Experts reveal truth behind Batman's gadgets

By: Kenny Ryan

Posted: 7/17/08

The Batman universe has seen its fair share of "super gadgets" over the years. The dark knight owns every toy you can add the prefix "bat-" to, and has inspired legions of fan boys to dream of owning their own batmobiles, batcaves or even the occasional bottle of "bat-shark repellent."

Professors at Texas A&M say that these bat-gadgets may not all be such surreal ideas, and that while not every aspect of the Batman universe is plausible, some of it is certainly possible.

"The tank thing they have, [the batmobile], I mean man, wow, that was a freaking cool beast," said Dave Toback, a physics professor for A&M. "From the videos I saw, it looked like it really had some functionality to it."

"It's definitely possible to make something like that because the batmobile in Batman Begins, they made actual vehicles for that," said Ryan Beasley, an engineering professor at A&M. "I looked up… the specs on them and they go 100 mph, zero to 60 in five seconds, and they can survive a 30 foot jump, things like that. Can they make them? Yea, but you wont get very good gas mileage or anything like that."

When examining the batmobile, the professors looked it over one function at a time.

"Can it really barrel through walls? I don't know," Toback said. "Clearly a real tank can barrel through walls so it's not crazy, but I don't know that things with rubber tires can generate enough torque to drive through a wall."

"The speed that you saw is probably much smaller than the speeds that you see for those walls to be real and be concrete. People can throw a baseball 100 mph, and I don't know about you but I don't see a lot of baseballs flying through walls."

Any Batman novice knows that when it comes to the batmobile, crashing through walls is just the beginning. In Batman Begins the caped crusader led a rooftop chase across the city, driving the car rooftop to rooftop as he easily soared over the alleyways and streets down below.

"The issue with jumping rooftop to rooftop is that… I think its possible, but I don't think it's convenient yet for sure," Beasley said. "The jumping of the car is difficult because it's so heavy, we are talking about a couple tons, getting that much force is not trivial. I think that's the biggest difficulty, making the car jump."

"[During] some of the flying from building to building you will notice the front end of his car is higher than the back end of the car," Toback said. "In order for the front end to go up you need something to force it up, like a ramp. Most buildings don't come with ramps, which is a problem. In that sense its pretty unrealistic unless there's some super booster under the car, but we certainly didn't see that."

While anyone can drive a car around town, not everybody has access to Batman's high flying gadgets such as his bat-grappling hook. Able to shoot it into the sky and wrap around or latch onto any surface, Batman uses his grappling hook to rapidly ascend to the highest elevations of the city.

"That's got to be a remarkable motor to pull you straight up," Toback said. "You're talking about a little device that's going to get such huge amounts of torque to wrap it around a little motor, that strikes me as a little unrealistic. Do you see mountain climbers like those? They would even take a small one or a slow one."

Of course, Bruce Wayne does have the vast resources of Wayne Enterprises to afford things that your everyday mountain climber wouldn't be able to afford.

"Um yea, but so does whats-his-name from Virgin Atlantic. Richard Branson, why doesn't he use one?"

Sounds like a riddle only Batman could solve.

Batman doesn't strictly use his inventive mind to get around town. He also wears a body armor that has somehow been able to absorb every bullet he has ever faced on film, while still being flexible enough for his martial arts skills to nun-chuck a man in half. The flexibility may be an issue, Beasley said, but the bullet resistance may soon be seen on a body armor near you.

"I've seen body armor that's ceramic and titanium mixture combination, I think its called dragon skin, it's able to stop AK-47 bullets from close range.

"In current research they are working on using spider silk, which is about 20 times stronger than steel, Kevlar is around four times stronger than steel," Beasley continued. "We are getting to the point where it is possible to stop machine gun bullets. Unfortunately it's still difficult…to dissapate that energy without actually break any bones."

Even assuming Batman wears the strongest of armors, Toback did note that Batman does have an unshielded area on his face.

"I don't understand why nobody hits him in the mouth. These are paid professionals here, somebody outta be able to hit him in the mouth."