Gravity Suit

Description

The gravity suit is another of Samus’ traversal abilities and definitely one of her most useful ones at that. Unlike the other abilities, I discussed previously, the gravity suit has no offensive capabilities. However, what it lacks in firepower, it makes up for in utility. The gravity suit allows Samus to traverse through water and other movement-restricting environments as if she were moving on land. Furthermore, the suit improves her overall defense and provides her with better visibility in these environments if need be, all while giving her suit a nice purple finish. Needless to say, it is often a necessity throughout her many adventures as they often involve underwater traversal.

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Process

To analyze the math behind the gravity suit, we need to know what it’s doing that allows Samus to move through water so freely so that we know exactly what we’re calculating for. I had a few ideas at first, however, one in particular, stood out to me. Based on my previous look at the screw attack, we know that Samus’ suit has no issues outputting large amounts of electrical energy. With that in mind, I had the hypothesis that her suit is performing electrolysis on the water around her.

For anyone unfamiliar, electrolysis is a way of inducing chemical decomposition of a substance by running an electric current through it. Simply put, my idea is that Samus’ suit is sending enough electricity into the water around her to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gases. I have had a few counters to that idea, such as the fact that such a process would create a large number of bubbles, given that Samus would be splitting a lot of water in almost an instant wherever she stands. My counter to that is that implementing such a mechanic would not be practical and would likely make the game arguably unplayable. Another argument that I have had is the fact that Samus can move just as freely through lava which would not simply split into gases when electrolyzed. While this had me stumped at first, I remembered that the movement physics in the water and lava are identical to each other with and without the gravity suit, meaning that they are both the same density. Therefore, the lava in Super Metroid is in fact not lava or at least isn’t of the same composition as lava/magma on earth (which is far denser). I hypothesize that the “lava” is actually some sort of super-heated acid, as it would be about as dense as water and could be electrolyzed in the same way.

At the end of the day it should be remembered that this is all theoretical, the exact workings of Samus’ various abilities were almost certainly never considered by the game developers and likely never will be. I addressed these concerns here in order to support my reasoning for my theory behind this ability, as it is not as straightforward as the others I have investigated.

Moving on from that, now that we have the theory behind the ability, we can begin the math. In order for Samus to move freely, at minimum, all the water she is displacing around her would have to be electrolyzed. To calculate how much water is being electrolyzed at any given moment we need to know how much space Samus is taking up. To do this, I took a look at her sprite once again from a couple of different perspectives. Using the images you see here, I split the sprite into a series of rectangular prisms and recorded pixel counts for length, width, and height of different sections of her body. After the painstaking process of pixel counting, I took the volumes of each section I recorded and added them up for a total volume of approximately 0.46 cubic meters (or 460 liters). At first all seemed well, until I verified what the approximate volume of a person would be with Samus’ in-suit mass and height.

According to Sciencing.com, the density of the human body is approximately 1010 kg/m^3. Since density is equal to mass divided by volume (p=m/v). Therefore, rearranging that to solve for volume, a person weighing the same as Samus in her suit (90 kg) would take up approximately 0.089 cubic meters (89 liters) of space. Factoring in her massive shoulder pads which would each add another 4 liters (about the volume of a human head as they are roughly the size of her head) still only puts us at 97 liters. Needless to say, this caused a bit of confusion for myself given the staggering difference, so naturally, I simply decided to use both volumes and compare the results for the sake of my own curiosity.

Final Calculations

Now that I have the volume, all that is left, is to determine how much energy it would take to split that volume of water. According to a document on the website of Ohio University, the enthalpy of formation of water is approximately -286 kJ/mol. This means that it would take approximately 286 kilojoules to split 1 mole of water. Since all we have is volume in liters, we will need to convert to moles. The density of water is approximately 1000 g/L. Therefore, we simply need to multiply our volumes by 1000. To convert from grams to moles, we need the molar mass of water (18.015 g/mol). the number of moles of a substance is equal to mass of the substance divided by its molar mass (n=m/mm). Substituting in our smaller volume (97 L) results in approximately 5,384.4 moles and substituting in our larger volume (460 L) gives us approximately 25,534.3 moles.

Results

multiplying both values by 286 kJ/mol gives us our final values of approximately 1,539,938 kJ and 7,302,810 kJ respectively. Either way you spin it, the theoretical output of the gravity suit at any given time is more than a gigajoule. The smaller value alone is more energy than 368 kilograms of TNT, that’s almost 2.5 times as much energy as the ice beam (154 kg of TNT). The larger extreme of 7.3 gigajoules would be equal to approximately 1.75 tonnes of TNT (1750 kg). By far, without a doubt the most powerful of Samus’ abilities I’ve had the pleasure of analyzing and it isn’t even a weapon. On top of all of this, she has tons of other abilities in her arsenal with ridiculous capabilities which she can use while still being extremely agile. While she may only be human, Samus Aran is definitely not someone you would ever want to mess with.