When someone hits water at terminal velocity, their biggest problem is the surface tension and inertia of the water that they hit - they cannot displace water fast enough, because the rest of the water gets in the way. People have survived falling into reedy swamps - the reeds break up surface tension, reduce density, and the fallee hits the reeds first so that the water surface is disturbed before they impact it.
Two pounds of grapes mushed does not have the sort of surface tension or bulk mass for inertia to come in to play - and if you make it go too fast, the bag will rip and the mass will just break up due to air resistance. And if you posit some super-strong plastic bag to hold the grapes - then just use it to suffocate the victim. It will be quicker and you can eat the grapes while they asphyxiate.
Are you sure about surface tension? I thought the issue with jumping into water was that the water is just too heavy to move out of the way quick enough, not too sticky - and that jumping into boggy ground was better because of compressible gas pockets inside living vegetation and trapped gasesous products of decomposition.
Surface tension is measured in milliNewtons per meter; when analyzing an event involving kiloNewtons of force, it’s negligible.
As you rightly note, inertia is the key - and a grape at 120 MPH has momentum/energy approximately equal to a same-sized blob of water traveling at the same speed (since they are of nearly the same density).
Get hit with a single grape at that speed, and you will have a severe bruise.
Get hit in the abdomen with a two-pound bolus of grapes at that speed (or even less - I’m suggesting 70-80 MPH), and you will experience massive, possibly damaging displacement of internal organs.
I’d be curious to know more about an example case, i.e. how high did they fall from, what orientation were they in at impact, and so on. There may be a density reduction if there is a mat of decomposing reeds (which have air chambers), but surface tension is still irrelevant.
It’s got a whopping two pounds - 900 grams - of bulk mass. Ever ridden a motorcycle, and gotten hit in the arm by a bug at 60 MPH? That’s a fraction of a single grape, and it can hurt like hell.
Agreed, the bag strength is marginal. But I can envision holding a bag of grapes outside my car window at 80 MPH without it shredding, so as long as the sling force isn’t too great (use a long sling harness), it should hold up.
If you could somehow make it so they couldn’t open their mouth (I’m thinking duct tape, but that seems disallowed by the OP), it’d be easy. Grapes up the nose - suffocation!
Maybe lots and lots of grapes in their mouth, then grapes up the nose? That could work.
Interestingly, I popped in to offer just such a comment - only my thinking was some of those grape stems can be a bit scratchy. If you were to smash some grapes, leading to exposed stem bits, you might cause some significant bleeding.
Of course even a hemophiliac wouldn’t die just from a few scratches (I think… I think usually the bleeding can be stopped eventually) but if he were so discombobulated at the bizarre attack, that he stumbled away, and fell, and hit his head, then yes indeed the cause of death might be attack-by-grape.
OP has specificially asked about beating a victim to death with grapes.
In addition to head or abdnomal impacts that I suggested earlier, I now also suggest a neck impact so as to induce a tracheobronchial injury; The resultant tracheal swelling may be enough to cause asphyxiation.
Yes, any place where somebody asks if you can beat someone with a bag of grapes, and is seriously responded to by people who begin devising ways to accelerate bags of grapes to 120 mph, and then nobody points out how absurd the concept of super-speed grape weapons, is a rather fun place.
As you note, it’s not the speed, it’s the acceleration/deceleration. You can probably accelerate it slowly enough to hold together, but the deceleration when it hits will break any normal bag. So that one hit better be impressive.
I am sure you are right about surface tension - it is a factor in some elements of water behaviour, but at the forces involved with a full body impact, it is insignificant compared to the inertia.
Actually, this would make a great video experiment for your web site - a bag of grapes, a watermelon or pumpkin a video camera…
I only can find a partial link to the report I am thinking of, but the jumper was vertical on impact due to the streaming reserve. There were more details at the time, but I can’t find a local news archive.
It seems ironic that the parachute Whanua failed to pack correctly was the one he chose to jump with, but I bet he gets all the rest he packs correct.
I think talking about the bag ripping is meaningless, because then you’re not talking about a bag of grapes, you’re talking about a bag. Be it that you have a crate of grapes or what have you, I think an infinite supply would be a given. I’m in the camp that enough bags of grapes with sufficient speed over a sufficiently long time with a sufficiently incapacitated victim would result in a grizzly and sweet murder scene.
Having read the thread in all it’s glory and evaluated the suggestions in the spirit of the OP, that is, a person killing another person with a bunch of grapes in a supermarket bag, so far the best scenario would seem to be a MLB pitcher or other trained ‘thrower’ taking a bunch of grapes, re-tying the bundle into a compact dense package, and then throwing them as fast a possible into the victims neck. Does this sound about right?
If so, we now need to know:
How fast can a pitcher- softball may be helpful- throw a 2 lb weight?
First cut - fast pitch softball throw a ball at 110-137 km/hr. Lets say 120 km per hour and a heavy end softball at 200g, gives us a kinetic energy of [1/2 mass x velocity squared = (0.2g/2*(120,000m/3600s)^2) = 111 joules - how should we adjust this for the grapes of wrath?
Next problem - how much energy can the trachea take?
