Comment on at least no more trolley problems
Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks agoThe idea is he's straining so hard because he's trying to use the exact amount of force he needs to stop the train without harming anyone inside. Too much force on the train and everyone in the train gets injured or killed, too little and it doesn't stop in time to save the kid, and I believe in this one he didn't have the option of just grabbing the kid because he would have been hurt too badly from the sudden acceleration.
If you've ever tried to assemble something where you've gotta snap together two pretty fragile pieces it's a similar idea. You absolutely can generate way more than the force needed to get the job done, the difficulty is in having the pieces survive the attempt.
I can tell you I have experienced it with models and computer components and you'd absolutely think I was arm wrestling a God with how much I was straining trying to push those parts together without breaking them.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
But then isn’t he accelerating the people on the train just as much?
Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Depends on the time in which he had to do the deceleration. I did some more looking and I guess that this page comes from Action Comics 1000 from a short bit where the current iteration of Superman is getting deja vu like flashes of things that this iteration of the character has not done but were rather part of the overall character's history.
So this likely came from a very early iteration of Superman that A) wasn't nearly as strong or fast, and B) that the situation most likely _ began _ with attempting to stop a runaway train from crashing. Then while attempting to stop the train, a child wandered into the path of the train and Clark couldn't exactly let go of the train to move the kid out of harm's way.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
If he can decelerate the passengers in the train non lethally, he by definition also had time to accelerate the kid nonlethally. Supes has muscles for brains.
Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Not if he was already pushing the train when the kid entered the equation. If this is an earlier version of Superman as this seems to be and he was already pushing the train when the kid came into the picture, then the only way for him to accelerate off the train to grab the kid is if he pushes off the train. Which effectively creates the same "stopping the train too fast," problem.
SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one 5 weeks ago
There’s a whole locomotive between them to dampen the impact.
Same reason why modern cars are designed to crumple. It absorbs more of the impact before it reaches the people inside.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
So only the first ten or so cars will be scenes of unbelievable carnage. Meanwhile, he could have simply picked up the kid and cushioned him from the impact.
Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
So I did some more looking and it seems like this image is from a... basically a clip show of a "story" that's going through the history of Superman.
So in that context we're likely looking at a significantly less powerful Superman earlier in his history. Which also means that the situation was likely that the train itself was going to crash and he'd been pushing on it for much longer with the kid having wandered into the tracks while he was in the middle of stopping the train.
Hathaway@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Yes. In the opposite direction, gradually. It’s called deceleration. The mass of the train would spread the impact of Superman hitting and slowing it across the entire train, rather than the frame of a tiny human going from not very fast, to super man flying speed. At least that’s how I’m rationalizing it with rudimentary physics. I’m probably wrong.