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[Urist Da Vinci]

Yeah, it seems like this'll happen a lot more in future.

Does the mass of the target's inventory get taken into account? A unit wearing full copper armour or hauling an elephant carcass should logically be harder to send flying.

It appears that knockback only happens when a creature is struck in the upper body, lower body, or head.

Are reanimated limbs immune to knockback in that case?

1. An armored dwarf holding an elephant corpse could still be kicked or thrown around just as much as a regular dwarf (and he had the elephant corpse when he arrived at the other end of flight), whereas an elephant still can't be kicked or thrown away. It's rather illogical.

2. Reanimated limbs were immune to knockback from being struck, whereas you can still grab and throw them. Reanimated limbless torso could still be kicked around.

[Kofthefens]

Well !!scienced!!

[Urist Da Vinci]

A bit more testing shows that Weapon Traps don't cause knockback, even while using absurd trap weapons that cause knockback when wielded by creatures. Many in-game chickens died for this knowledge.

Mostly waiting for the next release to arrive.

[Urist Da Vinci]

0.34.08 - now with seemingly realistic propulsion.

Throwing - mostly unchanged (see below).

Kicking/punching - more powerful, so a dwarf can kick small birds around a few tiles, or bronze colossus can kick a cow a few tiles (they had a hard time kicking a dog that far before)

Weapons - much more powerful, I'd say they are fixed in a realistic sense. Dwarves can play bat with small birds, but can't send elves flying. Bronze colossi can mace around a few things, subject to the limit below.

Distance limit and mechanics - it's now hard to gauge the strength of a hit, since nobody flies further than ~12 tiles on level ground. This is because they now bounce and skid on the ground, presumably slowing them down. If you kick/throw them from a high place, they now fall in a parabolic path and bounce, so they travel much farther. Did you know that flying (projectile) dwarves will go through fortifications?

I don't feel like replicating the earlier science much right now, but the problems seem fixed to me.

[slothen]

Does this new physics affect bridgapults?

Did you know that flying (projectile) dwarves will go through fortifications?

 

[Tierre]

Wow this is corpuscular-wave duality for dwarves:)

[Pirate Bob]

I am a bit curious about how you determined

1. Law of cartoon motion
Objects in flight stay at the same elevation and velocity until they run out of momentum, at which point they fall straight down. This may change with soon-to-come updates (parabolic minecart paths).

In the real world, launched objects will travel on parabolic paths.  I realize they did not in this version, but it would be reasonable that Toady might try to approximate a parabolic path as moving an appropriate distance and then falling down.

Anyway, if an object travels on a parabolic path, then the distance it travels will be proportional to its energy, not its momentum.  Here is a proof:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Assume an object is launched with velocity v at angle a, and ignore air resistance.  The time the object spends in the air will be proportional to the y component of the velocity
g*t = v cos(a),
where g is the acceleration due to gravity.  The distance traveled will be
x = t *v sin(a) = v²sin(a)cos(a) / g
which is proportional to the kinetic energy (1/2 mv²).

Toady has a Ph.D. in math, and could certainly work this out (although I have a Ph.D. in physics and it's not immediately obvious to me without thinking about it, so he may not have).  If he wanted to produce such physics without parabolic paths, he could just say that a constant force is applied to objects in flight, and they fall to the ground when they run out of energy.  Then the length they travel would be x=E/F, where E is the energy and F is the force.  If F were a constant which doesn't depend on object size or anything else, then you would have projectile distance proportional to energy, as you would expect in the real world, without the messiness of coding parabolic paths.

All this is a very long-winded and technical way of saying that it is not valid just to assume that pre-minecart projectiles fly a distance proportional to their momentum, as it would be just as easy (and more realistic) for Toady to make it proportional to their kinetic energy.  That being said, it is quite possible that it was proportional to momentum, and I would be very interested to see proof of this.

[Gentlefish]

...what if a dwarf skids when he is inside a fortification?