|
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Spider-Man 2005 is out,
written by Spiderfan's Al Sjoerdsma and a bunch of his fellow webheads from the
site. Al came to me for assistance with some heights and weights because of my
extensive training as a clown with the travelling carnivals guessing people's
physical attributes. Or perhaps it's my professional engineering license which
grants me the right to estimate the earth's gravitational pull on anatomically
exaggerated cartoon characters? Whatever the case, because nobody asked, I
present for you the calculations that went into the weight estimate for the
vibranium skinsuit of the world famous nerd, Charlie Weinerman.
I first had to make some underlying assumptions. We estimated Charlie Weinerman
weighing 140 lbs. I found a statistic online that the surface area of skin is
somewhere around 1.6 m². I wasn't sure if that would be too high or too low for
5' 7" Charlie, so I just left it. I then assumed the thickness of the skinsuit
would be 1 mm (0.001 m). Multiplying the surface area by the thickness produces
a volume of 0.0016 m³ of vibranium.
Next, I needed the density of the metal. Steel has a density around 7850 kg/m³.
I looked up vibranium and adamantium in the old Official Handbooks of the
Marvel Universe. The only clue I could find was that Captain America's shield,
a mixture of adamantium and vibranium, weighs 12 lbs and has a 2.5' diameter. I
know there's a curvature to the shield, but for simplicity, I assumed it was a
disc about 1/20th of an inch thick. That would yield a volume of 0.000578 m³.
At 12 lbs (5.44 kg), the density of Cap's shield is 9398 kg/m³. I opted for the
density of Cap's shield to approximate pure vibranium. At a density of 9398
kg/m³ for a skinsuit volume of 0.0016m³, the additional weight on Charlie's body
is 15.04 kg or 33 lbs. Therefore, Charlie's weight with the skinsuit is 173
lbs! Class dismissed!
|