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[UristMcHuman]

Until then, silver (platinum if you can mood it) makes the best blunt weapon.

Don't you mean 'Mod'?

[lanceleoghauni]

No. Strange mood, Can make artifact weapons of non-normal materials.

[Gergination]

Ok, I didn't realize just how stupendously light candy was. 

Lets do some calculations here:

Conditions:

• A dwarf swings the head of a hammer at 22.222 m/s (or 80 Kph) relative to the surface of his target, which I feel is probably a decent estimate.
  
• I'll use the size of the weapon and the density of the material used to determine mass
  

Ok, using those assumptions:

     A Silver Warhammer has a mass of 4.196 Kg's
     A Candy Warhammer has a mass of .08 Kg's

Oh lord, I see where this is going already.


Ok, these weapons will hit their target with this much kinetic energy:

     Silver Warhammer:  1036.05 joules
     Candy Warhammer:  19.75 joules

Which gives a staggering result that a silver warhammer hits ~52.5 times as hard as a candy one.  For a little comparison, the round an AK-47 uses has a typical muzzle energy of about 2050 joules.

Course this is all relative to how fast the weapons are considered to be going within the game or however Toady ends up calculating all that good stuff.

[lanceleoghauni]

That's the point we were trying to make dude Candy is useless for blunt weapons.

[Gergination]

It's a point you didn't need to make, I understood that fact already. 

It was more so arguing that it seems a little backwards or odd that the "best" material in the game makes the absolute worst blunt weapons.

[Kattel]

It's a point you didn't need to make, I understood that fact already. 

It was more so arguing that it seems a little backwards or odd that the "best" material in the game makes the absolute worst blunt weapons.

so what your trying to get across is that you think that the best edged material should also be the best blunt material?

i feel that  having different materials better at different things is a superior mechanic then having and all powerful 'i win' button for every weapon mechanic. imho.

[Girlinhat]

I don't think many people realize just how insignificantly light candy is, is the problem.  It's on par with featherwood.  A cube 11 feet wide on each side (11ft³) would weigh as much as a five pound bag of sugar, if my maths are correct.

[FallingWhale]

Candy can also be sharpened down to the quark, so rather than normal anti-armor fighting (cutting the joints and thin spots) they just slash through the torso and watch the goblin/demon/arena breed yeti/giant badger/troll/giant giant tortoise/glitching kitten fall in half.

[Shmo]

For collisions I'd imagine the momentum matters more than the kinetic energy, since impulse depends on momentum and I'd think non-penetrating damage (bone-breakage, organ-bruising) comes from impulse. Kinetic energy can just be dissipated as heat.

Supposing a non-elastic collision between a 4kg silver hammerhead moving at 20 m/s and a breastplate of some kind:

We can imagine that the total "give" of the breastplate is on the order of 5 cm, giving us an average acceleration of 400/0.1 = 4000 m/s^2. multiplying by the mass of the hammerhead we get around 16kN average force. Since force is roughly bell-shaped as a function of time for such an impact, it is not unreasonable to surmise that peak impact-transmitted force is on the order of 30kN. More rigid breastplates would actually serve to increase peak force ("giving" less in terms of momentum and dissipating less energy in deformation in terms of energy).

Applying such force orthogonally against a rib bone of radial area, say, 2cm^2, we get a shear stress of 30kN/0.0002m^2 or around 150 MPa.

Doing a little Googling around I find the ultimate orthogonal shear strength of human bone (the breaking point) to be on the order of 100MPa. Of course this all gets far more complicated with impact angle, intervening tissues, the stopping distance assumption, etc, which would all serve to attenuate the impulse. but we see that a silver hammerhead is just at the right weight to deliver bone breakage. Anything less than half as dense should have trouble snapping bones, and anything less than one quarter as dense should be all but useless against bones except in ridiculously lucky/ideal circumstances.

Edit: I conveniently ignored impact area of the hammerhead, which if large would of course distribute the force across multiple bones/organs. However, the above still seems valid with a reasonably compact (say, 6cm * 6cm, from the weight/density/imagined hammer shape) impact area.

[Sutremaine]

It was more so arguing that it seems a little backwards or odd that the "best" material in the game makes the absolute worst blunt weapons.

The reason it's the best material is because its one weakness doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that it couldn't crack an egg open when you can make it into a weapon that renders armour irrelevant.

[ImBocaire]

mining picks supposedly beating axes/swords/any other conventional melee weapon

This is less a bug and more a consequence of the fact that using a pick as a weapon uses the mining skill, and mining is far, far easier to train (indeed, pretty much trivial) than any sort of melee weapon skill. The weapon itself isn't actually as good in terms of combat effectiveness, it's the skill of the wielder. Take, for example, an axedwarf and a miner; theoretically, the axedwarf should be the superior combatant. However, you're far more likely to have a superlegendary miner than a superlegendary axe lord. A legendary +5 axe lord will probably beat a legendary +5 miner, and also outperform them in combat. However, miners make a very good stopgap in case of a sudden need for a military force. There's also the fact that miners probably have trained their strength attribute rather high, once again from mining.

Realistically, of course, I expect swinging a pick to chip away at rock requires rather different types of coordination than swinging a pick at a goblin's head.

[Pan]

Same as how woodcutters, no matter how good they are, aren't good at being an axedwarf unless having the axedwarf skill. A tree is just different from a goblin.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Fun facts about Adamantine based only on the contents of the raw files:

- It melts at 8333 C (15032 F), so you'd need to throw it into the sun in order to melt it.
- If it did melt, its density would increase 13x from 0.2 g/cm3 to 2.6 g/cm3. Most normal substances decrease in density slightly when they melt. This means that a melting adamantine bar would shrink.
- Adamantine is only ~10x stronger than steel, more or less, but it is perfectly rigid. How adamantine thread works is beyond me.
- Adamantine can be made ~10x sharper than most metals, according to the max edge.
- Adamantine has a specific heat 2x higher than water, and 15-20x higher than most other metals.

Strange consequences of these facts:

- The speed of sound in air is 343 m/s (1126 ft/s), in water is 1484 m/s, and in iron is 5120 m/s. According to my calculations, the speed of sound in adamantine is at least 63200 m/s, due to the high stiffness and low density. If adamantine is perfectly rigid, as shown by having 0 strain at fracture in the raw files, then the speed of sound in the metal approaches the speed of light. Adamantine musical instruments would produce ultrasonic vibrations, and cut off the fingers of the musician.
- Adamatine would make for excellent crowbars/prybars, because you could use a 20 foot long pole to pry open a heavy stone door and it wouldn't bend the tool.
- When adamantine does break, it would suddenly shatter like glass without warning, because it is so rigid and because it stores so much internal energy. The resulting shrapnel would be nasty, good thing it is next to impossible to break...
- Even a perfectly sharp blade needs a bit of force to cut, as you have to force the flesh/stone/metal/etc. to part so the blade can move forwards. Since adamantine has low weight, there would be little momentum in the sword swing and all of the force would come from the user.

[i874236951]

Neat.

[Gergination]

All I really care about is which weapon is better for sending enemies flying, warhammers, or maces?

Armor doesn't really matter for blunt weapons either when goblins can take a one way flight into the wall.