The Batman universe has seen its fair share of "super gadgets" over the years. The dark knight owns every toy you can add the prefix "bat-" to, and has inspired legions of fan boys to dream of owning their own batmobiles, batcaves or even the occasional bottle of "bat-shark repellent."
Professors at Texas A&M say that these bat-gadgets may not all be such surreal ideas, and that while not every aspect of the Batman universe is plausible, some of it is certainly possible.
"The tank thing they have, [the batmobile], I mean man, wow, that was a freaking cool beast," said Dave Toback, a physics professor for A&M. "From the videos I saw, it looked like it really had some functionality to it."
"It's definitely possible to make something like that because the batmobile in Batman Begins, they made actual vehicles for that," said Ryan Beasley, an engineering professor at A&M. "I looked up... the specs on them and they go 100 mph, zero to 60 in five seconds, and they can survive a 30 foot jump, things like that. Can they make them? Yea, but you won't get very good gas mileage or anything like that."
When examining the batmobile, the professors looked it over one function at a time.
"Can it really barrel through walls? I don't know," Toback said. "Clearly a real tank can barrel through walls so it's not crazy, but I don't know that things with rubber tires can generate enough torque to drive through a wall."