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[Melting Sky]

Some people might want to expand on this, or something, but I simply wanted to say that heavy armor should increase falling damage, instead of deflecting it.

Why? Being heavier doesn't make you fall faster, unless you're a feather or something else with an excessively high surface-area-to-mass ratio. It increases your momentum, but that only impacts what you fall on, not the collision itself. In fact, by making the collision more elastic, steel armor would go a long way toward making itself, and the person contained in it, less prone to damaging deformations from the impact.

Increasing your density, which is exactly what wearing heavy metal armor will do on average, certainly will increase your acceleration towards the ground and your terminal velocity since your surface areas is going to remain roughly the same while your mass has increased. Given what we know about physics in the real world, wearing armor should have little if any benefit when falling from height. One of the ways mounted knights in full armor were often injured was getting knocked from their horse. There is a reason we use parachutes when jumping from a plane rather than suits of armor.

[Bumber]

But air resistance isn't modeled. It shouldn't be hacked in for armor if it's not taken into account for other objects. That's a bug fix waiting to happen if it does get added.

Edit: Also, mass increases your momentum (force,) not your acceleration (towards the ground.) The effect of mass on acceleration is canceled out by inertia. Your acceleration is decreasing the entire time, unless in a vacuum. Greater density means it takes a higher velocity for acceleration to reach zero.

[Migrant]

Honestly with the level of detail DF wants to achieve it is perfectly reasonable to simulate how armor will protect you from blunt damage (which falling basically is except blunt weapons are made of very dense and hard materials and not dirt). Ideally it should take into account that metals aren't particularly good cushions but the characteristics of the material you're falling onto are more important (landing on feathers vs granite is more important than whether you're wearing armor or not).

One of the ways mounted knights in full armor were often injured was getting knocked from their horse.

I think this has more to do with the height of the fall than the fact that they wore armor: the fall is long enough to harm you but you don't have enough time to react and protect yourself.

There is a reason we use parachutes when jumping from a plane rather than suits of armor.

This is a pretty far fetched comparison because 1) jumping out of planes doesn't happen particularly often in adventurer mode or fortress mode and 2) parachutes are far more modern than the technological level DF simulates. A far more reasonable comparison would be falling off a bike (or a horse) and bike riders wear (or at least they should wear) helmets and not parachutes.
In conclusion: armor should protect you from blunt trauma based on its properties. Metals are terrible cushions (although they might spread the force a bit) but other materials make fine cushions and could protect from damage resulting from a fall.

[Neonivek]

2) parachutes are far more modern than the technological level DF simulates.

>_>

[AJC]

Fall damage is modeled in the game as a tile-sized cube of the floor material striking the character at its fall velocity.  In previous versions, the entire strike would hit one bodypart and you might escape with losing a tooth.  Now that impacts spread, at least that should end.

that always made me laugh because i get the image of some dwarf falling getting back up only to get smacked by a magically appearing cube.

[pikachu17]

2) parachutes are far more modern than the technological level DF simulates.

The earliest evidence for the parachute dates back to the Renaissance period.[3] The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy (British Museum Add. MSS 34,113, fol. 200v), showing a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy.[4] As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. The design is a marked improvement over another folio (189v), which depicts a man trying to break the force of his fall by the means of two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars which he grips with his hands.[5] Although the surface area of the parachute design appears to be too small to offer effective resistance to the friction of the air and the wooden base-frame is superfluous and potentially harmful, the revolutionary character of the new concept is obvious.[5]

Shortly after, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol. 381v) dated to ca. 1485.[4] Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal.[5] It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learned about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time.[6] The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by Briton Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by Luigi Cani.[7] According to the historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it."[3]

1) jumping out of planes doesn't happen particularly often in adventurer mode or fortress mode

but falling off tops of tall castles can happen in both modes(in adventure mode mostly in a tall player fort) and I'm sure any goblin that dodged off a bridge into a deep pit, or thrown down into the same pit, would have appreciated a parachute.

[hatiphnatus]

The things affecting the terminal velocity in the natural environment are the power of the gravitational field (almost a constant near the surface of a planet) and the air resistance (varying heavily depending on the shape and other properties of an object). Thus heavier objects don't fall quicker.
They are, however, heavier, so the total energy/momentum of the impact are greater.

The helmets are designed in such a way that they try to distribute the force of the impact over larger area. In medieval times people wore quite thick padding underneath chain coifs/helmets that protected them against blunt trauma. That's why they worked at all, as getting hit in the head can easily cause concussion which makes you usueless in a fighting context long enough for the enemy to finish you off. Modern helmets are no different, they use various technologies to distribute the force applied to the outer hard surface of a helmet. Same thing applies to armour. It was padded, so that blunt force was dissipated more easily. Today, we don't se effective body armour on soldiers mainly because of that: often even if we stop the bullet so that it doesn't penetrate the shot victim, the force it carries is so big it will shatter the bones and internal organs hidden behind the protective gear, resulting in a quick death. There is simply no easy way to dissipate such a directionally focused energy in a small space comparable to the thickness of clothing.

Which gets us back to the energy/momentum. Assuming you wear a stiff piece of armour (like a plate breastplate) when you hit the earth (or the other way around, doesn't really matter) your kinetic energy at the moment of your "landing" gets used on plastic deformation of the ground (if any), plastic deformation of your armour (if any), plastic deformation of yourself and a little heat. So more energy means more potential deformation, what in turn means more damage. So heavier objects falling can potentially receive more damage from the fall. That's why bugs can fall 2m and do not harm themselves while humans may trip and die.

But at the same time, some of the energy went into the deformation of the armour itself (don't count on it when you're wearing chainmail though). So the (plate) armour at the same time both increases the damage you receive due to weight (energy) and reduces it due to stiffness. If there is padding underneath, it will help distribute the force so it dissipates more easily (probably converted into some form of molecule movement a.k.a. heat). Hopefully the energy that will inevitably reach joints and other vulnerable areas will not be enough to "deform" them permanently.

Same thing applies to internal organs. They are like boiled potatoes in a sac filled with dense soup. They can move a little inside your body, so they will make their own little "fall" on your skin, from the underneath. When you wear an armour the energy that gets used on deformation may slow you down a little, and in consequence maybe help your organs cope with the extreme deceleration. Hopefully your intestines won't then get squashed by the rest of your body, clothing and armour falling onto them (that's why you have a ribcage, but that's not infallible unfortunately).

TL DR; If I were to fall from the roof of my house I would wear a suit of plate armour with padding underneath if I had the choice.

[Migrant]

The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy

The oldest european recipes for gunpowder are ~200 years older than this and until besieging armies bring canons I will insist that parachutes are too modern for the rest of DF (aside from the medical sciences because they are pretty advanced).

I'm sure any goblin that dodged off a bridge into a deep pit, or thrown down into the same pit, would have appreciated a parachute.

I'm sure any recruit facing a group of zombies would have appreciated a hand grenade but I don't think hand grenades should be implemented because they are out of sync with the rest of the game. Your argument ignores that the vast majority of falls are short enough for armor to have an impact and I don't see why we should ignore the protection granted by armor because a parachute might protect you as well. And armor does protect you. That is why motorcyclists, equestrians, (some) skaters wear helmets and not parachutes.

[Fleeting Frames]

Eh, regardless of time period, feeling like magical medieval fantasy is more important, even if this results in anachronisms
(steel, evil clouds, gunpowder, flying islands for square of "more modern but present", "DF is more modern than reality", "less modern but not present" and "cool but not presently in either").

[Neonivek]

Gunpowder is an exception based on feel.

But still parachutes are a bit... unnecessary all things considered... and would probably be fairly expensive.

[Fleeting Frames]

So's everything else I listed. Though indeed I can hardly imagine where I would want to use parachutes - maybe in adv mode?

[Migrant]

I feel like steel is okay because it is restricted to dwarves who are renowned for their craftsmanship. But maintaining the flavor is important.

[Melting Sky]

But air resistance isn't modeled. It shouldn't be hacked in for armor if it's not taken into account for other objects. That's a bug fix waiting to happen if it does get added.

Edit: Also, mass increases your momentum (force,) not your acceleration (towards the ground.) The effect of mass on acceleration is canceled out by inertia. Your acceleration is decreasing the entire time, unless in a vacuum. Greater density means it takes a higher velocity for acceleration to reach zero.

My point was that increasing the density of an object will make it fall more quickly within an atmosphere where there is air resistance. This is after all a suggestion thread on how something should work in DF rather than how it currently does which I think we can all agree is pretty silly when you have some guy falling off the equivalent of tall building and then somehow deflecting all the G forces of the impact with his armor and walking away without a scratch. In a vacuum a feather will fall as fast as a bowling ball, but it will not do so when there is friction aka when it is falling through through the air.

My original point was simply that wearing armor is not going to magically make you immune to fall damage and that increasing your mass while retaining your original surface area will in fact likely have a negative impact on your final collision with the ground since you will be hitting it faster and with more energy than if you were naked. Yes if you land on your head with a crudely padded helmet that layer of padding may decrease slightly the amount of G's your brain experiences but the added 60lbs if armor isn't going to feel any nicer on your neck as is snaps on impact.

[Dirst]

But air resistance isn't modeled. It shouldn't be hacked in for armor if it's not taken into account for other objects. That's a bug fix waiting to happen if it does get added.

Edit: Also, mass increases your momentum (force,) not your acceleration (towards the ground.) The effect of mass on acceleration is canceled out by inertia. Your acceleration is decreasing the entire time, unless in a vacuum. Greater density means it takes a higher velocity for acceleration to reach zero.

My point was that increasing the density of an object will make it fall more quickly within an atmosphere where there is air resistance. This is after all a suggestion thread on how something should work in DF rather than how it currently does which I think we can all agree is pretty silly when you have some guy falling off the equivalent of tall building and then somehow deflecting all the G forces of the impact with his armor and walking away without a scratch. In a vacuum a feather will fall as fast as a bowling ball, but it will not do so when there is friction aka when it is falling through through the air.

My original point was simply that wearing armor is not going to magically make you immune to fall damage and that increasing your mass while retaining your original surface area will in facing t likely have a negative impact on your final collision with the ground since you will be hitting it faster and with more energy than if you were naked. Yes if you land on your head with a crudely padded helmet that layer of padding may decrease slightly the amount of G's your brain experiences but the added 60lbs if armor isn't going to feel any nicer on your neck as is snaps on impact.

At least dodging is disabled for falls.

The "hit it with a big cube" mechanic ought to work just fine if it could be spread over several bodyparts.  Armor can't absorb that much momentum without passing it through to lower layers.  Pick an impact epicenter and model impact to it and the bordering bodyparts, with the force divided among them proportional to RELSIZE.  That force can move beyond this set of parts normally (land on a foot, which is connected to toes and a leg, excess force goes "upstream" to the lower body).

[MoonyTheHuman]

A minecart can certainly destroy a target under an adamantine floor without destroying the floor.

lets Test it, who has a lead minecart full of really heavy lead bars?