[Torg] Jumping in Torg

[travisjhall at optusnet.com.au]

Kansas Jim <ksjim at sdc.org> wrote:
> 
> Benjmain Grant wrote:
> 
> > In other words, if the superhero goes a vastly shorter distance than 
> the
> > projectile, and the reason is *because* he has superpowers, that is 
> bizarre,
> > even for supers.
> 
> <shrug> Show me a speedster in a comic book long jumping thousands of
> feet and I'll reconsider.

Actually, I'm fairly sure I have seen the Flash leap great distances by running off a ramp in comics (though I can't cite issue and page because I've only ever read borrowed DC comics, and it would have been a decade ago that I read this). What we don't see from the speedsters is long jumps off a level surface.

(And it also depends on the nature of the superspeed. A character who does it by affecting time should fall faster as well as run faster, so shouldn't get superhuman leaps off a ramp.)

And you know something, you won't see that from a car, either. That whole "limit value for a car" bit? No, it doesn't make sense. Cars don't jump at all without a ramp, so the ramp has to be more than just a +1 to the limit value. It enables the jump.

It seems to me that a better approach would be to simply apply physics. A formula for horizontal distance travelled by a projectile is d = -v^2 sin(2A) / a, where d is the distance travelled, v is the launch speed, A is the angle of projection, and a is the acceleration due to gravity. -10m/s^2 is likely close enough for acceleration due to gravity for our purposes. (Negative because downwards.)

Which gives a simple form of d = v^2 sin(2A) / 10.

Disregarding air resistance, of course.

Plugging in the Mythbusters figures, that gives a jump of about 260 feet - significantly more than the Mythbusters achieved, but given the inaccuracies of Mythbusters' methods, air resistance, and other factors that undoubtedly affected the experiment, that's not surprising, and it's in the ballpark.

Yeah, I know, it means you need a calculator during play, but frankly I think it's simple enough to tap in that it'd be faster than the more complex and obscure Torg rules. The sine function never exceeds 1, too, so you can use v^2/10 as a quick estimate of the absolute max jump for a moving object, and eyeball downwards from there.

Travis Hall