How is it that bugs take no fall damage?
In: Physics
The terminal velocity of an object, aka the fastest a thing can fall before air resistance stops it from speeding up any more, gets bigger with weight, and smaller with cross-sectional area (you can think of cross-sectional area as just, how much of the object you can see from one direction).
This means heavy things fall faster, and wide things (like paper when its wide side is facing down, or a frisbee) fall slower.
Now, weight increases according to how big a thing is, and so does area **but** they increase a different speeds.
Imagine you have a single cube. Now imagine growing that cube so each edge is twice as long as the original.
To fill this new, bigger cube, it takes *8 of the original cube* (2 cubes along each edge). This makes the cube *8 times as heavy*.
On the other hand, each side of the cube only takes 4 of the original cube’s sides to make. This means the cube’s *cross-sectional area 4 times as big* as the original.
From those examples, you see that increasing something’s size increases its weight faster than its cross-sectional area.
This holds in reverse too. Shrinking something shrinks its weight faster than its area.
Now, remember that bigger area means slower fall, and bigger weight means faster fall.
If you take a human, who falls fast enough to hurt a lot, and shrink them down to the size of a bug, their weight will shrink a lot more than their area, so in turn, they’re going to fall a lot slower than a normal human.
This is most of the reason that bugs “don’t take fall damage”, as you said.
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