Submitted by WoollerMan2003 t3_z8b3a6 in WritingPrompts
zeropointcorp t1_iycv571 wrote
Reply to comment by GrunkleStanwhich in [WP] You are constantly mocked for having such a weird superpower by all the other heroes. “The power to make anything into perfectly cooked soup”… One day, a massive meteor is barreling towards earth. As all the other heroes are panicking, you wait perfectly calm, at the impact zone, bowl in hand. by WoollerMan2003
Does his power conserve inertia or not? Because converting the meteor to gazpacho wouldn’t significantly reduce its mass (I mean it would a bit, because most meteors are definitely going to be denser than gazpacho, but even so…). If the meteor is a planet killer - say, the size of the one that did for the dinosaurs - you’re talking:
Vol = 4/3 * πr^3 = 4/3 * π(500000)^3 = 5.2 x 10^17 cm^3
And assuming the density of gazpacho is the same as water, at room temperature that’s going to be 5.2 x 10^11 tonnes of gazpacho, and if inertia is conserved, you’re looking at about 1.2 x 10^16 MJ of energy if it hits at 25000km/h. That’s about 10,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent. Magnus’s “mega-ton” punch ain’t gonna do shit.
GrunkleStanwhich t1_iyd4c1h wrote
I gotta be honest with you. As impressive as this is...his power is just soup. And Magnus's power is to hit things as hard as the plot needs him to.
Ruadhan2300 t1_iydautb wrote
There's an XKCD for this.
What if a rainstorm dropped all its water in one big droplet...
Spoiler-alert, The answer is somewhere on the order of a megaton-range nuclear blast for half a cubic kilometer of water.
A dinosaur-killing meteor a dozen times bigger turned into more-or-less-water would clear the soil down to the bedrock for tens of miles, and flatten everything for thousands of miles radius, flash-flood half a continent, move mountains..
And that's assuming it started at 0 velocity a few kilometers up.
If it keeps any of its momentum it's just going to be worse.
Tomagathericon t1_iyddr2i wrote
If we are trying to be real here, then Souperior would have never even been able to touch the meteor, and even if he was, the damage would have already been done by the time the meteor is ~2.5 meters from impact.
When faced with stories like this, it's best to just accept it and enjoy the ride x)
Selkie_Love t1_iyd1txn wrote
The momentum delta is important as well. Being hit by a pillow vs being hit with a sock full of rocks
hussiesucks t1_iyd3j0j wrote
Well yeah but soup is a liquid so the total force would be distributed over a longer period of time.
zeropointcorp t1_iyd4a32 wrote
I kind of feel that half a million megatonnes of soup traveling at Mach 20 isn’t going to give a shit about the distribution of force over the 0.24 seconds it will take to punch through the earth’s atmosphere.
hussiesucks t1_iyd4gld wrote
But it wasn’t going at Mach 20. In the story.
zeropointcorp t1_iyfcopo wrote
It’s a meteor. 25000km/h is at the lower end.
zackadiax24 t1_iyf3zu2 wrote
Exactly, even if it kills everyone at the impact zone as well as a few miles out destroy all life on the planet like the meteor would.
RollenXXIII t1_iydpftw wrote
science in story about superheroes/10
Thegrayman46 t1_iye6jy7 wrote
you forgot to factor air resistance and the effect on a liquid mass rather than a solid, also the thermal effect of surronding air currents now being able to affect the liquid mass. Its more than just velocity.
DaisyDuckens t1_iyek48r wrote
This so why I never finished my science fiction story. I get so caught up in the science part I lose the fun.
Thegrayman46 t1_iyf917e wrote
science is fun, just not school science, real world science...imagine the soup tsunami, hurricane that was created
zeropointcorp t1_iyfd9c9 wrote
The soup punches through the atmosphere in 0.24 seconds. Air resistance is ignorable. Air currents aren’t going to do shit.
superstrijder15 t1_iye76n3 wrote
well perfectly cooked soup has to be edible afterwards. Can't be edible after slamming into Earth at that kind of speed.
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