Originally posted by srankmissingnin
This is why people are always making fun of you h1a8, you are [b]staggeringly stupid.How would the car have helped Captain America pull the helicopter. Turn on your brain and think about that for a second. Steve was standing up in restrained in the back set, he wasn't buckled in and his grapple was not tethered to anything. How is the car helping him? If anything being in a car makes the feat more difficult.
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll223/darknight2k/batduct.jpg
You think that is a seven ton feat? Maybe you'd like to educate us as to why it would take the equivalent of seven tons to rip a few hundred pounds of hollow metal piping up? [/B]
Being in the car made the feat easier since the car was going in the direction that Cap is pulling. Thus it is help pulling. Cap was using the car to pull against WHILE the car was moving forward. Look at Cap's feet, they're on the seat in such a way to allow the car to help him pull. Common sense says that if the helicopter had more force than the car was exerting then the helicopter would have stopped and pulled the car. But it didn't.
Such pipes have a tensile strength of 400MPa. This is 400 million netwons per square meter. Assuming the thickness was about 1cm, then from a thin square rod we would get a cross sectional area of (1cm)^2 or (1/10000)m^2 . Multipying this area by the tensile strength and converting to tons yields 4.5 tons.
That means a rod with twice the area would yield about 9 tons. The pipe was circular and thus had more than twice the cross sectional area as 1 rod.
But math and physics wasn't needed. It is clear that a 7-8 ton truck could hang from such a pipe without breaking.