In the final shot of the Force Awakens trailer, the Millennium Falcon pulls out of a precipitous dive to engage two TIE Fighters above a vast desert landscape. It’s a pretty intense aerial maneuver. The question is: How intense is it, exactly? And could Han Solo (or anyone, for that matter) actually pull it off?
At Wired, Rhett Allain has been analyzing the physics of The Force Awakens. In his latest post, with the help of some handy, rotation-correcting video analysis, he estimates the pitch of the Millennium Falcon during its dive to be about 54°. Factor in the time it takes the MF to level off, the spacecraft’s approximate speed (he assumes 200 m/s), and the average acceleration of the ship as it pulls up from its dive, and Allain says you get a value of about 12.6 Gs
This is only an estimate (depending on the actual speed of the MF, Allain says the ship’s passengers could be experiencing anywhere in the range of about 7 to 18 Gs – see the above graph), and Star Wars obviously takes place in a fictional universe, but here in the real world, this is a biologically interesting window of g-forces.
via Gizmodo
