While waiting for tropical storm Erika to hit my area later tonight (the center of the storm is expected to make landfall after 9:00 p.m.), I decided to try burt Artis’ Compass with (WWC) wind indicator (available on the marketplace) on one of my sailboats. To my surprise, I also found it works for regular avatar movements too. So here are some curious results of that alternate experiment.
- On average, an avatar walk at a speed of 6.2 to 6.4 kts, if done on an almost flat surface.
- An avatar can reach a speed of 9.6 to 9.9 kts when running on said flat surface (on my test I reached an average of 10.4 kts going downhill).
- An avatar flies at 31.1 kts on a horizontal direction.
- Free fall speed seems to max out at 99.9 kts (if you don’t hit an unforeseen sky platform on your way down first). It could well have been that the instrument can’t measure faster speeds, I don’t know.
According to Wikipedia, a knot is “a unit of speed equal to one nautical mile (1.852 km) per hour, approximately 1.151 mph.” Later on, it points out that:
The speeds of vessels relative to the fluids in which they travel (boat speeds and air speeds) are measured in knots. For consistency, the speeds of navigational fluids (tidal streams, river currents and wind speeds) are also measured in knots. Thus, speed over the ground (SOG) (ground speed (GS) in aircraft) and rate of progress towards a distant point (“velocity made good”, VMG) are also given in knots.
A person’s walking or running speed is not measured in knots, by the way (I’m sure you knew that already). I’m just giving these fun facts because they were the measures given by the thingy I was testing, and because it was also interesting to compare it to the speed of the sailboat I was trying out (which speed at 15 kts winds tended to average 6 to 10 kts, depending on the direction of sail).