Calculating MCU Hulk's Strength Feats

Alright, I'm probably going to get roasted and lose all my credibility on ComicVine after this. I ACCEPT IT. *sweats nervously*

So, the first one I'm going to do is the Chitauri Leviathan feat (this one has neglected figures. Updated calculation below!). I don't know where Gubz got his numbers because he doesn't do the calculations in his videos, so this should be a much more transparent account.

So, from the looks of it, this Leviathan isn't the same height as the buildings around it. Since I already know that someone is going to yell at me, I'm just going to overshoot the Leviathan's length at 888 feet, or half the height of the World Trade Center. That puts this thing at 10.8 blue whales. One blue whale weighs 150 tons, so 150 x 10.8 = a body weight 1,620 tons. I can't really know the density or mass of the armor (to be honest though, it does not look that strong), but from a kinesthetic standpoint, a suit of armor for a 180 pound man that would retain optimal mobility is 50 lbs (this is the historical average for full plate armor), so 27% of his body weight. I'm going to assume that the Chitauri would want this configuration for their bio warship, so 1,620 x .27 = 440 tons. 1,620 + 440 = 2,060 tons of total weight. When Hulk hit this creature, it was going at a velocity of 35 km/h. Now comes the fun part.

To calculate the kinetic energy from its velocity and mass, we'll have to use E = 1/2 (mv^2) formula. I will be using m/s and kg.

E = 1/2 (1,868,800kg x (9.7m/s)^2)

E = 1/2 (1,868,800kg x 94.09m^2/s^2)

E = 1/2 (175,835,392 kg/m^2/s^2) <--- Joules

E = 87,917,696J

This translates to about 64,844,765 ft-lbs, or 32,422 tons of kinetic energy. Now we're going to look at how much force it takes to stop this much kinetic energy. The stopping distance it took Hulk to make the leviathan tumble over itself was about 5 meters. Our equation is w = fd.

87,917,696J = f x 5m

17,583,539J = f

12,968,953 ft-lbs, or 6,484 tons. Note that this is NOT a striking feat. The time that Hulk's muscles spent in tension far exceeds the time that his fist impacted the leviathan. If I had to ballpark it, I would say that the punch by itself was between 1,000 - 2,000 tons.

Now I'm going to do the Surtur CAW-CAW attack.

When watching the scene, you'll notice that Surter emerges from the Asgardian castle. So, the castle's diameter is a pretty good way to scale Surter. This is important to know how far Hulk actually knocks Surtur over. When Surtur bends over, he takes up the space of about one more Odin castle. The question is how wide this castle actually is. Asgard is actually much smaller in Ragnarok than it is in the previous Thor movies. I wanted to use The Dark World's camera fly through, but when looking at a picture of Asgard in Ragnarok, I realized that I couldn't use TDW because Asgard got way smaller.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--OLS-Yein--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/leqnx574svaycydi6jdx.jpg

So, I decided to just say that the castle (that matches his body, not the stupid outsides) is about 1000 meters, or 0.6 miles long. Now Surtur's mass... Does fire have mass? Or is he made of rock taken from Asgard? Whatever, let's pretend that Surtur's body weighs the same as muscle. If Surtur weren't so huge, he looks like he'd be a 220 pound, 6'3 male. Scaling 6'3 up to Surtur's height (800 meters), we have to multiply our male up by cubic growth (thanks to APEX_pretador for doing this), 8 million tonnes. So now we have the weight and the distance that he moved (0.6 miles). It took Surtur about half a second to get knocked over. So, his velocity would be 966 meters divided by 0.5 seconds, giving us 1,932 m/s. To find the amount of force it would take to move this, we can use F = (0.5 × m × v^2) ÷ d.

F = (0.5 x 8,000,000,000kg x (1,932m/s)^2) ÷ 966m

F = (0.5 x 8,000,000,000kg x 3,732,624m^2/s^2) ÷ 966m

(Skipping this step because the numbers are in the quintillions)

F = 1.5456 x 10^13 Newtons

3,474,647,014,401 ft-lbs, or 1.737 billion tons. That's definitely a step up from the leviathan feat if we're strictly talking about striking power (but keep in mind that this is what Hulk can do with his total body weight, not his fist). I also used Surtur's TOTAL weight, not the parts that actually moved (pretty sure Hulk didn't knock Surtur's legs a half mile away). To move just the thorax and upper arms (34.26% of the total weight), Hulk would only need to hit with 5.295 x 10^12 Newtons, or 595 million tons.

I'm going to grab my popcorn

This gon be good

The first calc alone has way too much speculation to even be considered credible.

@thevivas: The only thing I speculated was the leviathan height and the weight of the armor. The leviathan isn't as tall as the buildings around it, so the height is actually too much (but it helps Hulk look more impressive). We haven't armored up any animals (including ourselves) that can take more than 30% body weight and still be full speed in a battle. Some marines have gone over 50% but it destroyed their bodies, and idk if the Chitauri would really want that. 50 lbs is the historical average when it comes to full plate armor (except for jousting variants but none of the weight is on your knees on horseback), so it's what I used.

MCU Hulk is too inconsistent to calculate.

@legacy6364: not really. He’s never failed to lift or stop something if he’s tried to lift it. He’s pretty much shown to be unstoppable in his universe. Only being taken down by specialized armor or a god, I don’t see why he can be a 2 thousand toner other then people don’t want him to be

@flashfyr: The height by itself is way too much of a random number thrown out there.

And why are you limiting the calc based on real world examples of humans when these are Chitauri who have weapons similar to be Tesseract and can travel through space? They are clearly more technologically advanced than us, so placing their armor under our limits doesn’t make sense.

@flashfyr:Nice of you to make the effort, but there are a few things I would have to disagree with you.

length

888 feet (270 meters) is almost the length of 3 football fields. Not to mention you just admit to overshooting it. This alone makes the entire calculation false. A blue whale is a around 98 feet ( 30 meters). Also length alone does not affect weight, you need the height, width, to get the total approximate volume, then you'll need density which is unknown.

At best that beast could be the length of 2 to a max of 3 whales if you considered these photos

Gallery

Armor

You're comparing modern day metals to historical metals. We use stronger and lighter metal compared to old times and that's just humans. Chitauri are are pretty much assumed to be advanced with alien metal. So far alien metals like Vibranium are durable but lighter.

Also if you compare human technology to Chitauri then it could be even lighter since we tend to use lighter metals for flying machines to reduce weight.

Striking

Finally, Hulk smashed the head on the asphalt and used the added advantage of friction aiding him which further reduces the amount of force he had to apply.

You can see right after he punches it, it hits the floor and starts digging while pushing Hulk back until its overwhelmed and topples over.

@macleen: Thank you for your criticisms. I am going to do my best to make these calculations perfect, so please keep pointing out caveats until they are reasonably accurate.

So, addressing the size of an average whale, "Possibly the largest recorded male was killed near the South Shetland Islands in 1926 and was measured at 31.7 m (104 ft)." The largest accurately measured female was only 29.5 meters, and anything over that has caveats in the measurements, and it is stated that they may be exaggerated. So, I used 82 ft as that is a calculated average. For the leviathan's weight, I personally don't think that an animal who spends a majority of its time in zero gravity would be very dense or heavy (less resistance means less muscle development), but let's assume that it actually is because they're kept in a similar gravity environment to Earth's (since that seems to be the standard in the MCU for every planet).

I was actually thinking that the metal used for its plating isn't very heavy either because of how easily Hulk just deformed it and ripped up pieces (and the spike he pulled out wasn't very thick, which was taken from the TOP part of the plating). Just for argument's sake, I'll steal Gubz's number and set the leviathan's weight at 12,000 tons (I still don't know where he got this number and I'm ignoring my analysis for now) for this next calculation.

Ultimately, the friction coefficient won't really matter because it's already accounted for in the stopping distance. I'll be able to calculate a theoretical amount of force where the concrete is helping Hulk. The normal force will give you a guess as to how much force the ground was pushing up against the leviathan. I'll calculate the friction anyway, but first, here's the normal force. F = mg, and the leviathan's head would be about 7% of its total weight (840 tons). So, the normal force, or the max static friction, is 762,035kg x 9.8 m/s^2 = 7,467,944 Newtons. Considering the fact that the leviathan's head was actually inside the concrete and not just sliding over the surface, then we'll have to use the actual compressive strength of concrete since the rock is exerting direct force on the leviathan's head to assist in stopping it. We'll use a medium of the best concrete to the worst concrete for residential applications, giving us a strength of 23 MPa. So, the resistance that the concrete is giving off is 23,000,000 newton meters, or 5,170,605 ft-lbs (2,585 tons). Just for fun, the friction coefficient is 0.32. This doesn't matter since we have the frictional force, but whatever.

Redoing the calculation of Hulk's applied force with 12,000 tons:

E = 1/2 (mv^2)

E = 1/2 (10,886,217kg x (9.7m/s)^2)

E = 1/2 (10,886,217kg x 94.09m^2/s^2)

E = 1/2 (1.024 x 10^9 kg/m^2/s^2)

E = 5.122 x 10^8J

So, that's about 377,736,612 ft-lbs, or 189,000 tons of total kinetic energy.

W = FD

512,142,078N/m = F x 5m

102,428,415N = F

23,026,823 ft-lbs, or 11,000 tons of force. Thanks to the concrete, we can take off 2,585 tons to put Hulk's muscle strength at 9,415 tons. Considering how easily Hulk can just deform the armor at exponentially less strength, I'm not even going to pay attention to how much kinetic energy the plating soaked when dealing with figures this high. Again, this is not a striking feat. However, I think that the leviathan is lighter than 12,000 tons, so this is a high ball calculation. I'll do my next calculation with a weight that I think is a little more realistic for a creature that spends most of its time in zero gravity (lower density) with lightweight metal.

@flashfyr: If it helps, surtur was confirmed to be 800 m tall when he just appeared

Alright, I'm probably going to get roasted and lose all my credibility on ComicVine after this. I ACCEPT IT. *sweats nervously*

What credibility? You just have 57 posts

@flashfyr: anything that is above 300 meters is bullshit

Surtur was only as big as odin's tower.

Don't listen to that foolish statements about 1000+ m

Thor's multi hundred to thousand tons hammer throws barely moved little surtur, so yeah

During the sequence Mega Surtur grew. He ranged from roughly 800m when he first appeared to about 4,000m when he finally destroyed Asgard.

Source

Madballer started early, he probably meant to avoid that

Nice

Applying real-world calculations and physics to movies is generally fruitless.

lool the moment ou said it was 300m long you lost me. the leviathan is probs 60m long

@apex_pretador: Alright, Surtur's been redone with 800m for height. I actually forgot to convert feet to meters last time, but this calculation should be spot on. Also, I was talking about the credibility I don't have yet :c

Okay, everyone. First off, I am not trying to calculate Hulk's maximum strength or put a pin on how strong he is, or trying to limit him to these feats. All I'm doing is calculating how much strength he used at these times. In battles, feats are brought up with qualitative arguments like "Feat X was better than Feat Y," and not enough mathematics to substantiate those claims. At the very least, multiple calculations with multiple weights should supply the numbers that are applicable to whichever interpretation you want to use when you reference it (does the leviathan weigh 12,000 tons or 2,600 tons, etc). I really do not see why anyone needs to say that this is all pointless or to just call me wrong and not help make it better in any way. All this is is fun; no one is obligating you to actually use any of this. At the very least, I'll just use it to intrigue a few off-site friends. I didn't need to do it and I'm not looking for pat on the backs. The very least I'm asking for is to not be pointlessly dissuaded.

pfft, good luck with that. There's always gonna be the people that dismiss every good point you bring up with either some inconsistency argument, or a bs statement

@flashfyr: weight increases cubically with height not linearly

You need to correct the surtur calc

.

It would more or less come to around 8 million tonnes - as absurd as it sounds

Nice work. I appreciate the effort put in to this.

Obviously these calculations are not going to be perfect and need to be taken with a grain of salt but it does serve to give a rough ballpark figure

@apex_pretador: I don’t have credibility and you look at my post lol jk I just like to make battles and interesting discussions

@apex_pretador: Edited c:

I don't get it, are you OP?

@apex_pretador: Lol no trying to make a joke but it failed miserably

@webinyoureye11: I don't give a f&amp;#ck

Things that happening on screen»»»»stupid statements.Also there is some calcs about the size of sutrtur and The Asgard itself

Stupid statements from the effects team that created surtur?

I don't see how it's debatable. The castle he was almost-as tall as, was the height of a mountain.

@webinyoureye11: yes.

if the team that created Cap say that hi is brunette,you will think that he is actually brunette?

Again,what we see on screen»»statements

We have seen that Surtur was just as tall as that damn Odin's tower.

@drpepperman: Since when was Thor’s hammer multi hundred to thousands of tons? Captain America was able to slightly move it. If it weighed that much, it would destroy the tables it was on and break through the floor.

@kanyecosby: by this logic, 616 Thor isn't even a car buster. Thor threw his hammer so hard he sent malekith across dozens of meters, through pillars, into a car, wrecking it. Surtur tanked those. He also tanked a regular hit or two, which Thor has proven to be capable of beyond multi hundred tons.

Here you go

@drpepperman: That's more from the power, durability, and speed of the hammer than its weight. Even in the comics Mjolnir doesn’t weigh a lot. It only weighs about 42 pounds. If Mjolnir weighed hundreds of tons that would be contradictory to almost everytime we have seen it on screen. There are far more showings of it doing nothing to the area around it than there are it actually hitting with thousands of tons of force.

@kanyecosby: I never claimed Mjolnior weighed that much in the first place, just that it hits that hard.

@drpepperman: When you said, “Thor's multi hundred to thousand tons hammer throws” it made it sound like you thought his hammer weighed that much. When I asked since when does it weigh that much, you didn’t really clarify it then either.

As for the Surtur feat, can you prove that Surtur was being hit with hundreds to thousands of tons of force? Thor also throw his hammer at Iron Man and random fodder soldiers. Were they getting hit with hundreds to thousands of tons of force?

@kanyecosby: I really should have clarified that, so that's on me.

Thor holds had against fodder and was weakened against Tony, Surtur fought Odin, thor was going for the kill, and surtur wasn't human so there was literally no reason for thor to hold back.

@webinyoureye11: @drpepperman: @kanyecosby:

I'm not sure what you guys are arguing, but yes, on screen is more important than just pure physics imo. Technically speaking, there's really no way Hulk would be able to hit the 800m Surtur with just his body weight and acceleration. Kinda just have to accept that these characters can produce sudden impulse power out of thin air. Although, giant Surtur technically could have moved himself to some extent (ever had something fly towards your eyes before?). Still, it's more force than possible with Hulk's attributes even with that. So, yeah I would say that Thor's striking power is more from his muscles than the hammer's weight.

@flashfyr: Visual effects team said surtur was 800 meters at his smallest and 4000 at his biggest. Also if you slow down the asgard busting scene you can see that mountains were launced by a shockwave and surtur did not even budge. he should at least be as dense as mountains likely much more

@apex_pretador: Post number =/= credibility.

@drpepperman: Thor was weakened against Tony, but he was still holding his own against the Hulk, even while he was holding back. This means that he wasn’t significantly weakened. By your logic, Iron Man would still be getting hit with hundreds of tons of force.

Thor didn’t look like he was taking the fight seriously enough to throw his hammer with hundreds of tons of force against Surtur. He was cracking jokes for most of the fight.

There was one in avengers where hulk hit thor through concrete into some boxes on the hellicarier.

@nwgzsjuwhm96y2: yeah

As we have seen on screen,hulk was 10 times smaller than surtur's head(in length) so there is no way that surtur was more than couple of hundred meter at that moment when Hulk punched him into his face

Stop speculating statements when they are wrong

Surtur was 100 000-300 000 tonnes at best.Impressive feat for hulk but nothing like this funny little fandoys say

@hulkuberstomp: Hulks size is likely a mistake, visual effects staff said Surtur ranged between 800m to 4000m tgere is no speculation at all its an official statement.

He was also bigger that the central tower which is 700-800m. He has no reason to shrink.

In movies kaijus change size to better fit in but he is meant to be 800+

@nwgzsjuwhm96y2: as I said,there are some accurate calcs of height of Odin's Citadel and it was only 300+ meters

You also can see two mountains near this building which are as big or even bigger than this building,but mountains behind are much bigger than Citadel

@nwgzsjuwhm96y2: In movies kaijus change size to better fit in but he is meant to be 800+

again

What we see on screen>>>>official statements

If we believe official information about Pacific Rim Jaeger's and Kaiju's mass,the should float on water like a peace of wood,cuz this size metal armored robot should weight MUCH more than 2000 tons,and slattern is even as big as a mountain but in official handbook it is only 7000 tons

@hulkuberstomp: Their inside could be mostly epty to sink in water. That 300m calc is not accurate at all. It was done by using a low resolution pic and assumed that the bridge was same width everywhere. I scaled it myself and found 800+m. Official info >>> fan calcs