Issue date: 7/17/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Chris Griffin [Click to enlarge]

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."

Continued...

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