Engineering in Games: The Helldivers 2 Hellpod

if you have managed to get under the hell diver servers you know exactly what the hellot is and it's awesome but could the engineering behind something like this work in the real world my name's Nate I have a master's degree in engineering and I'm here to spread manage democracy so the first and most important step of engineering anything is determine its purpose what's the purpose of the hellot exactly well it's actually fairly straightforward when you dig into it it's a single-use orbital troop deployment vehicle or a suat dove doesn't really roll off the tongue with that acronym but that's okay we'll let marketing deal with that one later so now that we know what we want our hpot to do let's look at how exactly we wanted to do it stepping through our horrendous acronym from earlier let's look at that first section here single use now the fact that our hellot here is going to be single use makes the engineer of this a whole lot easier take the humble soda can for example this is a single-use product and a perfect example of one it's just a thin aluminum can that you pop open once drink the contents and throw away preferably recycle it but now try to think for a second how you would make that easily and reliably reusable I gave it a little thought myself but honestly couldn't come up with anything really good for making that reusable and also reliable so you know what if you have a good way that's honestly a million-dollar idea right there go work on it go get it patented it's free patent hour with Nate take that one and run I give it to you and you know what because I'm giving out free patents here today i' thought if you consider leaving a like on this video or maybe considered subscribing to see more of this absolutely feral engineering I'm doing here but that's enough rambling about soda cans there was a point to that analogy there our dropt is essentially the soda can of orbal deployment you use it once and you throw it away so the next half of acronym the O half is going to be much much harder to engine here orbital means we're going to need this to survive re-entering the atmosphere of a planet troop tooy means it's going to need to deliver a soldier and all their gear safely to the planet and ready to fight and vehicle means well vroom vroom so now that we've established our purpose of the hell pod and we've established the requirements of how the HELLP pod needs to operate it's time to tackle our first problem here orbital entry so the loading menu here is actually a fantastic example of what an orbital entry looks like because that is exactly what the hellot is doing and that's why I've even made this video we're trying to establish how that works but the fire you see in front of there really happens on an object entering back into a planet's atmosphere happens to little meteorites to go into atmosphere that's why they burn up they encounter a lot of heat and air resistance which we'll get into too and this was an issue they had to figure out for the space shuttle program and any other space program that was trying to get the astronauts safely back to Earth so the first portion of our problem here is actually going to help the HELLP pod out air resistance is going to cause drag on the hell pod as it goes into the atmosphere and this means it's going to bleed off a significant amount of speed and cause less impact on the poor little soldier inside the hell pod that is impacting the planet's surface now that air resistance is going to cause a massive issue for our hellot here even though air is a very minimally dense fluid it is still fluid that has a density which means as it passes over our object the hell pod is going to create some friction and not an issue if you're driving your car down the highway massive issue if you're hurdling towards a planet at thousands of meters per second so for example the space shuttle when it reentered atmosphere experience temperatures around 1,400 C so that's um a lot it's also known as around the temperature steel melts but seeing as astronauts have safely returned to Earth before Material Science has an answer for this problem what they did in the space shuttle program they use ceramic tiles on the front of the shuttle as the shuttle came in these ceramic tiles that could withstand the extreme Heats experienced during re-entry we're taking the brunt of the Heat and allowed everyone to land safely and considering that hell divers takes place in the far future where we have space travel technology I'm going to assume they figured out how to make a composite that can withstand more heat than our current composits so I'm going to say as long as the Leading Edge of that little cone there has some good composits on it problem [Music] solved so back to our acony from earlier we've actually solved the orbital problem already now the problem is the troop deployment so we need to figure out how to not make the soldier inside be human pancake when this thing lands so we're going to need to do a little math to figure out and this math is going to be a lot tougher than before we're going to need to do some real calculations here first we're going to need to calculate terminal velocity of the hell pod terminal velocity being at the point which the drag caused by the air creates enough force that it brings the acceleration of the hell pod to zero and once that acceleration equals zero that means our hell pod will no longer be decelerating the atmosphere now you may be saying how the hell do we calculate this well I'll tell you what luckily NASA has provided us with an equation they've been a great benefactor to the hod program so far and this equation has a lot of variables so let's break them down real quick looking at our terminal velocity equation here we're trying to solve for VT here our terminal velocity which is going to give us the square < TK of 2 * the mass time gravity over the density of the air time the surface area time the coefficient of Dr so we're going to start off by establishing our density of air as exactly equal to the density of air on Earth because I don't want to figure out the density of air of an entire the alen planet so we're going to use 07 lb per feet squared next up we can knock out none of these variables easily oh dear okay so we're going to have to figure out our weight here which means we're going to need a lot of calculations we're also going to need to figure out the frontal area and we're also going to need to figure out that drag coefficient so let's take a quick vote here on which variable we want to start with figuring out oh yeah I'm the only one here um I've decided we're starting with weight just because so how are we going to solve for the weight of this thing well I've been given no information tried looking up online not a whole lot around so we're going to break this thing up into two portions the human tube and the little Con on the front and with that we're going to start with the human tube first cuz this is going to honestly be a lot more difficult to solve so what size is the hell pod that's a fantastic question how we're going to solve this I have this still image here here for me dropping into a mission let's assume this hell diver is 6t tall just to make things easy we can look at the hell diver's Height work backwards and see this circle on the bottom that circle is visible as the helot is dropping so we have a constant here that we can use to measure the dimensions of this thing so 6 tall hell diver and if we take this line and kind of just tilt it up I'm going to say that's 5 1/2 ft it's pretty close to there but it's a little bit shorter so this circle here is 5 1/2 ft in diameter so looking at the rear of our HELLP pod here as it drops onto a planet we see that same Circle which we know is 5/2 ft in diameter let's take a line of one of these six sides and if you move that over it looks to me to be about 2/3 of the length and doing some incredibly generous rounding we're going to say each side 3 and 1/2 ft just to make things easy so looking at the side view of the hell pod dropping figuring out the height of this portion is going to be a little bit tougher we can kind of see that same Edge we measured and we could maybe work backwards and use it but pretty obscured by the fire so we're going to do a little fudge in the numbers here so saying from before the hell diver we were look at is 6t tall we have to assume not everyone the same height let's say this can fit people up to like 6'6 they want to fit everyone in these things so that everyone can be a hell diver and spread managed democracy so we need to account for that here and we know there's a mechanism that shoots you up as you land so there's got to be some sort of mechanical thing at the bottom there that we need to cfor space for so I'm going to say this thing is 9 ft long so we're counting for the extra 6 in on top of our six hell diver as well as like 2 and 1/2 ft of random junk in the bottom so now that we've established our side lengths we know our height and we know how many panels we have that means there are six panels that are 3 and 1/2 ft by 9 ft in length so oh we need more thing to K wait we need know how thick those panels are so figuring out the thickness of our hell pod here is going to be a little tough there's no way we're getting a cross-section view of this hell pod we can't cut this thing in half and look how thick the walls actually are so we're going to have to do some guessing here looking at the Space Shuttle again the hall was up to 15 mm thick in some places and since I don't know what A millimeter is or we're going to convert that real quick that's about 610 of an inch so that's a pretty hefty hall right there now will that be enough for our HELLP pod as the question now the space shuttle was designed to take astronauts to space bring them back in re-entry and land on a Runway our hell is not landing on a Runway it is smashing into the planet at a high velocity embedding itself in the ground and bringing a person up so we're going to need a little bit thicker skin now figuring out exactly what kind of strength we need there is pretty tough we essentially want this to embed in the ground and survive so we're going to kind of use a fudge Factor here and just say if you double that that'll be pretty good cuz the main shock is going to be on that bottom cone not the sides the sides just need to not get crushed in by the ground pushing its way back in so let's just double it let's call it 1.2 in now if I were hellot designer and this entire hypothetical I am I would probably pick titanium now the reason for this is It's lightweight which is going to help us later on with our Landing calculations and by Landing I mean smashing it to the ground it's about half the weight of Steel and also it can withstand the high temperatures of re-entry this can withstand about 3,000 de F before it starts to get all liquidy and considering the re-entry before was about 4 de below that I call that pretty good so first let's get a quick volume of one of these panels we've got 9 ft by 3 and 1/2 ft by1 ft thick converting real quick from inches that gives us 3.15 ft cubed now multiplying that by our density of titanium 281 we get about 900 lb per panel here and we have got six of those so that means we get a grand total weight for our human tube of 5400 lb so with the weight of our man can solved let's move on to that nose Cone first let's figure out the drag efficient real quick because that'll actually be fairly easy and while you may ask it's an established Factor now who established it you may ask I don't have the faintest idea but Eng in textbooks use the value so we're going to use it too now a 45° angle cone here has a coefficient of .5 and looking at a hellot here I would say that looks like kind of a rounded version of a 45° angle cone and I'm not going to calculate the actual curves of that so that's a 45° angle cone now so looking at our 45° angle nose cone we've got here this here is meant to just like penetrate into the ground so we're going to assume this is solid metal if it was anything else it' probably crumple and not do its job properly now what do we want to make our nose cone out of again this is penetrate into the ground and break through hard rocks and buildings and whatever else it's going through so we want something tough now titanium's good but I think there's better options let me introduce you real quick to the Mo's hardness scale this ranks material is based on hardness based on how hard they are compared to Diamond the hardest KN material so Titanium on the scale is a six that's good but that's not great there's a lot of things that are above that so I think instead we're going to use tungsten carbide this is used to make a lot of cutting bits on machinery and stuff that makes other metal pieces so this here this is going to make sure we go through anything we need to now for finding our weight we need to First find the dimensions of our cone here this looks to be about the same height as it is width and using that Circle we found from before we're going to say the width is 5 1/2 ft so cut that in half give us a radius of 2.75 now enter our height width into the handy dandy volume calculator of a cone on Google because I don't want to do the math Myself by hand we get about 2.78 or if we round that up 22 let's call it now we've got our volume let's multiply that by the density of tuxen carbide here which is about 1071 put that together we get about 24,000 lb for a nose cone that's a hefty nose cone but you know what we need a hefty nose cone now we need one more quick piece of info and we're ready to solve that terminal velocity equation we need to figure out the cross-sectional area of that cone this is a pretty simple one we just use our radius 2.75 gives us an area of about 24 we'll go with now we have every part we need to fill out this terminal velocity equation and that gives us a final terminal velocity of the hell pod of 1,475 ft per second which is in fact very fast now you may be sitting there thinking to yourself why is this guy even solving for the terminal velocity the hellot has engines that pop out when you get close to the ground you can use them to maneuver and it slows you down when you land you don't even need the terminal velocity do this guy just solve equations in his free time for fun I tell you what I do but that's not the point here okay we actually needed that because we need to figure out how fast we're going when the engines slow us down so now how are we going to figure out how much these Rockets actually slow us down we don't know anything about the Rockets we don't know what kind of force they're outputting we could calculate it if we knew the kind of force they're putting in the opposite direction like we did with termal velocity and drag but I know none of that so knowing no variables causes problems so considering this is hypothetical engineering we're going to give it a fudge factor and based on how the video looks when it kind of slows down when the Rockets launch we're just going to call that that it cuts the speed to a quarter of what it used to be that sounds nice I think so cutting our terminal velocity in a quter that gives us about 370 ft per second now we're going to use that to calculate the gForce based on how long it takes for the Pod to stop in the ground so to calculate our final gForce that's put on our hell diver here we're going to use the change of velocity over time time gravity so now I record all my videos in 30 frames per second and looking at this video here as we step it through we see the engines turn off at frame one and then by about frame three it looks like it stopped moving so we're going to say that's one10 of a second it takes to slow down so taking all these final factors put equation here we get a gForce of about 114 that's a lot of gForce to put on a person looking up some random stuff online it says in like a car crash you can survive about 30 G's in an impact our hell diver is not doing too well here our hell diver is a pancake at the bottom of this hell pod why is the hero of manag democracy flat now an important step in engineering is figuring out what went wrong after you test something and if it fails it's important to work backwards and figure out what happened here now why is our hover flat we did all the math we made a pod here I still flat well that's because this is a video game and unfortunately it does not take into account the uh fragility of the human body now what scenarios we could change to actually make this thing work if our goal is say 30 GS to be survivable we could cut down on weight say and that would reduce our terminal velocity maybe make that nose cone Hollow instead of fully solid maybe some real thick walls on that would do just fine instead of a complete solid cone or we could say the engines that pop out at the end are much stronger and we need to put some stronger engines on this thing really slow us down better that would reduce her impact speed and then reduce G's in the end but at this point we're making hypothetical changes to an already hypothetical H pod so let's just call it here before this gets out of hand if you enjoyed this I'd love if you have a like down below and if you want to see more of this type of content I'd love if you hit that subscribe button thanks and I'll see you next time next time we return to spreading managed democracy that is Liberty

Channel: Nate's Game Box

Views: 4,619

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Id: BWqYs54G6A8

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024