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Hey everybody! I was recently reading through KHR for around the third time and came across a rather interesting speed feat from really early on in the manga. So I decided I'd try and calc it.
Here's the feat. Basically, Reborn is training Yamamoto and fires his gun at him from close range. Yamamoto, in turn, effortlessly blocks the bullet.
Keep in mind, this is from chapter 39 of the manga, back when it was still just a comedy series. This is Yamamoto before his intensive training with Reborn in the Future Arc, before his fight with Squalo, before he even learns kendo from his father.
Anyway, onto the calculations. We need to determine the distance between Reborn and Yamamoto. Unfortunately, Yamamoto is standing slightly hunched over, and the shot itself is at a weird perspective, so apologies if my pixel measurements seem a bit wonky.
Yamamoto's height is officially listed as 177 cm, and his height in pixels here is approximately 339 pixels. The distance between the end of Reborn's pistol and the impact between Yamamoto's Bat and the bullet is about 248 pixels.
Doing some simple math here, 177/339 = ~0.522. 0.522 * 248 = 129.487. We'll just round this up and say the distance was 130 cm.
Now to determine the speed of the bullet. Reborn states in his interview with Haru at the end of Volume 5 that his favorite pistol is his CZ 75. (Side note: in the anime, most of Reborn's guns are just Leon transformed into various weapons. However, in the manga, he is shown to use real firearms most of the time.)
The CZ 75 is a real type of semi-automatic pistol popular in Czechoslovakia, and has an average muzzle velocity of 360 m/s. We'll assume that this is the gun Reborn is using to shoot Yamamoto. With that, we can determine how fast the bullet would have reached Yamamoto, and therefore how fast he would have needed to react to block it.
360 m/s = 36000 cm/s. 130/36000 = 0.0036, or 3.6 milliseconds. The average human reaction time to visual stimulus is around 250 ms, meaning Yamamoto's reaction was 69.4 times faster than the average human.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Let's take a closer look at how stupidly superhuman Yamamoto is, even this early in the series. During this training sequence, Reborn gives Yamamoto a weapon: a baseball bat that can transform into a katana when it is swung fast enough. Specifically, Reborn says that it transforms when it it swung over 300 km/h.
Now, the speed of a baseball bat swing isn't easy to measure, and isn't really something that players care about the specifics of as long as it's fast. However, there are still ample enough records to go off of. According to the MLB's official StatCast website, the fastest recorded exit speed of a bat swing was 118.4 mph by Pete Alonso of the New York Mets. (Here's the site if you want to check for yourself https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/lead...2020&position=&team=&min=q&sort=5&sortDir=asc ). Converting that to km/h gives us a speed of 190.546 km/h. This means that Yamamoto's swing is at least 1.57 times faster than the fastest swing ever recorded in American pro baseball. (In fairness, exit swing speed isn't the exact same as the bat's "head speed", as Reborn puts it, but this still gives us a good metric to compare Yamamoto to.)
In order to make sure I had all bases covered (pun intended), I decided to also compare this to the speed of a sword swing. Now, like with baseball bats, the speed of a sword swing isn't something that is easily or frequently measured, so I found the next best thing. Isao Machii is a modern-day master of Iaido, the art of the katana quick draw, and holds many Guinness world records for the speed and precision of his sword, so he seemed like a good choice of comparison. For instance, here he is setting the record for most sword swings in one minute.
Now I wasn't able to calculate the actual speed of his swing, but we can compare him to Yamamoto by, oddly enough, scaling their feats. Machii holds records in similar projectile-slicing categories, such as fastest BB pellet cut with a sword, and fastest tennis ball cut with a sword. The one we'll be using for comparison here is, fittingly enough, Machii cutting a baseball with his sword.
The radar gun in the video shows that the ball was shot out of the pitching machine at 161 km/h (44.72 m/s), and according to this article from CNET, Machii was standing about 30 feet (9.14 meters) away. 9.14/44.72 = 0.204, so Machii would have had to react and precisely cut the ball within 204 milliseconds. Impressive, but still 56.67 times slower than Baseball Brain's reaction time.
One last thing to illustrate how ridiculous Yamamoto is: he states numerous times that the bat Reborn gives him is noticeably heavier than a standard baseball bat. I.e. it's likely that this isn't even Yamamoto's peak at this point, as he can probably swing faster with a bat/weapon that he is used to the weight of.
Here's the feat. Basically, Reborn is training Yamamoto and fires his gun at him from close range. Yamamoto, in turn, effortlessly blocks the bullet.
Keep in mind, this is from chapter 39 of the manga, back when it was still just a comedy series. This is Yamamoto before his intensive training with Reborn in the Future Arc, before his fight with Squalo, before he even learns kendo from his father.
Anyway, onto the calculations. We need to determine the distance between Reborn and Yamamoto. Unfortunately, Yamamoto is standing slightly hunched over, and the shot itself is at a weird perspective, so apologies if my pixel measurements seem a bit wonky.
Yamamoto's height is officially listed as 177 cm, and his height in pixels here is approximately 339 pixels. The distance between the end of Reborn's pistol and the impact between Yamamoto's Bat and the bullet is about 248 pixels.
Doing some simple math here, 177/339 = ~0.522. 0.522 * 248 = 129.487. We'll just round this up and say the distance was 130 cm.
Now to determine the speed of the bullet. Reborn states in his interview with Haru at the end of Volume 5 that his favorite pistol is his CZ 75. (Side note: in the anime, most of Reborn's guns are just Leon transformed into various weapons. However, in the manga, he is shown to use real firearms most of the time.)
The CZ 75 is a real type of semi-automatic pistol popular in Czechoslovakia, and has an average muzzle velocity of 360 m/s. We'll assume that this is the gun Reborn is using to shoot Yamamoto. With that, we can determine how fast the bullet would have reached Yamamoto, and therefore how fast he would have needed to react to block it.
360 m/s = 36000 cm/s. 130/36000 = 0.0036, or 3.6 milliseconds. The average human reaction time to visual stimulus is around 250 ms, meaning Yamamoto's reaction was 69.4 times faster than the average human.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Let's take a closer look at how stupidly superhuman Yamamoto is, even this early in the series. During this training sequence, Reborn gives Yamamoto a weapon: a baseball bat that can transform into a katana when it is swung fast enough. Specifically, Reborn says that it transforms when it it swung over 300 km/h.
Now, the speed of a baseball bat swing isn't easy to measure, and isn't really something that players care about the specifics of as long as it's fast. However, there are still ample enough records to go off of. According to the MLB's official StatCast website, the fastest recorded exit speed of a bat swing was 118.4 mph by Pete Alonso of the New York Mets. (Here's the site if you want to check for yourself https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/lead...2020&position=&team=&min=q&sort=5&sortDir=asc ). Converting that to km/h gives us a speed of 190.546 km/h. This means that Yamamoto's swing is at least 1.57 times faster than the fastest swing ever recorded in American pro baseball. (In fairness, exit swing speed isn't the exact same as the bat's "head speed", as Reborn puts it, but this still gives us a good metric to compare Yamamoto to.)
In order to make sure I had all bases covered (pun intended), I decided to also compare this to the speed of a sword swing. Now, like with baseball bats, the speed of a sword swing isn't something that is easily or frequently measured, so I found the next best thing. Isao Machii is a modern-day master of Iaido, the art of the katana quick draw, and holds many Guinness world records for the speed and precision of his sword, so he seemed like a good choice of comparison. For instance, here he is setting the record for most sword swings in one minute.
Now I wasn't able to calculate the actual speed of his swing, but we can compare him to Yamamoto by, oddly enough, scaling their feats. Machii holds records in similar projectile-slicing categories, such as fastest BB pellet cut with a sword, and fastest tennis ball cut with a sword. The one we'll be using for comparison here is, fittingly enough, Machii cutting a baseball with his sword.
The radar gun in the video shows that the ball was shot out of the pitching machine at 161 km/h (44.72 m/s), and according to this article from CNET, Machii was standing about 30 feet (9.14 meters) away. 9.14/44.72 = 0.204, so Machii would have had to react and precisely cut the ball within 204 milliseconds. Impressive, but still 56.67 times slower than Baseball Brain's reaction time.
One last thing to illustrate how ridiculous Yamamoto is: he states numerous times that the bat Reborn gives him is noticeably heavier than a standard baseball bat. I.e. it's likely that this isn't even Yamamoto's peak at this point, as he can probably swing faster with a bat/weapon that he is used to the weight of.
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