Real or House Rule to determine Force from the Mass Rank

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Red Ryder
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Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2020 1:09 am

Real or House Rule to determine Force from the Mass Rank

Post by Red Ryder »

I may be overthinking it, but I wondered if there were some official or simplified house rules for determining the amount of force that can be generated with strength based powers.

I have a character with a Move Object power with an increased mass of 22.
This means the normal upper limit my character can lift is 100k tons, which is a lot.
However I started to imagine some hypothetical scenarios of rescuing people from a moving craft like an airplane, train, or other and I realize that it isn’t then a matter of mass, it is a matter of force.

Example:
A 747 airplane is roughly 375 tons and has a cruising speed of about 700mph.
With my ranged telekinetic, Move Object, power of 22, I could easily lift it at rest, but at that speed can I bring it to a stop and save the people and the plane if it was out of control or something?

I had to make an assumption using the Measurements chart to determine the maximum velocity and therefore the acceleration that I would be capable of generating.
Since my power rank is 22 and the mass rank is 14 for the plane, the difference is 8 which means I can throw up to 400 tons 1 mile in 1 round. That means 5280 ft/6s or 880 ft/s. After researching the correct Kinematic equations and Newton’s F=ma law, it means that with a change in distance of 5280 ft, the maximum force I can generate is 7,604,016.04 N.

Without going too deeply into the math, though I can if anyone wants to know, I determined that with the above maximum force, I could stop the plane, but it had to be over a distance of no less than 7186.67 ft.
Meaning that simply stopping a massive plane going that fast required a fair distance to stop. I could stop it in a shorter distance, but then the force required starts to go up and that would mean using Extra Effort or something.

At any rate, it was fun to math it out, but wondered if there was a reasonable shorthand that could be used instead of real math during games where I don’t have Excel programs in front of me.

If you made it this far, then I thank you for any feedback.

Sincerely,
Ryder
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Davies
Posts: 5081
Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:37 pm
Location: Edmonton, AB

Re: Real or House Rule to determine Force from the Mass Rank

Post by Davies »

Red Ryder wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 8:23 pm I may be overthinking it,
If you ever find yourself wondering if this is so, it is almost certainly so. It is definitely the case in this instance.
"I'm sorry. I love you. I'm not sorry I love you."
Shock
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Joined: Fri Nov 04, 2016 8:27 pm
Location: Connecticut USA

Re: Real or House Rule to determine Force from the Mass Rank

Post by Shock »

If you want speed to be a factor, I would add speed to the mass rank to determine the rank needed to stop it.
Red Ryder
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2020 1:09 am

Re: Real or House Rule to determine Force from the Mass Rank

Post by Red Ryder »

Right as usual Davies. :)

Thanks for the suggestion, Shock. I hadn't considered that.
That is interesting because 700 mph is speed rank 9 using the Speed = distance - time formula.
9 speed + 14 mass = 23.
That works because even with a move object rank 22, it was going to be tough to stop, but I had done the math with rank 23 and it was much more manageable, so that lines up.

I will suggest that and see if it can be used as a much shorter rule of thumb.

Thanks as always for the suggestions.
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