Can I make a suit that will allow the wearer to survive a 40 story fall?

Sure, if it’s a bathing suit and you land in deep water.

Survival chances aren’t good, mind you.

Considering that stuntmen use enormous air-filled “mattresses” and piles of hundreds of cardboard boxes, chances look dim for a natty, practical attire you could buy from Moss Bros. The best option would be some kind of built in “wings” allowing you to steer yourself towards trees/water etc (although remember that at large velocities the shear modulus of water is such that it behaves more like concrete).

I have this image of the “suit” being 39.5 stories high… :slight_smile:

Hmmm, I think that in terms of surviving an impact, this wouldn’t work very well as the container would hit the ground and a tremendous shock wave would travel through the fluid, injuring the occupant.

Not quite a ‘suit’, but wasn’t there a design for an orbital escape device that was little more than an overstuffed chair; the astronaut travelling arse-first toward the ground braked only by wind resistance?

Holy moly. You first.

Sounds like a bastardization of G-suits pilots wear. IIRC, they have water or some other fluid in the legs. But they work by pushing blood out of the extremities so the pilot doesn’t black out. They wouldn’t protect him from being crushed.

See, I’m wondering how much deceleration a human body can handle if the force is distributed evenly. When you fall out of a building, most of the force lands on one spot which either shatters your head or sends your legs flying up through the rest of you.

Gumbercules - See that bear suit is what I had in mind.

this (or somethihng very much like it) was the re-entry vehicle I was thinking of; I think the retro motor is there to drop the thing below orbital velocity, rather than slow descent.

Oops - it wasn’t that one because the occupant has a parachute; with the one I was thinking of, the occupant stays in it all the way to the ground.

This is the one.

I refer you to the wonderful Zorb. If you watch the beginning of Jackie Chan’s film Operation Condor, you can see Jackie roll off a 200 foot cliff in one (actually a facsimile), hit the water, and start walking away.

Actually I think acceleration tanks have been studied and considered for space missions that would involve extreme acceleration. I’ve only ever heard of it once, though, and unfortunately I don’t have a cite, but the point is it is a solid theory. By distributing the force of impact evenly across the entire body, you could increase the amount of sustainable G-forces many times over.

I don’t get how that Paracone never reaches more than 30 mph or so. It doesn’t seem like it would create enough drag.
The problem it seems is that the thicker you make the suit, the greater the drag and the slower you will fall.

Sounds like the way to go is to wear a suit with large inflatable air bladders. So while I’m working and typing and whatnot, I just look like a guy with a slightly rumply suit. But when it’s time to go home, I just smash a chair through the window, use a CO2 canister to inflate like a raft and bounce the heck out of there.

What I really had in mind though was more along the lines of the Iron Man suit. A hard outer shell to protect the occupant from spinal injuries, broken bones and the skull shattering impact of hitting the pavement. The inside lined with some kind of foam. Maybe a hydraulic fluid that is ejected like one of those highway barriers. Basically, you can’t move in it, someone just tosses you out the window and you tumble like a gingerbread man.

The problem with the Iron Man suit is that your body will stop in a very short distance, with only the thickness of the foam to travel. G-forces are based on decelleration over distance, and no matter how good the exo-skeleton is, your body can’t stand such high forces.

Your brain will splat against the inside of your skull, your aorta will tear away from your heart, life will be very unpleasant for a short period of time.

The zorb website strongly discourages this.

So how large a “crumple zone” do you need to survive a 40-story fall? IIRC someone survived 48G in the famous rocket sled experiment. If you wanted to keep it under 40G for safety, would it simply be a 1-story long crumple zone? (I’m too sleepy to do the math, sorry).

If you wanted it to be a rigid suit, you’d want to put 3-meter long mechanica legs with very good shock absorbers. I think that’d do the trick.