Colonies on the moon are inevitable; and when that happens the menfolk will eventually require football to maintain their delicate sensibilities and equilibrium.

Football on the moon will be a bit challenging since the gravity is one sixth that of Earth.

The GROGco Sports Division has been hardly at work designing a special head-to-toe skintight suit individually tailored to each mans precise dimensions. It weighs exactly six times what each player weighs. So, if a player weighs 228 lbs **(103.42 kg) here on Earth, this flesh colored suit will ensure he weighs exactly 1,368 lbs **(620.51 kg) prior to putting on his pads. It is filled with thousands of gel sacs, each one filled with real human fat gleaned from the countless thousands of liposuction procedures done every year. Special sensors on the outer layer immediately transfer tactile sensations of heat, cold, and pressure to the player's actual skin found deep inside the suit.

The offensive and defensive lines staring each other down will just about take up the entire width of the field.

Naturally, the football will weigh six times as much as a normal football.

**Edited to include metric, I think..
-- Grogster, Jan 28 2012

Jeux Sans Frontiers http://www.youtube....watch?v=L2bTwSfWtsE
This game would look something like this I imagine... [normzone, Feb 01 2012]

It's not that simple. Gravity isn't the only factor to take into account. Sure, if you want someone to put the same effort into standing, on the Moon, as on the Earth, you need to add weight to that person. But for that person to MOVE AROUND, that takes the exact same effort on the Moon as on the Earth, for an unweighted person, because the "inertial mass" of that person has not changed.

In other words, if you have a mass of 100 kilograms on the Earth, and you want to accelerate your mass by running, you will put the same effort into doing that on the Moon as on the Earth. Any weight you add, on the Moon, will require extra effort to accelerate --and extra effort to decelerate. Two men each having a mass of 600 kilograms, crashing into each other, are likely to do far more damage to each other than happens on Earth where each might only have a mass of 100 kilograms.

Still, you don't want your Lunar football league to bounce around as if on a trampoline. Some sort of compromise will have to be made, with respect to the amount of extra mass you make the players carry around.

The preceding means that the football also need not be much more massive than on Earth. For long throws and kicks, you want a more-massive ball, because gravity plays a large role in the trajectory of the ball. But for short passes (like "laterals"), you want the ball to mass about the same, since in those passes gravity does not have much of a role, and you want those passes to be able to be done quickly. If the ball has too much mass, the person throwing it laterally will have to put a lot more effort into making that happen, and the.ball will be easier to intercept because it will end up travelling slower.
-- Vernon, Jan 28 2012


Shades of Jeaux Sans Frontiers tv show circa 1970 something, see youtube for video as it keeps knackering my browser...
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 28 2012


This would work if you could establish some sort of time dilation. If you played with 6x the mass, under 1/6th G and at 1/6th speed, then everything (intertial forces as well as weight against gravity) would seem normal.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 28 2012


Then momentum would scale correctly, but kinetic energy would be 1/6 normal. I thought you would use normal mass, but 1/6 normal strength. The athletes would have to go on rigorous non-exercise regimes, with plenty of weightless non-lifting.

Of course the main flaw with this idea is the premise that a game in which players can leap 6 metres into the - err - vacuum, kick the ball 600 metres, and run at 180 km/h* is something that needs fixing.

* Ballpark figures.
-- spidermother, Jan 28 2012


//momentum would scale correctly, but kinetic energy would be 1/6 normal// Ah - good point. Perhaps you'd need to play in square-root time.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 28 2012


< GROG = struggling to achieve 1/6 normal >
-- Grogster, Jan 28 2012


Let m, v be Earth mass and velocity; hence (6m), (v/6) are Moon mass and velocity.

Momentum (Earth) = mv

Momentum (Moon)
= (6m)(v/6)
= mv
=> Momentum (Moon) = momentum (Earth)

Kinetic energy (Earth) = œ mv²

Kinetic energy (Moon)
= œ (6m)(v/6)²
= œ mv²/6
=> Kinetic energy (Moon) = kinetic energy (Earth)/6

(In case it wasn't clear, I was responding to [MaxwellBuchanan]'s annotation; [Grogster] didn't specify a particular velocity scaling. //Both would be 6 times normal// only if acceleration and velocity were normal, which they aren't even in the original version, as already covered by [Vernon].)
-- spidermother, Jan 28 2012


You also need 36 times the coefficient of static friction between the players' feet and the playing field (6 times the lateral force with 1/6 the downward force).

The Mythbusters once tried to make a scaled down whirlpool. They wrongly assumed that they had to reduce the angular velocity by the scale factor - which resulted in a sluggishly revolving pool and no hint of a funnel. Scaling is tricky.
-- spidermother, Jan 28 2012



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