In Season 4 of Enterprise, specifically in the Vulcan story arc, The Forge, The Awakening, Kir Shara or whatever its called, did Archer not bleach two or three Vulcans at hand to hand fighting ? He also kicked the shit out of a Zombie Vulcan in an earlier episode, so it seems that Vulcan superstrength is only occasional, as the story dictates.
I think it's reasonable to assume a Vulcan woman is 3 times stronger than a human woman. Since in real life on average women typically have 40-50% the upper body strength as a man, you can say on average a Vulcan woman will be somewhere around the strength of an average to above average man. It never was really revealed to my knowledge, but it wouldn't be surprising to me if T'pol had an upper body strength level comparable to Archer. Considering she probably weighs about half as much (I would guess her to be around 110 LBs, Archer probably at least 200 LBs), that isn't bad.
I think T'Pol is weaker than Archer by quite a bit. In Twilight, she was unable to move the debris from her ankle, or even budge it, while Archer got it off her ankle. Also, it has been demonstrated that female Vulcan's are perhaps less tough and resilient as female humans. In the Maquis two-parter, the female Vulcan gets knocked down a lot.
Like male Vulcans and all Romulans, a female Vulcan is as strong as the writers remember to make them at the time. ENT was terrible for Vulcan superstrength, Archer was always kicking their asses hand-to-hand. Compare with the reboot, where Ayel lifts Kirk by the throat with one hand, Nero makes a giant leap effortlessly, and Spock fights Khan hand to hand.
But Archer would be lifting with his legs and back, making him automatically three times stronger than somebody lifting with arms only... ...Which would be all the more impressive if Kirk didn't do pretty much the same things, only with the cute addition of some panting and gasping and fashionable bleeding. Reminds me of the death of Mace Windu. So he gets burned by the Force, has both hands chopped off, and is thrown down from a building so high it tickles low-orbiting moonlets? Big deal - every one of those things was established as being survivable for a Jedi knight in the preceding movies!! Timo Saloniemi
Well, even Geordi was able to slap around a Romulan in The Next Phase, so inconsistency is certainly a problem. In fact,for a long time on screen, there was never a clear cut example of Romulans having super human strength. A common question that seemed to pop up was "Do Romulans have Vulcan-like strength?" Until Star Trek 2009, that was never really answered! As for T'pol, I chalk that up to inconsistency, but then again maybe she isn't as strong as Archer. All I was saying is it wouldn't surprise me if T'pol, who is a small person, had the strength of an average to above average man, which would put her around Archer's level. As for the female Vulcan in Maquis, could be explained by her being weak, even by human standards. I am sure Vulcans, male and female, come in all sorts of strength levels, like humans do, and not every Vulcan is going to have 3 times a human's strength. Take a very weak woman with basically the strength of an adolescent girl who might be able to dead lift 85 lbs, and compare that to Brian Shaw, one of the world's strongest men who can dead lift 985 pounds. That is nearly 12 times her strength. Then you have Becca Swanson, one of the world's strongest women, who can bench press over 500 lbs. How many guys can do that? The most I have ever done in my life was 320lbs, and that was over 10 years ago, when I worked out every day! I would be lucky if I could do 250, now, which I think is about average for a man!
I double-checked, and just for the record - Sakonna gets hit twice in the space of two episodes, both times a surprise hit to the face and both times from Dukat, a non-human. Also both times she recovers immediately. It seems Enterprise may be the better source for inconsistency.
Is that 40-50% adjusted for amount of training though? Men tend to train more than women and have more physically demanding jobs, I think the difference between an equally trained man and woman is smaller. I'm looking at the world weightlifting records on Wikipedia and the female world records tend to be more around 70% of male world records. I think we can assume male and female military officers are given the same training.
We might consider that Spock never got Vulcan military training as far as we can tell, while T'Pol supposedly did. OTOH, T'Pol wouldn't have gotten human military training, save for what little could take place aboard the ship, while Spock would have received that at the time his body (the human half of it, at any rate) was at its most receptive to such things. I wonder what things Vulcans would emphasize in physical training, be it military or civilian...? Possibly species-specific combat arts such as the nerve grip would be considered more important than muscular strength, and might even be at odds with it. Timo Saloniemi
It's established that the average Vulcan is 3x stronger than the average Human. Vulcan men and women are similarly proportioned to Human men and women, in terms of overall mass and upper body thickness etc. Unless there is a particularly unusual quirk associated with Vulcan physiology, the would make the male Vulcans a fair bit stronger than the females, (on average). Just as with Humans, if a female Vulcan lifted weights and was of a generally larger build than average, she could in theory be stronger than a smaller, untrained Vulcan male. There are powerlifters on Earth now who are way more than 3X stronger than your average guy who works in an office. Based on this, it's entirely possible that a Human man could train to be stronger than an average Vulcan man, and therefore significantly stronger than an average Vulcan woman. This kind of reminds me of the old TV show Alien Nation. It was established that the Newcomers were 30% stronger than average Humans, yet small female newcomers could ragdoll big strong Human males. It made no sense really because at best they would be of similar strength.
I have to admit that I've been wondering the same thing about Vulcan women. My girlfriend and me are currently watching Enterprise, and on several occasions, she has turned to me and asked 'aren't Vulcans supposed to be so much stronger then humans?'. And all I can answer is, supposedly yes. If the writers simply forgot, that's just to bad. But if they did remember, and purposfully made T'Pol physically weaker would be stupid, to say the least.
Maybe the writers made T'Pol appear less muscular because she thought it'd be unattractive to the male audiences they were targeting. But Vulcans are supposed to have a denser bone structure and more efficient musculature than humans, so T'Pol absolutely should be stronger than the humans on the ship.
It's interesting to note that of the three prisoners Kruge had in his charge on The Genesis Planet, Saavik was the only one he held in any regard - probably due to her strength.
No its not adjusted. I am going by a stat I read online that an average woman is around 40-50% an average man's strength. How true is it? I don't know, but I assume that to be everyday people the stat refers to. It's just an anecdotal mean for purposes of discussion, not intended to be an absolute fact. With training, IE if a woman lifted weights as much as frequently as a man did, that 40-50% stat probably can go higher. I don't know if 70% across the board, but probably its at least possible in some categories of lifting. But if you take the strongest man in the world and strongest woman in the world, I think you will find both are mutants relative to the rest of the population, so not sure that is a good example.
Agreed. Although we could also say he respected the uniform of a fellow warrior and spat on civilians... Timo Saloniemi
1. Kruge lifted Kirk by the throat with 1 hand, however, the comment was made earlier about gravity fields being in flux. 2. The comment was made regarding the strength of a Vulcan on different worlds in different environments because they come from a high gravity, thin atmosphere world. In the book Uhura's Song, Spock contracts Aspirant Pneumonia on a jungle planet with a very humid atmosphere, which is described as a build up of fluid in the lungs and can be fatal. This implies that just because the gravity is lighter, the Vulcan may not have a physical advantage because of other atmospheric conditions. CCC.
Indeed, too much oxygen in the air might reduce Spock's performance significantly, perhaps forcing him to take shallow breaths or risk upsetting his acidity balance or whatever... Kruge's displays of strength were indeed impressive; the struggle with the worms from Spock's coffin would have had little to do with gravity, but seemed to impress Kruge's men. Perhaps bodybuilding was a personal hobby of Kruge's, and performances in front of an audience an opportunity he never could skip? No other Klingon so far has demonstrated such raw upper body strength. (Some of the stunts in ST:ID may hint at great strength, but they could be suggestions of artificial combat exoskeletons, too.) Timo Saloniemi