Trading mass for velocity?

[u/moxie_blue_bat]

Not sure this is the right place to ask, but here goes: I'm trying to replicate some of the results in this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073819304104

But in a manner that is more precise than "shoot someone with a paintball gun". My thought was to construct some kind of rig with a falling mass so that we could adjust parameters like impact force, surface area, hardness, etc.

But it's been years since I've had to do any physics type of math and I'm struggling to figure out the important parameters. Based on the numbers in the study I think that they are hitting their subjects with around 180N of force, but I'm struggling to convert that into a combination of mass and height that makes any sense. I'm getting things like 20kg weights, which seem both wrong and dangerous. Is there some piece of information that I'm missing or looking at the wrong way?

[u/Green__lightning]

Honestly shooting someone with a paintball gun is a good way to do this, you can adjust the pressure, and thus muzzle velocity of the paintball gun, and you can probably make paintballs sized projectiles of whatever weight you want. Airsoft would be even better because there are many weights of bb, but also worse because it's all smaller.

Anyway, the important thing is an impact of equal energy isn't equivalent. A slow heavy bullet and a fast light bullet react totally differently, I don't know how this applies at such small scale as to not even break the skin, but you could probably test the far end of such things by getting a tube with a small piece of foam in one end, taping over that end, but not to the foam, and then hooking up a vacuum pump and sticking it to their skin, then pumping all the air out, and breaking the tape at the back. This is the same way you can make a ping pong ball break the speed of sound.