The distance they jump/the speed at which they fall seems like it would be impossible to land without falling flat on your face. There is obviously some cool physics going on, but please.
In: Mathematics
I mean it’s the same concept as an airplane landing. It doesn’t fly straight at the fuckin ground lol, it lands at an angle. Same thing applies to ski jumpers; the angle at which they land allows them to gradually change their speed and direction without injury.
It’s not Fall damage because they ski in winter. It’s Winter Damage. Remember “the agony of defeat” from the intro to ABC wild world of sports.
They land on a hill with a very steep slope, like going down one of those chute style water slides…
It’s not fall damage. Think of it as “stopping damage”
If you fall off a building and hit the ground, you go from travelling “very fast” to “not moving” in an instant, that is the part that causes damage.
As you can see from ski jumpers, they are jumping from “very fast” to “pretty fast”.
They do not come to a sudden stop, which would usually cause a damaging impact, they slow down gradually because of the angle of the jump/ramp.
Because fall damage only happens in games that have proper physics enabled. skiing isn’t a real game
Impact damage comes from stopping fast. If you go from 60 to 0 in 10 seconds it’s just a gentle push. If you go from 60 to 0 in 0.0001 seconds it’s big hurt.
The ski slope is like a big slide that makes it so they can keep falling down while slowing down in contact to the ground. They are also trained athletes that land in a way made to maximize the amount of time it takes them to slow down.
For starters they are never too far off the ground. Secondly they land on a slope which significantly reduces the force you experience since most of your momentum is carried down the slope and you can gradually slow down as you come to the bottom. Lastly while in the air they actually have some control over the speed and attitude, using their body positioning and their skis for control. They can also somewhat slow themselves down. If a skier overshot the slope the results would be disastrous. The same principle applies on all jumping disciplines. If you’ve ever seen a motorcycle jumper overshoot the landing ramp you know how rough the landing can be, but if they hit the ramp they roll away like nothing happened. It’s the same for car jumps, motocross, skateboarding, snowboarding and a host of other sports with ramp jumps. Perhaps the closest equivalent is the mega ramp used in skateboarding/bmx competitions, most notably the x games. Landing on the right part of the slope of the second ramp is crucial for a soft landing. Coming up short or overshooting it is very bad.
Landing on a slope means that most of your downward momentum is conserved.
If they landed on a flat surface, they would die instantly.
They don’t land on a flat surface. They land on a surface that is almost as angled as their angle of flight. The skiers speed directed at the landing surface is fairly small, like if you jumped a single flight fo stairs.
As someone who actually DID get damaged from a ski jump I can say that the key is to land on a steep downslope. Then you’re not even really landing at all. Just sort of continuing the “fall” but along the side of the mountain, slowed down a bit by the friction.
What happened to me is I hit a “table top” jump like: /—– Where you’re supposed to come down on the opposite side, but I hit it going too fast and totally cleared the whole thing, landing on the flat area beyond the jump. I strained my back and sat on my own hand, breaking it.
Imagine you have a jetpack. You are flying vertical to the icy ground. You are wearing something to reduce friction even more. At that moment, it seems to you, like the ground isn’t moving closer to you. You are not falling. You could slowly fly lower and touch the ice. Glide on it. Or, the ground could slowly come up to you and touch you.
We have no problem with touching or landing on something that’s moving slowly towards us. And from that perspective with the jetpack, it would look and feel like you are slowly moving towards the ground.
So how do you achieve the same thing while ski jumping? You calculate the trajectory of a jump. And then you build the ground to go down at the same speed and height as the jumper. So imagine you jump, and if there was a cliff you would jump 100 meters. But now imagine someone builds a slope while you are jumping right under you, but not touching you. You will also fly 100 meters without touching the ground, but at every moment you are only centimeters away from the ground. It will look from your perspective like you are flying over the ground in a straight line. At any point you could put your feet down like you put your feet down from a stool.
And then you are just on a slope slowly stopping your fall, by getting slowly more and more horizontal.
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