1963 report by the FAA on human survivability of extreme impacts in freefall
This study collated data from medical reports about incidents of freefall from high places and determined that humans are capable of surviving falls from (83 meters/275 feet) with impact speeds as high as (39.3 meters per second/79 miles per hour). That's a little bit more than half the speed that a human body attains at terminal velocity.
Survival of high-velocity free-falls in water
This 1965 paper cites a study where experiments were performed on anesthetized guinea pigs in order make an empirical measurement of their terminal velocity. The outcome of this study gives the terminal velocity of a guinea pig as (37.1 meters per second/70.9 miles per hour). This conflicts with my earlier back-of-the-napkin estimate of 25 miles per hour, which makes sense because earlier this morning I found implicit assumptions in my previous calculations that a guinea pig has a surface area of approximately 1 square meter, which would be silly and increase the critter's wind resistance above realistic levels. This speed is approximately the same as the speed that Snyder's 1963 paper claims is the outer limit of the falling speed that a human can survive. That said, I would expect a guinea pig to be able to survive higher-speed impacts because its lower mass gives it less momentum. Unfortunately I can't directly access the 1955 guinea pig study because Elsevier has it behind a paywall even though it's federally-funded research in the public domain.
As for Calista's surface area, we can't rely on guinea pig measurements because they're basically furry lozenges. If we keep to the assumption that she's 0.73 kg and say her height is 17.2 cm (the average length of an adult female hand), we can calculate her surface area using the Du Bois formula as 494.4 square centimeters, which incidentally is about 82% of the size of a sheet of US-letter paper. Feeding that information into an updated version of my old calculations, together with a better estimate of her drag coefficient based on a study of the human body (0.6 instead of my earlier default guess of 0.1) leads me to believe that Cricket's real terminal velocity is probably closer to (22 meters per second / 50 miles per hour). That's within the range of survivable injury speeds even for normal-sized humans.
The two are not comparable.
:shrug:
