of physics and floggers…

Check my math on this, all suggestions welcome. The  On a recent mailing
list thread the assertion was made (in error, I believe) that a flogger stroke
by a particular dominant would "throw" his submissive "three or four feet". I
made an innocuous correctiont hat she must have meant it staggered or knocked
her forward.

Predictably, her dominant came back and told me maybe I should watch them
play before I started engaging in "ill informed speculation". For fun I decided
to figure out what it would take to throw someone 3-4 feet with a flogger. Here
are the relevant parts of my reply.

> Sent: Monday, July 04, 2005 2:02 AM
> To:
[email protected]
> By: [email protected]

> Subject: Re: [differentdesires2] Re: Fw: punching and slapping..was

You might want to re-read my initial post, see what I did and did not
claim and what I did and did not take objection to. I made no disparaging
marks about your skills, toys or the force you can deliver. I corrected a
single word because I felt it left an improper image. The word was "throw".
If she had said "pushed", "knocked" or "sent" I wouldn’t have made any
comment at all. Picky of me, but I am a picky guy. Further, the original
comment was made mostly in jest and for clarification. It was not intended
as an insult.

The rest of this post is similarly here for amusement, because you and I
are saying the same thing in the end – that your stroke staggers or knocks
her forward. I doubt you mean to imply that your flogger strokes lift her
off the ground and "throw" her 3-4 feet forward. I am sure from your
comments below that you are not speaking of that. Knocking someone over, (as
you mentioned) is a much less energy intensive task than throwing someone.

However, if we want to take this all that seriously, my point stands. I
don’t need to see you play. There is nothing about your relationship that
negates the laws of physics. The math can be fairly simple if we approximate
like mad. The mass of the flogger and the speed of the flogger. How much
energy would be required to "throw" (that was her word) her mass 4 feet.

Let’s simplify the problem then… the flogger is not solid, so its
connection to the handle is effectively irrelevant for this. That means that
your mass and speed is not a factor at the moment of impact, only the mass
and velocity of the flogger "head". Since you cannot continue to push for
the same reasons, the force will be applied to her over a very short period
of time.

Let’s do this in Newtonian physics – surely the relativistic effects
aren’t important at these energy levels.

The simplifying assumptions:

• She is at rest
• She is perfectly rigid
• The energy transfer is perfect
• She only weights 100lbs or about 45kg
• She is "thrown" 3-4 feet, simplified down to 1 meter
• She is in the "air" for 1 second
• You are on Earth

So, to overcome gravity, she needs to be moving upwards at 9.8m/s^2
(approx). Since we will be moving her forwards at only 1m/s^2, the sum of
those forces is… (9.8 * 1) * (sqr(2)/2)) or 10.8 m/s^2 * .70 = 7.56m/s^2
if we assume your flogger stroke hit her at the optimum angle.

Let’s figure out how fast the flogger would need to be going… since we
are only tracking this in the first second of the event, we will look at
these as absolute speeds and not accelerations (m/s not m/s^2) as it’s more
intuitive.

m1 * v1 = m2 * v2 or
45kg * 7.56m/s = 2.27kg * x m/s
340.2 = 2.27 * x
340.2 / 2.27 = 149.86 m/s

So a 5 pound flogger is moving at 149.86 meters / second… 149.86 * 60 *
60 = 539,496 meters an hour, or 529.49 kilometers an hour, or 335.22
miles per hour. In order to "throw" your good lady 3-4 feet, the
following would have to be true:

• Your flogger hit at the perfect angle (almost straight up under her
  ass)
• Your flogger perfectly transferred all its energy
• She was perfectly rigid, with no give in her body
• You hit her at exactly her center of rotation
• Your flogger was moving in excess of 335.22 miles per hour
• She is made of titanium because that impact should break her bones
  when it happens

There may be some flaws in my simplification – but the fundamentals
stand.

You could not generate the power needed with your flogger to "throw" her
3-4 feet. Even if you could, you would injure her seriously with each
stroke.And that is all assuming perfect conditions… in reality the energy
transfer is much less and the action of her body would be to fold around the
impact, not get thrown.

I don’t need to "see" you play to know this. The rules of the universe
continue to apply, even in dungeons.

[he asserts that he is capable of knocking her over]

An entirely different assertion, and one I already said in my post to her
when this all started I agreed with. Dude.

[the comment that all I have is ill informed speculation]

Yeah, the big problem with physics is how speculative it is. Before you
get offended by something I say, make sure you know what I said 🙂