Could a really strong sumo suit save you from a fall from height?

Infinite for the purposes of being dropped out of an airplane. Once you start having to worry about reentry things get a bit hairy.

Not for purposes of how big this thing needs to be, but we do have to start assuming a miracle material which could withstand and shield the heat produced. The only question concerning size and acceleration would be whether the atmosphere would be enough to decelerate you safely from escape speed to surface terminal velocity (impact at surface terminal velocity would be survivable, given our previous calculations). To that, I don’t know the answer (one would need to know the density and temperature profiles of the atmosphere and aerodynamic behaviour of the ball in a wide range of regimes), but at a guess, I would say that it would be sufficient (again, assuming miracle materials for the ball to keep you cool).

I’m happy keeping this fictional person within the earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps in a really high plane, but that’s it.

I wonder if you were that high up if the puffyness of the suit would act like a bit of a parachute and slow you down anyway?

Alice, Alice, Alice. Pay attention in class. That’s what all that stuff about Reynolds number and drag was about. The suit will slow down your fall to 78 mph, as opposed to maybe 120 mph for someone who’s not in drag, umm…not wearing an 8 foot diameter Sumo suit.

Note, though, that we haven’t really addressed the key issue of keeping the Sumo suit oriented properly. If, for example, our experimental subject lands on his head, then unless he’s Lil Abner, it’s all over. In fact, it’s much more likely that the suit would rotate wildly – because it’s so wide, our subject isn’t going to be able to control the yaw and pitch by moving arms. In fact, we better make sure the suit is shaped like a torus (donut) – eight feet in diameter but shorter in the vertical dimension so that the head can stick out. We want to make sure that we can get air in and puke out.

Right, right. Of course. I knew that. I’m not teh dmub. :stuck_out_tongue:

Now then - what if we just added a nifty padded sumo HAT to the outfit - that would protect from a head impact. Perhaps equiped with some breathing straws and a barf bag. Yes?

I’m not too worried about aerodynamic stability, myself. We’re thinking of a roughly spherical “suit”, are we not? And a sphere is of neutral stability. So we wouldn’t have to do very much to it to make it inherently stable, independant of the “wearer”'s actions. One might, for instance, add a long ribbon to the “belly” of the suit: The drag from the ribbon might not slow down the suit significantly, but it could be enough to move the center of drag ventral to the center of mass, thus keeping the person’s back down (the best position for human G tolerance, and one of the best positions for allowing compression of the padding).

Thus rendering the “hat” portion unnecessary, yes? (because the person would be unlikely to fall on their head with the ribbon pulling their backside down first)

Right. If one instead tried for the hat approach, the hat would need to be much thicker than the other parts, since you’d need that much padding on the end of what’s already the long axis of a human, and head-down is the worst position for a human for G tolerances.