How fast could the composite human swing a sledgehammer?

[KLOL506]

Ummmm, you might wanna look at this:

WWE Sledge Hammer Zombie Face EXPLOSION! ZOMBIE GO BOOM

 

[Uradelbauer]

Plastic is not bone

 

[KLOL506]

That was made to be thick as bone.

 

[KLOL506]

And when I meant multiple hits, I meant 9 to 10 hits.

 

[Uradelbauer]

Yeah okay. I'll need actual proof on that.

 

[KLOL506]

You can check the video for yourself then. Dummies are usually made that tough for testing.

 

[Uradelbauer]

Dummies made out of some strange material are not the same as human bones, flesh and muscle.

 

[KLOL506]

They're still comparable tho.

 

[KLOL506]

And of course, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjFoLOU8AJY

 

[Mand21]

The dummies in the video were made to be comparable to human skulls, Uradelbauer. The video even explains that the blow inflicted is indeed completely overkill against a person.

Now we need to know... how much DC was that? Given the decapitation and skull fracture, doesn't seem any less than the 36kJ that it was said to take to take out a skull. But if that's 10-A base strength moving a sledgehammer, what's 9-C+, full blown Peak Human strength moving the best possible sledgehammer? What value can we assume? I do no longer doubt that 100 kJ is possible, but I wanna know so that I can make a fight between Composite Human and some 9-B character whereas CH has armor and perhaps a shield (or some other wearable defensive equipment) chosen by him and the best sledgehammer as all his equipment.

 

[XING06]

Eh actually real-life impact weapons tend to work more through force than energy (eg. a baseball bat has maybe 400J of energy but 4000 lbs of force - enough to kill a bull with repeated strikes to the head). So yeah, sledge strikes can be measured in tons. For instance, I think I heard someone on the practical machinist forum who had to straighten out a steel frame. He tried using a 10 ton? press on the thing, but it didn't work so he used a standard 10 lb. sledge instead. So it should be able to generate ~20000 lbs. of force.

Edit: Actually nvm, I dug out the actual question on the forum. It was an aluminum frame, a 25 ton press and a 20 lb. sledge.

 

[Mand21]

Uh, so how do we try a "conversion" to know how high one has to be into 9-B to tank the pressure and force generated by a sledgehammer strike?

 

[XING06]

Well we do know force but we have to know the distance in which they can generate it to convert to J. I'm sure there's a few papers on peak swing speed for a baseball bat somewhere which we could use, but I'd have to dig those out.

 

[Numbersguy]

Dummies made out of some strange material are not the same as human bones, flesh and muscle.

You are wrong mate

-Punched and kicked by MMA fighters, no damage. And the MMA fighter that punched it has a punching energy of 1,035.96 joules, and that didn't even sink the skull in.

-Gets curbstomped, no damage

-A weaker ersion of the skull got a knee blow to the front of the skull and it didn't do much damage

A real skull can resist that, and the plastic they made it shows it.

 

[KLOL506]

Exactly, and even though this will result in severe brain damage, the skull still remains safe as is.

 

[Mand21]

Damn, I want to see those calcs. Any idea of what the force is? Maybe we could use the length of the hammer head or width of the bat for a mid end.

 

[XING06]

Oh we know what the force relatively is, it's just harder to find energy.

Like I said earlier a baseball bat can generate an average of 4000 lbf . I don't think anyone has studied the peak force a sledgehammer can generate, but the anecodtal story with the press suggests a possible 50000 lbf. This isn't taking into account difficulties with positioning the press properly or prior weakening b/c of the press, so it's probably several times lower, but still in that range.

For comparison, it takes around 600 lbf for a framing hammer to drive a nail into a 2x4. Even the lightest battering ram swung relatively slowly can generate at least 1500 lbf. A heavier 30 lb. battering ram is stated by its manufacturer to have a maximum force of 30000 lbf. Considering the motion of swinging a sledgehammer downwards is more natural and that gravity helps, I'd guestimate a similar level of force.

 

[Mand21]

Sure, that's ~200 000 Newtons.

Two hundred thousand newtons over the distance of...

...no more than ten centimeters, really?

Yeah, seems like 20 kJ.

Wait, is 50 thousand pound-force really the Peak Human strength of a hammer press? Like, the world record of the best someone has ever pressed a hammer is something that seems to translate to baseline 9-B? ><

 

[XING06]

Nah that's an athletic human swinging a 20 lb. sledge. A peak human would get higher.

 

[Mand21]

Hmmmm ><

I'm curious to how much higher. I mean, an athletic human whose punches are baseline 10-A+ (200 J) compares to a Peak Human (~1600 J) with an 8x ratio between power levels. This means we can easily get to something like 100 kJ if I use a smaller ratio such as 5x.

However, can we really use such a random multiplier as a low end? Probably not, which is why I'm curious as hell because I really wanna know this, and perhaps even try to see if we can get Composite Human to scale to this level with all melee weapons which have a way of increasing his damage.

That would mean we could give them matches wherein they have armor and ANY melee weapon and will fight enemies on the middle end 9-B like an amazing badass. The very imagination of a human being taking on large sized monsters or lower key superhumans excites me, lol.

 

[XING06]

Its a cool idea to have them fight a 9B but they'd never hit anything with a sledge that heavy. That level of force is what you get if you wind up really really obviously; it means its really easy to dodge and you can't defend yourself after the blow. Even composite human with class 5 lifting strength wouldn't be able to swing it all that fast (The class five is from a backlift? I believe. Not the major muscles involved in swinging) while maintaining control.

Knights are definitely peak human and their weapons were 5 lbs at most, anything more and they wouldn't be able to control it well. If you want to take on a low to low-middle 9B with a base human weapon use something like a warhammer or a better yet a poleaxe or a bec de corbin.

Also, honestly, the machinist example I gave would actually be peak human, b/c a swinging motion is much more intutive than a punch. Not to mention that this is mostly hearsay from another forum (not even taking into account the problems with frame positioning and pre-weakening by the press), so you shouldn't use our rough estimates. And definitely don't scale from this.

 

[KLOL506]

Holy crap, so one-arming sledgehammers as fast as swords is indeed more impressive than I thought!

Then again, this isn't really a thread to see CH swing his sledgehammer that fast in combat, it's to check out an experiment.

 

[Mand21]

Yeah, it's kinda... the strongest that CH can possibly attack in combat. We do know he could potentially lay down traps to allow a few hits with all his strength, so... maybe we can find out how far that will take him? I'm still betting on at least 100 kJ.