P5 7 Sailing around at the speed of sound

Abstract

In this paper we attempted to use a simplified fluid dynamics model to determine how fast the video game character Sonic would need to run in order to run on water, like he does in his movie Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Although our results suggested that the scene is realistic, the velocity required to run on water came out as 2.6 ms−1 - unrealistically slow. This lead us to question our models and conclude that the methods we used were far too simple for something as complex as running on water.