Catie Helm writes:
>OPEN MOUTH, REMOVE FOOT
>
>Mark Cook's injunction to research PRIOR to stuffing one's foot (back)
>into one's mouth is one well worth heeding (yea, verily, by me too).
>Ever since the discussion on grav belts and free fall and velocity
>limitations thereto apertaining, I've been digging out my refs on
>exposure and other wind-related injuries, with the aim of posting up a
>synopsis of what injuries/trauma are induced at which velocities...but
>I'm not done yet (AND I'm in the middle of moving, which makes things
>a little harder than usual because my EMT texts are in a box
>_SOMEWHERE_). What I'd like to find (and expect to be able to find at
>the UCal library) is a ref which details the trauma induced by sudden
>acceleration/deceleration (something which NASA did a lot of research
>on, I believe). Then I'll really be in business as to having my facts
>all lined up and well-behaved.
What you probably want is the research done for the Air Force by a Col.
Stapp back in the mid-50s. He's the guy in the famous film sequnce of a
man on a rocket sled.
One bit of trivia I recall from someone's review of the book (in an old
magazine! I'm not *that* old!) was the experiments with extremes of
temperature. They had volunteers who endured an air temperature of 450
degrees F for something like an hour. The only damage were burns where
a couple of them had been wearing sweatbands (as I understand, they
were otherwise naked). I'm fairly sure this was at *zero* humidity!
Picture the fun you can have with trivia like this. Either presenting
the players with a *possibly* survivable situation that they are sure
will kill them, or alternatively, having them trying to deal with a
world labeled "habitable" because some computer somewhere got the data
on "endurable extremes" confused with the data on *livable*.
"But the computer *insists* that humans can survive at those
temperatures..." :-)