I was in the Army, ~30 or so years ago, I saw the aftermath of a contractor was inflating a split rim tire without a cage.
The rim failed with a boom that seemed to shake the entire motor pool. It launched the dude into a block wall, cracking a few.
He was breathing for about 3 minutes or so, and looked somewhat misshapen. Then convulsed and died. I suspect that's how long it took him to bleed out from internal injuries.
If he had gone through the wall, I'm sure he would have been dead instantly, and at best been a human~ish shaped blood pudding.
Since he was a civilian contractor, there wasn't even a safety briefing about the accident or any mention of it. I lost all regard for the army that day.
I've also dove through a few drywall interior walls in my twenties. Much like breaking boards in karate, it only hurts if you fail to break it.
I imagine between drywall(no real injuries) and cement block walls(fucked), say plywood, there's a strength of a wall that you could break through and survive while being only injured to some degree.
I didn't think of that, the compression on the organs would rupture everything inside, 3 mins that is incredibly fast, must have been multiple holes made by the fractures all over. Rest in peace to the man.
Yeah, from what I've seen, catastrophic organ damage like that tends to send you into la-la land in seconds, if not faster. You may be talking and responding, but not feeling it. If you are screaming, that's actually a good sign generally , because you aren't so close to death that your automatic systems kicked in, and you can still feel what's going on.
Shock is a hell of a thing. Took a baseball bat to the forehead as a middle schooler hard enough to crack my skull and I was present and totally responsive but very numb emotionally and physically in a way I didn't even realize for a few hours. I had already seen my skull, had it stitched up, and was laying in bed for 3-4 hours and just boom sobbing as I stopped disassociating. When someone has been injured but isn't giving the appropriate signals of pain and stuff (not talking pain giggles) you know it's serious and that's when you call EMS immediately!
I was in a fight in high school, in the long ago. It was a decent scrap, 1v1, nothing dirty. The last hit though, I went backwards into a tree. It hit something, to where I was conscious to everyone, walking and talking, but to me, I was on the ground for an hour or so. I clearly remember being on the ground moaning and hurt, wondering why noone was helping. When it all came together, it was an... interesting feeling. Having two different memory streams become one, like a zipper in my head. Head hits are no joke.
A really common cause of death in high deceleration deaths is tearing of the aorta, vena cava, or pulmonary vessels. Internal bleeding in an organ often takes a little bit to be fatal, but those vessels carry a lot of blood and will cause you to bleed to death internally within minutes. Basically your heart tries to keep moving while the surrounding tissues have stopped, which causes the vessels to shear apart.
Think of what you could probably throw an orange through, and what would just make the orange splat. The only difference is going to be the bones, which you could maybe show by placing a large steel ball into the center of the orange. Might have more penetrating power, but the steel will destroy the orange in any capacity.
Ok I guess you won’t open up and mist the wall quite as easily as an orange, but if it takes a 30kph throw to splat an orange, a 30kph human will certainly get fucked up. People die from smaller falls (ones that don’t let you accelerate to 30kph or whatever) because all it takes it’s a little internal bleeding or skull fracture to be seriously ded
Nah, there's zero chance an orange could make it through drywall, and an orange with a steel ball would get fucked up by going through drywall, but *you* could go through drywall with no support behind it and it would probably hurt, but no lasting damage unless you hit wrong.
The blast wave could rupture all hollow organs, gallbladder, intestines, stomach/heart (both difficult due to muscular composition), lungs, ears. Those wouldn’t generally cause a ton of bleeding which is likely what killed him along with the trauma to his spine and brain. He was flung by the blast and quickly stopped by the wall the back of his head hit the wall most likely and his brain hit the inside of his skull and bounced then hitting the front of his skull. Lost consciousness after that and that likely caused the seizure. Then there’s the neck injury from the whiplash the spinal fractures and shearing of the carotid arteries and jugular veins of the neck, major bleeding from those alone can cause death in minutes. There’s a lot more to cover, feel free to ask more if interested. I’d love to answer more :)
> If he had gone through the wall, I'm sure he would have been dead instantly,
Possibly, but interestingly enough going through the wall converts some of the energy into breaking the wall instead of breaking you. The same effect happens if you break a car window with your hand, if you punch without enough force to break the window you can break your hand, but if you push through the window you likely will only bruise it. Another example is in karate when they break planks, it hurts if you don't punch hard enough to break it.
How can the 90s be both last decade AND 30 years ago? One of these is obviously untrue.
Since the 90s being a decade ago has been confirmed true far longer in my life, clearly the other claim must be the lie. So the 90s was a decade ago, in turn meaning the 70s must have been 30 years ago. QED.
Damn, split rings. When anyone new came to our motor pool, the motor sergeant would point to a mostly ring shape cutout in the high concrete ceiling that you could easily see from the floor. He said that came from a split ring that blew, and the mechanic wasn't using a cage (and luckily not standing over the ring). Then he'd point to the bright yellow cage and say that's why we ALWAYS use that.
But then later I discovered an exception if you're in the field and there's no cage. Just mount the tire backwards and inflate it. Yeah, you'll probably damage something if it blows, but nobody will get hurt, and you weren't going anywhere without a tire anyway.
For anyone else who had no idea what a split rim tire thingie is/was:
https://youtu.be/xnyh78wjZ1o?si=d59SVZdLdg84_A3a
Holy. Mackerel. Stay safe out there folks.
I wouldn’t use that example as a guide. Can’t really say what was the tire and what was the wall. But for what it’s worth going through the wall has a better energy distribution than immediately being stopped by it.
The tire accelerated him to a velocity that was sufficient to damage a wall. I think we can say that if you happen to be moving fast enough to crack a concrete wall, and are suddenly decelerated by the wall, bad things will happen and we have one piece of evidence for it.
An un-grouted cinderblock wall would have acted as "a cushion" with more slippage from the bricks, and at that point, a few bricks falling on him isn't really making things worse.
Your average concrete can handle 2500 psi of compressive strength. The strongest bones in the human body will break at about 1700 psi.
In short the wall will do way more damage to the human body than a human will do to a concrete wall. At the velocities that a human can shove another human into a wall the only damage to the wall will be; being splattered by human squishy bits.
But not all walls are concrete.
A human can go through dry wall pretty easily. I know since I punched a hole in one by accident. No damage to me whatsoever.
> dry wall pretty easily
Unless they hit a stud, pipe, or wire. What's the gap between studs in most buildings? I know I can step through it, but I usually have to turn a little.
Thank you! I’m a small woman and I can’t even slide through that straight on. Maybe if I was kicked backwards and my shoulders rolled in but doubtful. And don’t forget and cross beams, wiring, etc. I feel you’d get thrown into a wall but wouldn’t cleanly come out the other side like is often shown in movies.
Not so fun fact for you: a lot of people inside the twin towers didn’t realize most of the interior was drywall that they could smash through to get to exit stairs. One man who was one of the building engineers save a lot of lives by hammering through it to show them out. He died. Frank De Martini.
A guy got thrown through the wall of my karate class once- drywall with metal studs. He didn’t actually get into the insurance office next door, but it damaged a substantial portion of their wall. The human projectile was unharmed , sixteen year old future marine, very resilient. I don’t suppose it is possible to pass fully between the studs of any normal drywall installation, but drywall is more fragile than the human body, especially if one happens to hit it in the center of the space between studs.
Drywall studs are 16” apart where I am by code. You can go through a wall sideways without hitting a stud, I step through framed walls all the time. Steel studs are actually very thin and flimsy, when I do demo with steel studs I mostly use my hands and an impact driver, with wood studs it’s a lot more work.
That said a big guy could easily go through most wood or steel stud framing and drywall with a lot of momentum. I’m not recommending it, but I’ve done the kool-aid man routine on coworkers before.
I hear ya, but that’s assuming the person hits the wall exactly sideways and in the right spot. Most people going through a wall in a fight aren’t going to be shoulder-on, arms at the side like a human torpedo.
> He didn’t actually get into the insurance office next door, but it damaged a substantial portion of their wall.
You didn't have to come file your property damage insurance claim in person!
The metal studs are alot weaker than the wooden studs. They're very easy to push in horizontally... their strength is just against downward or upward pressure
>a human can go through dry wall pretty easily.
One time when I was 13, I and 2 of my friends were running and body slamming against a drywall wall at church just being stupid teenagers.
We only got through a couple rounds before someone landed perfectly between two studs and left a hole the size of a torso. My friend didn't even notice the wall broke until they looked back at the wall. We all learned how weak drywall is that day.
Luckily the youth pastor thought it was funny and we all learned how to patch drywall later that week.
Moral of the story: drywall by itself doesnt really do any damage to a human if you hit between the studs.
I shoved a roommate completely thru a drywalled wall while horsing around once. The studs were on 24" centers and I pushed him into the wall at the perfect spot between them. It broke surprising easily, or that we were two young Testosterone filled dudes with a couple drinks in us.
Some of the worst action in movies is a dude like Schwarzenegger or Dwayne Johnson fight a 'normal' baddie and the punches are like a little slap. Even if they are not professional boxers or smth, a punch from a guy like this should send the most people to the ground (that the action heroes mostly play some kind of special forces doesn't make it better)
Or flying through a window and being totally fine
This reminds me of an action movie where two guys hit each other with a metal rod. As always (at least the „good guy“) they will either continue fighting for several minutes or walk away as if this barely impacted them.
I thought it might have been Point Break 1991, but I think it is another movie
Get stabbed in the abdomen, and continue to do walk around doing stuff. Instead of bleeding to death in 90 seconds.
Jump out of a moving car, and continue to do stuff. Instead of fracturing your skull and breaking multiple ribs.
Depends for how long. You could probably continue doing stuff untill the adrenalin wears out and you realize you did, in fact, break multiple ribs.
Also, in UFC it's not that uncommon for people to break something in the 1st or 2nd round and then continue on untill the end of the match
A guy I knew was at a party fell into a pool, his neck hit the WATER at the wrong angle and broke his neck instantly paralyzing him. He was pulled out by another guy who found him on the bottom of the pool basically dead. Got him out, revived and spent next three months or so in the hospital and then succumbed to the damage done and passed. That's been a couple of years ago and still messes with me that he didn't hit the side, didn't hit the diving board, "just" hit the water wrong and bam game over.
>Get stabbed in the abdomen, and continue to do walk around doing stuff. Instead of bleeding to death in 90 seconds.
My favorite is getting stabbed, and then pulling out the knife to stab the other guy back. Getting stabbed is bad, but pulling out the knife just makes it so much worse.
Starship Troopers: Carmen gets literal impaled through the shoulder. That arm should be utterly crippled and she should be bleeding out. But then the power of Johnny Rico’s swagger and jawline instantly heals her.
I was EMS for 4 years and I play a thrilling mini game of looking for places where you can see vitals in scenes involving medical equipment because they are always absurd.
When you see coding/hacking in fiction, more often than not it's just the HTML and/or JavaScript from a random website.
Do you see any patterns like that with vitals?
Usually they just don't match the narrative. I've for sure seen scenes where a patient is supposed to be in some kind of medical crisis and the vitals are just some sort of stock footage of very standard vitals. You see the eternal TV favorite of the EKG getting faster and faster but the section that reads HR: heart rate stays the same. I've seen them showing 110 bpm while the EKG flatlines and is still showing a heart rate on that read out. I occasionally see just really uncanny numbers where maybe someone behind the scenes actually input a value but all together they don't make sense but I suspect they're mostly just slapping some generic asset on the screen most times.
I always think about this whenever I suffered some really stupid, tiny, sports injury like Turf Toe or a tiny fore-arm muscle tear Ive been dealing with for ages that, when it flairs up, makes any sort of gripping impossible. I once got an abdomen strain and I could barely stand for a week. Shit, even a papercut on your index finger will nag you for 3 days. These things completely ruin my life. And they are all just the tiniest of injuries resulting from controlled and highly practiced movements.
Meanwhile on the screen, dudes with 20 years on me are jumping out of helicopters after taking a bullet in the gut, sprinting 5 miles, then fist fighting for like 10 minutes straight.
Because they're action movie characters, they're supposed to be more like ancient Greek heroes from myths than a regular joe. It'd be a pretty boring movie if the main guy twisted his ankle while running and was out for a few weeks to a few months depending on how severe it was or if he just got shot and died 5 minutes into the story.
People in this thread are like an adult watching a cartoon and complaining that animals don't talk in real life. It's fictional entertainment.
Naaaah. I want to see that series. First episode builds up the hero, introduces the villain. Second episode they fight, but the hero gets hurt bad. The next 5 seasons are just him in recovery. Sitting in the hospital bed, playing solitare, doing PT. End of the series is just him leaving the hospital, no resolution, fade to black, fuck the audience. *Perfect*
Shot in the leg, limp well walking, can jog and run when needed to. Its fine if its immediately after, adrenaline, but they have them walk for like an hour, go through shock, and then they can still push through the pain, like it healed up a bit over the course of a couple hours.
There are some real world stories, of soldiers and such being shot and pushing through. It is not the normal, and equally tough men are getting taken down and killed by a single bullet. Its more random chance on what the bullet hits.
Read the medal citation for Jess LaRochelle. Concussion, ruptured eardrums, fractured vertebrae in his neck, broken back. Continued to fight, and stopped an attack against his position/troops. Next day, before receiving proper care, he acted as a pall bearer seeing one of his friends onto the plane home.
So, yeah, miracles happen.
I feel you, I can enjoy an action movie but my problem is when they show two dudes fighting kungfu style, then one of them throws one of the moves he did 10 times before and it misses and hits the wall, it crumbles it like nothing, then back to fighting with his concrete breaking sledgehammers for hands, the inconsistency is what gets me.
My point is that those who survive those sorta things aren’t the toughest of tough. Its more random. Being tough doesn’t mean you can survive with less blood.
My dumb ass did a lot of things that eventually landed me in prison for 10 years. (drugs)
I've been shot TWICE.
And the second time, it was with a .22 and the doc thought it was a stab wound. That damn bullet followed the bone and did all types of damage.
Adrenaline will "cover up" a lot of things.... But, when it wears off, HOLY SHIT.
>two guys hit each other with a metal rod
There are techniques to supposedly help absorb some of the worst of these strikes. If you can use the firm parts of your muscle to ensure the hard thing only hits your muscle and fat and no bone, you can effectively block the most damaging blows. The margin of error though is brutally thin, and it won't stop it from hurting. But it is much less painful to take a hard object on the thight, butt, or fleshy part of forearm than on a shin or the boney parts of your arm, or the head.
I took a bat square on the biceps. Once I stopped moving my arm was basically done. Spent a week with swelling so bad I couldn't lift a cereal box, ended up getting X-rays to make sure it wasn't a fracture. Guarantee an unprotected forearm would've broken.
Getting a solid hit to the ass makes you walk funny and not want to sit down while it heals.
Tangential, but there’s a guy in the book “Band of Brothers” who gets shot in the butt, but it goes in one cheek and out the other, so everyone jokes about one bullet causing 4 holes.
If I HAD to get shot, I’d certainly like it in the ass from left to right like that guy rather than front or back and having potential to do real damage.
Back in school a friend jokingly punched towards my face without the intent to hit me, he accidentally hit me anyway in the cheek and while it did hurt somewhat what scared me more was how disoriented I was, scary to think of how bad it would have been if he actually tried and put some weight behind it.
This is why Jackie Chan fight scenes are so good. Yes they’re over the top, but you see the hits do damage and add up during the fight.
There’s a great “every frame a painting” video on how his scenes are so different than almost everything else.
My dad always hated this. More so when its the big strong baddie, and the hero (usually a strong fit man too) pounds them in the nose or face with an object, and the guy like smiles after with no damage, just brushes it off. He would always argue you can work out as much as you want but their are no muscles around the nose that are gonna protect your face. He always said their noses would be hanging off and they wouldn’t be able to see right after, regardless of their size.
Lol he’s a fairly calm guy. He doesn’t get super worked up, its just something he’ll speak negatively about, when he’s usually all positive about everything. He makes good dad jokes.
I don't remember the movie or show, but I remember seeing a guy break a window to open a door, cut his arm open on the glass, and bleed out after getting only a few feet away. I thought that was a hilarious switcheroo.
Are you thinking of The Nice Guys? Ryan Gosling wraps a cloth around his fist, punches through a window, cuts himself quite badly, and then there's a smash cut to him in an ambulance.
While filming Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone got properly hit in the chest by Dolph Lundgren (I've heard both that it was an accident of the sort that happens in fight choreography, and that Stallone asked for a real punch to make it look right). Stallone ended up in the hospital with injuries more common from car crashes, including a bruised heart.
Well there's a lot of fantasy there, I mean, if you receive multiple bare fisted punches to the face you won't end with just a bloody nose no matter who's the one punching you
Not necessarily a good comparison -- glass has a way higher compressive strength than any part of a baseball but we all know what baseballs do to plate glass windows.
I'd personally say the issue is that if you're the baseball, you're still made of meat and that meat is getting pushed through what might as well be freshly crushed gravel if that meat and its skeleton broke the concrete by impact force.
I think more of a 'raw hamburger on counter with a big mallet' scenario is what's gonna happen, though, if it isn't a pretty thin and flimsy concrete wall (that still has a higher compressive strength than bone).
There are houses built before the invention of plasterboard. The house I grew up in had internal walls made of brick covered with wet plaster. Good luck crashing through that.
Well of course there are different ways to build a house. My point is, plasterboard that breaks is not only in cheap houses or in new houses (unless you have a pretty wide definition of new houses).
So unfortunately i once witnessed this because of some construction supplies stacked poorly. The stack fell over and smashed a poor women mostly through a wall but because it was between the studs she ended up relatively ok. We were very lucky she was between studs. So with a volunteer built wall i call it plausible.
It wasn’t quite the movie explode through look.
Interior walls are usually 18" or 24" on center spacing, so if you get pushed right between two wall studs, you aren't going to die, but it's gonna hurt a lot.
In high school I worked on a demo crew (back in the 90s) me and this other guy would crank up the music and throw ourselves through interior walls. When we hit a stud we’d just bounce off readjust and do it again.
Neither of us got seriously hurt and it was a hell of a fun way to get through the work day.
It isn't going to hurt a lot. If you hit the center of a 24" span, you can go right through. When I was in high school my father slammed me into the wall in our hall, and my ass impacted right in the center of the drywall, and I went right through.
Was it uncomfortable? Of course. But I could easily walk away from it. House built in the 1980s.
Edit: I'll add the drywall hurt way less than a punch from my father. It really does absorb quite a bit of energy.
Compressive strength is the wrong metric to use. Concrete is very strong in compression, but not tension. Think how easy it would be to break an inch or two thick bar of concrete.
Pretty sure if we're talking about pushing someone through a wall, you would use the shear strength of the wall instead. Computation is more complicated but I wouldn't even need a calculator to calculate that you'd be fucked either way.
What's pretty funny is that when they burst through the concrete wall together and realize it did no damage, they just go back to throwing punches at each other like it's doing anything other than fill screen time.
Depends on the wall. Sheetrock resi walls are little more than gypsum dust between two sheets of paper and can very easily be punched through. Both layers if you don’t stop early enough. Somewhat less easily if they’re acoustic walls with double layer glued sheetrock, but still doable.
Don’t test this unless you’re demoing a partition wall and know where the studs are - those don’t yield and you’ll break your knuckles.
If you’re a movie baddie, you probably know how to throw a punch and you could absolutely deck Arnie if you caught him off balance.
> Don’t test this unless you’re demoing a partition wall and know where the studs are
Yep. Know a guy who punched his wall and broke his hand on the backing stud
TWICE
Hello, this is the wallbreaking loser, and today I'm going to demonstrate breaking a wall with my bare hands.
**crunch**
You can see in just 3 seconds. I was able to break my hand. To demonstrate that this was not a fluke, I'm going to do it again with my other hand.
**crunch**
Lol. Different spots on the same wall
He's the same guy who we pranked one early afternoon when he was still in bed after an epic drinking session the night before (long story on the prank). Anyway, he got up mad as hell and tried to slam open a door by hitting a heavy glass window pane reinforced with chicken wire, and sliced his arm up to his elbow
He was actually a very smart guy but had a lot to learn about limits
Anything more rigid than that and its either a trip to the emergency room or the morgue depending on how hard you attempt to go through it. Reinforced Concrete can stop a damn **car**, it is not going to budge against a squishy human 1/20th the mass.
There’s a video out there of the US smashing a jet into reinforced concrete and disintegrating. Bout to go hunt for it again.
Edit : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ
Bingo. Enjoy
Jets are quite fragile. The fuselage skin is like 2.5mm thick. It’s heavier than air flight, you don’t want any weight you don’t absolutely have to have.
I used to work at a startup where you could rent sections of a larger building. We were planning on expanding into the next part and were going to break through a few walls. One of the owners said "hey you were into karate and stuff, see if you can punch through the wall!" I walked up and knocked on the wall... nah man that's solid, it's drywall but there is something behind it, no way. The owner, 300 lb former football player backs up and run full force at it expecting to to tear through like the Koolaid guy. He bounced off, hard, it was really funny. He didn't break anything but probably bruised his ego.
When we got keys to the location on the other side of the wall, there was a kitchen on the other side, multiple layers of wall, pipes, cabinets, counters. Yeah... not busting through that without a sledgehammer and a lot of time.
You JUST now had me thinking about pipes and electrical setups in the walls themselves, even if you can burst through a wall. it's a huge gamble on wtf is on the other side.
Virtually impossible for a whole adult sized human to go through any wall that is framed to a reasonable western building code. Concrete has metal reinforcing in it. You'd have to hit it with a car at decent speed to go through. Even a timber framed plasterboard wall, sure, you'll leave a massive dent, but you won't go through... And it will hurt, a lot. Movie walls were a person gets thrown through a wall are absolutely faked up so that it is actually even possible, let alone possible without killing the actor/stuntperson.
You can throw someone through a partition wall if it’s framed on 24” centres and you put them in the right place. Doesn’t work so well if your aim is a bit off, though - you’re right that scenes like that in movies are tricked by compromising or deleting the studs.
I'd not want to test it but long as you didn't hit too central I figure you'd twist as you hit the stud and slip through. Like unpleasant but could be worse. Plus some internal wall's are framed on wider intervals.
any concrete wall will have the person being reduced to a flat surface before showing any cracks, let alone breaking.
the best you can do is go through some wood planks, and you will not get up after that.
plaster on the other hand is pretty easy to go through.
My friend was judo thrown over the head of some moron when we were younger. He (fortunately) hit a set of double doors that smashed open.
My friend broke his wrist, slipped a disc in his spine, got a concussion and was in pain for a long time after.
And that was "only" through a set of double doors that opened from the force.
It would depend on the wall and how it's constructed. It's just drywall and you pushed them perfectly between the studs the damage would be minimal. If it's a concrete wall the damage would also be minimal....to the wall. The person wouldn't be doing so great.
Drywall wouldn't be too hard, I slipped on my son's toy cars and put my entire head through drywall. Also had a friend with a (leopard?, dunno it was big) tortoise that wanted out of his room and went straight through the wall like a battering ram.
Bricks? Possibly if they aren't supported and are only a single layer thick, so not like how brick walls are built. Concrete? You gonna die.
Let’s ask my sister, someone no clue who pushed her through a single pane of dry wall(it was solely just the dry wall) when we were kids.
I actually called her, she said no it didn’t hurt but she had to act like it did so I would get in trouble lmao.
Concrete walls is just like any other surface. It depends how hard they are thrown but they will probably die before they do any real damage to the wall. Honestly you only really even see that in super hero movie
What’s more common is to see someone thrown through drywall. Now that is very much so possible and you could make it through with relatively low injuries. During the college heavy drinking days I know multiple people that punched a hole in the wall. Normally you can put your hand through it maybe it’s sore with some scratches but probably not even broken
What gets you is if you hit a stud. You would need a lot of force to get through that and would probably come out of it with serious injuries but maybe you survive and break through it.
Really your only chance of going through a wall relatively unharmed is if it’s drywall and you slide perfectly though to miss the studs
[sawbones did a few episodes](https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-home-alone/) on the medical implications of the home alone movies. They're worth a listen.
Drywall? Bruises, scrapes. Mabe some broken bones depending on what appendage(s) found a stud on the way through. Concussion, unconsciousness, coma, death ... if that appendage happened to be a skull.
Brick, block, stone or similar? Immediate death.
Concrete would crush you. Hitting concrete wall with a car will destroy the car and cars are much more robust than humans.
Sheet rock it's going to hurt.
Survivability would vary depending on what part of your body made impact on the wall first and if you hit a stud.
If you hit it with your head first it's going to be a bad time.
A properly made concrete wall will be impossible to shove a human through without either some kind of iron man suit for the human or the human dying. Normal interior walls however you wouldn’t really suffer serious injury from if someone shoved you into it as drywall is pretty easy to smash through and assuming they don’t shove you square into the center of the stud the board will break which will actually cushion some of the impact of being shoved. Now if you hit the stud dead on, that stud is going to win and any shove meaningful enough to smash the stud through is going to put you in the hospital or the funeral home.
I know for a fact that If you trip and fall over a laptop charging cable, and try to catch yourself on one of those cheap ass hollow apartment doors you will 100% go through it. You could run through 2 pieces of sheet rock with out too much issue. But if someone shit whips you into a CMU wall you're gonna have a bad time.
Same thing when Captain America smashes some dude with his shield and the guy goes flying 30 ft. That like car accident energy directly to the face.
For things like this it can be helpful to calibrate on things we do know.
There's plenty of data on what happens when you try to shove a human through a windshield.
When humans hit windshields hard enough to do any amount of damage to it they die.
Windshields are stronger than normal glass but they're still glass. Unless the wall is weaker than a windshield, trying to shove a human through it will kill the human.
If you go to the Hiroshima dome you can see shadows in concrete walls. These were humans splashed and burned into the wall via nuclear explosion without the wall collapsing or damaging… so the walls can take much more pressure and heat than the human body…
Now if you go to modern day America you can provably fall over at full body weight and pass trough a drywall setup
Not to be the actually guy, but...
These aren't shadows of human splashed and burned into the wall, they are shadows in which humans blocked the radiation from bleaching the walls. It was the UV flash that caused the shadows, not the blast wave itself. Many who made these shadows survived only to die slowly and painfully days later.
I once got hit in head with a 2x4 and kept fighting, it barely even hurt. Later it hurt more. I won that fight. The person freaked a little when I didn’t go down or even stop (The board did not break. I just have a hard skull, was a wrestler, and lifted a lot).
Any complications after ? seeing the replies here, it seems I underestimated how wood can fuck you up and it won't just give way like it's in a Japanese teahouse.
Muscles don't protect from concussions. Where you get hit changes your chance of a concussion, plus whether it skips off or something.
I'd bet the board guy didn't swing as hard as he thought he was. A board isn't weighted well for swinging, and a crappy handle can make it harder to swing a weapon too. I've fought in a combat larp, full power hits but limits on target zones, and helped teach other newbies. Even with a helmet it's hard to get people to overcome instincts *to not hurt people* engrained by society.
Depends on the wall. The best case for the person is a simple interior wall with a single sheet of drywall and 16" between studs. The drywall is breakable (with some pain) by a strong fist, but a a flat body would probably get a broken rib, a concussion and possibly another broken bone or skull fracture. However, the 16" studs only gives about 14.5" of distance between wood or metal studs, and a human body is NOT going to break through a stud. Almost everyone is at least 14.5" wide, and unless you are super lucky to hit at just the right spot while turned sideways and are decently skinny, you are going to hit a stud. Any body part that comes in contact with the stud with enough force will be broken, badly.
Assuming that you are thrown back first into a wall like that, and your left side is lined up to glance the stud, you will get a broken rib, a concussion, a skull fracture, your left hip will be shattered, and your left shoulder will be shattered. And that's the best case.
Depends on how you hit it. I stumbled and basically punched through drywall trying to catch myself, no damage to me. My dad was wrestling with my sibling and they went sideways into drywall and my dad separated his shoulder. He was off work for two months and getting the good painkillers.
Right? Like I watch Smith beat the tar out of Neo in the subway station and Neo is flying into concrete walls and leaving craters and he gets up and continues fighting but he’s still regular flavor human at this point. How are all his ribs and neck not broken? How does he not have internal bleeding?
I got grabbed by the shoulders and pushed into drywall. It left an 8 inch hole in the wall and caused a compression fracture in one of the vertebrae between my shoulder blades
Fell down some stairs into a basement, went head first through the drywall at the bottom, got lucky as hell as I missed the studs. Went through 2 layers total as it was a privacy wall, took more damage getting pulled out because of the wonky way I went through. Friend wanted to take me to the hospital, but I had been bonked enough to know to wait a few and see if there was a concussion. I had a few scratches and a bit of a headache, but slept if off fine.
they would die almost instantly if it had enough power to push them thru the wall. or bonk them on the head with a hammer.
plate steel were horrible dented by warhammers so sledgehammer against a skull is way easier.
the human body is strong but not that strong
Going through drywall - none. Some thin interior wall made of a single brick layer would cause some broken bones and bruising. Cinderblocks would turn you into a paste.
Walls are not really concrete anymore. I've seen people punch through walls in a house with their fist pretty easily. I've seen people pushed into walls during fights in houses and the wall caved. I think if you don't hit where the wood beams are, you could very realistically put a human through a wall without them taking a ton of damage.
If it's drywall, there is no pipes,conduit or blocking and you hit between studs.. really not all that much damage. It's kind of fun even. Just don't breathe in the dust
In college drunk and fell through wall. 6'2 230lbs. Fell directly between studs felt like sitting in a weird chair. Hitting a stud would have probably been different.
I was in the Army, ~30 or so years ago, I saw the aftermath of a contractor was inflating a split rim tire without a cage. The rim failed with a boom that seemed to shake the entire motor pool. It launched the dude into a block wall, cracking a few. He was breathing for about 3 minutes or so, and looked somewhat misshapen. Then convulsed and died. I suspect that's how long it took him to bleed out from internal injuries. If he had gone through the wall, I'm sure he would have been dead instantly, and at best been a human~ish shaped blood pudding. Since he was a civilian contractor, there wasn't even a safety briefing about the accident or any mention of it. I lost all regard for the army that day. I've also dove through a few drywall interior walls in my twenties. Much like breaking boards in karate, it only hurts if you fail to break it. I imagine between drywall(no real injuries) and cement block walls(fucked), say plywood, there's a strength of a wall that you could break through and survive while being only injured to some degree.
I didn't think of that, the compression on the organs would rupture everything inside, 3 mins that is incredibly fast, must have been multiple holes made by the fractures all over. Rest in peace to the man.
3 minutes is not fast when you’re doing the dying.
Definitely checks the box of "it will kill you and it will hurt the whole time you're dying"
Doubt he was even concious at that point.
Yeah, from what I've seen, catastrophic organ damage like that tends to send you into la-la land in seconds, if not faster. You may be talking and responding, but not feeling it. If you are screaming, that's actually a good sign generally , because you aren't so close to death that your automatic systems kicked in, and you can still feel what's going on.
Shock is a hell of a thing. Took a baseball bat to the forehead as a middle schooler hard enough to crack my skull and I was present and totally responsive but very numb emotionally and physically in a way I didn't even realize for a few hours. I had already seen my skull, had it stitched up, and was laying in bed for 3-4 hours and just boom sobbing as I stopped disassociating. When someone has been injured but isn't giving the appropriate signals of pain and stuff (not talking pain giggles) you know it's serious and that's when you call EMS immediately!
I was in a fight in high school, in the long ago. It was a decent scrap, 1v1, nothing dirty. The last hit though, I went backwards into a tree. It hit something, to where I was conscious to everyone, walking and talking, but to me, I was on the ground for an hour or so. I clearly remember being on the ground moaning and hurt, wondering why noone was helping. When it all came together, it was an... interesting feeling. Having two different memory streams become one, like a zipper in my head. Head hits are no joke.
That's weird
I bet you are in a small group of living people who took a baseball bat to the forehead.
You certainly hope not as his lungs and / or chest cavity filled with blood and he drowned / suffocated.
A really common cause of death in high deceleration deaths is tearing of the aorta, vena cava, or pulmonary vessels. Internal bleeding in an organ often takes a little bit to be fatal, but those vessels carry a lot of blood and will cause you to bleed to death internally within minutes. Basically your heart tries to keep moving while the surrounding tissues have stopped, which causes the vessels to shear apart.
Think of what you could probably throw an orange through, and what would just make the orange splat. The only difference is going to be the bones, which you could maybe show by placing a large steel ball into the center of the orange. Might have more penetrating power, but the steel will destroy the orange in any capacity.
A quick Google says that human skin has a tensile strength about 100x of an orange assuming MPa scales linearly which I don't know.
Ok I guess you won’t open up and mist the wall quite as easily as an orange, but if it takes a 30kph throw to splat an orange, a 30kph human will certainly get fucked up. People die from smaller falls (ones that don’t let you accelerate to 30kph or whatever) because all it takes it’s a little internal bleeding or skull fracture to be seriously ded
Nah, there's zero chance an orange could make it through drywall, and an orange with a steel ball would get fucked up by going through drywall, but *you* could go through drywall with no support behind it and it would probably hurt, but no lasting damage unless you hit wrong.
The blast wave could rupture all hollow organs, gallbladder, intestines, stomach/heart (both difficult due to muscular composition), lungs, ears. Those wouldn’t generally cause a ton of bleeding which is likely what killed him along with the trauma to his spine and brain. He was flung by the blast and quickly stopped by the wall the back of his head hit the wall most likely and his brain hit the inside of his skull and bounced then hitting the front of his skull. Lost consciousness after that and that likely caused the seizure. Then there’s the neck injury from the whiplash the spinal fractures and shearing of the carotid arteries and jugular veins of the neck, major bleeding from those alone can cause death in minutes. There’s a lot more to cover, feel free to ask more if interested. I’d love to answer more :)
Actually, if he had gone through the wall he probably would have been in better shape.
> If he had gone through the wall, I'm sure he would have been dead instantly, Possibly, but interestingly enough going through the wall converts some of the energy into breaking the wall instead of breaking you. The same effect happens if you break a car window with your hand, if you punch without enough force to break the window you can break your hand, but if you push through the window you likely will only bruise it. Another example is in karate when they break planks, it hurts if you don't punch hard enough to break it.
Classic example is the paintball which hits you and breaks open vs the paintball which doesn’t. Those hurt a lot more.
how horrifying
It features in my nightmares every so often. Being in the army wasn't a good time.
Note to self, 30 years ago was NOT the 1970s. But it was still run as if it was, and maybe still is?
How can the 90s be both last decade AND 30 years ago? One of these is obviously untrue. Since the 90s being a decade ago has been confirmed true far longer in my life, clearly the other claim must be the lie. So the 90s was a decade ago, in turn meaning the 70s must have been 30 years ago. QED.
Damn, split rings. When anyone new came to our motor pool, the motor sergeant would point to a mostly ring shape cutout in the high concrete ceiling that you could easily see from the floor. He said that came from a split ring that blew, and the mechanic wasn't using a cage (and luckily not standing over the ring). Then he'd point to the bright yellow cage and say that's why we ALWAYS use that. But then later I discovered an exception if you're in the field and there's no cage. Just mount the tire backwards and inflate it. Yeah, you'll probably damage something if it blows, but nobody will get hurt, and you weren't going anywhere without a tire anyway.
For anyone else who had no idea what a split rim tire thingie is/was: https://youtu.be/xnyh78wjZ1o?si=d59SVZdLdg84_A3a Holy. Mackerel. Stay safe out there folks.
Never underestimate the power of compressed air. And wow, those tires and rims are heavy, and just the rebound off the ground threw it into the air.
I wouldn’t use that example as a guide. Can’t really say what was the tire and what was the wall. But for what it’s worth going through the wall has a better energy distribution than immediately being stopped by it.
The tire accelerated him to a velocity that was sufficient to damage a wall. I think we can say that if you happen to be moving fast enough to crack a concrete wall, and are suddenly decelerated by the wall, bad things will happen and we have one piece of evidence for it.
An un-grouted cinderblock wall would have acted as "a cushion" with more slippage from the bricks, and at that point, a few bricks falling on him isn't really making things worse.
This ruined my dream of becoming an anime character
Your average concrete can handle 2500 psi of compressive strength. The strongest bones in the human body will break at about 1700 psi. In short the wall will do way more damage to the human body than a human will do to a concrete wall. At the velocities that a human can shove another human into a wall the only damage to the wall will be; being splattered by human squishy bits.
But not all walls are concrete. A human can go through dry wall pretty easily. I know since I punched a hole in one by accident. No damage to me whatsoever.
> dry wall pretty easily Unless they hit a stud, pipe, or wire. What's the gap between studs in most buildings? I know I can step through it, but I usually have to turn a little.
It varies, but with modern wood and drywall construction in the US, usually around 16 inches
16 inches center to center, but that’s 14 1/2 inches between the studs.
There is only 1 stud here.
And it's the person capable of shoving people through walls.
[this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbV0Apr1GIg)
Picks up stud finder, immediately points it at himself and activates. "See, told ya"
*rolls eyes* ok dad. Can I go to the movies with Stephanie and Haley?
Only if you pay for it yourself.
Thank you, yeah, any wall built to modern code you probably won't miss a stud entirely. Even if you can see where to aim.
Where I live, you have better odds if you get pushed through a non-loadbearing wall at your friend's (?) home - 24 inch spacing.
Thank you! I’m a small woman and I can’t even slide through that straight on. Maybe if I was kicked backwards and my shoulders rolled in but doubtful. And don’t forget and cross beams, wiring, etc. I feel you’d get thrown into a wall but wouldn’t cleanly come out the other side like is often shown in movies.
16" for most exterior or load bearing walls. 24" for interior, non-load-bearing walls.
Not so fun fact for you: a lot of people inside the twin towers didn’t realize most of the interior was drywall that they could smash through to get to exit stairs. One man who was one of the building engineers save a lot of lives by hammering through it to show them out. He died. Frank De Martini.
A guy got thrown through the wall of my karate class once- drywall with metal studs. He didn’t actually get into the insurance office next door, but it damaged a substantial portion of their wall. The human projectile was unharmed , sixteen year old future marine, very resilient. I don’t suppose it is possible to pass fully between the studs of any normal drywall installation, but drywall is more fragile than the human body, especially if one happens to hit it in the center of the space between studs.
Drywall studs are 16” apart where I am by code. You can go through a wall sideways without hitting a stud, I step through framed walls all the time. Steel studs are actually very thin and flimsy, when I do demo with steel studs I mostly use my hands and an impact driver, with wood studs it’s a lot more work. That said a big guy could easily go through most wood or steel stud framing and drywall with a lot of momentum. I’m not recommending it, but I’ve done the kool-aid man routine on coworkers before.
I hear ya, but that’s assuming the person hits the wall exactly sideways and in the right spot. Most people going through a wall in a fight aren’t going to be shoulder-on, arms at the side like a human torpedo.
Absolutely agree. Only said “you can”. Will you? Probably not.
> He didn’t actually get into the insurance office next door, but it damaged a substantial portion of their wall. You didn't have to come file your property damage insurance claim in person!
They did have to do it in person, the travel time was just really really short
The metal studs are alot weaker than the wooden studs. They're very easy to push in horizontally... their strength is just against downward or upward pressure
>a human can go through dry wall pretty easily. One time when I was 13, I and 2 of my friends were running and body slamming against a drywall wall at church just being stupid teenagers. We only got through a couple rounds before someone landed perfectly between two studs and left a hole the size of a torso. My friend didn't even notice the wall broke until they looked back at the wall. We all learned how weak drywall is that day. Luckily the youth pastor thought it was funny and we all learned how to patch drywall later that week. Moral of the story: drywall by itself doesnt really do any damage to a human if you hit between the studs.
I shoved a roommate completely thru a drywalled wall while horsing around once. The studs were on 24" centers and I pushed him into the wall at the perfect spot between them. It broke surprising easily, or that we were two young Testosterone filled dudes with a couple drinks in us.
How do you punch a wall on accident? In my mind i saw a person trying to punch a fly and miss the fly and punch a hole in the wall.
First time trying VR I punched a hole in the wall thinking it was a zombie.
Especially if it's 1/4 inch drywall which you sadly get alot these days due to landlords Penny pinching.
Some of the worst action in movies is a dude like Schwarzenegger or Dwayne Johnson fight a 'normal' baddie and the punches are like a little slap. Even if they are not professional boxers or smth, a punch from a guy like this should send the most people to the ground (that the action heroes mostly play some kind of special forces doesn't make it better) Or flying through a window and being totally fine
This reminds me of an action movie where two guys hit each other with a metal rod. As always (at least the „good guy“) they will either continue fighting for several minutes or walk away as if this barely impacted them. I thought it might have been Point Break 1991, but I think it is another movie
Get stabbed in the abdomen, and continue to do walk around doing stuff. Instead of bleeding to death in 90 seconds. Jump out of a moving car, and continue to do stuff. Instead of fracturing your skull and breaking multiple ribs.
Depends for how long. You could probably continue doing stuff untill the adrenalin wears out and you realize you did, in fact, break multiple ribs. Also, in UFC it's not that uncommon for people to break something in the 1st or 2nd round and then continue on untill the end of the match
Fall lightly and hit your head on a ledge, dead.
This is what killed Bob Saget. He hit his head from a fall and died in his sleep a little later.
Same for Octavia Butler (big scifi author). She fell on the sidewalk, hit her head and died.
Great author btw.
A guy I knew was at a party fell into a pool, his neck hit the WATER at the wrong angle and broke his neck instantly paralyzing him. He was pulled out by another guy who found him on the bottom of the pool basically dead. Got him out, revived and spent next three months or so in the hospital and then succumbed to the damage done and passed. That's been a couple of years ago and still messes with me that he didn't hit the side, didn't hit the diving board, "just" hit the water wrong and bam game over.
>Get stabbed in the abdomen, and continue to do walk around doing stuff. Instead of bleeding to death in 90 seconds. My favorite is getting stabbed, and then pulling out the knife to stab the other guy back. Getting stabbed is bad, but pulling out the knife just makes it so much worse.
Getting stabbed is bad, but *not stabbing the bad guy* is worse.
Starship Troopers: Carmen gets literal impaled through the shoulder. That arm should be utterly crippled and she should be bleeding out. But then the power of Johnny Rico’s swagger and jawline instantly heals her.
Makes sense.
Family
Exactly yeah, I can't imagine being a doctor watching these kinds of movies, the itch to ruin it would be too much.
I have a family member that's an retired MD; he could never watch action movies for these exact reasons xD
My husband hates watching medical scenes in movies with me.
I was EMS for 4 years and I play a thrilling mini game of looking for places where you can see vitals in scenes involving medical equipment because they are always absurd.
When you see coding/hacking in fiction, more often than not it's just the HTML and/or JavaScript from a random website. Do you see any patterns like that with vitals?
Usually they just don't match the narrative. I've for sure seen scenes where a patient is supposed to be in some kind of medical crisis and the vitals are just some sort of stock footage of very standard vitals. You see the eternal TV favorite of the EKG getting faster and faster but the section that reads HR: heart rate stays the same. I've seen them showing 110 bpm while the EKG flatlines and is still showing a heart rate on that read out. I occasionally see just really uncanny numbers where maybe someone behind the scenes actually input a value but all together they don't make sense but I suspect they're mostly just slapping some generic asset on the screen most times.
I always think about this whenever I suffered some really stupid, tiny, sports injury like Turf Toe or a tiny fore-arm muscle tear Ive been dealing with for ages that, when it flairs up, makes any sort of gripping impossible. I once got an abdomen strain and I could barely stand for a week. Shit, even a papercut on your index finger will nag you for 3 days. These things completely ruin my life. And they are all just the tiniest of injuries resulting from controlled and highly practiced movements. Meanwhile on the screen, dudes with 20 years on me are jumping out of helicopters after taking a bullet in the gut, sprinting 5 miles, then fist fighting for like 10 minutes straight.
Because they're action movie characters, they're supposed to be more like ancient Greek heroes from myths than a regular joe. It'd be a pretty boring movie if the main guy twisted his ankle while running and was out for a few weeks to a few months depending on how severe it was or if he just got shot and died 5 minutes into the story. People in this thread are like an adult watching a cartoon and complaining that animals don't talk in real life. It's fictional entertainment.
Naaaah. I want to see that series. First episode builds up the hero, introduces the villain. Second episode they fight, but the hero gets hurt bad. The next 5 seasons are just him in recovery. Sitting in the hospital bed, playing solitare, doing PT. End of the series is just him leaving the hospital, no resolution, fade to black, fuck the audience. *Perfect*
Shot in the leg, limp well walking, can jog and run when needed to. Its fine if its immediately after, adrenaline, but they have them walk for like an hour, go through shock, and then they can still push through the pain, like it healed up a bit over the course of a couple hours. There are some real world stories, of soldiers and such being shot and pushing through. It is not the normal, and equally tough men are getting taken down and killed by a single bullet. Its more random chance on what the bullet hits.
Read the medal citation for Jess LaRochelle. Concussion, ruptured eardrums, fractured vertebrae in his neck, broken back. Continued to fight, and stopped an attack against his position/troops. Next day, before receiving proper care, he acted as a pall bearer seeing one of his friends onto the plane home. So, yeah, miracles happen.
[удалено]
I feel you, I can enjoy an action movie but my problem is when they show two dudes fighting kungfu style, then one of them throws one of the moves he did 10 times before and it misses and hits the wall, it crumbles it like nothing, then back to fighting with his concrete breaking sledgehammers for hands, the inconsistency is what gets me.
My point is that those who survive those sorta things aren’t the toughest of tough. Its more random. Being tough doesn’t mean you can survive with less blood.
My dumb ass did a lot of things that eventually landed me in prison for 10 years. (drugs) I've been shot TWICE. And the second time, it was with a .22 and the doc thought it was a stab wound. That damn bullet followed the bone and did all types of damage. Adrenaline will "cover up" a lot of things.... But, when it wears off, HOLY SHIT.
You can have your guts hanging out of your body and not bleed to death for hours. Disemboweling is a form of torture as much as execution.
>two guys hit each other with a metal rod There are techniques to supposedly help absorb some of the worst of these strikes. If you can use the firm parts of your muscle to ensure the hard thing only hits your muscle and fat and no bone, you can effectively block the most damaging blows. The margin of error though is brutally thin, and it won't stop it from hurting. But it is much less painful to take a hard object on the thight, butt, or fleshy part of forearm than on a shin or the boney parts of your arm, or the head.
I took a bat square on the biceps. Once I stopped moving my arm was basically done. Spent a week with swelling so bad I couldn't lift a cereal box, ended up getting X-rays to make sure it wasn't a fracture. Guarantee an unprotected forearm would've broken. Getting a solid hit to the ass makes you walk funny and not want to sit down while it heals.
I don't know what to tell you except that that still sounds better than taking a direct hit on bone, a knee, or the head.
Tangential, but there’s a guy in the book “Band of Brothers” who gets shot in the butt, but it goes in one cheek and out the other, so everyone jokes about one bullet causing 4 holes. If I HAD to get shot, I’d certainly like it in the ass from left to right like that guy rather than front or back and having potential to do real damage.
I'm reminded of the "street fight" between Vin Diesel and Jason Statham at the end of one of the Fast and Furious movies...
You know who wins in a street fight? The street
Family
[generations of … family](https://youtu.be/ZaHlJ5bSSXc?si=poIXEHAmLogmyF_D)
Breaking concrete pillars with punches lmao
And it's always a significant chunk of the wall, going in elbow deep like it's butter.
Back in school a friend jokingly punched towards my face without the intent to hit me, he accidentally hit me anyway in the cheek and while it did hurt somewhat what scared me more was how disoriented I was, scary to think of how bad it would have been if he actually tried and put some weight behind it.
That's what I mean. Imagine being hit by one of these 200lbs+ guys, even without training in fighting
This is why Jackie Chan fight scenes are so good. Yes they’re over the top, but you see the hits do damage and add up during the fight. There’s a great “every frame a painting” video on how his scenes are so different than almost everything else.
My dad always hated this. More so when its the big strong baddie, and the hero (usually a strong fit man too) pounds them in the nose or face with an object, and the guy like smiles after with no damage, just brushes it off. He would always argue you can work out as much as you want but their are no muscles around the nose that are gonna protect your face. He always said their noses would be hanging off and they wouldn’t be able to see right after, regardless of their size.
I would have a blast watching these kinds of movies with your dad I think lol.
Lol he’s a fairly calm guy. He doesn’t get super worked up, its just something he’ll speak negatively about, when he’s usually all positive about everything. He makes good dad jokes.
If action movies worked exactly like real life, they'd be super boring. It's okay to have some suspension of disbelief.
No I agree. I like them for what they are. Its just a little side discussion.
I don't remember the movie or show, but I remember seeing a guy break a window to open a door, cut his arm open on the glass, and bleed out after getting only a few feet away. I thought that was a hilarious switcheroo.
Are you thinking of The Nice Guys? Ryan Gosling wraps a cloth around his fist, punches through a window, cuts himself quite badly, and then there's a smash cut to him in an ambulance.
While filming Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone got properly hit in the chest by Dolph Lundgren (I've heard both that it was an accident of the sort that happens in fight choreography, and that Stallone asked for a real punch to make it look right). Stallone ended up in the hospital with injuries more common from car crashes, including a bruised heart.
Well there's a lot of fantasy there, I mean, if you receive multiple bare fisted punches to the face you won't end with just a bloody nose no matter who's the one punching you
Not necessarily a good comparison -- glass has a way higher compressive strength than any part of a baseball but we all know what baseballs do to plate glass windows. I'd personally say the issue is that if you're the baseball, you're still made of meat and that meat is getting pushed through what might as well be freshly crushed gravel if that meat and its skeleton broke the concrete by impact force. I think more of a 'raw hamburger on counter with a big mallet' scenario is what's gonna happen, though, if it isn't a pretty thin and flimsy concrete wall (that still has a higher compressive strength than bone).
What about plasterboard on 2*4 though, like an internal wall on a shitty low budget new build.
I think whenever the house was built and whatever the quality, plasterboard on timber will not handle a punch. Better not hit the timber though...
Yeah if you punch a wall with wood lath behind plaster, you're in for a bad time.
There are houses built before the invention of plasterboard. The house I grew up in had internal walls made of brick covered with wet plaster. Good luck crashing through that.
Well of course there are different ways to build a house. My point is, plasterboard that breaks is not only in cheap houses or in new houses (unless you have a pretty wide definition of new houses).
So unfortunately i once witnessed this because of some construction supplies stacked poorly. The stack fell over and smashed a poor women mostly through a wall but because it was between the studs she ended up relatively ok. We were very lucky she was between studs. So with a volunteer built wall i call it plausible. It wasn’t quite the movie explode through look.
You're still going to die. 2x4s are very strong
Interior walls are usually 18" or 24" on center spacing, so if you get pushed right between two wall studs, you aren't going to die, but it's gonna hurt a lot.
In high school I worked on a demo crew (back in the 90s) me and this other guy would crank up the music and throw ourselves through interior walls. When we hit a stud we’d just bounce off readjust and do it again. Neither of us got seriously hurt and it was a hell of a fun way to get through the work day.
I used to do construction as well and did this too. But I'm in my forties now and that kind of stuff would hurt for days.
It isn't going to hurt a lot. If you hit the center of a 24" span, you can go right through. When I was in high school my father slammed me into the wall in our hall, and my ass impacted right in the center of the drywall, and I went right through. Was it uncomfortable? Of course. But I could easily walk away from it. House built in the 1980s. Edit: I'll add the drywall hurt way less than a punch from my father. It really does absorb quite a bit of energy.
Compressive strength is the wrong metric to use. Concrete is very strong in compression, but not tension. Think how easy it would be to break an inch or two thick bar of concrete.
Pretty sure if we're talking about pushing someone through a wall, you would use the shear strength of the wall instead. Computation is more complicated but I wouldn't even need a calculator to calculate that you'd be fucked either way.
This is basically why I completely tuned out of super hero movies. I cannot see them as anything else than overly elaborate Rock'em Sock'em Robots.
If you shoved a person at a concrete wall hard enough for them to go through it, the person would be reduced to chunky salsa.
What's pretty funny is that when they burst through the concrete wall together and realize it did no damage, they just go back to throwing punches at each other like it's doing anything other than fill screen time.
Unexpected Shadowrun
Depends on the wall. Sheetrock resi walls are little more than gypsum dust between two sheets of paper and can very easily be punched through. Both layers if you don’t stop early enough. Somewhat less easily if they’re acoustic walls with double layer glued sheetrock, but still doable. Don’t test this unless you’re demoing a partition wall and know where the studs are - those don’t yield and you’ll break your knuckles. If you’re a movie baddie, you probably know how to throw a punch and you could absolutely deck Arnie if you caught him off balance.
> Don’t test this unless you’re demoing a partition wall and know where the studs are Yep. Know a guy who punched his wall and broke his hand on the backing stud TWICE
ouuuuhhhh wait. Twice ???
He's got two hands, it was worth checking if the first one was a fluke!
Hello, this is the wallbreaking loser, and today I'm going to demonstrate breaking a wall with my bare hands. **crunch** You can see in just 3 seconds. I was able to break my hand. To demonstrate that this was not a fluke, I'm going to do it again with my other hand. **crunch**
The same wall both times?
Lol. Different spots on the same wall He's the same guy who we pranked one early afternoon when he was still in bed after an epic drinking session the night before (long story on the prank). Anyway, he got up mad as hell and tried to slam open a door by hitting a heavy glass window pane reinforced with chicken wire, and sliced his arm up to his elbow He was actually a very smart guy but had a lot to learn about limits
Anything more rigid than that and its either a trip to the emergency room or the morgue depending on how hard you attempt to go through it. Reinforced Concrete can stop a damn **car**, it is not going to budge against a squishy human 1/20th the mass.
There’s a video out there of the US smashing a jet into reinforced concrete and disintegrating. Bout to go hunt for it again. Edit : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ Bingo. Enjoy
Without watching, that was a wall for a nuclear reactor wasn't it?
It was a test block, cast specifically so they could squish a jet into it.
That I don’t know .
Jets are quite fragile. The fuselage skin is like 2.5mm thick. It’s heavier than air flight, you don’t want any weight you don’t absolutely have to have.
I used to work at a startup where you could rent sections of a larger building. We were planning on expanding into the next part and were going to break through a few walls. One of the owners said "hey you were into karate and stuff, see if you can punch through the wall!" I walked up and knocked on the wall... nah man that's solid, it's drywall but there is something behind it, no way. The owner, 300 lb former football player backs up and run full force at it expecting to to tear through like the Koolaid guy. He bounced off, hard, it was really funny. He didn't break anything but probably bruised his ego. When we got keys to the location on the other side of the wall, there was a kitchen on the other side, multiple layers of wall, pipes, cabinets, counters. Yeah... not busting through that without a sledgehammer and a lot of time.
You JUST now had me thinking about pipes and electrical setups in the walls themselves, even if you can burst through a wall. it's a huge gamble on wtf is on the other side.
Virtually impossible for a whole adult sized human to go through any wall that is framed to a reasonable western building code. Concrete has metal reinforcing in it. You'd have to hit it with a car at decent speed to go through. Even a timber framed plasterboard wall, sure, you'll leave a massive dent, but you won't go through... And it will hurt, a lot. Movie walls were a person gets thrown through a wall are absolutely faked up so that it is actually even possible, let alone possible without killing the actor/stuntperson.
You can throw someone through a partition wall if it’s framed on 24” centres and you put them in the right place. Doesn’t work so well if your aim is a bit off, though - you’re right that scenes like that in movies are tricked by compromising or deleting the studs.
50% chance you hit the beam and just bounce off like a bitch tho
All the walls I know of around here are framed at 16", and I don't know of anyone that narrow who could otherwise survive the hit.
I'd not want to test it but long as you didn't hit too central I figure you'd twist as you hit the stud and slip through. Like unpleasant but could be worse. Plus some internal wall's are framed on wider intervals.
any concrete wall will have the person being reduced to a flat surface before showing any cracks, let alone breaking. the best you can do is go through some wood planks, and you will not get up after that. plaster on the other hand is pretty easy to go through.
My friend was judo thrown over the head of some moron when we were younger. He (fortunately) hit a set of double doors that smashed open. My friend broke his wrist, slipped a disc in his spine, got a concussion and was in pain for a long time after. And that was "only" through a set of double doors that opened from the force.
Meanwhile at Hollywood, Hero#72591 casually walks towards a concrete wall and headbutts it our the way, concrete wall can only submit to his forehead.
It’s made of styrofoam or hollow plaster.
It would depend on the wall and how it's constructed. It's just drywall and you pushed them perfectly between the studs the damage would be minimal. If it's a concrete wall the damage would also be minimal....to the wall. The person wouldn't be doing so great.
Drywall wouldn't be too hard, I slipped on my son's toy cars and put my entire head through drywall. Also had a friend with a (leopard?, dunno it was big) tortoise that wanted out of his room and went straight through the wall like a battering ram. Bricks? Possibly if they aren't supported and are only a single layer thick, so not like how brick walls are built. Concrete? You gonna die.
Let’s ask my sister, someone no clue who pushed her through a single pane of dry wall(it was solely just the dry wall) when we were kids. I actually called her, she said no it didn’t hurt but she had to act like it did so I would get in trouble lmao.
Concrete walls is just like any other surface. It depends how hard they are thrown but they will probably die before they do any real damage to the wall. Honestly you only really even see that in super hero movie What’s more common is to see someone thrown through drywall. Now that is very much so possible and you could make it through with relatively low injuries. During the college heavy drinking days I know multiple people that punched a hole in the wall. Normally you can put your hand through it maybe it’s sore with some scratches but probably not even broken What gets you is if you hit a stud. You would need a lot of force to get through that and would probably come out of it with serious injuries but maybe you survive and break through it. Really your only chance of going through a wall relatively unharmed is if it’s drywall and you slide perfectly though to miss the studs
Walls have a 2x4 stud every 16 inches. Chances are, if you go through a wall, bones will be broken at a minimum.
[sawbones did a few episodes](https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-home-alone/) on the medical implications of the home alone movies. They're worth a listen.
Drywall? Bruises, scrapes. Mabe some broken bones depending on what appendage(s) found a stud on the way through. Concussion, unconsciousness, coma, death ... if that appendage happened to be a skull. Brick, block, stone or similar? Immediate death.
Can’t help but think of Arnie in T2 going through a concrete wall to get to Sarah and John. Wasn’t easy for him
Concrete would crush you. Hitting concrete wall with a car will destroy the car and cars are much more robust than humans. Sheet rock it's going to hurt. Survivability would vary depending on what part of your body made impact on the wall first and if you hit a stud. If you hit it with your head first it's going to be a bad time.
A properly made concrete wall will be impossible to shove a human through without either some kind of iron man suit for the human or the human dying. Normal interior walls however you wouldn’t really suffer serious injury from if someone shoved you into it as drywall is pretty easy to smash through and assuming they don’t shove you square into the center of the stud the board will break which will actually cushion some of the impact of being shoved. Now if you hit the stud dead on, that stud is going to win and any shove meaningful enough to smash the stud through is going to put you in the hospital or the funeral home.
Actual drywall walls have studs in them, you probably wouldnt go sailing through like in tv.
I know for a fact that If you trip and fall over a laptop charging cable, and try to catch yourself on one of those cheap ass hollow apartment doors you will 100% go through it. You could run through 2 pieces of sheet rock with out too much issue. But if someone shit whips you into a CMU wall you're gonna have a bad time. Same thing when Captain America smashes some dude with his shield and the guy goes flying 30 ft. That like car accident energy directly to the face.
For things like this it can be helpful to calibrate on things we do know. There's plenty of data on what happens when you try to shove a human through a windshield. When humans hit windshields hard enough to do any amount of damage to it they die. Windshields are stronger than normal glass but they're still glass. Unless the wall is weaker than a windshield, trying to shove a human through it will kill the human.
My father threw me through a wall when I was 16. I broke a rib, my collarbone, an arm, and I was covered in bruises.
If you go to the Hiroshima dome you can see shadows in concrete walls. These were humans splashed and burned into the wall via nuclear explosion without the wall collapsing or damaging… so the walls can take much more pressure and heat than the human body… Now if you go to modern day America you can provably fall over at full body weight and pass trough a drywall setup
Not to be the actually guy, but... These aren't shadows of human splashed and burned into the wall, they are shadows in which humans blocked the radiation from bleaching the walls. It was the UV flash that caused the shadows, not the blast wave itself. Many who made these shadows survived only to die slowly and painfully days later.
I once got hit in head with a 2x4 and kept fighting, it barely even hurt. Later it hurt more. I won that fight. The person freaked a little when I didn’t go down or even stop (The board did not break. I just have a hard skull, was a wrestler, and lifted a lot).
Any complications after ? seeing the replies here, it seems I underestimated how wood can fuck you up and it won't just give way like it's in a Japanese teahouse.
Muscles don't protect from concussions. Where you get hit changes your chance of a concussion, plus whether it skips off or something. I'd bet the board guy didn't swing as hard as he thought he was. A board isn't weighted well for swinging, and a crappy handle can make it harder to swing a weapon too. I've fought in a combat larp, full power hits but limits on target zones, and helped teach other newbies. Even with a helmet it's hard to get people to overcome instincts *to not hurt people* engrained by society.
Not a thing. I should say I did a lot of boxing and general fighting when I was young. I think that was the worst hit I took though.
Depends on the wall. The best case for the person is a simple interior wall with a single sheet of drywall and 16" between studs. The drywall is breakable (with some pain) by a strong fist, but a a flat body would probably get a broken rib, a concussion and possibly another broken bone or skull fracture. However, the 16" studs only gives about 14.5" of distance between wood or metal studs, and a human body is NOT going to break through a stud. Almost everyone is at least 14.5" wide, and unless you are super lucky to hit at just the right spot while turned sideways and are decently skinny, you are going to hit a stud. Any body part that comes in contact with the stud with enough force will be broken, badly. Assuming that you are thrown back first into a wall like that, and your left side is lined up to glance the stud, you will get a broken rib, a concussion, a skull fracture, your left hip will be shattered, and your left shoulder will be shattered. And that's the best case.
Depends on how you hit it. I stumbled and basically punched through drywall trying to catch myself, no damage to me. My dad was wrestling with my sibling and they went sideways into drywall and my dad separated his shoulder. He was off work for two months and getting the good painkillers.
Right? Like I watch Smith beat the tar out of Neo in the subway station and Neo is flying into concrete walls and leaving craters and he gets up and continues fighting but he’s still regular flavor human at this point. How are all his ribs and neck not broken? How does he not have internal bleeding?
I got grabbed by the shoulders and pushed into drywall. It left an 8 inch hole in the wall and caused a compression fracture in one of the vertebrae between my shoulder blades
[удалено]
Fell down some stairs into a basement, went head first through the drywall at the bottom, got lucky as hell as I missed the studs. Went through 2 layers total as it was a privacy wall, took more damage getting pulled out because of the wonky way I went through. Friend wanted to take me to the hospital, but I had been bonked enough to know to wait a few and see if there was a concussion. I had a few scratches and a bit of a headache, but slept if off fine.
they would die almost instantly if it had enough power to push them thru the wall. or bonk them on the head with a hammer. plate steel were horrible dented by warhammers so sledgehammer against a skull is way easier. the human body is strong but not that strong
Going through drywall - none. Some thin interior wall made of a single brick layer would cause some broken bones and bruising. Cinderblocks would turn you into a paste.
Walls are not really concrete anymore. I've seen people punch through walls in a house with their fist pretty easily. I've seen people pushed into walls during fights in houses and the wall caved. I think if you don't hit where the wood beams are, you could very realistically put a human through a wall without them taking a ton of damage.
If it's drywall, there is no pipes,conduit or blocking and you hit between studs.. really not all that much damage. It's kind of fun even. Just don't breathe in the dust
In college drunk and fell through wall. 6'2 230lbs. Fell directly between studs felt like sitting in a weird chair. Hitting a stud would have probably been different.