How Strong is He-Man

[Eyendasky80]

I was watching He-Man tonight and started to wonder how strong he would be in Champions. He did the craziest thing tonight, he threw a huge stone tower into the sun. I calculated it to be about 566 tons. Figured it was about 70 ft tall and had an 18ft diameter. Making it about 22,640 sq feet. After that I kind of just guessed a lot. I'm not really sure how much a sq foot of stone weighs but I went with fifty pounds, which seemed on the light side. That's how I came up with 566 tons. SO how strong do you have to be to put 566 tons out of orbit and into the sun. (I'm not even gonna try to calculate the range modifiers) If anyone else has a better estimate of the wieght based on what I said or if they saw the episode too (Second Skins) love to hear it.

[Tamashii2000]

Umm Megascale (for throwing distance only???)????

[melessqr]

Nothing weighs anything per square foot... can't have mass in 2 dimensions.

 

Granite (a comon material for making monoliths) has a specific gravity of 2.69... yielding a weight of 168lbs per cubic foot.

 

Your 18 foot x 70 foot monolith has a 17,812 cubic foot voulme, weighing in at 2992552 lbs. or 1496 tons.

 

1,357,148 kilograms, or 1,357 metric tons... so he'd have to have a strength of 80 to lift it...

 

More difficult to figure how strong he'd have to be to trow it into the sun, as the distance doesn't really matter as much as the ability to accelerate the object to 7 miles per second (escape velocity)... and here we run into a problem... Hero doesn't do this so good... Throwing something happens instantaniously... if I thow it now, it gets there now... Leaping has a mechanic to correct for this if you're using non-combat leaping... but no similar mechanism for throwing things huge distances... so the time in the formula reduces to 0 and we get infinite velocity on any throw.

 

So, you can't really figure it out using the rules, other than the ballpark answer of 'alot'.

 

If we say that since a segment is 1 second, and all throws happen in 1 second (which they do by the rules, but boy is this a kludge), then he'd have to be able to throw the object 7 miles, or about 11,265 meters or 5633 hexes... This would require and exess strength of 7017 (with a running throw)... which means he'd have to have a strength of 7097.

 

Wanna figure out the skill levels he'd have to have to offset the range modifiers now?

 

Melessqr

[Vanderbilt_Grad]

Well the sun *does* have a lot of growth.....

 

Oh, and he didn't take a running start.

[levi]

The sun also generates a HUGE gravity well to help pull the monolith in.

 

I had a brick once who was suppossed to be able to do things like He-Man, Supes and other cartoon/comics strong guys do. I bought it this way:

 

75 STR base

+25 STR, Only for Feats of Strength (throwing, lifting, etc. -1/2)

Naked Advantage: Megascale 1" = 1 MKm on 100 STR (175 AP), Only for THrowing (-1), 3X Increased END (-1) Cost: 58 points

 

Remember that Megascale can't be used in combat.

 

In your example and using melessqr's mass stats and giving He-Man a 100 STR (at least for feats of strength). With a required 80 STR to lift the monolith this leaves He-Man 20 STR to generate throwing distance which for a standing throw equals 8" or Eight Million Km. Still only a fration of the distance to the sun, but well beyond orbit and on its way.

[Eyendasky80]

I knew my math was wrong. Thanks for the detailed estimate. Would jumping into the air count as a running throw? It's movement?

 

It was so funny how it happened too, someone told him nothing on Eternia could destroy this thing he wanted to smash with his sword so he just hucked this whole monolith with the thingee on it into the sun. When a character does something like that I just find myself wondering why he doesn't huck all his problems into the sun. (i.e. Skeletor) If you're wondering why he didn't just launch the thingee, it repelled him quite violently when he tried to smash it so I assume the same would happen if he tried to grab it.

 

And I'll let someone else have the first stab at the range modifiers. Despite the Sun's (obviously) massive size, I'm pretty sure it's still gonna end up at rolling a natural three. Then again, maybe you could buy levels to offset range in megascale too. I assume, since Eternia is very Earth-like, the distance from their Sun is comparable at 150 million kilometers. So since I am again at work, someone else can run with that.

[Mephron]

He-Man's strength can be easily calculated using the following formula:

 

"How strong does he need to be to do the big strength thing this episode?"

 

We've seen him trapped by rock and unable to escape, and then we see him throw stone towers into the sun.

[Grond]

Originally posted by Mephron

He-Man's strength can be easily calculated using the following formula:

 

"How strong does he need to be to do the big strength thing this episode?"

 

We've seen him trapped by rock and unable to escape, and then we see him throw stone towers into the sun.

There was an episode of the old serie, in which he moved an object which was frozen in time. I suppose to do such thing you have to effectively move the entire universe. That's more than 7000 strength I guess... (eh)

[TechnoViking]

There was a pre-criris Superman and He-Man crossover. They stated that both Superman and He-Man had equal STR.

 

Mike

[Griffonheart]

I think that the answer to the question of how strong is He-Man is...Strong Enough.

 

He's kinda like the Hulk, he has limitless strength when he needs it, but most of the time he doesn't need it all that badly.

[Eyendasky80]

I fully agree that He-Man's strength varies to accommodate the story, but I was asking how much strength (or mega scale if appropriate) he would need to perform a stunt like that in a Champions game. And I thought melessqr's answer was pretty darn impressive.

About being trapped under rocks, I don't know if it happened more than once, but when he was trapped in Council of Evil it was due to the effects of a spell cast by Skeletor so maybe it was a REALLY big entangle and not so much weight pinning him down.

[Armitage]

Originally posted by melessqr

So, you can't really figure it out using the rules, other than the ballpark answer of 'alot'.

 

Adventurer's Club #20 had an article "How Far Did Grond Throw You?", by Dean Shomshak. It attempted to apply real world physics to calculate how far superhumans could throw objects, rather than the throwing rules.

According to the charts in the article, it would require 130 STR to throw the tower at orbital velocity.

The equations rounded the acceleration of gravity to 10 m/sec/sec, used an escape velocity of 11200 m/sec and assumed an acceleration time of 1 second.

F = m x a

F = m x (v/t) = (m x v)/t

F x t = m x v

m = (F x t)/v

m = (lifting mass M x 10 m/sec/sec x 1 sec)/11200 m/sec = M/1120

 

So the amount a superhuman can lift, divided by 1120, is the amount they can throw into orbit. Conversely, the amount they can throw into orbit x 1120 is the amount they can lift. In this case, roughly 1.6 megatons, 130 STR.

The article notes that the equations don't account for air friction.

[Vanderbilt_Grad]

I was trying to avoid taking this too seriously but as long as we are talking physics … tossing objects into the sun is more difficult than it appears on the surface. True the sun has a lot of gravity … but there is another important factor, the Earth’s orbit. The Earth travels around the sun at a more or less fixed speed and radius. As the object thrown heads towards the sun the object retains the orbital momentum, but as the nearer it gets the shorter the effective ‘radius’ of the object’s orbit. In effect the object speeds up as it nears the sun & this helps prevent it from falling in further.

 

To get the object to ‘fall’ into the sun you would have to throw it away from the Earth in the direction opposite of the Earth’s orbit with a speed equal to the Earth’s speed around the sun. Then the sun’s gravity would take over and the object would just start to fall in.

 

And let me tell you throwing something with enough force to overcome the Earths orbit is magnitudes of order more difficult than just getting it out of the Earth’s local gravity well.

[BlackSword]

Originally posted by melessqr

Hero doesn't do this so good... Throwing something happens instantaniously... if I thow it now, it gets there now...

Having seen the episode, this is pretty much a perfect explanation. I think the time from it leaving Eternia to going poof in the sun is in the order of seconds, meaning he managed to throw it faster than light speed (assuming Eternia's orbit is similar to Earth's and is several light minutes from the sun).

[Zeropoint]

Nitpick: while you CAN throw something into orbit, it will be an orbit which intersects the ground. To get a more nearly circular orbit, you need another impulse to provide some lateral motion.

 

Zeropoint

[drrushing]

you want to throw WHAT into the sun?

 

WOW...............

I used to play around with equations like this in Physics class in High school. I'm impressed with everyone's dedication and commitment to realism. Now, can someone account for wind friction through the atmosphere and the relative position of the Moon(s), and it's countereffect gravity? Also, how about the relative position's of the planets between Eternia and the Sun?

 

And I thought creating a theoretical model of an orbital gauss cannon was challenging.

[megaplayboy]

Originally posted by Grond

There was an episode of the old serie, in which he moved an object which was frozen in time. I suppose to do such thing you have to effectively move the entire universe. That's more than 7000 strength I guess... (eh)

 

Actually, hmm....one sun sized star...about 500 STR

about a billion solar masses for a decent sized galaxy...650 STR

maybe a trillion times that for the universe?...850 STR

 

I can't imagine needing more than 1000 STR to do ANYTHING in hero system...besides, Hero Designer won't let you go above 995 or so;)

[megaplayboy]

Originally posted by Armitage

Adventurer's Club #20 had an article "How Far Did Grond Throw You?", by Dean Shomshak. It attempted to apply real world physics to calculate how far superhumans could throw objects, rather than the throwing rules.

According to the charts in the article, it would require 130 STR to throw the tower at orbital velocity.

The equations rounded the acceleration of gravity to 10 m/sec/sec, used an escape velocity of 11200 m/sec and assumed an acceleration time of 1 second.

F = m x a

F = m x (v/t) = (m x v)/t

F x t = m x v

m = (F x t)/v

m = (lifting mass M x 10 m/sec/sec x 1 sec)/11200 m/sec = M/1120

 

So the amount a superhuman can lift, divided by 1120, is the amount they can throw into orbit. Conversely, the amount they can throw into orbit x 1120 is the amount they can lift. In this case, roughly 1.6 megatons, 130 STR.

The article notes that the equations don't account for air friction.

 

the conversion I always used was mgh=1/2 mv^2

 

That is, the information on STR is essentially the ability to press weight up to the height of the character. That lifting conveys the potential energy of the maximum lift. If we posit that somehow the character can transfer that energy to a thrown object we can calculate the STR reqired to throw a given object a given velocity.

 

g is constant, in this case v is constant(11000 m/sec),

 

so, (STR in kg lift) x 10m/sec/sec x 2m= 1/2(mass to be thrown in kg) (11000m/sec)^2

 

20 x (STR in kg lift) = 60 million (mass to be thrown in kg)

 

STR in kg lift = 3 million x (mass to be thrown in kg)

 

So, you need about 110 STR in excess of the mass to be thrown to hurl it out of orbit. So, for the mass in question, which requires about an 80 STR to lift, you'd need about 190 STR to chuck it into space.

 

By the way, add 260 STR to throw objects at near-light velocities:D

[Gary]

This is easy. 1" superleap usable as attack with a bunch of mass multiples and a bunch of megascale. About 5 or so active points.

[Eyendasky80]

That might work if it was a person or maybe even a vehicle and possibly a base. But the object was basically a big rock. I've never seen a rock leap. I don't think a gm would allow that.

[Gary]

Originally posted by Eyendasky80

That might work if it was a person or maybe even a vehicle and possibly a base. But the object was basically a big rock. I've never seen a rock leap. I don't think a gm would allow that.

 

No GM would allow that power anyway because it's highly abusive.

 

However, superleap can represent many more special effects than just leaping, such as rocket engines. It's represents any movement where you get all the acceleration at the beginning and then have a period of uncontrolled flight.

[Eyendasky80]

Oh, okay.