izaaz101 on 14 April 2008
| alpha_dk said: Well, if we take Wikipedia's word for it, Sonic can travel faster than Mach 1 (which explains the name Sonic). This means he travels at about 300 meters per second. The vast majority of bullets do not break the sound barrier; that means that the vast majority of Master Chief's weapons would be worthless. However, there do exist Sniper rifles that shoot bullets at faster than the speed of sound; this is ideal for snipers, because the bullets will hit their targets before the target hears them shot. If we assume that the Halo sniper rifle shoots bullets at faster than the speed of sound, then we have a single weapon that is able to potentially hit sonic if he is running away from it. This means that it will fall back to maneuverability vs. Master Chief's aiming and reflexes. I have been unable to find documentation as to Sonic's maneuverability, so I will here do some calculations to figure it out. We assume Master Chief has normal human vision; that is, his eyes take in about 24 frames per second. Actually, for the sake of argument let's assume he is a superhuman that sees 100 frames per second, for a full 180° of vision. This means that in order to get an accurate gauge on Sonic's movement, he would have to be within the same 180° arc twice in a row (well, really more, but lets give MC a chance here). That means that Sonic would have moved less than pi * r (where r is his distance from MC) in 1/100th of a second. This gives us the equation V_Sonic/100 ≤ pi * r. Solving for r, we get V_s/100/pi for how far Sonic has to be from MC in order for MC to even have a chance at seeing him (in meters). This gives us a radius of about 1 meter where MC would not even be able to see Sonic, much less react to his presence. If we assume that MC might require, say, 10 frames in a row to react to something (that is a reaction time of .1s; more than reasonable considering the average of *VERY* simple reaction tests I've seen (as in, ones that don't require aiming a gun and are just simple button presses, etc) seem to average about .15-.20s), then solving for R we get about 10meters out that MC can't even begin to react to Sonic. All this leads me to believe that MC wouldn't stand a chance. Sonic would wipe the floor with him and not even be remotely in danger at any time. And if anyone seriously thinks Mario would have a chance vs. Sonic, I have some real estate on the moon to sell you  |
Who knew that taking physics in high school/university would actually come in handy, and allow me to understand an online debate about video game characters?
