The DEADLY Physics of the Halo Rings! | The SCIENCE!... of Halo

Dear 343 Studios, or Bungie? I mean, I'm talking about stuff Bungie came up with- *unintelligible anger* Damn! This is the exact same problem I had last time, ARGH Hi, it's me, AUSTIN. You know, I'm having a little trouble deciding which pre-topic to rant on. There's the obvious choice to point out that the fun I had researching the first Halo video over a year ago was what made me decide to pursue

science

full time, BUT as exciting as I get about talking about gamma ray bursts, I must say that my heart is carrying a heavy load this week.

On average, during the first year of life, a baby gets sick at least six times. But he can get sick up to 12. IT HAPPENS that my baby is a high achiever and has managed to catch not one, not two, but three separate illnesses in the last five weeks, of which I have also been blessed because each time I have also gotten sick. Awesome! Turns out being Mr. Mom has its drawbacks, but it's still there. Here we are, magically, with a video going. And besides, I finally picked up the horrible poop story merit badge that seems to be a requirement for all parents.

I'll spare you the details and leave it to your imagination what the Zero stuffed animals we picked up from Disneyland during VidCon were like. he momentarily looked more like Harvey Dent than an adorably pristine white ghost. Anyway, it's been over a year; YouTube has hit those who use profanity with content rating chokes; PewDiePie is still PewDiePie; and finally. After all this time, I've decided to look into the incredibly cool SCIENCE of

halo

rings

, and the

science

? Science makes Ok wait a minute. Wait, hey, hey, hey, youtube, hello. It's me, Austin! OK does not matter. Can you look away for a second?

Right over there. Yes. Yes, do it right. I'll put them on very quickly. Just for a second you understood it, you understood it. Okay *clears throat* Science MAKES NO SENSE GOD *sigh* It felt really good to say it. This has been covered before by a few people, including an essay in the

halo

novel that covers almost all the details, but it has quite a few. things fucking wrong, but I'm here to set the record straight first. Let's talk about the basics. Halos are giant

rings

that float in space and come complete with rocks, trees, grass, snow, and most importantly, gravity.

We'll get to the question of gravity. a little But I have to get back to how gigantic these things are: they have a diameter of 10,000 kilometers, which is only two thousand kilometers shorter than the Earth would mean if the Earth decided to go on a diet. It has the ideal gastric band size. enough to curb that massive appetite, but not enough to starve him to death. With a width of 318 kilometers, this gives the halo rings an area just shy of 10 million kilometers or 3.8. Millions of square miles for context, that's enough space to fit the United States, Iraq, Rwanda, Barbados and Paris, with enough space left to I don't know have a small National Park or something.

That means there's enough room to contain the war on terrorism and a couple of nice vacation spots, which is all you really need in life, besides being big. They produce gravity in an absolutely fascinating way, rotation specifically, centrifugal force, now wait, just hold it, stop it, stop it. I know the sound of an angry keyboard followed by a nasal sound, but don't you need to say shooting a phone? Oh? No, no, I don't have time to go into the difference between frames of reference just to satiate your pedantry, since we're going to talk about Objects on a Spinning Ring.

Centrifugal force is enough for now, go, go, whine about it. to me on Twitter along with your feelings about photons having mass? Where have I been learning about artificial gravity for a long time? Scientists can remember that gravity is a little strange and yes, it definitely exists. But Einstein showed that there is literally a difference between acceleration and gravity TLDR if you are in a box accelerating through space at 1 g of acceleration or 9.8 meters per second squared. There is no experiment you can do that can prove that you were in a box flying through space instead of in a box.

Sitting on the surface of the Earth, objects fall, light bends, all things are literally exactly the same. This is called the equivalence principle. There are some problems with this as a long-term solution to gravity in space; However, first are the power requirements, the fuel requirements to maintain this acceleration rate would be close to the order of having a fuel. A star-sized tank, which secondly accelerates at 9.8 meters per second for a long enough time, has disastrous space-time complications. In just under a year you will have reached speeds of such a high fraction of the speed of light compared to the rest of the universe that you effectively risk time traveling directly to the point in time where the entire universe dies in a couple of days In order to get around the relativity problems associated with this constant acceleration in a straight line problem, enterprising engineers and physicists came up with a secret way to provide constant acceleration without moving in a straight line.

Spinning rings and that's how it works. Old Isaac Newton told us that an object in motion will remain in motion until acted on by an external force. It is acceleration and staying in motion is called inertia. So you're standing on a rotating ring, right? How let's stop it right there, at this exact moment when your body isn't actually spinning. It is moving in this direction 90 degrees in the direction of rotation at that exact moment. This is called a tangential vector, okay? But we are doing well. Let's start again as the ring rotates. As a result, it moves you away from that tangential vector at a constant rate.

You constantly feel a direct change in time delta v over t Also known as acceleration, you feel this force, this tangential force as gravity and in almost always you can control the amount of gravity of something on the surface of your ring. Experiment by changing the rotation speed, spin faster, more acceleration, more gravity, slower, less, etc., and this is the cool way halo rings work. However, since this is a Dark attempt to hack the laws of

physics

according to Sir Isaac Newton and my friend Einstein, it has some serious drawbacks, as often happens when you flirt with the cosmic Kraken.

But we'll get to that. First we have to know how fast this thing is. is spinning, you will see that most calculations performed on the halo rings to date have assumed a gravitational constant of 9.8. Same as Earth, but if there's one thing I've learned in my time analyzing game science, it's to never trust gravity. I love game developers, but I don't remember the last game I played that actually had a gravitational acceleration of 9.8 meters per second and Halo is no exception through a clever combination of frame-by-frame analysis, pixel measurements and abuse of government-issued equipment. I was able to determine that the rate of gravity in a halo ring is a whopping fifteen point one.

Seven meters per second squared over a G and a half, which I'm pretty sure you could spend some time on and be. Over all, it's okay, but it would kind of suck. Normally it would weigh around one hundred and forty pounds or more. Depending on how recently and how many times I've given in and gorged on the local central Illinois delicacy known as horseshoe, I'm in a halo. Like I weigh 210 pounds, is that a big difference? Running with this thing would absolutely suck, luckily the Master Chief is a super soldier with super soldier sized glutes, gravity however is the least of the bad news.

They get a lot worse and to illustrate exactly, we're going to have to talk about guns. Hashtag Don't tag me YouTube hashtag. It's just for science. The nice thing about halo rings is that the larger the ring, the less noticeable the negative drawbacks of the tangential acceleration of gravity that you experience, but they never completely disappear so you can pull 1.5. G, our ring has to rotate a little slower than one rotation per hour, 23.9 five rotations per day and what seems really slow, its tangential speed is absurdly fast, 8711 meters per second or more than 19,000 miles per hour, This isn't a big deal if you're already in the ring, but it makes getting into the ring almost impossible to remember.

There is no real gravity here. You are simply experiencing a constant change in direction and speed, which means that if you wanted to land on this ring you would have to match the rotational speed you have to make a spacecraft spin at 19,000 miles per hour. without managing to crash into the damn thing with a normal planet with normal gravity. You can just skim the surface using the atmosphere to slow you down if you're trying to do that with a halo ring. You would be being hit by an atmosphere moving at Mach 25 and it would tear even the best armored ship to pieces.

We'd be tempted to approach this thing from the side, but I don't recommend it. The best chance you have is to get started. somewhere near the center and trying to match the spin by inching inward, this would still take forever and be incredibly difficult to achieve, no wonder all the Marines died on impact at the start of Halo 1, a crash high speed combined with a 1000. The master chief of the kilogram hanging around the inside of the ship because, like some kind of idiot, he decided not to wear a seat belt. Those marines didn't stand a chance, but that's okay.

You are in the ring. Oh, good, now. It's wrong, the nightmare has just begun because the worst feature of these rotating rings for the modern super soldier is their effect on gunfights, so you will experience a lot of authorized ballistic testing in the halo ring. I found that the muzzle velocity of the assault rifle is exactly 1000 meters per second. That's awesome, that will make my calculations so much easier. And it will be necessary because I have some complicated trigonometry to do things in free fall from the surface of the halo ring. the worst effects of this tangential acceleration, centrifugal force, the instant you fire a gun, for example, and the bullet leaves the barrel, it is no longer tied to the surface of the ring, its inertial frame of reference, a term for Well , the frame of your reference frame that you use to measure Physics, your inertial frame of reference leaves a ring surface where your inertial frame is and enters the broader Galaxy you see, remember that gravity is caused because your feet are in the ground in your direction and changes by the rotation of the The ring your body wants to move in a tangential direction but stopped next to the ring, but as soon as you are not touching it.

You immediately start traveling in a straight line at 8711 meters per second, if you are just jumping you will hit the ground very soon, especially at less than 1.5 G. But if you move faster, let's say if you were a bullet, you will see. The easiest way to see this effect is to shoot a bullet directly into the air. It travels upward at 1000 meters per second, but as a result it also moves at 8711 meters per second to the left in the direction of the rings' rotation. For every second the bullet travels 1,000 meters upward and 8,711 meters to the left, ignoring the effects of atmospheric resistance.

Oh God, the atmosphere, you know, oh, just wait. We didn't get to that. It's not the moment yet. What happens if you look at the bullet from the outside? The ring while traveling in a fairly normal ballistic arc isn't exactly mind-blowing. But let's look at your perspective on the ring: a gun fired straight up into the air will prevent Windfall from going backwards. below, if you are on planet Earth, well, for the most part, the Coriolis effect exists on Earth, but it is not as bad as on rotating rings, while on Earth, the rotation of a planet can affect the trajectory of a ballistic object within a few centimeters or feet in a halo ring, these bullets end up landing 22 kilometers away in the direction of the rings' rotation.

This happens for a few different reasons, for one, as the bullet moves further from the ring and closer to the center, it travels more per second relative to the ground in the direction of the rings' rotation, sort of like how A figure skater can spin faster by pulling on his arms, but there is also the general problem of the ring moving so fast, meaning that any bullet fired in any direction is going to affect you, but as you start shooting in directions other than direct ones, things get even stranger. I actually had the easy model on my computer because the math was too complicated to visualize with just numbers if you shoot your gun. at an angle of 45 degrees In the opposite direction to the rotation of the rings strange things happen, noI have time to get into the complicated mathematics of ballistics.

But like here's the math if you're curious, as a certain amount of the 8711 per second velocity cancels out combined with the ring curving away from the tangential path of the bullet. A bullet fired in this direction actually experiences less gravity than a bullet fired in the other direction. A bullet fired at 45 degrees in the same direction. As a result rotation Experiences more gravity and falls faster as the tangential speed is added to the bullets Horizontal speed and the ring curves towards it However, since the speed of the ring is so absurdly fast more than eight times faster that a bullet even though the bullet is fired the opposite direction of rotation experiences less gravity travels higher and stays in the air longer actually travels less distance since the ring robs it of much of its horizontal velocity, so On the contrary, the bullet fired from the ring hits the ground faster.

But it travels 21 kilometers farther and a bullet fired perpendicular to the rotation of the rings would curve to the left and right respectively. This is not just a problem for snipers. This issue creates a 30% difference in accuracy depending on direction. When shooting, you would basically have to be directly in front of someone to have any hope of hitting. Whatever you aim at and if you shoot in the wrong direction and at the wrong angle, you run the risk of taking a bullet intended for someone else who turns around. and just hit you in the face And then there's the weather Well, it's possible to contain in an atmosphere without a roof these angular velocity problems would create the strangest weather ever seen.

Storms would be quite frequent since the Coriolis effect would be much more exaggerated in this ring than on Earth. But since the rotation is actually perpendicular to the Earth, the storms are perpendicular to the Earth, this means thunderstorms and tornadoes that spin horizontally. . Imagine being sucked into a tornado that doesn't even touch the ground, the only good thing about this is that bullets could become completely irrelevant because Masterchief, weighing a thousand pounds of dirt and over 1500 pounds in a halo ring, would have no to worry about weapons at all. He'll sneak up on the Covenant and jump on their heads like a brutal space version of Mario To hell with shooting your enemies with that jump height Master Chief is a living weapon of mass destruction Land on elites and grunts with the force of a car intelligent European thrown from a building This is not a place you want to live you feel fatter You couldn't pour water without spilling it and just for the sheer horror factor.

You're also sitting on a weapon of mass destruction capable of releasing 599 joules of gamma radiation from Quintus iliyan, more than 100 times the energy released by the most powerful explosion ever recorded in our universe, which was a supernova caused by the merger of two dwarfs. white and as a result I concentrated too much in one place and had to explode to spread it again, so yeah, to hell with these things. I wanted to live on one when I was a teenager, but I've totally changed my mind. Fights with firearms are impossible. And you run the risk of being eaten.

I live for space herpes, just by opening the wrong door, screw. This I'm going back to my cartoon shooter that has adorable girls with death rays, quantum mechanical teleportation, and sound guns capable of destroying cities honestly Austin PS. Hey, did you know I came up with the name for those of you who like my show? Scientists, are you a scientist? Then join my Discord channel, just follow this link and you can chat with other people who like to show or like. Try to tell me I was wrong today. Although no, did I do the math? Thank you.

Everyone is watching my video on Halo. I hope he does well. I was really excited that Evan wanted to do this for a while. He's been in my back pocket because Lost I still love the Halo franchise even after all these years. Even no one makes better games than others, okay? oh yeah you should subscribe to game theorist if you haven't already and check out my other videos check out the map header videos watch them grab koopa videos Oh I can't remember what my next topic is going to be for next week so No I will do that.

I'll tell you what it is. Yeah?