0.40.05 is out and I think it changed many things related to DF physics. Can you please investigate further?
This inquiry requires DFHack, which is not ready for the new version yet. Urist has said he plans to investigate when it is.
So would I, but at the moment we don't have structures or DFHack for 0.40.01
My gut feeling is that body parts seem MUCH weaker, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfmM59S_5EE
First off, this is truly fantastic! Sorry I didn't notice this before, or I would have commented long ago. I can't say I understand it all yet (I will have to start playing with spreadsheets and real numbers when I get a chance) but this looks like you have a complete model for DF combat, which I had thought was too impossibly complicated to be possible. I guess hacking the raw code helps...
I do have a couple of questions:
1) I see that sharpness enters into all calculations of edged weapons penetrating layers. Does that mean that adamantine, with 10x the sharpness of other metals, should penetrate armor with 10 times less momentum? We may never have tested this with bolts, as usually adamantine has much lower momentum due to its low density, but I can easily run this test.
2) It isn't clear to me where the observed behavior that armor is only effective if its SHEAR_YIELD and/or SHEAR_FRACTURE is greater than or equal to that of the projectile comes out of these equations. Am I missing something, or is this separate? I have only skimmed this thread so far, so if its in there, feel free to tell me to just look harder.
3) I see there are a few "unknowns" and "factors". Do you think there are any cases where large-scale testing could help determine these?
4) I have observed that I get slightly different rates of deflection off different body parts when using your uniarmor (uniform thickness, no overlap) to cover both parts. In particular, I used targets with 2-part bodies, and found deflection at slightly higher force off the upper body than the lower body. Can the material properties of the tissue layers underneath impact deflection off armor? If the question I am asking is not clear enough, can post a detailed description of the data I have and how it was obtained (either here or elsewhere).
I think what I really should do is just download your lua script and go through that. Is it safe to assume that all relations described in the thread are included in it? Knowing the exact equations you found for 34.11 will be immensely helpful for testing 40.05, as it is far easier to test if a known equation is true than to try to guess equations from data. Also, I suspect that the armor/layer end of things (which appears to be the bulk of the work here) has not changed, and only the way velocities are determined for weapons has changed.
I also can do tests of melee weapons, and have already run a few. I believe all that changed with melee is that Toady applied your binary patch which changed a 10,000 to 100,000 in the mass calculations. Therefore, you should still be able to make accurate predictions for melee? Do you have any suggestions of tests I could run to check if melee is still following your predictions?
Thanks so much for doing this! Extremely fine work!