So I’m listening to the midnight sun audiobook and Edward states that he ran back to Bella’s house from Port Angeles faster than the drive home. Specifically, he got to her house in minutes.
I know vampires running faster than cars is a somewhat established lore point but just how fast is that?
The distance between Port Angeles and Forks is approx 56 miles (90km) according to google.
When people say minutes without a qualifying number they usually mean less than 10.
So let’s just say 9 mins because I genuinely have no idea, man could have meant 4.
That’s a pace of 10km/min or 600km/hr
(That is approx half the speed of sound, around the average cruising speed of a passenger jet)
Based on the lack of sonic boom description I’m gonna assume he took at least 5 mins to get to Bella.
But this speed is still fast enough to create a subsonic wave. When an object is travelling faster than Mach 0.3 air can’t move out of the way fast enough as instead starts to compress (massive oversimplification I know) creating a pressure wave.
This also heats the air, though maybe this is countered by how cold the vampires are? Idk is there a lore average temperature for them?
So now I wanna see what a vampire running heat map would look like but that’s tangential.
So back to lore…
Edward mentions he ran through the forest to get to Bella’s home. How is it that there is not a straight path of parallel trees bent away from each other leading directly from Port Angeles to Bella?
Apologies for the ramblings of an unemployed uni student procrastinating an assignment 😅.
If anyone better at physics than me can improve these estimates please comment I find it endlessly entertaining to consider the practical consequences of the vampire powers.