User blog comment:JoePlay/The Avengers Battle Royale - The Death Match/@comment-4652104-20120425175919/@comment-3217795-20120426213801

I'm impressed. You made a poor impression at the outset with a sloppy debate argument, but you're really pulling it out. Since I'm now assuming you'll understand these terms better, lets work this out in pure math terms. Pounds per square inch. The average professional boxer is able to exert a force of 776 PSI, and the highest recorded total is 1400 PSI. Multiply those totals by the average square inch total of a boxer's fist and you get 3104 pounds of lifting power and 4200 pounds of lifting power. Since these PSI pressures are single shocks, we may assume that the actual lifting power of these fighters is significantly less than this. Lets say a comfortable lifting power being an 1/10 of these extreme totals. Applying the same mathematics in reverse, since we know Captain America can somewhat comfortably lift around around 1200 pounds. Half that for each arm, and we get 600 pounds. Times it by 10, and we get his "lifting power" of 6000 pounds. We'll give him an average boxers hand size of 4 square inches, and with that we get 1500 PSI. Not bad, its slightly better than the world record. Of course, Cap won't just hit with his fists. Lets take it to the shield. Lets give the shield striking surface an area of about 1.5 inches. (I'm being conservative here, it might be less, it might be more.)  That gives us 4000 PSI. Thats MUCH better, right? Not really when you consider his opponent. Lets calculate the blunt force trauma potential by using Cage's fight with the Wrecker. Wrecker punched him without hitting him with a crowbar a couple of times. And no real traumatic damage was sustained. Wrecker can comfortably bench about 81000 pounds. Divide by two, and you get 40500 for each arm. Wrecker is rather larger than normal, so we'll increase his hand size. Lets give him 6 square inch hands. Probably a bit large, but we'll go with it. Work that out and we get a whopping 6750 PSI. Thats well over 1.5 times the best hit Captain America can put out. The only thing that increases PSI, which is the value you use to calculate how much blunt force trauma can be inflicted by a particular hit, is by decreasing the surface area of the striking surface. A karate chop produces more PSI than a punch, etc. Nerve strikes use two fingers for this reason. Large amounts of force exerted against a small surface area, however with such strikes, a lot of force is lost by the fragility of the fingers. We can fiddle with the numbers more, but any way you slice it. Even if you use the BEST numbers for Cap, and the worst numbers for Luke Cage, the numbers still greatly benefit Cage. He may not be in the upper tier of physical strength, but his invulnerability allows him to fight people who are vastly more powerful than he is. Cap is pretty sturdy. He won't break his hands punching Cage, but he really won't be able to exert the kind of force necessary to actually hurt him. Though I will give you this. On the admittedly large chance he lands a hit on a nerve cluster, he'll give himself some breathing room. But Cap really is the underdog here. Nerve strikes are usually not crippling blows, and any other sort of blow Cap can put out won't really do nearly enough damage to affect Cage's performance.