Baelor Targaryen helmet strike TESTED - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, one of my favorite shows. There is a, you know, content warning with some explicit stuff, but outside of that, absolutely brilliant. Now, we are going to be looking at the main fight scene in Episode 5, breaking it all down. But in this video, I want to do something a bit more specific and special. So, there is a pivotal moment in Episode 5. I'm going to avoid spoilers as best as I can, but by the nature of the video, we need to explain a content, well, explain that something happens. But if that is too much, spoiler warning for the context of this video. What happens is, someone gets a mace hit to the back of a helmet, so hard that it actually caves in the back of their skull and rips apart the skin that the back of their head basically falls out. I want to see how possible it is. Now, in terms of possibility, yes, anything's possible in like, damage potential if you put enough force behind it, but is a regular human capable of producing that much force? And there are some caveats as to the type of helmet that might protect you against such a blow or might not. And so, we have a coconut inside right at the back here, and we're going to see if we can crack open that coconut with a mace strike. So, there are some caveats worth mentioning before we dive into this overall discussion, and I believe you have some thoughts as well, Tyrone. Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts. Well, because there's a couple of different ways we can approach this topic, right? Because in the show, it looks like LARP helmets. Now, this is like, there's the charitability because it's a show, right? But they show a lot of close-ups of the close-ups. So, you can see that the steel isn't that, you know... Not only that, like real helmets are twice as heavy as LARP ones because they're twice as thick on the steel, and you can literally feel it and see the motion, see the inertia this thing has. You can feel, you can see that it has weight in my hands. The weight of, say, Dunk's helmet, you can see him lifted and put up, it's light LARP grade. You can tell the difference. Well, you can heat treat helms just like you can heat treat pretty much any steel, so it can be lighter. And then there's the added context that, because there's a lot of close-ups, you can see that there's not really any padding on any of them. Yes. Really at all. Which, this is where I kind of, I think it's possible, but not for the reasons that they infer from the show. Because we are going to test it against a LARP grade helmet, which is like only one mil thick steel, even though this is a bit tougher than your standard LARP one. And we have a coconut inside, so we will know if we crack it open because the juice is going to fall out, right? But then we have an actual battle-ready thick helmet, two mil thick steel, and I bought it. We need to use it for something because it is one of my favorite helmets, but I'm willing to put it on the line. Now, my expectations, we'll find out if this is true or not though, if you had proper padding and a properly made helmet, I'm not sure even a full powered mace hit would do that level of damage. No. You'll feel it. I do think you could give you a concussion. It could kill you from the blunt force. Actually caving in the skull part, it's just not how the forces transfer, if that makes sense, right? And also they're domed in such a way that they're really resistant to being caved in when they're thick. And so caving in like this helmet, I'm not sure it will be possible. We'll try. We'll try our darndest, but the caveats, all right, now there's some caveats that might help it. Mekar has said that he is very strong. The actual line that Baelor says is that my brother is very strong. It was probably his blow. Yes. If like, I would agree with you if there was a big cave in the helmet. Yeah. If there was a big cave in the helmet, it's like, yeah, for sure. 100%. But the helmet looks... The helmet that they show doesn't have a big inwards dent. Doesn't have any damage really in it. So that's where I'm like, I just don't, I don't think so. Right. What I think could have happened, which again is going to go, we're going to go through some hoops here to get to this, is if they had a LARP grade helm with a suspension rig that holds it kind of a little bit off your head. So it doesn't sit, the steel doesn't sit necessarily on your head. It sits a little bit above and you hit with a mace, the impact of the mace hitting the helmet, which then compresses with no... Yeah. Imagine if it kind of like just flexed in. With air, right? There's no padding. That then makes contact with the skull. Exactly. And if the front of your head was being sandwiched by the front of the helmet and it's being compressed from behind, there's a chance. Now this is where there is something that exists within the setup of the show that might justify it. The armor that Balor is wearing is not his, it's his son's. And it might be too small for him. Meaning that the helmet... Too small for him to fit padding. To fit padding. That's what I mean. That he had, the only way to get the helmet on was with padding and it's better to wear a helmet than not. But in reality, you would just get not a different, I would literally wear an unmatching, unfancy, uh, you know, helmet with padding just to get that protection. Then, oh, I got to wear, you know, this helmet because it matches without the padding, you know? My issue with this is that none of them wear padding. Well, yeah, it doesn't look like anyone's wearing padding. Like this could explain why Balor doesn't have padding, but not for everyone else. And a padding is like a full padded coif around your head. So I do think it would be possible, possible given that context, but that context shouldn't be the correct context. So that's kind of what I mean by we're jumping through some hoops. Well, what we're going to try and do when we go up to the series real helmet is we, we're going to put the coconut right at the back of the metal with no padding and give it every possible chance. That's what we've done with this one. We're going to give us every possible chance to succeed. And the only limitation will be our strength. And one other, there is one other. The size of mace. Sure. So this is very approximate to the size of weight that most medieval maces had. The mace that Maekar is using looked a little bit bigger. And so bigger than this, I've tried it. They're basically unwieldy. Okay. But Maekar is really strong, I guess. And so with a bigger mace, the chances are higher to succeed. So there's going to be some variability here because what we've got here is we've got this lap helm. Uh, there's a coconut pressed right up against it and then it is braced on the inside. So it is like right here is the coconut. I do think that we're going to break and crack this coconut, but I don't know how applicable that is to a human skull. And there's also the added context that the helmet should be able to move a bit, right? Like this is really braced. You would not have a helmet braced like this on your face. Yeah. This is, we're stacking the deck against, you know, survivability. And we know, I mean, like you can just look at the steel. We know that this is very soft and this mace will probably cave this in. So, all right. Coconut right there. How much power? Go all out. Don't hold back. Really? You don't, you think you could do it with just one? I reckon I can do it with just one. It being braced like that, I reckon, yeah. Give it a go. The steel is soft. Yeah. I'm not seeing any coconut juice. You're not? Oh yes, there is coconut juice. Where'd you hit? Was that, was that it? Yeah. Was that it? All right. Shall we, uh, see what the coconut is like? Could you grab it? You didn't like cave it in, but that's a skull fracture, right? Yeah. Yeah. That would be, uh, that was just one handed, not too, not too much anything. But again, this is purely down to that steel just being so soft. Yeah. So do you want to give it a go again to try and do more damage to here? Like for all out. Now there's coconut juice. It's raining. This is like someone's blood, you know? Yeah. Like this is what we're talking about with LARP steel. I just want to kind of look at that in dent. So like if you have this sort of steel with no padding, like we kind of explained. Yeah. Like I'm actually, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Juice. You know that these two swords are actually not that different in price when they were sold. I bought this when I was like 16 years old and the sword market as it once was is so different to what it is today. I like orders of magnitude and Taranith and I discussed that in the new exclusive video. The contrast is shocking what is available now, all that stuff. And you get access to that exclusive video as well as the entire backlog of exclusive content, but just $1 a month. And that's true. Patreon subscribes to our channel memberships. We have a full, you know, film that is available for you. If you sign up the main Epic Adventure Quest finished film, as well as I get great value for the money. And it's the only way we are sustainable these days. So please sign up and help us out. If you're in the, you know, available door, I have the means to do so. Thank you so much for everyone who is supporting us. And now let's get back to the main topic. I don't want to do it boss. Too bad. I don't want to do it. I'm running away. The truth is I actually think your helmet has a pretty good chance against this homemade DIY mace you made. Like I actually think, you know, like we'll find out. We did try this against the other Okay. Uh, two mil thick battle ready helmet. Everything's structured. The coconut is resting right against it. What so far? That's what we predicted. Light grade. You can mess someone up with a mace hit because it's basically just like hitting a mace. There is one other caveat. My car hits him with a backhanded swing. Do you reckon that would affect power? Cause I just wildly going bang. Yeah. Cause the setup for this, well, sorry, too many spoilers. I can't go to the center, but the person that, you know, hit did the hits. I can't even go into that. I think, I think it's fair if I just do one hand then. Yeah. If I did this one hand hit forwards or backwards, I do think that you would get a lot of power, especially because it's not a, it's not like this is a move type thing. It's more of like a, just a bang. So I'm okay with the power on that. All right. Let's find out. So coconut right there. No juice. It's a good dent. That's a good dent. My helmet. That's uh, that's actually a bit more than you, I would want, honestly, I would actually want that to tank it a bit more. So, cause I don't think this is hardened steel. I think it's actually mild steel. It's just thick. But, uh, it's thicker. Oh, maybe did I miss? Cause like, it's like that one might've been just a miss. Like I think the coconut is right here. I think we need to hit a little lower. I'm seeing juice. We got a lot of juice. That's my grouping guys. Isn't that interesting? So that cracked the coconut. Yeah. And by the way, like when you were saying how anaglyphs, coconuts that aren't cracked open that actually have internal pressure have some measure of similarity to someone's, a guy's skull. I know I'm going to have to clean my helmet. Interesting. So that, that didn't, isn't huge. You just caved it in by what a centimeter at most. Maybe. Yeah. All right. Context, right? If you had a whole bunch of padding and stuff like, like you should, then I think that's perfectly fine. Right? Obviously I wouldn't want it to deform this much, but generally speaking, it's going to take some of the force away from your head. However, in this very uncharitable setup where we're essentially wedging the steel of your helmet against the back of your skull, this is kind of the result, which is what I expected. I think we're going to be able to crack it through the skull, but we're not going to cave it in. Yes. I think a cracked skull, which can still be lethal, right? Is very plausible, but to cave it in entirely. Cause like what you see in the film is like, he has a hole. He has a hole. I don't even know how the physics of it works. I think it's like what the helmet was pressed so tight that it like held his skull together. And then the moment he takes it off, it all falls out. Like the, the, the context is that the impact was so deep that it literally turned this into like just pieces, crushed it all in on the face of it. And the intent was holding it all in. And when it took it out that they took it off, it all falls out. Well, the funny thing is just on that point, do I think that you could cave someone's head in and the, like the pressure holds it in maybe, maybe, but I reckon you could maybe take a couple of steps, kind of like go, Oh, that kind of hurt. Kind of like sit down and pass out, not do a complete fight in a melee afterwards, have some conversations and then go, all right, I'm gonna take my helmet off. It's just funny. Sorry. Yeah. Trouble feeling his fingers. It's a fantastic scene. I want to make that clear. It's, it's incredible. Powerful. It's got all the, you know, storytelling beats that you want. Uh, but as to the level of damage, I, I look, I would say plausible with a heavier mace and a lot more strength. Kind of, kind of, because I think when the Uncharted was set up without padding, all of this is on the helmet. If he has a LARP helmet, then yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. But if you have like a proper helm, which it's supposed to be, I don't know, like that qualifies as a proper helmet, but there are variants in medieval grade helmets. There were ones that were mild steel, there were ones that this is set up to crack this. Yeah. And even then it's just a little bit of a crack. What you see in the, uh, in the, in the show is like night and day above this. And I don't even think we got the same sort of results with our super uncharitable, uh, like charitable setup. So, I mean, in the uncharitable setup, I'm talking like, I think two-handed like full powered from a guy that is crazy strong, maybe. And we're still in the maybe territory, but that is stacking the deck so much. In jet, like this is a one-handed backhanded swing. Because what actually caves it in, right? This is what we've got to decide on. I think what would actually cave your skull in is the mace head itself deforming the actual steel. Yes. And the steel itself is creating the crater, right? I agree. The problem we have with this sort of setup is even if, if you had a proper helm that was in the appropriate thicknesses and everything, and you had all the padding, this crater is nowhere near enough. It doesn't even reach the skull. The padding would absorb it. Exactly. That's my problem here. So then if we look at the LARP, even the LARP, which took a huge amount of damage, especially in comparison to this, even if we didn't have padding, it's still not as big as a crater as what we see. Oh, are we getting close though? Some of these are pretty deep. Like, like, I think you could get to that level with a bigger mace, like a sledgehammer would do it. Maybe, maybe. The problem is, did we see any deformation on the helm? Not a lot, when I couldn't see a lot. So, but overall, it's only plausible in the most unfair setup. In, in, in a more realistic setup with padding, I, I can, I think a skull fracture might be possible, but not, not the, not the crater that we saw. The collapsed skull. Check out this video where we test a motorbike helmet versus a real medieval helmet. I think that's the one where we put the back against a thick proper helmet. Yeah. And it does some damage, but is it enough? Check it out. It's right there, guys. Cheers.