The peasant railgun is kinda weird tbh.
It first uses game rules ignoring physics (using the ready action to pass the object super fast along the line of peasants), to then flip and ignore game rules while using physics (not applying the rules for throwing an object but instead claiming that physics “realism” demands that the object keeps its speed and does damage according to the speed, not according to game rules).
Fun meme, but really doesn’t make sense in game.
which is why the dm is able to stop them in their tracks by enforcing the game rule about not calculating speed for damage
I think it’s totally valid to run a realistic game where realism takes precedence over game rules, but then the “passing of the object” part fails.
It’s also totally valid to run RAW game, but then it fails like you said.
So no matter what game you run, the railgun makes no sense.
What would make sense with a RAW game is to use the railgun for fast travel/fast transport, but then again for it to give a decent advantage, you need thousands or millions of peasants who willingly cooperate, which also won’t really work in most games.
unless it’s cool
See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you’ve got infinite free energy!
That’s just slave labour with extra steps (magnets)
Peasants, how do they work?
Each peasent can only pass the magnet once every 6s, as they can only do so on their turn.
Also, this is a universe with magic in it. A level 0 sorcerer can endlessly cast the cantrip “shape water” to move a turbine for infinite free energy. For less work (but more training) the level 2 spell “Heat Metal” can be cast on a boiler.
Fucking in a world of magic you still make electricity by boiling water?
You say that as if nuclear energy isn’t also just boiling water
The peasant railgun and the squirrel chain are effective in 2 conditions:
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Each one with above average strength contributes a +1 “helper” bonus. You’re not concerned with how fast it gets to a place, but that with everyone helping, you can get it around the world and back again - and everyone helped.
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You’re not concerned with the damage - only how it gets there. So if you can get a Hands Across America thing happening, you can pass messages in a single round.
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Fun fact about this in real life: A problem that gunmakers have had to deal with is that, although a faster-moving bullet fires straighter and penetrates better into its target, if the bullet moves too fast it will just poke a hole straight through a person without imparting enough of its kinetic energy onto them to be able to do real damage. So, i doubt the peasant railgun would be effective in real life.
you just have to make the gun and projectile bigger. fire a 100kg chunk of iron.
That is simply not true. All you have to do is design your projectile in shape, construction and materials so the kinetic energy gets properly used to have the desired effect on the target.
A tiny 40 grain .204 Ruger bullet with the insane muzzle velocity of 4100 fps will absolutely explode a watermelon if you use a rapidly expanding projectile such as a ballistic tipped varmint round. If you use the same against a reactive steel target that was only rated for rimfire, it will melt a clean hole through it without even noticeably moving it. And if you use it against a bull moose, it will absolutely destroy a large amount of surface tissue but not achieve enough penetration to reach the internal organs for a clean kill.
It isn’t a simple problem, the are many different types of dynamics that you can encounter depending on the nature of the projectile, velocity and target.
This is simply true, you do lose potential energy transfer if the bullet exits, that’s how it can exit, that’s just not usually the point of a bullet, and generally speaking making exit wounds is considered a positive.
Now if you want to design a bullet that explodes inside a wound causing mass trauma and an incredibly difficult surgery to repair it is a problem, but surely no one would ever deliberately design a weapon to do that! /S
Fun Fact: the .50 cal MGs the Soviets supplied to the Vietnamese during the American invasion usually had enough penetrative power to go through the M113 APC’s aluminum hull…
Once. And then it would bounce around inside.
I don’t see the point you’re trying to make here. You sound like you’re trying to disprove my point that more velocity won’t necessarily equate to overpenetration and “penciling through” with minimal damage but you all you did is explain that overpenetration means unused kinetic energy. Which is usually true depending on the situation but doesn’t disprove what I said.
The rest is just unrelated edgy statements. But yeah, downvote me. What the fuck do I know, I’ve only worked for 15 years in weapons and ballistics.
They also said that exit wounds can have benefits, though they didn’t get into it nearly enough. I’m imagining that two wounds, especially on opposite side of a person, are going to be a lot harder to deal with and the increase blood loss potential while also distracting anyone trying to help them has a lot of benefits.
Also I say benefits, but yuck.
I get the feeling the 4 million grain Revolving Peasant Gun with the velocity of 1% the speed of light will have the desired effect on any target.
What makes you say that?
Well I’m being tongue in cheek, but I don’t see how a peasant travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light will not obliterate anything he hits (along with himself)
The peasant rail gun doesn’t fire peasents, it fires a single “small object” using peasant propulsion. In D&D5e, a small object is anything that fits into a ~60cm cube.
Other comments were discussing bullet shape, but I think if you fire something the mass and size (!) of, idk, a pumpkin or even a nightstand, shape isn’t that important.
I know, I was playing on the joke. Not obvious enough apparently.
There’s a lot of factors, shape speed and deformation are all factors. Penetration and energy transfer are also at odds with each other in general. Gun manufacturers have this problem because speed is more or less capped by a practical barrel length, a rail gun can (theoretically) achieve enough speed that either factors start to become less relevant.
Somewhat pedantical quibble, really just because I find it interesting: It’s not exactly limited by barrel length. We can make faster burning, higher powered propellants, which you can get the full energy out of with a shorter barrel. The reason we don’t is because that means you have a higher pressure inside the chamber and, even if your gun doesn’t explode, you face more erosion from use. Your metallurgy ends up being the limiting factor, as it’s all about how strong you can make your chamber. I just think it’s cool because guns are a great example of how inter-related technologies are and how everything depends on everything else. Take a design for a machinegun back to the Napoleonic era and it will be worthless because without smokeless powder it will jam and clog after a couple rounds. Take back a formula for smokeless powder and it will be worthless because you don’t know how to make brass cartridges. Try to make brass cartridges and you’ll find you lack the precision tooling, and so on.
Pure theory, likely never ever going to be real, but could a bullet move so fast that it goes through someone without even damaging them?
Define damage. Can it pass through the middle of organs? Sure, if it hits just right. But that’s not so much a question of speed.
You’d need a pin needle shape to have a chance of piercing an organ without causing lasting damage, but it will probably break on impact
Just like ghosting through it or something
No, but if it travels fast enough it would disintegrate and you could argue the resulting plasma blast would be what actually damages the target.
Any matter going through you with that much mass is going to cause damage no matter how fast it goes. Billions of particles called neutrinos are moving through you right now as you read this but they are around 100,000,000,000,000x less massive than a hydrogen atom
Turns out Gamma Ray Bursts are just distant peasant railguns
No.
Not really applicable but think there could be a small chance it would quantum tunnel through the person but that’s such miniscule chance.
The obvious use of the peasant railgun is instant delivery. Gonna start my new enterprise, pFood, coming at you within 1 turn or your money back!
Only if you have a peasant chain leading up to the building
It even works with people. They can carry up to 150 pounds if you have them move 30 feet before passing it to the next guy or 300 pounds if they’re moving 5 feet. I call it the peasant railway.
Ok, but hear me out:
If you accelerate something into a freefall orbit, then it stands to reason that the projectile would deal falling damage (equal and opposite force, you know) which maxes out at 20 d6.
If a character has 121hp or more they’re able to jump from a space station onto earth with like a super hero landing??
In 5e yes. I think the theory is once you hit terminal velocity, you aren’t going to get any more damage from a longer fall.
Fun fact, I actually did have a villain do exactly that in a campaign once. The party achieved a secondary win condition during combat and so the BBEG jumped off the top of the space elevator to escape.
Wouldn’t jumping off the top of a space elevator just put you in orbit? Or, if by top you mean the point where the space elevator anchors to its counterweight, in orbit around the sun.
Yes.
ODST-Dropping your barbarian is objectively the best way to have him enter combat, and it inflicts psychological damage to anyone close enough to witness it.
I dont remember exactly what we did, but i remember we had a situation where one of my fellow players was a centaur. The dm ruled that if you were to use a battering ram while riding said centaur, both your strengths get added together for the check. The person riding the centaur has something that enabled them to more effectively use tools they were holding, i think it was if they used a handheld tool they got advantage with it. And then we had one more player who was a turtle person. As long as they were in their shell they got a ton of defense buffs. So, we had player 2 hold player 3 while they both climbed onto player 1. We then proceeded to use player 3 as a battering ram against a magical door that we couldnt figure out how to open. After rolls went through, we ended uo blowing the door down so violently that is killed most of the spawn in the next room
Alternatively, invest 18 levels into monk and get no damage in 99,51% of cases
theyd also need something to protect them from the friction and resulting heat of air brushing by at terminal velocity tho, i assume?
oh no wait, im making it too realistic
Piss hard so the reaction mass slows you down along with the cloud of expanding piss vapor.
They call me the yellow comet
Terminal velocity for a human is not fast enough to cause air to heat up. You’d probably get frostburn instead.
Heating on reentry is actually due to compressing the air in front of you, not friction. Falling from orbitall height will absolutely cause you to heat up the air in front of you, even as the air paassing you by is doing you no harm.
Though, if you smash into the atmosphere at orbital speeds, it’s probably going to do you some harm as it tries to force you back down to TV.
If you’re jumping from a space station then you’d be traveling at orbital velocity when hitting the atmosphere which is plenty fast enough to generate heat.
Unless the space station is not orbiting. Maybe it’s a mobile one like the Desthstar.
… the death star orbits. The timer for the rebels to blow it up in a New Hope was how long its orbit would take to clear the moon in its path to the rebel base. The battle of endor was fought over the new death star in orbit over the moon.
Yes, the death star is capable of warp, but that just puts it into orbit over different things.
It can orbit. It doesn’t have to. It’s capable of moving between systems, it’s not confined to a single gravity well.
Yes it orbits in the movies, that doesn’t conflict with anything I said. I’m describing a scenario where it doesn’t (which doesn’t happen in the movies).
A space station with the ability to achieve orbital speeds on it’s own power means it can also negate orbital speeds, before you jump off. And presumably regain them afterwards, if it doesn’t want to also plummet down to the planet.
Hold up. Didn’t some guy drop balls off a roof to show that things fall at the same speed?
I recently had this explained to me, terminal velocity is falling versus the force of the air pushing back on you, right? In vacuum you just keep accelerating, in atmosphere the air pushes back against you falling, limiting your speed
That force follows the rule that force (of air pushing back) is equal to acceleration (9.8m/s/s) times mass
So different weights fall at different speeds.
Half of the replies to me when I said what you said were
Idiot, f=ma
Or similar
So, yes and no. Acceleration due to gravity impacts all objects equally. With no air resistance, on earth, everything speeds up at 9.8m/s/s. But, that “no air resistance” is a big asterisk. This is why, say, parachutes work. It’s also how we get terminal velocity. Often misinterpreted as “how fast you’d have to go to die from a fall” it’s actually “how fast you need to go before the drag from your air resistance is a force greater than or equal to gravity”
Right. That all makes sense. So the air resistance is what is also causing it to heat up. I still don’t see why a person wouldn’t do that.
So, multiple options here. Skydivers regularly hit terminal velocity, as fast as they’ll go in atmosphere, before pulling their chutes. At these speeds, heat from friction isn’t enough to worry about. Once again though, if you’re coming down from space, that “in atmosphere” asterisk goes away. If you’re dropping from a satellite, you’re going at speeds necessary to orbit, and you don’t have anything slowing you down until you hit the atmosphere. Suddenly your terminal velocity is way lower than infinity, and the friction you’re feeling from the atmosphere is INTENSE, rapidly turning that speed into heat
Shape affects aerodynamics.
Well sure but I don’t think a human is shaped in a way that would really affect this.
Never seen a sky diver? Head down vs belly flop changes their speed
No. They’d need a pretty impressive jump height to slow down enough to leave orbit.
Applying real world logic to game rules never works out.
Also, you forget to take into account the weapon’s mass, form, structural integrity, the commoner’s reaction time, probability to fumble, the force of the wind, and probably a few dozen other factors that have an effect in the real world.
Just don’t. It’s a game.
I was just making a joke. Lighten up.
If you can manage to get someone into freefall I’d allow it. But no, equal opposite forces doesn’t mean you roll dice the same lol. Your sword does not take damage when you attack with it.
I want to play a game where there is an NPC roving band of guerrilla peasants that in times of crisis form a rail gun militia. Dragons? Rail gun. Tax Administrator? Rail gun. Cathy’s Baby Shower? Also believe it or not, rail gun.
Cathy’s Baby Shower? Also believe it or not, rail gun.
Handing out gifts at the speed of sound.
