I think what we need to do is bring some science into this...
Because of all the light things we are aware of (Syrofoam, Pillows, Pie) they are also soft and tend to break.
What happens when you put a lot of force into something light but indestructable?
Anyhow from what I can guess an Adamantine hammer will AT LEAST strike with the weight of your arm with the strength of your swing plus or minus leverage.
Mass times velocity is momentum so somebody with a skilled grip on the thing should be able to still achieve a decent impact with it but the actual energy of the hammer will be used up quickly so you've got to take a huge shock through your wrist and arm if you want to have that energy used in the hit.
I don't think that's really the point with hammers as you should just have to use your energy getting them moving and then have them carry it through as the things in their way crumple. If it was just the rigitity doing the work the brass knuckle shape would be better as your arms would have enough force to cave in someone's skull and punch out the other side of it on their own.
Really I think a hammer made entirely out of unyielding material is going to hurt the user.
i'm surprised no-one's mentioned the Energy = Mass*(Velocity^2) part of the equation yet. I..e, the 10lb adamantine hammer moving at 20 m/s is way better than a 40lb hammer that only gets swung at 5m/s.
Particularly when splitting wood, sometimes a lighter splitter is better than the 12# maul. The advantage of the maul is that you don't really have to accelerate it -- just start it downwards. The disadvantage is that even if you really want to swing it faster than 9.8m/s/s, it gets really goddamn hard.
-- not that i want to hijack the thread with physics.
It's inevitable.
But how do our limbs send energy into an object we are swinging? Can we really put 64x as much energy into something 10lbs as we can into something 40lbs?
The miners was just being 'harassed,' so I doubt -redacted- are Forgotten Beasts. My guess? Purring Maggot Men, soft but warlike animalmen, valued among Dwarves for the thick milk that runs in their veins.
Gross. (also, moddable? Purring Maggot Man+2 tile room+trap full of whips+drain= RESERVOIR OF DWARVEN MILK?)
Not as of yet. Having more liquid flows isn't going in soon so you'd need some job to suck it up off the floor to get it.
In order for watermen to be killable, you'd have to make them like Morpha from the Legend of Zelda; a big motile blob of waterish substance, with a squishy brain in the center. That would make a cool mod, but unfortunately liquid monsters can't grapple in this release. You'd also have a Morpha corpse left over, and I don't think there's any way to make a critter drop flowing water when it dies. Are their any good Zelda mods for DF? The only problem race I could see would be the Zora, and you can have them live on good shorelines. The Gerudo even build dark fortresses, and their fuckwitzed gender ratio could be pulled off with castes!
Well no. The water is obviously not just regular water molecules with nothing going on. If it's magic disrupting the shape should still apply strain on the thing though in the case of morpha the effect emanates from that core but the core isn't reliant on the water in the way that we need kidneys or intestines- the water is only the method of mobility and wrestling. It's like our arms and legs but not filled with that blood stuff we need.
For other types of watermen you could sort of think of them as only presenting a tiny fraction of their body at any time. When you bruise the surface of an arm or such it would rotate that in and display a different volume of water until the arm was fully wounded and perhaps even severed at some point. The arm-water is probably interchangeable with foot-water though so if they could have some number of graspers and such but with just the one pool of hitpoints it would work... at least as well as frequent implementations of water-people.
you can only swing something so fast before you reach the terminal velocity... is that the right term?
Not quite. Usually it refers to the point where air resistance pushes against an object enough to counter gravity, meaning that you stop falling any faster. The actual definition doesn't care so much about falling so much as air (or water or whatever fluid) resistance countering the force that was accelerating an object.
Air resistance can certainly be an issue with hand-held objects of certain shapes but in the case of weapons like these we're not hitting hitting that. Our muscles put out a lot more force than gravity (the strength of gravity is what it would take to just hold something up- picking it up is automatically more,) but we're more limited by the range of motion our arms can go through. A skydiver jumping out of a plane has gravity pulling on them for about a minute before they reach terminal velocity while swinging an adamantine hammer is going to last maybe two seconds but probably more like one second.
I'm not sure if that only applies to falling... anyway, you get my point. If an Ultra-Mighty dwarf can swing a lead hammer at terminal velocity, he will also swing an adamantine hammer at terminal velocity, and the lead would do more damage because it weighs more, and has more inertia.
We haven't established exactly what determines the maximum velocity of a weapon. If something like air resistance did matter the lead hammer would have a much higher terminal velocity (if you were swinging it down) because gravity pulls on all the weight while air resistance only pushes back on the surface.
For the purpose of the maximum speed we can swing something using an arm we have to be concerned with how much force an arm can generate and how fast that can make an object move in about one second or the range of an arm.
My guess is that the -redacted- is either the 'old' HFS(clowns) which apparently wander freely now or 'new' HFS(name pending) which Tree Toe could have very reasonably wandered into. Especially since he probably knows everything about what was added including the hidden stuff Toady won't talk about.
Given that the default is three underground layers the HFS should be mainly around the lower levels, what with the "we dug too deep" danger scaling feel Toady aimed to put back into the game.
My guess is that the -redacted- is either the 'old' HFS(clowns) which apparently wander freely now or 'new' HFS(name pending) which Tree Toe could have very reasonably wandered into. Especially since he probably knows everything about what was added including the hidden stuff Toady won't talk about.
You'd think either one would have killed ThreeToes miners on sight rather than harass. Of course though, this is hingeing on what definition of harass is bieng used here.
Maybe it was a tentacle demon sexually harrassing them?
I want to animate some tentacle monsters in suits from a few decades ago while they chat about how confused they are with the sexual harassment laws now.
for those who claim air resistance won't matter, go play with a foxtail, then come back.
Heck, even try swinging a dowel compared with a cardboard tube. Air resistance matters.
The foxtail has a lot of surface area so there's enough force on the head to make the stem flex but there's not so much force that it slows down your arm.
The cardboard tube has me at a bit of a loss because I can't see air resistance doing anything there. I can swing one just as fast as a dowel of similar weight it seems but with cardboard being weaker there's some mental resistance because I expect it to buckle if I apply too much force swinging it around. There's a little difference in the way I hold on to it though as with the dowel I can make a tight fist around it while with the cardboard if I try to grasp it tighter I'll buckle it.
Now with really anything fan shaped at the end of the dowel or tube there should be enough air resistance to start making a detectable difference but on either object a paper fan would more that double the forward surface area.