Science Forum - Writing a Quasi-Scientific Comic Book, Had Some Questions

Whirlwindofsteel · Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject:

I am working on a comic book with superhumans (though I wouldn't call it superheroic). Anyways, the protagonist of the story essentially gets granted 'Superman's powers'. The levels of these powers are limited by the alien's tech and how much he trusts this guy with, but he agrees and gives him relatively Superman powers.
Being a fan of physics and, more importantly in fiction, consistency I wanted to get at least a basic understanding of 'if you could punch at Mach 5, what would you do to a brick wall?' The perpetual refusal of almost every comic book to even acknowledge things like air friction drives me nuts, and I intend to fix at least a little of that in my comic.
My mechanics questions are as follows:
1. Motor Skills: How fast could you move and still be able to control yourself with a human mind? Presume that his reflexes are at the level of top athletes, but and his nervous system (aside from his brain) is essentially light speed. This is more or less asking, "with a direct neural interface and good natural abilities, how fast could you control a humanoid robot?", since computers send information at near lightspeed anyway.
2. Macro-Speed: How fast would you have to be able to move to be essentially incoherent to the best human eye within close ranges? I want him to be able to zip up to people and punch them faster than their eye can follow, but I don't want him to move much beyond Mach 5, or he's going to be outrageously destructive to his enviroment.
3. Strength: His strength is entirely based on his muscle and acceleration. What I men that the tensing strength of his muscles is great enough to crush a diamond in his hand (with significant effort) but he can accelerate himself much faster. Thus his punches and throws will greatly exceed what he can lift. Three parts:
A. How much force PSI is required to crush a flawless 4 karat diamond over the period of, say, 45 seconds? How much PSI does a powerful (say, powerlifter) hand exert? By this means I can, roughly, work out the relative strength of his body for lifting, benchpressing etc.
B. How much energy is required to accelerate 10 tons to mach 1 in 1/100th of a second? This is pretty simple, but I can't remember the formula for it!
C. Having this kind of acceleration strength, he could obviously run pretty fast. But how much force can concrete stand up to before he just jams his leg through it and/or goes bounding off into the air?

4. Laser Vision: What sort of energy output would a high-band ultraviolet laser require in order to melt 4 tons of steel into complete slag in one second?

Once I can peg down some numbers for him, I can figure out what all the other characters can do by contrasting them with him, IE "Okay, it should take Ubermensch about 10 solid punches to kill this guy, so how much force can he stand up to?"

Anyone who can answer these questions, or tell me how to figure out the answers, thanks Smile

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