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The person is superhuman. There is both magic and sci-fi involved in the setting. They have the physical strength required to accelerate to supersonic speeds. They have the ability to latch themselves to a surface for leverage and to disperse force over a wider area to lessen deformation of surfaces they push off of. They have the ability to cool the body through a combat suit and magical means to prevent overheating from the heat generated from movement.

What I’m after here is what would it feel like for someone to just move around and fight at supersonic speeds. Would it feel similar to subsonic speeds, or would the air feel denser like muddy or feel erratic? I saw that planes added specific things to ‘warn’ the air ahead of their travel path.

I need to clarify that I want to know if moving at supersonic speed would be different then just going really fast at subsonic speed, or if it would be very similar.

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  • $\begingroup$ K I’ll delete the other questions $\endgroup$
    – Woli
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 19:13
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. Note that I suspect it would be a lot like fighting against a fire hose. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 19:17
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    $\begingroup$ As someone who's been ziplining I can attest that the wind pushing against you is quite high! And its cold too! And loud! Exhilarating, but not exactly comfortable. $\endgroup$
    – Len
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 19:33
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    $\begingroup$ If they're moving at supersonic speeds near the ground, they're also going to be very unpopular. The "crack" noise from a whip is the tip of the whip breaking the sound barrier. Limbs and bodies doing the same thing cause the same effect, but much, much louder. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 23:17
  • $\begingroup$ @jdunlop It'd look cool, though. All the class breaking. All the ear drums shattering. Cars being tossed aside. Movie producers love that kind of stuff! $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 23:31

2 Answers 2

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For a person to move at supersonic speeds, they would need to speed up everything: Their mental capacity, perception, metabolism, heat dissipation, etc.

If you don't upgrade mental capacity, then you'll splat yourself against obstacles. If you don't upgrade perception, then your eyes will see the world as a confusing mish-mash of the last few things you've looked at, as if you were tripping really hard. If you didn't upgrade metabolism, you'd burn yourself out in less than a mile. You get the idea.

Thus, to do this, you have to do something functionally identical to increasing the rate at which the person's entire body experienced time, slowing everything down, comparatively speaking.

I did a treatment of what this would be like in my latest book, "Dystopia: Clempson Goes to Hell." In that book, one character's power is to adjust her relative speed through time. In chapter five, the main character gets to experience things from an accelerated perspective. Here are the main characteristics.

Speeds

Standard jogging speed is around 5 mph. If you think you can flat-out run under this much stress, you probably haven't done much running. The speed of sound is 767 mph, so if you experience an accelerated frame rate of x150, you will be able to jog at the speed of sound.

Air gets thicker

Air is roughly 1/250th as thick as water, so at 250:1 acceleration, you are experiencing air with the thickness of water, but without the buoyancy. Search for "running under water" for what this would look like. Breaking the sound barrier wouldn't be quite this bad. If you accelerated over 250:1, you'd basically be swimming in the air, and could become airborne, but you'd have to worm your way through the air, pushing it out of the way like a snake. (this is why I named that character "Serpentine")

Gravity drops

Gravity would pull you 1/150th as fast, but would have the same force. Standing still, your legs would be supporting the same weight, but you would take longer to fall. This means your grip on the ground would be poorer, so you'd have to lean into your run to get enough grip on the ground. Again, watch the "running under water" videos.

Light would be dim, and red-shifted

At the speed of sound, you'd be getting 1/150th as much light. If you're familiar with cameras, it would be like using a shutter speed 150x faster (14 settings on most cameras). Anyone who's studied high speed photography knows how this works. Due to red-shift, you'd be seeing far infra-red as your normal spectrum. Conversely, your body heat would be extreme UV and soft X-rays. At around 100:1, you could give a person radiation burns by standing next to them for too long.

Sound wouldn't exist

Just kidding. Hearing would be preserved far better than sight. Our vision only gives us a single doubling of wavelength, but our hearing can perceive closer to ten doublings. Thus high-pitched screeches would become low-pitched groans that last forever. At 150x, all sounds would be around 21 decibels quieter.

External impact

This is something that comic books get WAY wrong. They have silly things, like the Flash shifting between his fighting togs and normal person outfits so someone thinks there are two people standing in front of them. Nope.

You're imparting an immense amount of energy into the air. You have to move your weight in air out of the way every 200 feet or so. You'd make sonic booms anytime you reached for something. A whip crack is breaking the speed of sound with a chunk of air smaller than a cubic centimeter. Scale that up to an arm, and you're breaking eardrums. Scale it up to a whole body, and you're breaking walls.

If you're taking a casual stroll through an office, even at 50:1, you'd have a cloud of paper and dust behind you. Ignoring the sonic boom, your vacuum wake could still shatter windows, and would definitely knock people over.

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  • $\begingroup$ You commented on movement through thicker air, but not the effect on breathing. I wonder how you would inhale behind the shockwave, or how would you exhale into the shockwave for that matter. $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 0:50
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    $\begingroup$ how would light be dim? you can see from a plane just fine, also red shift would happen behind you, the stuff in front of you will be blue shifted, but even so the amount of shifting at mach 1 will be negligible I think $\endgroup$
    – jk.
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 12:25
  • $\begingroup$ @DKNguyen, Breathing would be a challenge. Even if you allow the speed of air to sync with the person, thus allowing them to breath normally, the exhalations would pile up in an area, resulting in a high-pressure zone of smothering carbon-dioxide. I gave my character a secondary superpower that scrubs CO2 on the way out. She still can't smoke while accelerated in a room because no ventilation system could manage that. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 15:16
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    $\begingroup$ You aren't going a sufficient fraction of lightspeed to have perceptible redshift. Also, in the high speed realm drag goes at the square of velocity. 120 mph gives drag approximately equal to your mass (spreadeagled skydiver), thus Mach 1 gives 40x that. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 18, 2023 at 1:06
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    $\begingroup$ @RobertRapplean Slowing your frame rate is the same thing we do with high speed cameras--see any color shifts there? $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 18, 2023 at 23:22
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The closest experience you can get of moving at supersonic speeds is moving in water, because when you do you are actually moving faster than the speed of sound in water.

Strictly speaking, in water you are moving faster than the velocity of propagation of shear waves, which is why you leave a V shaped trail behind, which looks very much like the sonic bang of a supersonic airplane.

The drag will be conspicuous, and any movement will put you at risk of being ripped off by the surpersonic flow. In fact I suspect that when Felix Baumgartner did his supersonic jump, he did a lot of training to keep a good control of his body and attitude in the airstream.

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    $\begingroup$ The speed of sound in Water is much higher than in air. 1,500 m/s vs 330 m/s $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 20:57
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    $\begingroup$ The speed of sound in water is 1480 metres per second (3310 miles per hour). I had no idea humans were such good swimmers! $\endgroup$
    – user20574
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 21:46
  • $\begingroup$ shear waves folks, not compression waves $\endgroup$
    – L.Dutch
    Commented Feb 23, 2023 at 3:36
  • $\begingroup$ The first paragraph says directly that humans can move in water faster than the speed of sound in water. This is grossly incorrect. And the second paragraph introduces the notion of "shear waves" in a liquid, which definitely needs an explanation; I have no idea what you mean, and as far as I know there is no such thing -- shear waves are elastic waves which can only appear in a solid. (But I am probably wrong, as fluid dynamics is way down on my list of interests; but it does need an explanation and a link.) $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented Feb 23, 2023 at 8:17
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    $\begingroup$ I upvoted this because it's the only rational answer. Moving at super speed through air would be similar to moving at "normal" speeds through water. Gaseous air would begin to be experienced like fluids. Remember the old adage that, given enough speed, hitting water is little different from hitting concrete? Yeah, more speed and atmosphere begins to be a problem. Like the space shuttle burning on reentry kind of problems. people downvoted this after reading only the first paragraph - when in reality it's the correct answer despite interpreting a phrase out of context. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Jul 17, 2023 at 20:54

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