How do I translate body, strength, or whatever into an amount of force a metahuman can withstand without being pushed back?

Example:
Lets say a suicidal troll adept decides to rip a jet engine off it's test mount to direct the roughly 1500lbs of thrust at incoming bad guys. How many points of rooting would he need so that he doesn't just get carried away? Theoretically of course...

The rules very explicitly already adress this problem, under the header of Knockdown on the bottom of page 151, SR4. I goes pretty much like this: if the damage of an attack > the receiver's Body, he gets knocked prone. There are modifiers, like Water and Blast spells add their Force to damage for checking for knockdown, but that's the gist of it.

Foot spikes help to resist knockdown, and I believe there's an adept power that helps to resist knockdown as well.

Trolls weigh about 500 pounds, so he is resisting basically 3* the force of gravity to direct the thrust.

Or to visualize more easily, he is trying to wall walk on a wall built on a planet with gravity 3 times as great as Earth's.

Even adding some significant extra weight for the jet engine itself, I think this is beyond the ability of the power at max rating to handle.

ok, I was being a bit silly with that example. What I am looking for is a translation of force resisted verus strength or body. For a better example, there are rules for lifting & carrying that say for each point of strength you can lift 10kgs without a test, then can increase that with strength + body test. Now say there is a wall with a piston on the back and some metahuman has to hold it back. How would I determine how much force the metahuman can hold back without simply being pushed back or knocked down.

Another example to help clarify: Some fool at the stuffer shack took up 2 parking spaces, so you get your troll buddy to go over and push the car sideways so you can get the good spot. With said troll's strength and body, will he be able to push the given weight of the car to make room or will he just look like an idiot while his feet slide in place?

I don't imagine straight strength would do the trick because all the strength in the world wouldn't help if you can't stand your ground. The adept power rooting (SM p.179) states that the adept can become an immovable object and adds +1 body for knockdown tests. Wouldn't this also apply to being able to apply more force without being pushed back? At what point would rooting fail and the adept simply slide back anyway?

I hope this helps a bit, I think I added more questions than clarification...

If you can be assumed to lift/carry a certain amount without a test, you should be able to push/pull a certain amount. now, one can generally push/pull more than they can carry, as it is more of a isometric activity, i would say 3-4 times what they can carry.

The issue in the examples given is not so much the strength and mass of the pusher as the purchase his legs can get on the ground. Here's a typically Canadian example:

In the summer, I pushed my mother's Buick almost 100 yards to get it into a position where a tow truck could get at it easily. In the winter, I had a devil of a time getting my neighbour's Toyota 1 or two feet ahead, off the ice patch on which it was spinning wheels, as I too had my feet on slush and ice.

I would think your Troll would do next to nothing to the wall with the piston until he was pushed back far enough to be able to brace himself against the opposite wall.

Same thing, convert the piston to a jack and determine how much weight it can lift. Things under pressure are pretty good at moving objects. If you figure a car weighs 3000 lbs and sits in contact with the ground on four patches of 6" x 7" tire, about 20 psi of air in the tires will be enough to drive on (probably not wise to do though.) Does this mean 20 psi is about Strength 30? I don't know, but if I had the wall with the piston, I would try to figure out what amount of weight the piston could lift and then make the PC lift that weight to hold back the wall. Figure small hydraulic jacks are rated to lift at least 2000 pounds. For $30 you can go to a hardware store and get a 12 ton jack.


I have had some real life experience with this one. It is hard to slide the vehicle sideways because of the friction, so it is usually easier to lift and slide one end at a time. Figure 500-600 lbs is needed to be lifted. On snow or ice, it is a lot easier to slide the car sideways as there is less friction to overcome and no opposing lateral force.


You need to approach it like a Physics problem and apply force vectors. It is a bit tougher to figure out than just lifting vertically when the opposing force is lateral.

"Size matters not."
-- Yoda

"Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, the Size of your gun DOES matter"
-- Mr. Freeze

Are there no rules in the Athletics skill for how much you can pull/carry? Assuming there aren't specific rules for it already, I'd allow an athletics test to get you some additional dice in addition to some combination of your body/strength dice.

There were some in Rigger 3 about towing.

There were rules for lift and carry in SR3 too.
One could carry strength x10, lift strength x20 and benchpress strength x30 i think. And on bench pressing, you got one light stun wound every body number of turns which could not be resisted.
yes, this means a STR15 Troll can benchpress 450 kilo. Sounds about right eh?

The point about towing in R3 is it has the forces moving along the correct vectors as the posters question. They had quantified what a certain strength could move laterally.

See R3.64 for where it begins.