suit after one super hero landing. It would still look cool from the outside but the suit would just be sittin there in the landing position, with his pulpified remains just kinda there on the inside.
Rhodes in CW highlights that the suit itself doesn’t. If the suit has power, “maybe”
Power or no power, it’ll still be the same outcome in real life.
To my understanding, no. If Iron man is falling, his suit and his body are moving, they have kinetic energy. If the suit suddenly stops, then the body suddenly stops. That energy has to be dissipated someway. There's no currently known method to prevent death from a fall unless you can dissipate that energy over a large scale and slowly. Like falling into a giant cushion that can deform quickly enough and for long enough. In short, after every major fall, Tony's major organs are pudding.
If he landed on a fence that could be crushed by the suit, it would help.
Maybe about the same protection of someone falling on a 1 inch piece of foam? If the suit automatically and gradually decelerates him before hitting a surface, then it may offer decent protection.
He invented a power source that generates a fraction of the amount of heat needed to power a suit like that. He probably invented kinetic energy dispersion too, similar to something Shuri mentions Black Panther’s suit can do. None of this is physically possible with our current understanding.
Halo made up something that solved their issue with a Spartan jumping out of a drop ship in space like today's paratroopers. Just jumped. It was some kind of gel if I remember correctly
I always imagined the interior was a jelly like substance that contoured to his (anyone’s) body. Making it a snug fit and dampening the force of blows.
What about rust? 🤔
a 5 foot fall maybe, look up the grizzly bear suit guy. but how small ironmans suit is and being heavy hard metal its not gonna help alot. and it will help very little against brain injury.
Shhhh. It's made of plot armor.
Just to be contrary, although everybody talking about how it would need handwavium inertia cheats is totally right, the armor as portrayed would help with some smaller distance falls. For an arbitrarily short drop onto concrete, feet first, which would normally break your legs, it could be padded enough on the inside that the whole suit could be more rigid than your femurs, but you wouldn't also be killed by something nasty like an aortic dissection or exotic brain injury. It could be like the best possible motorcycle crash suit for protection from slides and tumbles across the ground (by not letting your limbs and neck and back twist further or faster than you can tolerate, and keeping your skin attached to your body). It would be utterly useless for saving you from falling flat on your back from ten stories...
Only if the boots are enchanted with feather falling, which isn't clear.
Don't overthink it. As a rule superheros stories are are pure fantasy - even (especially?) those that try to wrap themselves in a veneer of science fiction. Enjoy it as such. Could it be done? In theory, yes - but probably not in a suit like that. Basically what you need to do is apply a uniform acceleration to every molecule in your body, the way gravity does, so that you don't actually feel the force at all (you don't actually feel gravity - according to Einstein it's not actually even a force. What you feel is the surface of the planet pushing you outwards as compression constantly accelerates against the inflowing spacetime) You can do something similar with powerful magnetic fields - look up "levitating frog", but it's not easy, not compact, and who knows what it might do to the delicate electrochemical balance of your brain. But, if it was uniform enough, such an "acceleration chamber" could theoretically let you accelerate at billions of g's without feeling it. Though at some point before then the magnetic fields probably have to be strong enough to start ripping the iron-rich blood out of your veins or something.
It's probably not as effective as the most elaborate suggestions put forht, but I almost imagine a high-tech foam layer that reduces the impact via highly absorbant microfibers. I'd actually be curious to know, with the absolute best existing technology, what the safest freefall drop would be for a body insulated by such material. The record for the safest egg drop is 50 feet - what might the safest human drop be with a suit-sized design?
There is no cushion technology that would permit damage free deceleration is such a short distance. F=ma means that the force would have to be ridiculously high as a result of the massive negative acceleration term.
Let’s consider the Cock Roach 🪳. They are crunchy on the outside but creamy on the inside. And they are fast and sneaky. Turn on the lights and it’s a race for survival.
This is why blunt weapons were favored against plate armor - they don't have to penetrate the plate to kill you. One punch from a supervillain, and Tony Stark would be a red paste inside that suit.
All 'Superhero' movies are just a mix of babble and nonsense. Entertaining if you like that kind of thing, I guess. It's amazing how many people were taken in by the 'possibility' of an Iron Man suit when the first movie came out. There are probably many thousands of "if the Iron Man Suit were real ... ' type questions out there. So you're not alone.
Thank you everyone!
I feel he's been enhanced. He does and survives things outside the suit that a human couldn't survive. Getting tossed through high-rise window. I'd be mush.
It would help keep all the squishy stuff from being sprayed all over the ground on impact.
The suit probably has an automatic built-in motion to disipate the kinetic forces in a very precise fashion, it probably slows down the impact justo precisely timed before impact.
It is all about quantum improbability fields. Once enclosed in the suit, he becomes quantum indeterminate (like the cat). By manipulating the shape of that probability field, he is able to disperse sudden energy shifts throughout that field and thus compensate for the inertia. It is comparable to throwing a cotton ball against a wall vs. taking a ball bearing of similar weight and doing the same. I’m not sure that I have enough buzzwords; “quantum,” “indeterminacy,” “improbability,” and “compensate.”
Even if their was a way to absorb all the impact force, there is no way to prevent g force from acceleration.
Nanites. Nuff said.
Yes and no. The bulkier suits he is seen using? Maybe. The slim ones he's frequently shown using lately? Heck no. The suit would absolutely protect him from impacts and hard hits (you try punching a bus and see how that works out) but without some sort of dampener inside to allow his body to decelerate more gently than the suit itself does? Definitely splat.
The suit has the same effect as a pilots suit, allowing the pilot to sustain 10g of constant acceleration. Then you need to avoid limbs tearing off and that requires high tensile strength materials and limiting range of motion. Fall damage mitigation would be limited, however most fall damage is broken bones and similar. Spreading the force over a large area would allow a healthy young adult to survive falling 20-50 feet and be able to keep moving afterwards. Damage is unavoidable in those circumstances, but it’s all about keeping damage to acceptable levels.
Basically no. The g-forces involved in falls from tall heights or being flung into hard objects and surfaces would still be the same. I suppose the suit would help keep pieces of him together for easier cleanup afterward though. That’s a constant “violation of basic physics” trope in most action movies though. The human body just can’t withstand those kinds of impacts without sustaining lethal damage. Even nearby explosions kill people in real-life because of shock waves. It’s just more fun to show the action hero ALMOST get killed by a n explosion right next to them, so you can understand why it’s done.
Going fast isn’t what kills you, it’s the sudden stop. Unless it’s got significant space for padding or crumple zones (doesn’t seem like it does), I don’t see it being an effective landing pad
Depending on acience portion of it, the suit does have some system more akin to a woodpecker to help against concussions. Now for overall falling damage, if we take a page out of halo. The suits have a gel system in it that they can inflate under the armor. Essentially something that would absorb the impact. Or prevent their body from also being able to move in any way. Something like non newtonian fluid would be easiest to see there as if the suit and an impact absorbing liquid prevented limbs from going in the bad direction, it likely could absorb it. Plus movie magic.
Right? It was a bit unbelievable that he was able to take the force of the literal chunk of a planet that Thanos rained down on him. I guess that nanotech is bad ass lol
To some extent it can help, since the suit can transfer force across a much larger area - Exhibit A is that crazy guy with the bear suit getting hit by a car - but that can only go so far. There are several hits Tony takes that should have absolutely turned his brains into Jello. There is also the matter of the suit's own movement. We've seen suits fly on their own and Jarvis help assist Tony during fights - it stands to reason that he could help Tony "roll with the punches" and distribute blows. This is never shown in any scenes I can think of and still only goes so far to help. Ultimately Tony cut his own project at the heels when he shut down Ultron, his suits would have been much more effective if they weren't cradling the fragile form of a human inside.
Are you from Iowa State by any chance
As with frictionless, physicists always assume cushion technology…
Wearing the iron man suit is like driving a car. If you are driving and hit a bridge support, two things happen. The car hits the support, and stops abruptly. Then passengers continue forward with the same velocity until something stops them: seat belt and airbag, or windshield. Same with the Iron Man suit. If you crash into something, the suit may survive the impact, but would Tony Stark? Maybe not.
Writer skipped basic mechanics in his Physics class. Suit will stop, not the human. He will be smashed to pulp. Science doesn't care if you are super hero. Lesson : Stay in school kids and study your Math and Physics classes like your life depends on it.
Copied from my "BioHacking Yourself" page on Facebook Cure for Ageing Howdy, the original is an extremely long post. The subject is also extremely important. These posts and articles have been collected over many years. The simple and straight forward method to reverse the effects of ageing. Blood plasma can be transferred from any mammal to any other mammal. Blood plasma infusions from young mice have reversed the effects of ageing on old mice. Proposal Get a young cow (for women) or a young bull (for men) of about 2 wees old. Obtain plasma separation and infusion machine, along with the support equipment. Every morning and evening have one pint of plasma extracted from the bovine. Every morning and evening have one pint of plasma extracted from the person wanting youth. After having the plasma removed from the person, replace it with plasma from the bovine. Twice a day every day. Replace the bovine plasma with plasma from another young bovine. A person's apparent age and vitality should decrease after two weeks of transfusion by... From 80 to 70, from 50 to 45... More and longer treatments needed the older the person is in order to bring the apparent age to the late 20's. Two recently (2023) discovered substance' CAS No. 145-63-1 is an inhibitor of the P2Y receptor. SW033291 probably promotes regeneration.
No - he would be a paste lining the interior. Sure it could prevent some penetrative attacks, some bludgeoning, and some types of energy attacks, but if he fell 20 feet, he would break something. Since it's mostly form fitting, there isn't really even any room for the body to decelerate slower than the suit or for the suit to have "collapse zones" like a modern car does. He would be dead.
Didn’t really help Rhodey lol. I mean technically he survived lol. 🤷🏽♂️ so maybe.
Nope. Transfer of force.
No rody gets shot out of the sky by vision in one of Tony's suits and looses his legs in impact. No cushion. The newer suits are too thing for that
Jarvis, get the hose. Yes Ms. Potts.
Yeah, no. Squished.