All of 'em defeated with one line
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This is simply true, you do lose potential energy transfer if the bullet exits, that’s how it can exit, that’s just not usually the point of a bullet, and generally speaking making exit wounds is considered a positive.
Now if you want to design a bullet that explodes inside a wound causing mass trauma and an incredibly difficult surgery to repair it is a problem, but surely no one would ever deliberately design a weapon to do that! /S
Fun Fact: the .50 cal MGs the Soviets supplied to the Vietnamese during the American invasion usually had enough penetrative power to go through the M113 APC’s aluminum hull…
Once. And then it would bounce around inside.
I don’t see the point you’re trying to make here. You sound like you’re trying to disprove my point that more velocity won’t necessarily equate to overpenetration and “penciling through” with minimal damage but you all you did is explain that overpenetration means unused kinetic energy. Which is usually true depending on the situation but doesn’t disprove what I said.
The rest is just unrelated edgy statements. But yeah, downvote me. What the fuck do I know, I’ve only worked for 15 years in weapons and ballistics.
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Shape affects aerodynamics.
Well sure but I don’t think a human is shaped in a way that would really affect this.
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Well I’m being tongue in cheek, but I don’t see how a peasant travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light will not obliterate anything he hits (along with himself)
The peasant rail gun doesn’t fire peasents, it fires a single “small object” using peasant propulsion. In D&D5e, a small object is anything that fits into a ~60cm cube.
Other comments were discussing bullet shape, but I think if you fire something the mass and size (!) of, idk, a pumpkin or even a nightstand, shape isn’t that important.
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I don’t see the point you’re trying to make here. You sound like you’re trying to disprove my point that more velocity won’t necessarily equate to overpenetration and “penciling through” with minimal damage but you all you did is explain that overpenetration means unused kinetic energy. Which is usually true depending on the situation but doesn’t disprove what I said.
The rest is just unrelated edgy statements. But yeah, downvote me. What the fuck do I know, I’ve only worked for 15 years in weapons and ballistics.
They also said that exit wounds can have benefits, though they didn’t get into it nearly enough. I’m imagining that two wounds, especially on opposite side of a person, are going to be a lot harder to deal with and the increase blood loss potential while also distracting anyone trying to help them has a lot of benefits.
Also I say benefits, but yuck.
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Terminal velocity for a human is not fast enough to cause air to heat up. You’d probably get frostburn instead.
Heating on reentry is actually due to compressing the air in front of you, not friction. Falling from orbitall height will absolutely cause you to heat up the air in front of you, even as the air paassing you by is doing you no harm.
Though, if you smash into the atmosphere at orbital speeds, it’s probably going to do you some harm as it tries to force you back down to TV.
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There’s a lot of factors, shape speed and deformation are all factors. Penetration and energy transfer are also at odds with each other in general. Gun manufacturers have this problem because speed is more or less capped by a practical barrel length, a rail gun can (theoretically) achieve enough speed that either factors start to become less relevant.
Somewhat pedantical quibble, really just because I find it interesting: It’s not exactly limited by barrel length. We can make faster burning, higher powered propellants, which you can get the full energy out of with a shorter barrel. The reason we don’t is because that means you have a higher pressure inside the chamber and, even if your gun doesn’t explode, you face more erosion from use. Your metallurgy ends up being the limiting factor, as it’s all about how strong you can make your chamber. I just think it’s cool because guns are a great example of how inter-related technologies are and how everything depends on everything else. Take a design for a machinegun back to the Napoleonic era and it will be worthless because without smokeless powder it will jam and clog after a couple rounds. Take back a formula for smokeless powder and it will be worthless because you don’t know how to make brass cartridges. Try to make brass cartridges and you’ll find you lack the precision tooling, and so on.
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Any matter going through you with that much mass is going to cause damage no matter how fast it goes. Billions of particles called neutrinos are moving through you right now as you read this but they are around 100,000,000,000,000x less massive than a hydrogen atom
Turns out Gamma Ray Bursts are just distant peasant railguns
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See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you’ve got infinite free energy!
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The peasant railgun and the squirrel chain are effective in 2 conditions:
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Each one with above average strength contributes a +1 “helper” bonus. You’re not concerned with how fast it gets to a place, but that with everyone helping, you can get it around the world and back again - and everyone helped.
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You’re not concerned with the damage - only how it gets there. So if you can get a Hands Across America thing happening, you can pass messages in a single round.
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The peasant railgun is kinda weird tbh.
It first uses game rules ignoring physics (using the ready action to pass the object super fast along the line of peasants), to then flip and ignore game rules while using physics (not applying the rules for throwing an object but instead claiming that physics “realism” demands that the object keeps its speed and does damage according to the speed, not according to game rules).
Fun meme, but really doesn’t make sense in game.
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See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you’ve got infinite free energy!
Each peasent can only pass the magnet once every 6s, as they can only do so on their turn.
Also, this is a universe with magic in it. A level 0 sorcerer can endlessly cast the cantrip “shape water” to move a turbine for infinite free energy. For less work (but more training) the level 2 spell “Heat Metal” can be cast on a boiler.
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Each peasent can only pass the magnet once every 6s, as they can only do so on their turn.
Also, this is a universe with magic in it. A level 0 sorcerer can endlessly cast the cantrip “shape water” to move a turbine for infinite free energy. For less work (but more training) the level 2 spell “Heat Metal” can be cast on a boiler.
Fucking in a world of magic you still make electricity by boiling water?
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theyd also need something to protect them from the friction and resulting heat of air brushing by at terminal velocity tho, i assume?
oh no wait, im making it too realistic
Piss hard so the reaction mass slows you down along with the cloud of expanding piss vapor.
They call me the yellow comet
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See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you’ve got infinite free energy!
That’s just slave labour with extra steps (magnets)
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Yes.
ODST-Dropping your barbarian is objectively the best way to have him enter combat, and it inflicts psychological damage to anyone close enough to witness it.
I dont remember exactly what we did, but i remember we had a situation where one of my fellow players was a centaur. The dm ruled that if you were to use a battering ram while riding said centaur, both your strengths get added together for the check. The person riding the centaur has something that enabled them to more effectively use tools they were holding, i think it was if they used a handheld tool they got advantage with it. And then we had one more player who was a turtle person. As long as they were in their shell they got a ton of defense buffs. So, we had player 2 hold player 3 while they both climbed onto player 1. We then proceeded to use player 3 as a battering ram against a magical door that we couldnt figure out how to open. After rolls went through, we ended uo blowing the door down so violently that is killed most of the spawn in the next room
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In 5e yes. I think the theory is once you hit terminal velocity, you aren’t going to get any more damage from a longer fall.
Fun fact, I actually did have a villain do exactly that in a campaign once. The party achieved a secondary win condition during combat and so the BBEG jumped off the top of the space elevator to escape.
Wouldn’t jumping off the top of a space elevator just put you in orbit? Or, if by top you mean the point where the space elevator anchors to its counterweight, in orbit around the sun.
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Well sure but I don’t think a human is shaped in a way that would really affect this.
Never seen a sky diver? Head down vs belly flop changes their speed
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The peasant railgun is kinda weird tbh.
It first uses game rules ignoring physics (using the ready action to pass the object super fast along the line of peasants), to then flip and ignore game rules while using physics (not applying the rules for throwing an object but instead claiming that physics “realism” demands that the object keeps its speed and does damage according to the speed, not according to game rules).
Fun meme, but really doesn’t make sense in game.
which is why the dm is able to stop them in their tracks by enforcing the game rule about not calculating speed for damage
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Pure theory, likely never ever going to be real, but could a bullet move so fast that it goes through someone without even damaging them?
Define damage. Can it pass through the middle of organs? Sure, if it hits just right. But that’s not so much a question of speed.
You’d need a pin needle shape to have a chance of piercing an organ without causing lasting damage, but it will probably break on impact
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which is why the dm is able to stop them in their tracks by enforcing the game rule about not calculating speed for damage
I think it’s totally valid to run a realistic game where realism takes precedence over game rules, but then the “passing of the object” part fails.
It’s also totally valid to run RAW game, but then it fails like you said.
So no matter what game you run, the railgun makes no sense.
What would make sense with a RAW game is to use the railgun for fast travel/fast transport, but then again for it to give a decent advantage, you need thousands or millions of peasants who willingly cooperate, which also won’t really work in most games.
