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Author Topic: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance  (Read 49889 times)

Pirate Bob

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #90 on: August 15, 2014, 11:41:34 am »

Here is a typical example of what happens when arrows meet a breastplate of the same material; they either dent but deflect, or they may penetrate a little. But imedietely life threatening wounds would be rare. Ignoring the fact that IRL there would be other protective garments under a breastplate, I haven't seen an arrow or bolt of any description make it more than 2 inches past an iron or steel breastplate. That will only kill a human quickly with a lucky shot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCE40J93m5c&feature=related

sorry to quote off the 1st reply but...
in the video, note the thickness of the armour.
knights in medieval times actually admitted that they were afraid of crossbows. One knight was wearing 4cm thick steel plate armour. He was shot and killed by a single crossbow bolt.
he was my great great great great blah blah blah granddad
2 more words
Agincourt
Crecy
I assume this is supposed to be a joke?  Or maybe it is a typo and you mean 4 mm.

1) There is no way anyone could wear 4 cm thick steel.  It would be too heavy.  Steel has a density of about 8 g/cm^3.  Assuming the breastplate only covered the front of the chest, and was 30 cm wide by 50 cm high, it would have a volume of 6000 cm^3 and a mass of 48 kg.  I guess a very strong person might be able to stand with this, but it would be extremely difficult to move.

2) No arrow, from any bow modern or otherwise, is going to penetrate 4 cm of steel.  For example, 0.5 cm is apparently enough to stop gunfire.  I'm pretty sure even a modern large-bore rifle with an armor-piercing round would not penetrate 4 cm steel, but I can't find a reference for this.

Anyhow, either you are joking or you mean 4 mm. 

Since you bring up Agincourt, a quote from its wikipedia page:
Quote
Modern historians are somewhat divided on how effective the longbow fire would have been against plate armour of the time, with some modern texts suggesting that arrows could not penetrate, especially the better quality steel armour, but others suggesting arrows could penetrate, especially the poorer quality wrought iron armour. Rogers suggests that the longbow could penetrate a wrought iron breastplate at short range and penetrate the thinner armour on the limbs even at 220 yards (200 m). He considers a knight in the best quality steel armour would have been more or less invulnerable to an arrow on the breastplate or top of the helmet, but would still have been vulnerable to shots hitting the limbs, particularly at close range.

I am somewhat skeptical that any bow could penetrate even 4 mm of steel plate, although I suppose it might be possible if the steel was of poor quality and the bow was extremely powerful with a bodkin tip.  I think its more likely that a man wearing steel plate that at some places was a thick as 4 mm was killed by an arrow which hit him in a much weaker place.

I totally, 100%, unequivocally agree that armor should not provide complete protection from arrows, or anything else.  For melee attacks, DF does a decent job of reproducing this, as there is a large spread in protection (I believe due to different hits being "direct", "just able to graze", etc).  However, the protection offered by plate armor against projectiles is pretty much all-or-nothing right now.  You can somewhat get around this by making plates of different thickness protect differently (by setting contact area for bolts to be 10 or more to get around the rounding DF does), but its still not great (see the link in my previous post).  I felt the best solution available was to set bolt momentum to about 75, which gives 20% penetration of steel armor and 80% penetration of iron armor, so this is what I chose for my "light bolts" mod, but if others would like to make iron armor more effective by lowering bolt momentum, then what's wrong with that?  If you are happy with all arrows penetrating all armor all the time, then do nothing.  If you want only steel to be effective, then use 40.05, or mod 34.11 using a higher bolt momentum (say 100).

I would absolutely love to see Toady do something to make projectile deflection off armor more realistic.  In 40.05, he did at least reduce bolt momentum to a reasonable level (50), but since he left contact area at 5 this means that steel provides great protection, and everything lower is useless.  This is much better than before, but still somewhat incomplete.  I hope that in the future he does something like consider bolts hitting armor at an angle, which would be quite trivial if he just models armor components as spheres (I figured out how to do this before, but can't find it right now.  If you're interested I can work it out again, but it ends up being a simple function of just one random number).  This would result in even low level armors like copper having a (very small) chance to deflect projectiles if they hit at a glancing angle, while still allowing direct hits to penetrate steel (if you want that).
« Last Edit: August 15, 2014, 11:44:55 am by Pirate Bob »
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Insanegame27

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #91 on: August 16, 2014, 08:53:47 am »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

upon revising, my great great blah blah was killed from from short range while wearing 1cm thick armour plus chain-mail. the shield was a 3cm thick kiteshield with a steel frame but solid hardwood inside the frame. the crossbow bolt went through the shield, into the plate, through the chainmail, and buried into the lung.

my mistake. the bolt went through 3cm thick hardwood, 1cm thick plate, not sure how thick the chain was, and into his lung. i assumed from memory 4cm of material, so i assumed it was 4cm thick steel.

another distant relative of mine is Richard 1. you know what happened there, although i admit he wasn't wearing armour.
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scamtank

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #92 on: August 16, 2014, 10:43:05 am »

I don't have any middle-age relatives, but I still feel like you're throwing up way big numbers. 4cm of wood? That's about twice as thick as my desk.

And a whole centimeter of plate? Listen, do you understand what else had a solid 1cm of steel plate? A lot of the tanks designed in the 1930s.
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Agent_Irons

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #93 on: August 17, 2014, 12:47:01 am »

Huh, I did some research before opening my mouth, and it turns out up is down. Plate armor maxed out at maybe 25kg, with 15kg much more common. Medieval plate was shot at by hand cannons and the dent circled with decoration as 'proof', and good plate was rarely penetrated by crossbow bolts or gunpowder weapons. At range, that is. At close range all bets are off, natch. All about muzzle velocity and drag with ranged weapons.

And one centimeter of plate would only weigh about 12kg, cribbing densities/sizes from a couple posts up. Certainly quite heavy, but not ridiculously so.

A whole centimeter of plate isn't that crazy for a person. The Renault FT, the most popular tank in the interwar period, had between 8 mm and 22 mm of steel plating all over it. Invented in 1917, it was in use right through the beginning of WWII. Generally speaking it wasn't as successful during the war as the Vickers 6-ton(invented '28), which had 2.5 cm of steel on the front and 2 cm on the rest of it. So it would be a stretch to declare 10 mm of steel plate as strictly for tanks and not for people.

Note to self, scamtank has a very thin desk. 3cm of wood is just over an inch thick, which honestly seems a little light for a shield I'm putting between me and an axe.


Anyway. I don't worry too much about DF vanilla ranged weapons since 40.05, although I would like that black powder mod by DC to be updated to reflect the new momenta values.
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Art

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #94 on: August 24, 2014, 08:33:46 pm »

Thanks a bunch Pirate Bob, I have been playing with your suggestions for a while.

Now that 4.10 is out and it seems much of the major behavioral bugs have been fixed, I am probably going to start an adventure in 4.10

What do you recommend as far as 4.10 arrow modding? Should I just leave everything vanilla?
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Pirate Bob

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #95 on: August 25, 2014, 05:09:47 pm »

Thanks a bunch Pirate Bob, I have been playing with your suggestions for a while.

Now that 4.10 is out and it seems much of the major behavioral bugs have been fixed, I am probably going to start an adventure in 4.10

What do you recommend as far as 4.10 arrow modding? Should I just leave everything vanilla?
I have done some detailed testing, and maybe you still do want to do some modding.  See this thread for details.  Anyhow, you can either accept that iron plate armor is useless against projectiles and instead wear chain mail (100% effective against projectiles) or you can increase the contact area of bolts to 10 and the SHOOT_FORCE to about 1400.  This will make iron armor about 50% effective, iron and copper helms 100% effective, and chain mail only 35-40% effective.  You can of course tune SHOOT_FORCE up or down to change armor penetration - I give some more cases in the other thread.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Jake

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #96 on: September 04, 2014, 11:06:11 am »

Anyway. I don't worry too much about DF vanilla ranged weapons since 40.05, although I would like that black powder mod by DC to be updated to reflect the new momenta values.
You're not thinking of mine, are you? Because I've just about got it fine-tuned to the point of being ready to release... ish. Armour still has an annoying habit of deflecting lead bullets without the wearer suffering so much as a bruise, so I'm going to take onboard some of the excellent advice in this thread and see if upping the mass of the individual projectile helps at all.
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Never used Dwarf Therapist, mods or tilesets in all the years I've been playing.
I think Toady's confusing interface better simulates the experience of a bunch of disorganised drunken dwarves running a fort.

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Pirate Bob

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #97 on: September 04, 2014, 01:38:34 pm »

Anyway. I don't worry too much about DF vanilla ranged weapons since 40.05, although I would like that black powder mod by DC to be updated to reflect the new momenta values.
You're not thinking of mine, are you? Because I've just about got it fine-tuned to the point of being ready to release... ish. Armour still has an annoying habit of deflecting lead bullets without the wearer suffering so much as a bruise, so I'm going to take onboard some of the excellent advice in this thread and see if upping the mass of the individual projectile helps at all.
You may not need to increase the mass of the projectiles.  There are two reasons why deflection can occur:
1) The momentum of the bullet is too low to penetrate the armor.  Increase [SHOOT_MAXVEL] and/or [SHOOT_FORCE] to make sure the bullet momentum is high enough.  For testing, just make them super huge (say 100,000) to make sure you don't see any deflections.
2) The bullet itself cannot withstand the momentum of impact.  See the heading "The Projectile Absorbs the Force of the Collision" on the Material Science page of the wiki.  I believe this mechanism is unchanged in the new version, although I have not tested it carefully.  If this is the problem, you have a few options:
a) decrease the projectile contact area (gets multiplied times armor thickness (15-30) and rounded to the nearest 100, so only helps if it is not already less than 10).
b) increase the projectile size (and hence mass)
c) increase the IMPACT_YIELD for lead.

The IMPACT_YIELD for lead is pretty low (only 35,000, compared to 10,000 for wood, which is known to have this problem and 245000 for copper, the softest weapons grade metal).  I bet you already made your guns pretty powerful by increasing force and max velocity, so I am guessing your problem is #2.   I am also guessing that your contact area for bullets is no more than 10, so decreasing that won't help either due to rounding.  So you can either increase your bullet size (and mass), or, if your bullets are already as heavy as you want, just increase the IMPACT_YIELD of lead. 

I believe this mechanism is supposed to represent bolts being destroyed when they hit armor.  This works well for things like wood or bone, which will shatter, but lead bullets are expected to melt on contact.  The momentum of the somewhat melted lead is so high that it still will penetrate (thin) armor.  I would just increase the impact yield of lead by a factor or 10 or so to make this issue go away, as a lead bullet is not ever going to shatter.  Also, I doubt lead is used in any other weapons or armor besides bullets, so increasing its impact yield won't affect anything else. 

If you don't like doing this, you could also just make your bullets out of copper or silver.  You could even make this a "feature" - by setting the SHOOT_FORCE of your guns very high but the SHOOT_MAXVEL to something moderate such that all bullets are fired with the same velocity, you could make copper/silver bullets armor piercing and lead deflected by armor but more damaging to unarmored targets due to its larger mass.

If you have questions about exactly what numbers you will need for your IMPACT_YIELD, SHOOT_FORCE, SHOOT_MAXVEL, etc, I should be able to estimate these fairly accurately if you post the raws for your bullets (specifically size and contact area), and any modded armors that you want to protect from and/or be penetrated by bullets.
« Last Edit: September 04, 2014, 01:51:08 pm by Pirate Bob »
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Jake

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #98 on: September 04, 2014, 02:23:34 pm »

Aha! I actually increased the projectile contact area when SHOOT_MAXVEL and SHOOT_FORCE buffs didn't help, that might be part of it. Increasing bullet mass is worth looking into as well.

And I already have reactions for making bullets out of copper; in fact, I have reactions set up for making them out of any metal. I'm doing most of my calibration tests with lead because it's the material most often used in real life, and therefore makes a reasonable baseline.
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Never used Dwarf Therapist, mods or tilesets in all the years I've been playing.
I think Toady's confusing interface better simulates the experience of a bunch of disorganised drunken dwarves running a fort.

Black Powder Firearms - Superior firepower, realistic manufacturing and rocket launchers!

Agent_Irons

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Re: Broken Arrow - Fixed Archery Balance
« Reply #99 on: September 05, 2014, 02:28:40 pm »

Anyway. I don't worry too much about DF vanilla ranged weapons since 40.05, although I would like that black powder mod by DC to be updated to reflect the new momenta values.
You're not thinking of mine, are you? Because I've just about got it fine-tuned to the point of being ready to release... ish. Armour still has an annoying habit of deflecting lead bullets without the wearer suffering so much as a bruise, so I'm going to take onboard some of the excellent advice in this thread and see if upping the mass of the individual projectile helps at all.

I am, but I am really bad at attribution/remembering what the hell I'm talking about. Sorry Jake.

Yours is the only black powder mod for me! Finally a use for sterling silver, and galena, and all that pewter I make accidentally. I always use spring-guns because I can never source enough brimstone. :(
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