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[Lord Shonus]

A hard material absorbs less force than an elastic one, meaning that more is transmitted to other objects in contact with it A blow from a hammer against steel plate, for example, transmits nearly all of the force behind the blow to the person wearing it,while adding a layer of good leather behind the plate (the plate is still sovereign over cutting or piercing attacks) allows much of the force to dissipate.

[Footkerchief]

Hm, as far as I understand, people are arguing that a more elastic armour would be better against blunt weapons than a hard one. Could someone explain to me why that would be the case, both under the new system in DF and in real life?

See the section "Minimizing Impact Force."  They mention the helpful example of crumple zones on a car.

Some links for reading about the importance of cloth armor (I can't vouch for this site but it seems pretty good, as sites for enthusiasts of medieval weapons go):
http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_spot_quilted.php
http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131

Better source: "During the Middle Ages the gambeson underwent several changes but retained its original purpose - to absorb a blunt impact and even to resist piercing attacks.  Cloth, when well padded, is superior to metal when absorbing the shock of a blow..."

[Mel_Vixen]

In reality a you have the problem that a hard plate can and will dent inwards if you hit it hard enought. What this does to your bality to breath schould be clear. So you need for fights with blunt weapons Armor that absorbs and transfers the ímpact to a big area while it still can  regather its own form. Thus you need padded amor/thick leather since its high elesticity.

edit: BTW Chainmail is good agaisnt cutting. Blunt and pierseweapons would work (more or less) fine on it.

edit2: Some Combat questions. If i drive a Spear right throught the upper leg of a Goblin so the spear is stuck in the ground and the goblins leg would this imobelize said goblin? could the goblin remove the Spear by itself? If i hit with said action the goblins nerves will he only loose the fealing in his upper leg or in the entire leg? And would the goblin get unconscious from the pain even if hes full with the Gobs equivalent of adrenalin?

Hmmm i wonder if the poison framework could be used to get a (even more) realistic creature-life/Bodymodell in terms of the effects of adrenalin etc.

[Shoku]

Question about adamantine weapons.

If you wanted to make an adamantine hammer,  you could make a hollow adamantine shell and fill it with molten lead.  This would be a very effective weapon!  Will we be able to do anything like this in the foreseeable future?

I could have sworn this exact idea came up before, but I couldn't find much.

I had the same idea but didn't share it knowing a little about current weapon component behavior so maybe you're reading my mind.

[dreiche2]

Well, the crumple zones have the additional benefit that energy is absorbed by deforming the material. I can see that prolonging the duration of impact is helpful, though.

Still, mail shouldn't help at all, as far as I can see.

[Calenth]

Hm, as far as I understand, people are arguing that a more elastic armour would be better against blunt weapons than a hard one. Could someone explain to me why that would be the case, both under the new system in DF and in real life?

See the section "Minimizing Impact Force."  They mention the helpful example of crumple zones on a car.

Some links for reading about the importance of cloth armor (I can't vouch for this site but it seems pretty good, as sites for enthusiasts of medieval weapons go):
http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_spot_quilted.php
http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131

Better source: "During the Middle Ages the gambeson underwent several changes but retained its original purpose - to absorb a blunt impact and even to resist piercing attacks.  Cloth, when well padded, is superior to metal when absorbing the shock of a blow..."

yeah, but looking through that site:

As mentioned above, one of the main purposes of quilted textile armour was to absorb the shock of blows and thus minimize blunt trauma. The need for such shock absorption dictated the thickness of the quilted defenses. With the advance of full plate armour after 1410, the metal plates used could withstand blows due to their rigidity and transfer the force over a much wider body area. Thus the use of plate largely removed the necessity for very thickly padded textile defenses, but still required a thinner garment to be worn.

(emphasis added)

So, "realistically," full plate should reduce bludgeoning damage also (probably based on the impact resistance of the metal & workmanship of the armor), in the same way that a ceramic plate in a bullet-proof vest spreads the impact of the bullet across the user's chest.

That said, there should still be *some* transfer of impact through the rigid plate, and some need for cloth or leather undergarments. Even if you're wearing a ceramic plate, if you get hit with a rifle round, you'll probably be somewhat bruised underneath the plate -- the ceramic plate just changes the "piercing" attack to a much, much weaker "bludgeoning" attack, spreading the impact force over the widest possible area.

Still, mail shouldn't help at all, as far as I can see.

Seems like mail shouldn't do much at all against maces, yeah, should definitely stop cutting attacks as long as the material's harder than the cutting weapon, and should convert piercing attacks into much weaker bludgeoning attacks.

[Neonivek]

Goodness... the way people keep talking I am starting to seriously wonder what the point of Chainmail is.

Though... I have EXTREMELY contradictory information on it. (In one, Chainmail can stop arrows from piercing flesh. In another it cannot)

[Footkerchief]

Though... I have EXTREMELY contradictory information on it. (In one, Chainmail can stop arrows from piercing flesh. In another it cannot)

Against arrows, it's much better than nothing.  It depends on the arrow, of course, and tons of other factors.  Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's black and white.

So, "realistically," full plate should reduce bludgeoning damage also (probably based on the impact resistance of the metal & workmanship of the armor), in the same way that a ceramic plate in a bullet-proof vest spreads the impact of the bullet across the user's chest.

Yeah, definitely.  The game does have a notion of contact area and pressure, but I don't know whether armor effectively changes the contact area or what.

Here's some quotes that touch on blunt damage and contact area and all that:

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=21498.msg368028;topicseen#msg368028

Does bludgeoning damage transfer?  (AKA is unlikely to do damage to skin or fat but will bruise muscle and break bone)

Yeah, though it's sort of cludged since there's a lot going on and I wasn't quite wrapping my head around everything.  Right now it'll check the impact elasticity (which I guess is actually impact yield strain or something) of the outer layer, and that'll let it bypass impact fracture after a certain point (while still allowing bruises and ruptures without the layer eg skin actually breaking) even if the force is high enough (as the layer is assumed to have made way for the moving object in a sense).  So if you make a michelin man style creature that's just a purely elastic material, a mace will be unable to harm it unless it has blood flow and can bruise and so on, while relatively inelastic materials like bone will fracture, even through skin.  Skin has a lesser shear fracture than bone on the other hand, so a knife will cut through skin more easily than bone.

So we'll also have armor acting like a pseudo tissue layer for purposes of transmitting bludgeoning damage and so forth?

If an iron sword strikes some steel plate armour and fails to penetrate it, and the damage is converted to bludgeoning (AKA the force of the blow is spread out over the plate), will bludgeoning damage be inflicted to the creature beneath the armour?

Additionally, if we're talking about a steel-skinned creature (Giant Magma Ants?) instead of a steel-armoured creature, is the force transfer handled differently?

Yeah, that's basically how it works.  The armor is all checked in order from outer to inner, then it gets at the tissue layers, altering the character of the attack as it goes.  There's a little left to do there, so it's not completely clear to me which way it'll go as far as how much force is transferred (or if it matters if it's skin or armor -- it doesn't currently, though yeah, there is a difference in real life).  It has to be enough that skin doesn't stop bones from being broken, but not so much that armor is useless against impacts, depending on the mats and nature of the armor/clothing.

Obviously, from what you've said, it will be difficult to cut through, say, steel with iron. But HOW difficult?

I've only whacked the poor dwarf with the hammer.  Haven't tested armor yet, and all of this is very number dependent.  Ideally, there would be a point to upgrading equipment without making the prior equipment worthless.  A softer material can break a harder one with impact force currently if it's swung hard enough, but it would suffer itself in the process (though not so much if it is against something that just isn't as massive as it is).  There's a sort of mid-range spot I'm missing right now with wedge effects (like a dull axe), but I'll get at that at some point -- I have a contact area variable in the attack definitions that should make the pressure increase, but there are many things to balance.  There's a sweet spot we'll find eventually as long as everything is placed correctly.  Skill is probably still going to be the most important thing, unless you've got really really tragic atts or something (you can't be strength 0 unless you wait for your atts to rust for a long, long time, but if you theoretically did get down there, you wouldn't be able to cause any damage at all).

How do the strength values for metals interact with their effectiveness as weapons and armor?

Currently shear yield/fracture is used to determine edge effectiveness and the effectiveness of a material against a cut.  Impact yield/fracture is used to determine resistance against impacts.  Solid density will increase weight and therefore the impact of attacks.

Does it figure out a sense of dimension for bodyparts like limbs and extremities, or is it just a matter of part size?

It sounds like bludgeoning damage hasn't been merged with slash/pierce, even though contact areas are being tracked now.  Is it being kept separate just for combat text purposes or something?

Well, there's contact areas and contact areas, he he he, and edges are assumed to be at a small enough scale that my numbers don't resolve well there.  Edges move partially over to different calculations, using the shear value differences and their "edge" numbers without worrying so much about the particulars of the vanishingly small surface area of the slice, whereas bludgeoning weapons use the overall contact areas and do more actual pushing around in a more straightforward way.  It's sort of crappy and cobbled together, but hopefully it'll work out.  The edges still keep track generally of how much they are slicing through and how much momentum is behind them, so slashes are different from thrusts in that respect.  There's nothing here that wouldn't make an engineer vomit though.

In general, I don't have enough dimension information to do a really good simulation.  Critters parts have weird shapes, so I haven't fussed that much.  It oftentimes conflates total surface areas, volumes and depths, in ways that don't necessarily scale realistically, but it's not like I can do much about what these things look like.  As long as the results are good over the range of sizes and actions in the game, it doesn't matter as much, but some extra raw variables will probably come in over time as problems arise.

What will the functional difference between a war hammer and a mace be in the new combat system aside from using a different skill?

Yeah, the difference I've got right now is the contact area.  So a mace will have larger wound areas but won't concentrate the force as much.  It may be that this indicates one weapon is superior to the other in most normal applications, but I haven't had a chance to test that sort of thing carefully. 

[Shoku]

According to that goofy deadliest warrior show piercing weapons beat chainmail. Not sure how much force an arrow would need to get through but with my full expertise of having watched that one demonstration with a different weapon- seems plausible.

[Mel_Vixen]

That depends on the arrow,the force behind the arrow, the mails material, the mesh-type and the size of the rings. Normaly with a stilet or some other fine stabbing weapon you get to the flashy parts because the force is concentrated on only one ring of the mesh wich gets in the process of the stabbing destroyed.

[Calenth]

Goodness... the way people keep talking I am starting to seriously wonder what the point of Chainmail is.

Though... I have EXTREMELY contradictory information on it. (In one, Chainmail can stop arrows from piercing flesh. In another it cannot)

That's probably going to depend on the quality of the chainmail and the tightness of the rings. Big, loose links, all they'll do is stop cuts and spread the force of blows slightly (basically making whatever leather/cloth backing it's over, more effective) but piercing attacks will go through the links. Small, teeny-tiny links, of masterful skill, you're basically wearing a metal mesh, and attacks aren't going to pierce that any more than they're going to cut it.

[Calenth]

Against arrows, it's much better than nothing.  It depends on the arrow, of course, and tons of other factors.  Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's black and white.

This brings up another really good question: are we ever going to be able to make arrows with different types of heads? Some historical bolts had "Crushing" heads, some had piercing, etc.

[Mel_Vixen]

And some highpower X-bows had enought force to destroy the bolt completly so that balls/bullets (from metal/stone) were used.

[Footkerchief]

This brings up another really good question: are we ever going to be able to make arrows with different types of heads? Some historical bolts had "Crushing" heads, some had piercing, etc.

I believe you can mod them into the current version, although the next version will let you do so much more accurately.  The hypothetical item component system rears its head again here, to an extent.

[Bacu]

No update today? :\