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marvel - Is Iron Man’s suit really heavy enough to break through his roof?


In Iron Man (the 2008 film), right after Tony has his first test run in the Iron Man Mark-2 suit, he comes back to his Malibu beach house, says "kill power" and as a result he breaks through 2-3 layers of concrete and crushes the car he falls on.


Is the Mark-2 suit really heavy enough to do that? My doubt here is whether it was just a scene written in a bit of an exaggerated manner, or if the suit is really heavy enough to do that?







Answer



After some consideration I've come to the conclusion that it's very possible that the Mk2 suit could have sufficient weight to drop through a concrete floor and flatten a fibre-glass sport car body.


The original Iron Man Mk1 suit is described as being approximately 1500 pounds (over half a metric ton). The Mk2 isn't canonically weighed but there's a production quote from Shane Mahan (Head of Studio on Iron Man) stating that they were advised that the later suits would probably weigh something like 600-800 pounds or nearly a third of a metric ton.



600 to 800 pounds has always been the number that we kicked around



Assuming Tony's house conforms to Malibu Building codes then his floors are rated to a weight of 40 pounds per square foot. A suit that weighs something between 600-800 pounds would certainly fall outside the scope of this design standard and could very easily cause a structural failure including a "pancake effect" style floor collapse.


Similarly, a dead weight of half a ton hitting a sports car from a height of 10 feet would be more than enough to completely crush the bodywork.


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