The Science of Mandalorian Armor

hi i'm award-winning science educator and black friday chris hemsworth kyle hill you know we get up to a lot of crazy things here at the facility and i'm always looking for new totally not super villainy sciency ideas to science that's why today's episode is brought to you by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community centered around thousands of classes and courses that inspire creativity and creation i just happened to finish science fiction and fantasy creating unique and powerful worlds by lincoln michelle and the course helped me come up with no less than 12 new designs for lasers that only target people in birkenstock sandals come on people it's it's 20 20. if you want to try skillshare like i did the first thousand of you nerds to go down and click the link in the description get a free trial of skillshare premium and after that trial runs out it's just ten dollars a month you're welcome now let's see what we get up to on today's episode i'm not wearing sandals you can't prove that i'm not is it teva or teva have you seen this one yes oh look he's so small and what's chicken yes baby yoda is so cute that i'm literally dying right now why is mandalorian armor so good well canonically in the star wars universe we know that it's thanks to a material called best car which can deflect fingerlings blaster bolts in the occasional light save but what is it about the material itself it's properties that allows for this well i have some ideas first he's trying so hard to do the force but he can't because he's so small yes baby yoda is so cute it puts porgs and by extension ryan johnson and his whole family to shame well welcome to the facility now entering the facility hey did you know that baby yoda's on the iss now if we want to know exactly why mandalorian armor is so good we must first understand what it's supposed to protect against in the star wars universe canonically that's going to be yieldy blasters and the occasional lightsaber these could be categorized as energy weapons and energy weapons will damage or otherwise destroy a target through three damage modes the first damage mode is overheating whether we're talking about lasers or plasma energy weapons act to increase the surface temperature of their targets so with overheating you could train a laser on something like a spaceship and eventually heat it up so much that all the systems or at least the people inside fail the second damage mode is thermal shock this is where something like a single blaster bolt heats up a surface so quickly and so violently that the surface evaporates vaporizes and more or less explodes i think this is how most storm troopers meet their end the third and final damage mode is drilling sorry not sorry it's drilling this is where multiple pulses from an energy weapon drill into or eventually all the way through a target now whether we're talking about blasters or lightsabers energy weapons are depositing energy into surfaces and so therefore we can evaluate them with a scientific measure like energy per surface area for example it only takes around 10 kilojoules per square centimeter to kill a drone out of the sky with a big old navy laser look at that drone that thing's flimsier than qui-gon jinn's torso [Laughter] the most common weapon that a mandalorian's armor will be protecting against is ye oldie blaster an energy weapon that fires either lasers or plasma depending on how wrong you want to be about it on the internet at a target in single pulses meaning that the damage mode of a blaster primarily is going to be that of thermal shock now in a video i made a couple years ago that i guess i don't have access to for some reason i explained why thermal shock does what it does to storm trooper armor and in this case bescar is going to have all the properties that that stormtrooper armor does not have so first and foremost we could say that best car armor in the language of human engineers has an extremely high heat capacity that it takes a lot of energy per unit mass to raise the best car just one degree this would make it very hard for a single laser or plasma pulse to heat up the material melt it vaporize it or otherwise destroy it a good real world comparison for this if we're going to start making our own mandalorian armor would be something like boron carbide which is a carbon ceramic and it gets pretty close to what you might be considering as blaster proof another very important engineering and material property of bhaskar would be a great thermal conductivity to the facility showers let me ask you a weird question do you actually feel the temperature of stuff i could tell you sure that this shower water feels warm but i'm sure you've had this experience when you're in a nice hot shower and you step out onto the tile floor and it feels freezing on your feet and then you step on the bath mat or the carpet and feels a lot warmer now you would tell me that the carpets and the tile are two very different temperatures but we know that they're not they can't be they're both at the exact same ambient temperature so i ask you again do you actually feel the temperature of stuff wow there's a lot of air conditioner here based on simple yet powerful examples like this i wouldn't say you ever really feel pure temperature rather you feel the ability of some surface or environment to transmit heat energy to you or away from you this is thermal conductivity it's why a tile floor feels much colder than carpet in the same house while you can put your hand in the air of a 500 degree oven and not get burned but if you touch the sides you will instantly be burned and why even on a nice sunny warm day a pool can still feel very very chilly if mandalorian armor had a great thermal conductivity then a blaster bolt would have a hard time doing damage to it as the heat is rapidly dissipated away from what you're trying to vaporize or explode so now we have two potential properties of best car an extremely high heat capacity and thermal conductivity the third property i want to look at is a bit shinier to the facility makeup room where do you think i keep all the argan oil baby you almost hit my hair with that laser bolt kevin are you are you kidding me in the mandalorian we see one stormtroopers actually hitting their shots and two those shots bouncing off of pedro pascal's armor if this is a property inherent to bescar then best car in addition to everything else must have a very high reflectivity for the wavelengths the radiation coming out of this energy weapon in this case a blaster this is equivalent to saying that the hand mirror you are looking at me through right now it's cool right it's kind of like that shot from contact is very reflective of the wavelengths of visible light coming out from this laser pointer it sounds simple and that's because it is shiny armor would be better against laser-like weapons at least much better than armor that is very matte or black or absorptive and this kind of makes sense because mandalorian armor is quite shiny so oh the glasses oh they're for protection from the wavelengths of laser pointer light here even though it makes me look like scott summers from x-men oh my laser-fired lake girlfriend blew me up the whole movie they made about her is bad there's one final way that best car can be the best armor and that's the skill and the movement of the wear like mando himself so consider for example continuous wave energy weapon like a solid laser beam not a pulse the longer it stays on a single spot the hotter that spot gets the more energy is deposited until burning and smoke and vaporization occurs as you can see but now watch these moves the more i move around the harder it is for a single spot to get enough energy deposited on it to damage it or destroy it especially considering all the other properties of best car that we've postulated so far i'm fine i'm not even real making energy weapon attacks less effective through movement doesn't apply to individuals at just walking distance as much as it applies to giant spaceships and large-scale battles where what i'm saying is yes spinning would be a good trick but manu himself is quite mobile and so even though it wouldn't help as much as all the other properties we've talked about for best car so far it would do just a little bit and allow you to do stuff like this come on baby yoda let's go get some chicken nuggies but kyle what about lightsabers best cars supposed to protect against lansing blows from lightsabers first of all guy with the voice i know second of all even though lightsabers might pump out a lot more energy have a lot more power than something like a blaster many many megawatts worth to cut through a blast door like this all the properties that we talked about for best car so far heat capacity thermal conductivity movement of the wear of the armor that would all help it here to be more lightsaber resistant than any other material has any business being i don't know how to transition out of this scene because my doors are broken ari could you cut the camera for a second kevin i need this door fixed asap yeah i am still mad about the hair thing you almost hit it it's all i have i don't know do whatever the problematic aliens from episode 1 did to fix their blast doors when a space wizard with zero personality or likability cut through theirs they seem to have it fixed no i do not want to watch that movie with you it's it's it's awful so what makes best car just so beast well if i had to bet my engineering degree on it which i definitely would not it's a combination of high reflectivity high heat capacity high thermal conductivity and the skill of the owner slash wearer this could easily explain the properties of this space iron or or whatever john favreau says it is these days i can't keep track of cannon look there aren't a lot of good star wars sciency explanations out there trust me i would know but this this is the way until next time oh hey you fixed the doors do you like how i said the catch braids yeah those nerds eat it up now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for the direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant trey just and visiting scholar biped hey that's fun and kind of star wars if you want to get on the facility staff if you want to drape on your silky white lab coat and get behind the scenes images talk with me on our discord get members only live streams you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility today and if you support the facility just enough get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the te look i i would probably want really really good armor too that project that predicted against the you know most common weapons in the galaxy if i had a very cool admittedly helmet that severely hampered my peripheral vision that seems like a very bad idea if fighting is your whole religion and stuff you'd probably want a wide i i don't know i haven't seen the mandalorian yet is it good okay fine i'll go binge watch it right now just a second thanks for watching i didn't watch it i'm never gonna watch it you

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 425,945

Rating: 4.9317436 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, star wars, baby yoda, mandalorian armor, the mandalorian, boba fett, mandalorian cosplay, star wars mandalorian, science fiction, disney plus, sci fi, mandalorian season 2

Id: FiyXFGW2swM

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/perark05]

A key thing kyle forgot to mention is black body emission. Thermal capacity and conduction are fantastic properties but eventually the material can only store so much energy before you get to the state changing zone. You need to consider the rate the material can emit the energy out into the air, if you can emit quicker then the average blaster firing rate or each lightsaber strike then you are golden!