Strength and the ICONS benchmarks

SYSTEM: ICONS

I went looking for this information because I was sure I had put it here, transported from my old LiveJournal account.

I had not. I looked up the numbers in 2013, and can no longer remember what, specifically, they represented. So this is ballpark only.

If you're playing ICONS, you're not really concerned with hard numbers, but I played Champions for years and years... So I went and dug up things that the Strength benchmark lists as an example. And these numbers make it easier to eyeball conversions from other systems.

In the spirit of casualness, I always rounded up (I mean, I have a heavy sack as 20 kg, and a couple of heavy sacks as 50 kg). Still, I figured folks might like the numbers. (ICONS does not necessarily map to the real world; it's not meant to. This is so you can make judgements on the fly.)

Some of it is just, what? Weight of a building—what kind of building? Since superhero stories generally take place in New York or a New York analogue, I used the weight bandied about for one of the World Trade Center buildings. Since the next entry is 2x107 bigger, I think that works.

Again: I have no idea if these numbers are even in the one significant figure accuracy, but hey...

Rank	Example	Mass (kg)	Comments
1	Heavy sack	20	Yes, kilograms. I'm Canadian.
2	Child	35
3	Couple of heavy sacks	50
4	Adult man	100
5	Motorcycle	200
6	Car	2000	These days, cars are much lighter than they used to be. But I used the old weight.
7	Tank	60000	I think I looked up the weight of an M1 Abrams for this.
8	Plane or train	5E5 (500 tons)	A fully-loaded freight train weighs much more than a passenger jet. I think I went with a train here. A Cessna would be vastly lighter and qualify as a plane, but you know that's not what they're talking about.
9	Building	5E8 (500 kilotons)	Empire State Building? Football stadium? Big, anyway.
10	Mountain	1E16 (Lots. A hundred million kilotons.)