Okay, so something very silly has been bugging me about Luke Cage. Disclaimer: I know special effects are unrealistic for the sake of entertainment. Moving on.
Luke cage has unbreakable skin. People shoot him a lot, anyway.
In the Netflix shows, his default “I’ve been fighting people” look is a hoodie and/or shirt riddled with bullet holes. This is how you know he’s been involved in Serious Business.
I know absolutely nothing about this sort of thing, but my thinking is that a hole is the result of a bullet passing all the way through something. A bullet striking Luke Cage would either bounce off or deform and drop away.
So let’s say I put a fitted a T-shirt over a steel torso and then unload a clip into it. What would happen to the fabric? Obviously it would take a beating, but would we get actual holes or just rips? Are the bullets hot enough to burn a hole even if they aren’t creating one by passage through the fabric, or is the smoke coming off of him in that photo also from the land of suspended disbelief?
My wag would be that it would depend on how much his impenetrable body flexes when it gets hit. Solid steel, I wouldn’t expect more than maybe a slight cut of the fabric from the deforming bullet. But if his body allows some flex, then maybe the shirt get flexed past the point of ripping and makes a hole.
If the bullet hits Luke Cage and stops, it’s going to get very hot (400-500 Joules of energy is converted to heat). Those holes will be burned through the material of the shirt.
Or melted. I can confirm that a steel ball bearing dropped from a second floor window onto a synthetic fabric jacket lying on concrete results in round holes in the fabric: a scorched/burned zone of destruction in the middle with a melted/fused ring around it. Cotton or other natural fiber would probably just carbonize at the point of impact.
Bullets are hot to the touch, but now so hot that they will “carbonize” cotton. It most you might see a light scorching, and even then only if the bullet stops in contact with fabric. As the video that cornflakes linked to shows, a copper-jacketed lead bullet will virtually disintegrate when it comes into contact with a hard substance like hardened steel (which I interpret Luke Cage’s skin to resemble) and the copper jacket will seperate. This would certainly shred any fabric in the vicinity and the kinetic energy of the disintigrated bullet will plasticize synthetic fabrics like polyester by friction.
This, of course, leads to the conclusion that every site where Cage has been fired upon must be liberally coated with a fine layer of lead dust which will be inhaled or injested by anyone who disturbs it. The man is basically a walking Superfund site. Luke, get out of town before more innocent people die due to your proximity.
Well, once on Jessica Jones he lifted his shirt and applied a running circular saw to his stomach, and came away without a scratch, so, pretty durable.
