I'm sorry for a little bit of necro, but it seems that low-contact weapons with high momentum seem to pulp bodyparts much faster than it would be expected if they only damaged the tissue beneath them. A modded warhammer with contact 10 and momentum 13478 took only 7 hits to "explode into gore" the left front leg of an elephant with contact 1549 and blunt momentum resist 11025.
How's that possible?
I fully expect people to necro this thread, so no need to apologize (I locked the previous 0.34.11 thread because I didn't want
that one being necroed). The time between posts for topics like this can be large.
Here is an excerpt from the combat script results for a random elephant:
[DFHack]# combat
Creature size (base/current/racial): 490000 502606 500000
Creature strength (base/current): 1000 1000
Wrestle/Charge rating: 5036
...
BODY PART DEFENSE
Volume/Contact/Thickness/Material/Blunt_Momentum_Resist/Shear_Yield/Frac
...
left front leg
SKIN 1083 1582 14 skin 21 20000 20000
FAT 11348 1582 152 fat 226 10000 10000
MUSCLE 28434 1582 381 muscle 568 20000 20000
BONE 28434 1582 381 bone 11373 115000 130000
When describing armors I have the script give the blunt resistance for full contact and for contact 10. To limit the number of columns displayed for tissue layers, I just output the full contact resistance. The above example has the leg contact 1582, therefore the contact 10 resistances are 1/1/3/71 (this is partly why whips were/are easily chipping bones in DF).
EDIT: Oh, that wasn't the question.
I ran a different lua script to track the accumulated damage on a (different) elephant's leg bone when hitting it with a modded hammer similar to yours:
hit# area dam% dent%
1 10 1 1
2 26 2 2
3 66 5 5
4 178 15 15
5 346 35 35
6 747 78 78
7 1698 178 178
Combat log:
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, chipping the bone!
The Elephant 1 gives in to pain.
The Elephant 1 falls over.
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, chipping the bone!
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, chipping the bone!
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, chipping the bone!
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, chipping the bone!
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer, fracturing the bone!
You bash Elephant 1 in the left front leg from behind with your steel war hammer and the injured part explodes into gore!
It appears that hitting an old wound repeatedly will exponentially increase the wound's area. In your case the leg pulped after becoming 100% bruised through the soft tissue, and 100% broken in the bone. Thanks for pointing this out!