Reaction Time

There's a new commercial out that indicates that we humans can move at 268 miles per hour- and thereby dodge fastballs. Soooo......

My math skills seem to indicate that as in the vicinity of 300 plus ft per second. Slow handgun rounds move at about 850.

Given Merlin's 10 times normal strength and speed--- Does that mean that if he could see the bullet coming at Cayleb ---he could stop it? How about a small cannon ball?

tootall wrote:There's a new commercial out that indicates that we humans can move at 268 miles per hour- and thereby dodge fastballs. Soooo......

My math skills seem to indicate that as in the vicinity of 300 plus ft per second. Slow handgun rounds move at about 850.

Given Merlin's 10 times normal strength and speed--- Does that mean that if he could see the bullet coming at Cayleb ---he could stop it? How about a small cannon ball?

Two parts to this. Reaction time, and travel time. How soon does Merlin see the bullet, and how close is he to Cayleb at the time. and by the way 268 mph is about 393 fps. Does Merlin only start to react when the shot is fired (and is it due to the sound of the shot, which would be about 1100 fps at sea level, so there is a significant lag due to the speed of sound)? Or does he start at the time he sees the assassin pull the trigger? or when he sees the assassin pull a gun? Without defining the precise situation, the question is unanswerable.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

tootall wrote:There's a new commercial out that indicates that we humans can move at 268 miles per hour- and thereby dodge fastballs. Soooo......

My math skills seem to indicate that as in the vicinity of 300 plus ft per second. Slow handgun rounds move at about 850.

Given Merlin's 10 times normal strength and speed--- Does that mean that if he could see the bullet coming at Cayleb ---he could stop it? How about a small cannon ball?

Two parts to this. Reaction time, and travel time. How soon does Merlin see the bullet, and how close is he to Cayleb at the time. and by the way 268 mph is about 393 fps. Does Merlin only start to react when the shot is fired (and is it due to the sound of the shot, which would be about 1100 fps at sea level, so there is a significant lag due to the speed of sound)? Or does he start at the time he sees the assassin pull the trigger? or when he sees the assassin pull a gun? Without defining the precise situation, the question is unanswerable.

Better to rely on Cayleb's anti-ballistic undies and hope he doesn't get it in the head!

Don

tootall wrote:There's a new commercial out that indicates that we humans can move at 268 miles per hour- and thereby dodge fastballs. Soooo......

My math skills seem to indicate that as in the vicinity of 300 plus ft per second. Slow handgun rounds move at about 850.

Given Merlin's 10 times normal strength and speed--- Does that mean that if he could see the bullet coming at Cayleb ---he could stop it? How about a small cannon ball?

Good MLB level fastballs are only in the 90-100 mph range. And plenty of batters still get hit. You're talking about roughly tripling the speed of a fastball. I think reaction time is going to be a huge problem.

tootall wrote:There's a new commercial out that indicates that we humans can move at 268 miles per hour- and thereby dodge fastballs. Soooo......
SNIP

If we saw the same commercial... my understanding was that our nerves transmit messages at 268 MPH.

Also why we need to think about that kind of situation? It's better to think how to deal with assassins before they could try kill Cayleb.

Human muscles can move things at very high speeds, given a long enough lever (for instance, the end of a whip must move faster than the speed of sound to produce an audible crack). So sure, in theory, it would be possible to put the end of a long enough sword on the trajectory of a bullet to stop or deflect it.

The question probably isn't the right one though. With a modern gun (I'm not sure about the guns fired on Safehold at this point), the bullet moves faster than the speed of sound, so the only way to react in time is to see it coming, which means looking in the right direction, which normally means seeing the gunman firing, at which point you can react to the gunman pointing the gun in the first place, something Merlin definitely can do.

Interestingly, the Mythbusters once investigated this very question: can you dodge a bullet if you see the muzzle flash ? Of course this was with modern guns, but the answer was: only if the gun is far enough away that you couldn't possibly see the flash in the first place. Of course Merlin is faster, so he might do better...

Let's not forget that Merlin "froze" in shock when Paitryk Hainree attempted to assassinate Sharleyan in HFaF:

Merlin might no longer be human, but he felt his heart freeze as the shrill shout cut through the fading cheers. Even a creature of mollycircs, with a reaction speed far greater than any flesh-and-blood human, could be paralyzed—however briefly—by shock. For the tiniest sliver of an instant, he could only stand there, his head snapping around, eyes searching for the person who’d shouted.
He saw the bearded man standing in the front row, well dressed but obviously not an aristocrat. Then he saw the man’s right hand, and his own hand flashed towards the pistol at his side even as he leapt forward and his other hand reached for Sharleyan.
But that instant of shock had held him just too long.

So even if Merlin's electronic "nerves" can transfer signals 100 times faster than a human's chemically transmitted signals, (which is the textev from OAR) his reaction time is still impacted by how quickly he recognizes a sudden threat and overcomes his shock and surprise.

Granted, Merlin leaped to knock Sharley aside and shot Hainree a split second later, but not in time to prevent Sharley's antiballistic undies from taking a bullet in the ribs.

Since there's no textev of Merlin actually seeing a bullet in flight, but there is textev of his reaction time to an assassination attempt in which he was warned of the threat before the gun was fired, (although he had to pick the gunman out of the front row of the crowd before shooting him) it seems quite clear that Merlin couldn't snatch a bullet out of the air without prior warning at least.

We really can't calculate whether he could or couldn't, since there's no textev on whether he can see flying bullets, and we have no idea how 100x faster nerve impulses translate into the speed of moving his arms, legs, or torso. On the TV show "Mythbusters" they did a test of dodging a bullet and managed to mimic rotating out of the way at a distance of 400 yards, but that presumed seeing the muzzle flash (which humans could not) and anticipating the shot in the first place. So Merlin could dodge out of the way at a much shorter range, or interpose his body at a shorter range - assuming he knew the shot was coming and he was in position before the bullet was fired. Otherwise, forget it.

McGuiness wrote:We really can't calculate whether he could or couldn't, since there's no textev on whether he can see flying bullets, and we have no idea how 100x faster nerve impulses translate into the speed of moving his arms, legs, or torso. On the TV show "Mythbusters" they did a test of dodging a bullet and managed to mimic rotating out of the way at a distance of 400 yards, but that presumed seeing the muzzle flash (which humans could not) and anticipating the shot in the first place. So Merlin could dodge out of the way at a much shorter range, or interpose his body at a shorter range - assuming he knew the shot was coming and he was in position before the bullet was fired. Otherwise, forget it.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Merlin is PHYSICALLY fast enough to catch a bullet from a black powder weapon, but only if his mental reaction time is fast enough... which it isn't. I think he'd need to be in hyper-heuristic mode to see and move his hand fast enough and precisely enough to catch a bullet, and he can't do that because his hyper-heuristic mode is disabled by his software hacks.

evilauthor wrote:

McGuiness wrote:We really can't calculate whether he could or couldn't, since there's no textev on whether he can see flying bullets, and we have no idea how 100x faster nerve impulses translate into the speed of moving his arms, legs, or torso. On the TV show "Mythbusters" they did a test of dodging a bullet and managed to mimic rotating out of the way at a distance of 400 yards, but that presumed seeing the muzzle flash (which humans could not) and anticipating the shot in the first place. So Merlin could dodge out of the way at a much shorter range, or interpose his body at a shorter range - assuming he knew the shot was coming and he was in position before the bullet was fired. Otherwise, forget it.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Merlin is PHYSICALLY fast enough to catch a bullet from a black powder weapon, but only if his mental reaction time is fast enough... which it isn't. I think he'd need to be in hyper-heuristic mode to see and move his hand fast enough and precisely enough to catch a bullet, and he can't do that because his hyper-heuristic mode is disabled by his software hacks.

I thought Merlin was capable of moving and reacting 10x as fast as a normal human, not 100x.