>>Ranma wasn't moving forward nearly as fast as you'd like to think she was.
>And if they were moving as slowly as you'd like to think they were,
>they'd have fallen to the ground the instant after they jumped.  Gravity
>is a harsh mistress.

I'd like to point out (not because it favors one side of the debate or the
other but just to keep the physics clear), that, neglecting secondary
nonlinear effects like air resistance, one can treat the horizontal and
vertical components of motion of a body in free fall as independent
variables. So the time it takes someone to come back down in a jump depends
only on their vertical velocity vector, or, I think equivalently, on the
maximum height that they reach in their jump.

One's trajectory will basically be a parabola. To get the maximum range in
a single jump for a given initial velocity, I think, one wants to start
with a velocity vector at a 45 degree angle. (I haven't tried to compute
what kind of trade-offs there'd be, say, in running in a few large steps vs
many short ones.)

Trying to apply mathematical physics to Ranma 1/2 tends to break down at
some point: it looks like characters have an almost superhuman ability to
jump (though the physics isn't a strange as say, Road Runner cartoons).

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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu