Feats of Strength

[stickmaker]

Bowling balls are *tough*. I was thinking about a scene where a character in a bowling alley intimidates some hecklers by palming a bowling ball (which probably requires more than human strength by itself, not to mention very large hands) and then twists it apart.

Unfortunately, I'm an engineer, so I started doing the math. :-) More unfortunately, I was feeling lazy, so I used the Internet to get some basic numbers. I looked up standard bowling balls and the materials they're made of and made estimates of typical human strength, then ran some equations. My (admittedly very rough) estimate is that to do that to a bowling ball, the person would have to be strong enough to be able to press (lift over their heads) more than fifty tonnes.

Which makes Adam Savage breaking a bowling ball by accident even more impressive. ;-)

Comments

[kengr]

I did something similar in the first part of one of my Whateley fan-fics.

http://crystalhall.org/chboards3/index.php?t=msg&th=2121&start=0&

If your engineering side feels like it, I'd be interested in just what sort of pressure Connie was exerting on that poor defenseless rock. :-)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's getting up into Superman levels. And I mean Sixties Superman. :-)

Unless there's some power at work besides sheer strength.

[kengr]

sheer strength mostly. As you can see from the second post, there are odd things going on. Basically when she tries to "squeeze" something, she's generating a secondary force field and contracting it.

Her abilities amount to flying and strength. The force filed that protects her in flight also acts like powered armor for a strength boost.

Both flight and strength go up on a power curve (if she's trying to squeeze harder, go faster, they just keep building). A cubic curve.

They don't know it yet but her flight follows thos formula:

d = 1/6 * s * t^3

Where s is a constant (surge? Jerk?)

It takes her about an hour to get to the moon if she "pushes" it.

And yes, her other abilities all have to do with her being able to *survive* flying to the moon. :-)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I am currently working on a crossover between my Masks universe and Whateley. Energia - who has flown to the Moon under her own power but required a space suit - gets caught in a mad scientist's experimental teleporter, which takes her sideways instead of laterally. She winds up in the Whateley universe and has to find help to get back home.

Guess where the experts in dimensional travel are? :-)

[kengr]

Guess where the experts in dimensional travel are? :-)

Nary a clue. :-)

Flying Fox's "bubble" seems to include life support. So she can even carry people. Like her boyfriend Blip.

It's actually a lot more complicated than that (or simple, depending on your point of view). Got a whole set of scenes as powers testing stumbles across these aspects of her abilities. :-)