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Okay, so I know that 40k has some insane gak.... But this is actually too much. Let me show you some math.


Formulas taken from Brauer, Roger L. "11-2: Falls" Safety and Health for Engineers. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2006. 142-43. Print.

g-Force Constant

gc = 9.812 m/s/s


Velocity Upon Impact (v)

v = Sqr (2 * gc * Height)


Rate of Deceleration (a)

a = (v ^ 2) / (2 * StopDist)


g-Force Conversion

g-Force = a / gc


When combining the above formulas we can reduce / cancel out all the way to just:

g-Force = Height / StopDist


Both Height and StopDist must be in the same units of measurement, so if using a Height of Meters and a StopDist of Centimeters, the final formula is:

g-Force = Height * 100 / StopDist


Test Metric for these formulas provided by www.HazardControl.com :

From example on Page 7 of http://www.hazardcontrol.com/factsheets/pdfs/falling-objects-calculations.pdf

Height = 11 feet = 3.3528 m
StopDist = 0.5 inches = 1.27 cm
Correct g-Force Output = 264





So this is how one would find out how many G's are experienced during a fall. Assuming the Space Marine is say, falling down to Earth. That's 2000 kilometers, also 200000 meters. This Space Marine is pulling well over a MILLION G's on impact. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY that a Space Marine would survive that fall. At best, this Space Marine and his brethren would be pancakes, at worst, they're tearing through the DAMN PLANET. So I get that we all love dropping our troops from orbit at high velocity not accounted for here as I'm using a human's terminal velocity instead, that adds EVEN MORE G's. There is NO WAY that a human can be altered to survive millions of G's. Accelerating at 70 G's is literally impossible UNLESS a human being is modified SO HEAVILY that they'd barely even be called human at that point.


So I have one question for everyone else, what other insane math is in 40k that makes no sense at all?(I have some other numbers as well but hey, I'm open to discussion.)

1: They aren't considered human at all. Most loyalist marines consider themselves below humans and it's their job to protect them.

2: Not sure if you're talking about drop pods? But they have retro thrusters to slow descent.

And are you taking into account air friction?

What are you talking about? Why would a Space Marine be falling from orbit into a planetary surface?

I think you might be forgetting the laws of bad-assery that allows any marine to survive anything that makes him look badass.

Thumping onto the ground in a terminator armour with nothing more than a dampening squat to break the force is most certainly badass.

Aren't you forgetting the laws of terminal velocity

A human reaches terminal velocity after around 450m which reduces your result to 35433 Gs. Terminal velocity will be higher for a marine but we are still far from your claimed millions...

You're also assuming that 0.5" of deceleration distance. Dirt will deform much more than that. Even a few inches of padding in the armour makes a massive difference. The marine bending his knees on impact allows his torso to decelerate over a longer distance and the organs move inside the torso to decelerate them slower again. If we make that only 6" then forces drop to less than 3K Gs.

However, when do we see Marines being dropped from orbit? A drop pod does have braking thrusters.

Are you assuming a marine is tossed out, buck naked, from low orbit onto a planet? Because that doesn't happen unless it's his (spectacularly weird) execution.

Marines deployed from orbit are done so via drop pods, which have numerous systems designed to slow the descent of the craft. And even then the marines have to be strapped in to special harnesses to further dampen the G forces. If you're talking about Jump Pack Marines, they don't jump out from low-orbit crafts; they jump out from thunderhawks which can enter the atmosphere and probably are just a tad higher than parachute troops would drop from (and they use their jump packs to act as dampeners).

40k does have some freaky math at times (like how titans can even stand upright without collapsing in on itself) but this isn't one of them.

Hilariously, despite every animation since then showing them otherwise, Drop Pods have rockets and such on the bottom and they're supposed to slow down before they hit the ground.

See the way they're depicted in Dawn of War 1.

Well, 40k isn't exactly hard scifi...

Even if the basic laws of physics were set to "hard scifi", you could still explain drop pods with warp: Because all imperial citizens believe that the space marines are avenging knights who descend from the skies to the field of battle like meteorites, they are able to do just that. It's not like anyone understands the science (or... the lack of it) behind a drop pod. But that doesn't count as hard scifi either.

However, in the end it's just because of rule of cool. Because it's a cool idea, they have technology that allows them to survive the descent. It's just how they do things in the Imperium.

40k is Fantasy in Space, not actual SciFi. 40k is also wildly and fantastically inconsistent on just about everything as well.

Space Marines in general stop working as soon as you apply the tiniest bit of realism to them. Drop Pods, as frequently described, would turn anything inside, Space Marine or no, into tomato paste. A Space Marine chapter fighting a planetary war would be isolated, cut to pieces and destroyed in detail by almost any competent foe because there arent enough SM's to cover much more than a few hundred meters of ground at a time, die to heavy artillery and crew served weapons almost as easily as normal humans, and have no way to replace casualties in a time effective manner. Bolters wouldnt hit the broad side of a barn because they wouldnt reach their peak velocity until well after leaving the muzzle (RPG guns have been tried, they dont work well), on top of GW having given mulitple contradictory tracts on how they actually work.On and on and on.

Treat it as Fantasy with a scifi skin, 40k doesnt work when treated as SciFi.

It always amuses me the things that people always take issue with when it comes to 40k technology.

This is a world with psycho-kinetic living crystal powered by dead elves, daemons from the dimension of woogly-doo, transgalactic fart-powered dinobugs.

The majority of human technology is somehow maintained by the somehow-preserved lobotomized brains of slaves, the most comically inefficient form of automation that could possibly be conceived. Your average servitor would not be able to perform its function for longer than a few days, and would be dead within 2 weeks.

A space pod can have rocket thrusters to slow it down. Sure, fine, great.

Honestly most sci-fi and a good chunk of fantasy actually falls apart if you start applying modern day science and fact to it. There are legions of fantasy books where horses and riders go for miles without a pause at top speed.

Sci-fi is the same; its not about science its about cool. It's all about super cool stuff that kinda yeah does break some major rules ;but on the surface just works as a cool story.



Also don't forget technology way beyond your understanding is basically identical to magic!

OTOH, let's say Space Marines could survive a fall from high orbit. Proper representation in the game would require adjusting their profile to give them 2+ saves unaffected by AP modifiers.

I am for this.

There are real occasions when humans survive free falls from planes.

Yep, which is crazy but true. Mom used to skydive and there was some interesting stories about what you'd try to aim for if your chutes weren't working...

Didn't a woman survive falling 11000 meters from a plane?

That should result in terminal velocity to say the least.

Edit: Almost. Just over 10000 meters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

 Ashiraya wrote:
Didn't a woman survive falling 11000 meters from a plane?

That should result in terminal velocity to say the least.

Edit: Almost. Just over 10000 meters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

Since you reach terminal velocity after about 450 meters wouldnt it not matter if you are falling from 500 meters or 20,000 meters? Outside of overheating from friction of course.

Georgy Zhukov used to regularly kick troops off planes with no parachutes. Not at terribly high altitude, but high enough to avoid small arms fire.

The fact it can be done does not mean you do that with your elite fighting forces.

 techsoldaten wrote:
Georgy Zhukov used to regularly kick troops off planes with no parachutes

Where do you get this nonesence from.

I know in halo they had spartans falling from orbit and surviving, but that's a different kettle of fish. Marines don't do that, and i would assume their insertion gear has gravity and inertia dampeners and stuff to handwavium away the rest.

 Torga_DW wrote:
I know in halo they had spartans falling from orbit and surviving, but that's a different kettle of fish. Marines don't do that, and i would assume their insertion gear has gravity and inertia dampeners and stuff to handwavium away the rest.

They also have recharging energy shields powered by handwavium and with a strength that varies depending on the situation. In one moment it is deflecting ATGMs and 57mm autocannon blasts (Fall of Reach) and in another a few solid handgun hits drains the shield (the videogames).

So yeah.

Halo. Neat.

 koooaei wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:
Georgy Zhukov used to regularly kick troops off planes with no parachutes

Where do you get this nonesence from.

There's several other sites discussing this - http://community.battlefront.com/topic/40773-russian-paratroop-deployment-tactics/?do=findComment&comment=461317 for example.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Back on topic - they can't. Have a read of the aptly-named Terminal Velocity.

MechaEmperor7000 wrote:Are you assuming a marine is tossed out, buck naked, from low orbit onto a planet? Because that doesn't happen

It doesn't? But my army's whole fluff was based around that. The Fallen Nakeddudes they were going to be called. I did a bunch of conversions and everything. I was going to play "It's Raining Men" while I was deploying them.

I guess I'll have to find a new theme for my next arm-

the_scotsman wrote: transgalactic fart-powered dinobugs.

Tell me more...

There is a legal case in the UK just now of a man accused of trying to murder his wife by tampering with her parachutes. She fell 4000ft and survived, admittedly with serious injuries, because the field she landed in was freshly ploughed and therefore quite soft. Turns out they don't like each other terribly much.

Also dropping from an extraplanetary orbit has less to do with speed from gravitational potential and more to do with orbital velocities. Quite possible for something to drop though the skies at faster than terminal velocity if they started off much faster. You just end up with problems of eating due to air compression and machinery forces tearing you apart.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
40k does have some freaky math at times (like how titans can even stand upright without collapsing in on itself) but this isn't one of them.

What is wrong with Titans standing up? We build building sized buildings all the time and somehow they stay up. We even build building sized vehicles that work fine. A building sized armoured suit would be no problem. We could build the now if we really wanted. They are just stupendously stupid weapon platforms that only work in 40k because of tiny powerful plasma reactors and energy shields. Without the void shieds Titans would just be easy targets for kneeseeker missiles.

While there IS plenty to criticize in terms of 40k realism, we should remember two things:

Artistic License: Also linked with rule of cool, the writers cannot be expected to have a full education on cutting edge science of space and space travel let alone a similar degree of knowledge on countless other areas of expertise that would be required to realistically depict just Space Marines alone. They try to write good fiction, and yeah there will be realism mistakes. Even stupid ones. Some can be ret-conned but others may be difficult to do so since it's already established fluff.

For example, the most recent Jurassic Park movie depicted raptors without feathers, despite current knowledge suggesting they had them. While aware of this (and many other tidbits), they showed depictions they knew were wrong anyway because those aspects were already set in precedent from previous movies. Take that and multiply it by a thousand to get the degree of change in what we know as 'fact' now verses what we knew as 'fact' when Rogue Trader was released in regards to areas of science that affect just Space Marines alone.

Clark's Three Laws: Particularly the third; sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In a way, it's incredibly arrogant for any of us to assume that our current standards of what's possible for technology to do have any application to what's being used 38,000 years from now. Think of what people thought was possible technologically just 380 years ago.

Now this is not to say that there is no room for criticism of realism. There is quite a lot of room in various places for various reasons; take Vaktathi's example of Space Marine wartime achievements being impossible to do simply due to the number of marines involved. Even a whole chapter of a thousand marines is insufficient to do what far smaller numbers achieve in the fluff. And this is not because of some bit of technology or biology that shouldn't work, but simply because the capabilities of marines as described in the fluff are woefully insufficient to do what they are described as doing in the same fluff!

Besides, if you're not landing on a formation of squishy enemies to try to maximize casualties you're doing it wrong

 Vaktathi wrote:
Bolters wouldnt hit the broad side of a barn because they wouldnt reach their peak velocity until well after leaving the muzzle (RPG guns have been tried, they dont work well), on top of GW having given mulitple contradictory tracts on how they actually workFi.

Bolters are not Gyrojets. Every modern depiction of them, infact even the early ones, have been of a conventionally fired round with a secondary rocket motor after they leave the barrel at velocity. The contradiction has always been whether or not the round is cased or caseless, and presently its cased.

 koooaei wrote:
There are real occasions when humans survive free falls from planes.

I believe the record is 35,000 feet? Landed in a snow drift. Broke many, many bones, but survived.

 VictorVonTzeentch wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Bolters wouldnt hit the broad side of a barn because they wouldnt reach their peak velocity until well after leaving the muzzle (RPG guns have been tried, they dont work well), on top of GW having given mulitple contradictory tracts on how they actually workFi.

Bolters are not Gyrojets. Every modern depiction of them, infact even the early ones, have been of a conventionally fired round with a secondary rocket motor after they leave the barrel at velocity. The contradiction has always been whether or not the round is cased or caseless, and presently its cased.

And then there's Azrael's Combiplasma, where there's no way to feed the bolt into the barrel without teleportation technology (the connection point between the bullpup magazine is somehow smaller than the actual barrel).

A lot of 40k's stuff was made by people eyeballing existing stuff without understanding how they're suppose to work.