Exploding Barrels Are a LIE! | The SCIENCE of.. Doom Barrels

dear eid software uh i think honestly does anybody i'm even talking to still work there let me check real quick john romero gone both Carmack's gone tom hall sandy peterson Shawn green American McGee gone gone gone and gone I guess Kevin cloud is still there okay alright let's let's redo this dear 1993 ed software hi it's me Austin and I have a bone to pick with you you guys did you even know what you did you revolutionized the first-person shooter genre by well creating it granted good job props will boo you did it but with great power comes great responsibility and damn it you let me down you let all of America down you created something that echo through the annals of gaming history that defined tropes and transcended genre conventions you made a legacy and it's that legacy that has created the biggest bugbear to hound my sleep at night this is something that has annoyed me ever since I started over analyzing media in my wee childhood and has nothing to do with it being February with no new releases in sight when I've just done a video on Minecraft and did one on Pokemon before that and can't think of anything else to do before resident evil 3 and Final Fantasy 7 remake um out I have to talk to you about these things the exploding barrels you see little did you know it at the time but while you were busy creating an entire genre a video game you also made these things that have been haunting me in every single video game on earth and I'm serious I am not joking duke nukem grand theft auto diablo also wait what I hit it with a sword what what even no no I'm doing the list I'm not gonna rant about how stupid this is half-life Donkey Kong Country it's a CNT on the side and there's no fuse how does it even know austin focus stop it Resident Evil Crash Bandicoot breath of the wild Mass Effect gold and I got so carried away that literally everything explodes somehow that is not even a comprehensive list I guarantee you everyone watching this video can think of at least one game they've played with exploding barrels in it we could do this all day and it's all your fault and they make no freakin sense and I am here to set the record straight you are welcome okay I gotta calm down because I feel like maybe I've left some of you behind and you may not be as angry as I am that's a normal response right to be angry but at a videogame II thing I think so I'm normal this is normal we're all normal here first I think we have to go over what an explosion actually is because it's a surprisingly interesting and complex physical phenomenon I said physical there for a reason that wasn't an accident an explosion at its heart is a physical thing often it's created using chemicals but that's not always the case explosion simply is a sudden increase in the volume of gases in a space accompanied by a sudden release of energy chemical reactions and yes this includes just lighting stuff on fire can be really good at doing this but that's not the only thing that can cause explosions like just shoving gas into a container until the material of the container fails also counts the gas under pressure inside the container expands rapidly as a walls rupture check and all the energy is released into the surrounding air check incredibly quickly in order to understand explosions and more specifically why the exploding barrel is such a terror one let's look at a game with an amazing explosion scene in it seriously I haven't actually played this game in almost a year and I still can't get this scene out of my head it's the Red Dead Redemption - mission a kind and benevolent despot this mission in a two-minute scene is just wha it perfectly covers all the important elements of a proper explosion grain explosions are a very real and very dangerous reality in the age of mass-produced agricultural goods and storage this scene in Red Dead Redemption 2 is not made-up nonsense there are an average of 10 grain dust explosions in the United States alone killing at least one person a year and causing millions in property damage it's not a joke and it's a very real danger that people who work in the grain and sugar storage business have to deal with and mitigate every single day and it's a perfect platform to explain that what makes an explosive material explosive has more to do with conditions than it does the actual material itself under the right conditions sugar can make an amazing explosive and under the wrong conditions gasoline can make a terrible one there are four elements for conditions that must be met in order for a properly good and dangerous explosion to take place 1 you need fuel to heat oxygen 3 you need confinement and 4 you need an ignition source if you get all four of these you've got a good recipe for an explosion in a grain explosion the fuel is actually the dust floating in the air if you ignite it with an ignition source a single dust particle will light on fire and consume the oxygen around it if the concentration of dust is high enough to heat from that one particle will light nearby particles on fire which will light more on fire and bababababa about a boom a chain reaction travels through the entire confined space building up pressure caused by a combination of gas heating up and chemical changes from combustion and bam an entire building explodes the fuel is the grain the oxygen is oxygen the confinement is the building and the ignition source in Red Dead Redemption is the furnace these four elements don't change much even if you're talking about gasoline in a barrel in fact when OSHA is making their safety standards for material handling they describe the specific conditions materials are under when determining whether they are explosive or not specifically they focus on the oxygen mixture and the temperature because these are the factors that matter the most when assessing whether a material is safe for now these are described as the upper and lower flammable limits which is a bell curve for how likely a stored material is to explode if the temperature is too low too little fuel will be vaporized in order to sustain combustion if it's too high there'll be too much fuel in the air and there won't be enough oxygen but if conditions are just right all it can take is a tiny spark and then BAM and it's here where we start to run into problems first of all the lore of the original doom games and yes there is Laura Laura that I know because I once spent like six months researching doom lore for another video that I'm shamelessly plugging right now it's called devil's advocate it's on my other channel shoddycast it's really good and it only takes me approximately six months to make each video so you know maybe by the time I retire there'll be a whole 10 episodes to watch [Music] anyway the lure of the doom games is that these bases on the moons of Mars are primarily radioactive waste dumping sites and secondarily maybe a little bit of evil mad scientist experimentation that may or may not accidentally open a portal to the plains of hell and unleash all demon kind into an unsuspecting humanity these damage pools here radioactive waste these barrels filled with the same green slop presumably also radioactive waste which typically speaking is not flammable but let's say that it is because there's you know barrels and stuff on fire here this still makes no sense in order to know why it makes no sense let's go back to our four conditions number three confinement we have a big confinement issue here containers are not strictly necessary but they help a lot they can contain pressure and release it kind of like when you open a soda can and the pressure caused by the carbon dioxide bubbles inside is released all at once in a hiss thats because the pressure was allowed to build up inside the can while the walls contained it that hiss is the release of that energy all at once it's not exactly an explosion although it does pick a lot of the marks actually hey resident science expert is opening a coke can and explosion we don't we don't have one of those a resident resident science expert oh it's me I'm the well that's not great you don't really need to worry about your cans exploding for the most part they're designed to withstand over six atmospheres of internal pressure before a materials start to fail but more importantly look at this barrel it is wide open on the top which means unless it is filled with nitroglycerin which means the game lied to me about the whole radioactive waste thing there's no way this could build up enough pressure to explode catch fire sure maybe kinda not really but maybe fine so all we got to do then to fix this is to slap a top on this thing and then we're good right no no way because then we have a whole new problem specifically problem number two oxygen you see barrels full of flammable substances are pretty terrible at exploding because almost always the volatile fumes fill up any empty space at the top of the container and essentially smother any possibility of combustion by drowning out all the oxygen that's present in fact the more full a barrel is the less dangerous it is unless again it's full of nitroglycerin which is not radioactive waste this is because even if you do get a combustible fuel to oxygen mixture the actual volume it takes up is very very small making the potential energy release small by comparison meaning these barrels which are open topped and build to the brim with liquid GAC would never ever ever ever ever ever explode I guess unless you shoot them with a rocket launcher but that doesn't count best-case scenario a bullet that hits the metal barrel creates a spark that causes a fire and fires are pretty dangerous but they are not explosions and this is the basic problem with every exploding barrel in gaming how is the one in donkey kong country exploding TNT is a powder its entire selling point is that it's supposed to be resistant to shock induced explosions how on earth is crash an Eastern barred bandicoot slamming into crates with enough force to cause Sparks and ignite explosives a game that actually does it right surprisingly is half-life 2 the barrels are closed in these be pretty light meaning that they don't have a lot of gas in them in fact empty barrels that used to store gasoline are way more dangerous than tanks that currently store liquid gas this is because even a thin layer of liquid gasoline at most normal temperatures will put off enough vapor to totally mess with the oxygen fuel mixture but tanks that don't have liquid gas in them anymore they are way more likely to create the volatile oxygen fuel mix that leads to explosions and they don't explode with a lot of fire they just go pow and yeah kill you that that seems about right so screw you it'd screw you for making a genre defining literally genre-defining game that I still enjoy to this day especially when sorted with something extremely ultra violent like brutal doom screw you for making a game that's so good that we still play it today and for making totally and entirely unrealistic game mechanics that objectively make the game more fun and more enjoyable do better next time sincerely Austin [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,038,890

Keywords: doom, doom eternal, donkey kong, doom game, new doom, doom eternal trailer, doom e3, doom annihilation, doom eternal e3 2019, doom eternal e3, doom eternal battle mode, doom annihilation trailer, doom trailer, new doom trailer, doom 2020, barrel, barrels, the science of, the science, the science of doom, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory doom

Id: -g0n8FkJb6Y

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020

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