I've been reading, on my Kindle, a lot of indy (self published) books some very good, others, a one time read. I just finished “Bio-Weapon” by Vaughn Heppner. It's the second in his series and for most of it, as far as I can tell, he's right on the money with everything. Up until the hero is encased in an armored suit with a gel protecting his body as he's launched at 25G's in a guided missile to board an enemy ship.
I don't care how much you armor someone, or what you do to cushion the human body, if it's traveling at 25 G's it's going to be chewed up internally. Vasculature is going to be stressed and even burst. The brain which has the consistency of Jello is going to be smooshed against the skull, until it escapes through a hole. All in all a bad time.
There was a crazy dude named Col Stapp that did some human tolerance experiments on the effects of acceleration and deceleration, but he kept the time at 150 milliseconds. Gotta love the 50's when there were no rules on research. A NASA researcher named A. Martin Eiband then extrapolated the data and developed tolerance curves, now called Eiband curves. The problem is that if you get to even .2 seconds it only takes 5G's to cause damage (on the low end) for sudden acceleration. For uniform acceleration, it's a bit better, but you've still have the possibility of damage at 10 G's after 2 seconds.
Kinda cool paper on what Stapp and Eiband did here
So what should have been a great book was ruined by my own knowledge of obscure trivia. Sigh!
I guess this also means with out artificial gravity we'll never leave the solar system, unless we build generational ships. Bummer.
1 comment:
First time reading, much appreciate it
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