Bay 12 Games Forum

(wiki is unclear on what a poleaxe is,

It's what some call the weapon Late Medieval Knights carried; whether they all called it that isn't particularly clear. A two handed hammer or axe (for clobbering knights), often with a spear point on top (for stabbing the lesser-armoured),  and backed by the pointy thing that you think is required to hurt someone in armour.

Energy to make a small hole thru the armor is lots less then the amount needed to crush it.

Sure. But you can incapacitate someone in armour through "blunt force trauma"  without crushing the armour. That's how the weapon worked.

Put it the other way; we know these guys carried big hammers backed with spikes. We can reason that the spike is for punching through armour. The spike concentrates the force, might punch though, yadda yadda. I agree. But what's the hammer for? The spikes are still going to hurt the lesser armoured guys. Your reasoning says the spike's always going to better, yet the real historical knights carried a weapon which had both a spike and a hammer. Why?

Check out the estoc.  A thrusting sword made to slide into the gaps of armor made in the late middle ages.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoc.

Yep. Precursor to the rapier, and modern fencing swords. Many knights carried Miserycords, an edgeless dagger, to do the same thing versus a downed opponent. You think I'm trying to say pointy weapons weren't effective vs plate; I'm not. I'm arguing against your assertion it's only penetration by points that was effective.

Not sure is this fits with what the OP is after, but:

Would it be possible, rather than there to be a total interface overhaul as such,  for Toady to expose/create interfaces for others to hook in to?

The obvious current example would be Dwarf Therapist, which (AIUI) pokes into memory structures that it's got to find on each release. If there were an exposed interface which was "set Dwarf Id (x) with labour Mining", and "read Dwarf(x) status", etc, there could be competing manager programs which then wouldn't be broken  with each release. Toady would obviously have to do work to create the interface and get the internal menu system using it himself, but if he did, it would be known to be complete and sufficient.

You could do some things by just allowing the existing menu structure to be driven by an external program; (init)->bpuukk<right><down> builds a 3x3 farm down from the current cursor position, for example. There'd need to be program feedback for workshops and the like, though.