Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related FFQ: How fast can Sman run?

So he turns into a blur, but if it were to be quantified... Any idea how many miles per hour or whatever might be the best unit of measurement?

IIRC, one of the first powers to manifest was speed [besides invulnerability]. At 10, little Clarkie Kent would be how fast? If he was *really* fast at that age? Fast even for an up and coming superhero?

TIA .
Carol [who is working on her NaNo fic]

well...
the 100m dash in the Olympics and other international athletics events in currently completed in under 10 seconds...

so I guess for a ten year old this alone would be pretty amazing
or even faster if you wanted???


and this is sprinting too,
so for longer distances one may need to adjust this speed etc.

Well.. he's faster than a speeding bullet.

I found these for you, they might help, because they do list speeds and stuff. I'd read them all, but I've got a terrible migraine - hopefully they contain some sort of info you can use:

Faster than a Speeding Bullet
Speed of a Bullet
How Fast can Superman Fly?

So if a speeding bullet is about 1100mph or 18.33mpm [I'm ignoring the 3rd article which gets into the whole how long it would take Sman to hear you thing ] and the speed of sound is 770mph but we only ever hear 1 sonic boom so he has to fly between 770mph and 1540mph [12.8mpm and 25.6mpm] right [or we'd hear two sonic booms]? He could run from my house to church in just over a minute . Or from Metropolis [using NY as a base]to Topeka, KS [nearish Smallville?] in an hour or less [1253 miles].

We often in fic, have him arriving in Smallville in a matter of minutes. The current fic I'm working on has him flying from Metropolis to Colorado in about 10 minutes [just over 2100 miles] which now seems fantastical - but then again, the whole thing is fantastical . That would be 210mpm or 11xs faster than he can run. Is that even reasonable? Perhaps something about his aura or something makes it more plausible without extra sonic booms?

Okay - back to the running thing... if a grown up Superman can run 18mpm, how many can a 10yo Clark Kent run? 9mpm? 2mpm? .5mpm [which would be an extremely respectable 2 minute mile]? I had him at 2mpm but... I want to be at least quasirealistic as much as a fic with a flying man can be in this area anyway.

Thanks!
Carol

We've discussed this before. You can probably find the threads.

But when you get down to it, there's only one consistent standard I know of: He can run just fast enough to make it in the nick of time.

Bullets move at very different speeds, depending on what kind they are and what they were shot out of. Even a high-powered rifle shoots a bullet a lot slower than Superman goes. Take the speed you pick, then figure out how long it'd take to go from, say, NYC to Wichita, Kansas. The bullet sounds fast at first, but when you consider all those miles, it turns out to be much slower than you'd expect.

As for 10-year-old Clark... we have no way of knowing. He developed his powers gradually, but we have very few canonical specifics. At 10, he'd probably be faster, stronger, and tougher than any human his age. But not as fast, strong, or tough as he would be at his peak, when we saw him. Exactly where along that scale he'd be is up to you, and, at that age, might well change from one week to the next.

Okay back to answering my own question ...

At least as far as the grown up Sman flying goes... I think it's in WHALTTA when Lois is saying she wants two or three things and he flies out the window to get them... She says something about snow from the Andes [no payment there like the Swiss chocolate]. He takes off, and while I don't have the ep in front of me, he can't be gone more than 30 seconds TOPS, probably less than that. According to the ruler on Google Earth, from LaPaz, Bolivia to Orange County, NY is 4000 miles. So an 8000 mile round trip was accomplished in 30 seconds [for the sake of discussion]. That's 267mps give or take [which is considerably slower than the speed of light at 186,282.397mps]. That's 961200 mph for good ole Supes... No wonder he could reach Nightfall so quickly!

Anyway... some ramblings... And of course, the snow didn't melt at those astronomical speeds...
Carol

Or with adrenaline... Hmmm...
Thanks Paul.
Carol

I;m loving this thread

not just because I'm actually learning about the speed of sound and sound barriers with Mach speeds etc.

but because I love it when I see Imperial vs metric measurements....


One thing I find IRONIC about the US is their insistence in using imperial measurements (miles/Gallon/Fahrenheit etc.), which is ironic due to their historical schism with England (i.e. the W.o. Independence) and subsequent affiliation with the French (who invented the metric system)

this irony can be seen clearly with the US Billion (7 digits) vs the UK Billion (12 digits) as this is linked to the metric and decimal systems.... however they insist on using the imperial measurements


Only added this aside because I noticed that although the rest of you wrote in terms of Miles p/min
I wrote in terms of Metres p/second
and yet we all used a lower-case m to represent both Miles and Metres

Beethoven
who has a strange suspicion that one of either Miles or Metres SHOULD be abbreviated with an uppercase letter in order to differentiate... and I have a susspicion that it would be Miles as I think when comparing "mpm vs. Mpm" (when minute is abbreviated to m not min) then Mpm looks better...
however as usual I am not bothered to look this up so could very easily be wrong

He's always just fast enough, except when he tries to save his parents from a car accident.

As for the whole sonic boom thing. If you go twice the speed of sound, there is no second sonic boom. This is because "Sound is a mechanical disturbance
with limited speed. When an object
reaches seven-hundred-and-forty
miles per hour, it catches up with
its own noise and the piled-up
energy takes the form of a violent
shockwave called a sonic boom." Since sound only goes at 740 mph, only when you pass the speed getting faster, or slower, does the sonic boom happen.

In addition to the WHALTTA, in the Pilot it took him about 8 seconds to reach the Metropolis spaceport from Kansas.

BTW: Anyone ever wondered why someone would launch a shuttle so far off the equator?

Michael

Hmmm... doesn't the shuttle make a couple of sonic booms? Okay - that's because the nose makes one and the tail makes one...

Of course, the Delorean makes three, but that's a whole different issue .

And poor Clark Kent who loses his parents was only ten . Imagine the guilt he might feel... especially as he gets older and realizes what he can do 'full grown'.
Carol

Then again, in DTOSC (3.06) he says to L: