I know perfectly well about the "missing upper body" thing, that's been around since 2010. I mean use DFHack to check the unit's unit.flags1.dead flag.
Your musings are based off of observation but you're observing based off of DF's
notoriously bad UI which was never even designed to show you the things you're looking for anyway. The observations I'm basing my information on is actually delving into the game's runtime memory in order to determine what is
actually, literally going on with no error.
So let me go over things one at a time here.
unit does not convert properly to being dead in status
Health status is just a UI screen, it doesn't actually show accurately the underlying truth of the unit's status in cases (i.e. death) that it was not intended to show.
when the fatal blow is dealt it premptively turns into a corpse item and is registered by the game as dead.
Not sure what you mean by "preemptively", but yes, the unit sticks around and a new corpse item is made that has an ID reference to the unit that it originated from.
Its status as a unit remains seperate and holds onto anything manifest of it left in the world
Yes, of course, this is very convenient and necessary for the game's animation and resurrection mechanics.
my point of the health system is that in confliction, everything's physical condition is limited to severe injuries leading to a death of the body, but not a literal death (death=true) of the unit ID to dispel it and release control. (under no conditions, even with poison are units 'struck down' in fortress mode where this applies', Arena mode is separate, i literally provided photographic evidence both in my response on this thread and in both bug reports)
No, that's the GUI giving false info due to you using it in a way it wasn't intended. Looking at the dead unit's structures with DFHack will, indeed, show them as dead rather than just "missing upper body".
Un-intelligent wild animals are a huntable class of creature to be hauled back by hunters and butchered and are made in precisely that way as to ignore everything else, which is why it is a dicstinction between pets not being slaughtered (despite being factional huntable creatures) and wild animals working seemingly fine but not dissapearing off the unit dead screen when butchered because of a lack of (dead=true) for its status.
Simply not true. Butchered units and killed units both end up in the dead/missing screen just fine.
If you want irrefutable proof, wait for a member of your fortress to die/arrange a death, have a medical dwarf and by accessing a friend of that dead dwarf, jump from their relationship list on Z to view the dead dwarf's screen. Moving over to the health, there are traits associated to the level of decomposition such as inability to see from rotting eyes, unable to grasp and unable to breathe. To further re-iterate that this is not a static screen, and by manipulation post-death with letting it rot & setting burial zones, the states update for both health and holdings. Thoughts do not update because it only functions in a active body.
Again, this UI is simply showing you false info because you are using it in an unintended way and using actual reliable sources will reveal that death did, in fact, happen.
And Randomdragon in my 'musing' i never actuallly claimed that bleeding out humans would make them usable, any death even slaughtering (full body destruction) does not properly facilitate, and thank you for proving further my method of it being a universal death feature. Its based on how you can buy objects from the caravan that are ethically controversial and use fine but appropriate to your site (human skin book on trophy ethics etc) but when the unit on the site is involved (as it has to be with butchery) it fails to work. This is not a problem with site ethics precisely, but objects made out of & produced from still belonging to the unit it was sourced from who has been destroyed but not died.
They have died but not been destroyed, in fact. The unit sticks around, just dead (literally has a "dead" flag set, which cannot be seen in any part of the UI and must be seen with DFHack). It's totally a problem with DF simply not dealing with ethics the right way, there's no real concept of ownership with respect to butchery AFAIK.
All my 'musing' is based off observation and method, and in my bug-reports i have a save on the depot here that explains with method examples which i hope to expand to greater scope. I have acknowledged Max's suggestive finding but I don't feel its as centrally relevant to the issue though it may be related.
Your methods are flawed, as I detailed here. You're using the game's
highly unreliable UI for your information.
There was a bug a few years back where eyebrows were growing indefinitely, dozens of feet long--nobody could tell because the UI doesn't say this
anywhere, but it was discovered with DFHack.
There was a bug a couple years back where units who were born on any tick that was not divisible by 10 would never grow--this was also discovered with DFHack because there's no reliable way in the UI to get actual info regarding unit sizes.
If you want to try to get to the bottom of a bug--the
actual bottom of a bug, not what you think might be--you need to use DFHack. Anything less is mere speculation. Simply reporting what you see is fine, but trying to connect it is an exercise in failure
almost always unless you have DFHack evidence. Even DFHack can be insufficient, too, and problems misunderstood. It is best to merely report what you observe in a minimal way.