Oh. Erm, realistically, no, a burst of assault rifle bullets will cause rather ridiculous damage. It's hard to compare, because a direct hit from an assault rifle and a direct hit from a sword will kill you, and you can't take more damage than being dead, right? Of course, it all depends on weapon calibre for bullets. For example, elephant guns, well, kill elephants. Which swords can't really do. I believe that assault rifles can also punch through brick walls, which I doubt that most swords can do.
There's a difference between penetration and the actual amount of damage inflicted. Rifles have penetration. If the target is standing behind a quarter inch steel wall, an assault rifle will punch through the wall and maim the target, while a sword will break long before the wall will. However, against a human body, the penetrating ability of the assault rifle is largely wasted, because the bullets are going to exit the other side of the person, leaving only a small and narrow channel of injury. This is over-penetration, and it means the vast majority of the energy a bullet carries is
not translated into actual injury -- the severity of the injury is going to be roughly proportional to the frontal area of the bullet times the length of the channel. For this reason, a direct hit from an assault rifle
won't necessarily kill you. It depends almost entirely on what the bullets hit as they pass through the body. But if they aren't ripping through organs, your chance of survival is actually pretty good with modern medical care.
A single strike with a sword, on the other hand, will impart all of its energy into the body of the target, leaving a very wide and deep injury that doesn't just pierce the body the target, but cut a whole section of it apart. The amount of bleeding is significantly greater, and assuming both weapons hit the same location of the body, your chance of survival is substantially less if the weapon in question is a sword. To get an intuitive sense of this, think about the fact that a sword can realistically decapitate a person, while an assault rifle will only do that in LCS.
I agree that you would not use a sword against an elephant, but I have to disagree that this is a representative analogy that indicates how effective the weapons are against the human body. I know I'm stating the obvious, but an elephant is gigantic. A powerful gun is useful here because it can penetrate the body of the elephant and reach vital organs; a small pistol won't even pass through the human body reliably, and a sword is right out. Even with infinite cutting power, it isn't even large enough to cut all the way through the elephant.
Even with that said, a sword isn't totally incapable of killing an elephant. It's just not a good idea, since you wouldn't be able to reach or penetrate its vital organs as easily. Hacking at the head would help. But more importantly, it would be phenomenally stupid to try to engage in melee with an animal the size of a city bus.
Hmm... as for masks. SHOULD they be implemented as some form of disguise? Or is that just too much effort to code? I don't think it'd be that bad... just code it so that crimes committed while wearing a mask are not recorded onto the list of crimes, unless caught by cops at the site itself.
Yeah... sounds right. If I'm going to be part of a team about to launch a kidnapping, AND I want to walk around town normally for the next month, it stands to reason I would wear a mask to hide my identity, right?
I certainly think using masks to protect your identity, similar to the opening scene of
The Dark Knight, is totally reasonable. There are a couple of issues attached to balance. Making masks be very suspicious, like nudity, is pretty easy. The real challenge is letting police try to investigate and track down the masked crime squad despite their use of masks. Masks shouldn't be a perfect defense against identification, and a squad member that rats out a masked superior should let the police still charge the superior for their actions. The game doesn't currently support that much complexity in how it tracks crimes, and that's the biggest problem.
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Topic: What disguises fit where? (Read 3280 times)