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.

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.

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.

Turns out Gamma Ray Bursts are just distant peasant railguns

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!

The peasant railgun and the squirrel chain are effective in 2 conditions:

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

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?

Piss hard so the reaction mass slows you down along with the cloud of expanding piss vapor.

They call me the yellow comet

That’s just slave labour with extra steps (magnets)

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

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.

Never seen a sky diver? Head down vs belly flop changes their speed

which is why the dm is able to stop them in their tracks by enforcing the game rule about not calculating speed for damage

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

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.