I was just making a claim that one man cannot stop a heavy horse easily, and a heavy horse hitting a group of men would be much like a car plowing through a crowd of people. So if you're using the numbers in this thread, it would be more like a Smart Car(730kg) plowing into a group of people at about 20 miles per hour.
I used round numbers because that's what I thought a heavy cataphract would weigh close to a ton.
So, lets do some math just for fun.
Horse: 400 - 500 kg
Person: ~55 - 70 kg(Normal and Overwight for a ~5 foot 3 man from a modern BMI graph)
Armor and Equipment: ? - I honestly have no clue. I'm thinking about a heavier type of horse. Would be nice to get a number.
So the total would be around 512.5 kg for just a guy on a horse.
The horse would be galloping anywhere from 40-48 kph(25 -30 mph) on impact. The average of that is 44 kph. This gives a total momentum of 22550 kg km/h. Now assuming an inelastic impact because people kinda squish:
m1 * v1 + m2 * v2 = (m1+m2)*vf
And using the mass for a human of 62.5 kg, that gives us a final velocity of about 40 kph. So the first person only slows it down by 4 kph. Assuming that he couldn't do a barrel-roll, he took the lance in the chest. The lance then broke. The primary weapon is gone now but its going to continue trampling guys assuming they stand their ground. I guess this is assuming no bracing.
Here are more numbers for a horse hitting people:
Code:
Initial: 44 kph
Person 1: 40 kph
Person 2: 35 kph
Person 3: 31 kph
Person 4: 27 kph
Person 5: 24 kph
etc
So lets look at guy #2. He gets accelerated to 35 KPH in a split second. Assuming that it is accelerated to that speed in about x seconds, that's:
35kph / (3600 m/h * s/m) * 1000 * m/km = 9.72 m/s
9.72 m/s / 1/100 s = 9.72x m/s^2
9.72x m/s^2 * 62.5 kg = 607.5x N
Depending on how long the impact takes, he could either live or die. If anyone has a good idea of how long it takes to transfer all that momentum, please tell me.
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