nicorp97:

daemonbomb: So while re-reading homestuck I noticed something about doomed john.

His corpse was apparently burned. But his denizen uses wind powers. So I was thinking, when does air burn you? And it hit me. Steam. Doomed John was boiled to death.



And remember, his denizen gave him the choice between being allowed to leave fine and living out his days in a doomed timeline, or sacrificing himself so that dave becomes davesprite which allows the alpha universe to exist. John Egbert cares enough about his friends that he gave his consent to being BOILED ALIVE to let them win the game. This is a great theory, but I like overthinking relatively unimportant stuff, and, technically, steam is water, not air… But I don’t want to completely rule this out, how would air ”burn” something? I hadn’t given much thought to Doomed John until now, but this headcanon gained him a lot of respect on my side. Air would “burn” because of air compression, which is the reason why spacecraft need “heat shields” for atmospheric re-entry (You’d think it’s friction, but, actually, at these speeds, ~90% of the heat comes from compression!)

You’ve most probably heard of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster: Launch debris damaged one RCC panel, which, during re-entry, let HOT (~2500ºF/1370ºC) gasses into the left wing, slowly destroying the whole spacecraft in the process… You probably know where this is going by now. Assuming these burns are indicative of his death cause, Doomed John probably experienced the equivalent of re-entering the atmosphere from low-earth orbit, and he would’ve been hit by winds traveling as fast as Mach 25 without any protection (To put in some perspective, during his record-breaking jump, Felix Baumgartner reached a maximum vertical speed of Mach 1.1) So, John suffered through something so terrible no human ever has and hopefully never will experience to let his alpha self and his friends win the game



(Sorry if this isn’t 100% right, I’m also sure there are many better examples of extreme air compression heat, I’m just a dork who decided writing this was a better idea than studying for tomorrow’s physics final. But, assuming he died by something similar to burning, this is the best analogy I could come up with)

These… no.

daemonbomb: Being boiled alive would do much more than effect his suit. It also wouldn’t scorch his suit.

nicorp97: You got most of the details correct. Compressive heating is the source of a majority of heat up on landing.

One can easily experience the opposite of compressive heating - Spray a significant amount of material out of any spray can (canned air is one of the more obvious), and the can gets cold. The pressure of the can lowers, but with no reduction in volumne, the temperature lowers too.

It’s some component of the Combined Gas Law, I can never remember which.

Rentry happens at such speeds is that the air along the trajectory of the object acts as the container, due to its viscosity. Smaller volume, pressure raises, extreme heat.

Incidentally, this can happen because there’s no terminal velocity in space (due to the atmosphere). Good thing too, otherwise we’d never get into orbit.

… but none of that matters in this case. Because John gives a pretty good indication what his strategy would have been going to take on his denzien.

Actually this gives us more to think about

LOWAS has a very thin “atmosphere”. At orbital speeds, you might hit ground before you get to boiling point due to compression heat.

You can breathe in “space”. You leave smoke trails held in place by the air in space. This means there is very likely to be a terminal velocity. Speeds that would invoke compression heat would need continuous power behind them.

John really isn’t that intuitive of a flyer

But let’s say it was the Mach 25 wind scenaro, rather than a deception that his new toy was better than actual strategy.

He would have asphyxiated. The air would have been drawn out of his lungs by the low pressure currents before any compression heat would have accumulated. If not that, he very well could have passed out from the g-forces applied by the rocket pack. He starts to get scorched by his own flames, passes out, and doesn’t remember the rest of his demise.

Either way, I’m pretty sure that John died by his own hand.

(via ectoblologist)