Quite often I see people making jokes about how "Such and Such" would do "Such and Such" just because they don't like "Such and Such". One of the primary foci of this is the twilight series, with many jokes of alucard, blade, etc. To be fun, I often play the devil's advocate, but often people don't really realize just how overpowered the characters from that series are! ....so the other day, on a whim while doing my math homework, I decided to calculate out the rough strength of a twilight vampire, and show, once and for all, THE TRUTH.

I looked around, and apparently nobody else has done this. I wonder why.

Anyways, let's start with the basic assumption; in one of the books, there is a force applied to one of the characters arms via arm wrestling. As this is going on, this character speculates that the force being applied is roughly equal to a cement truck going down a highway. Hardly a precision statement, but it's something concrete(heh, heh...no?) that we can work with.

So we start out with the basic facts: Firstly, an average cement truck, when fully laden, weighs roughly 70000 lbs. Since american measurement systems are crap, lets first convert that into kilograms: 31751.4659 kilograms. Cool! Next, we'll make a rough estimate of the speed this object is traveling. On highways speeds can often be 75 mph or so, and cars often go 5-10 mph over that. However, we'll be conservative, and set it at a nice even 60 mph. Again, miles(ugh), so we change that into a more mathematical 26.9224 m/s.

So far we have:

31751.5 kg going 26.9 m/s.

Next, we convert that into energy! (1/2) * (31751.5) * (26.9)^2= 12684273.3808 Joules of energy!

Now for those of you who don't know, a joule is defined as the energy it takes to lift one kg 10 cm off the ground. Now, assuming the length of MY forearm(45.72cm), that means that a twilight vampire could, while lying down, with one arm, levering at roughly the worst possible angle of fulcrum the body has, lift 2774337.9 kg! (2.7 million, for those who cant read numbers without commas).

In addition to this, you have to remember that this energy is distributed over an area the size of a palm. I don't know about other people, but my palm is about 7 cm across, and roughly square, leading to a rough area of 49 square cm. This means that their skin can take roughly 250000 kg of force per square centimeter, essentially making them completely invincible!

Of course, this still doesn't show the absolute strength of one of these characters. For that, we need to go find something a bit more complex stuff, but at the moment the internet is failing me.

Regardless, the most a human can lift with their entire body is about 1000 lbs, at the absolute maximum of human performance. A twilight vampire can lift 2774x that much with one arm, with one of the worst levers the body has to offer. Four of them could probably play tetherball with an aircraft carrier.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. But now you know.

If you are going to write a second Twilight Fanfic, throw yourself off a cliff first.

Nah, my first one gets so many reviews I might as well keep it going.

In any case, I still haven't gotten to the reveal that they're actually an alien space marine zombie apocalypse, or to their telekinetic abilities, or to the galactic alien invasion, or to when the Great Old Ones are the cause of the original lycanthropy.

I've got this awesome scene planned out with a 2 story tall Cthulhuian Werewolf rampaging through seattle...should be pretty epic.

*facepalm*

To put this into comparison, this level of strength means that a single twilight vampire would be able to go (physically) head to head with comic book characters such as Thanos and The Hulk(not enraged). When other powers came to fore, it would probably change a lot, but still...amazing how such a limited author created such overpowered things with essentially no effort, hmmmm?

This is mindblowing .

Redo this with momentum. When objects come to rest through collision, it's the impulse that matters. You refer to "X kilos of force" but kilos are a unit of mass, not force.

Anyway, your conclusion is correct.

I don't quite follow, sorry. Math isn't really my field, per-say, but i've had people tell me something like this before. Could you point out what I need to change?

You read twilight? man... *respect-o-meter hits the ground*

You obviously never read my last thread on the subject

CAUTION: (IM)MATURE CONTENT: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=47693

I don't think all of the force of the cement truck will be applied the instant of collision. Wouldn't it be like a paper ball that squishes itself in?

The energy argument is not a good one if you want to measure this kind of strength. Energy arguments are useful when you don't care how long the experiment takes. Lifting a weight from the floor to your waist takes the same amount of energy if you do it in 1 second or 10.

What you're interested in measuring is the vampire's ability to exert a given force over a given timeframe. It would be absolutely unimpressive if I told you that I stopped the truck by pushing on it over the course of several hours. That is the concept of impulse.

Impulse (momentum) = mass x velocity = Force x time

That's shorthand for Newton's second law of motion. In order for the vampire to stop the cement truck in one second, his body must withstand an average force of 31751 x 27 kg m/s^2, or about 850,000 Newtons. I don't have precise numbers on what a human can withstand, but apparently about 10 gees applied uniformly to a human's back is about the limit, which is roughly 10,000 Newtons. So the vampire's body is probably at least 100 times stronger than a human's.

Calculating Impulse would probably be a good idea, but I lack the mathematical backing to do that sort of thing.

However, the basic assumption is that the strength being applied is constant, and constantly equalling that of a cement truck moving at 60 mph. Perhaps a better way to put it would be the strength required to accelerate a cement truck to 60 mph in one push, thought that still has difficulties based on the time used to accelerate it to that speed.

Even more annoyingly, I believe I'm correct in assuming instant acceleration=infinite strength, which obviously makes no sense. But since we have no textual basis for exactly how long it takes, it's extremely difficult to accurately predict. Again, since i'm no math major, I have difficulty thinking of concepts that could accurately describe mass times velocity without a time involved.

Calculating impulse is just as easy as calculating kinetic energy. I did it for you...

You speak of "strength [...] equalling that of a cement truck moving at 60 mph." You are literally talking about momentum there. In other words, your intuition is correct but your approach is wrong. You are correct in saying that we are making some assumption about the force being constant, which it obviously wouldn't be in practice. What I found above is the average instantaneous force required to bring the truck to rest in 1 second. That means that while the actual force may have varied, there was a moment where it was at least as great as the average I found, so this gives us a lower bound on the vampire's strength. And by the way, this is completely identical to the reverse problem of bringing the truck to speed from rest.

Finally, it's also true that we don't know how long it took the truck to stop. I picked 1 second as a baseline but if the event was longer or shorter than that you can just multiply my result by the factor. So if it only took 0.1 sec to stop the truck then the vampire is 10x stronger than my estimate.